Shelly Thomas - The Burning Sky

She willed a gust of headwind. The wyvern was not expecting that. With its wings spread wide, it was pushed by the current to a nearly vertical position.

She hooked her legs around its body—finally, a better perch. Now how to get the creature out of those doors without any reins—not that she knew how to work a set of reins in any case.

Well, the prince kept calling her the great elemental mage of their time. She had better come up with something.

Once the wyvern had leveled, and once she was sure her seat was secure, she hit the wyvern with a hard current that forced it to bank left. Then, a three-pronged approach that more or less hurtled the beast toward the front doors of the great hall.

Her efforts were inexact. The wyvern did head in the general direction of the doors, but it broke through the large rose window above instead, exiting the great hall in a shower of splintered wood and broken glass.

A messy business, rescuing princes.

It must be the fatigue of running five miles at the end of a day during which he had eaten only a handful of biscuits since breakfast. There was no other reason for Titus not to have vanquished the wyvern after a quarter of an hour.

He ducked into an alley. This was not good. Instead of fighting the wyvern, he was running away from it. So he could catch his breath, he told himself. It could not possibly be that he was afraid. Of dying uselessly. Stupidly. Of never seeing Fairfax again.

He crept along the edge of the alley. No sounds emanated from the cowered populace, or the wyvern. He held out his hand to feel his way—the sky had become completely overcast, the night impenetrable. His fingers came into contact with another wall.

He was in a blind alley.

He barely managed to throw up a shield as a stream of fire shot toward him—the wyvern had trapped him. He swore. He had not made this kind of mistake since he was thirteen, a lifetime ago.

“Aura circumvallet.”

The wyvern spewed more fire, but his spell acted as a holding pen for the fire. He shot two jets of flames at the wyvern’s belly. Subtle magic could not duplicate the scale of elemental magic, but he was decent at it.

The wyvern flew up to avoid his fire. He ran. But the beast again blocked his way at the mouth of the alley. He shot two more streams of fire. This time the wyvern was prepared and shielded itself with the outside of its wings. Dragon fire might singe its wings, but ordinary fire lacked the power.

He dove under one wing. The wyvern’s spiked tail came at him. He threw himself to the ground and rolled away. Still the end spike opened a nasty gash on his side.

He screamed in pain. And with that pain came an angry rush of energy. “Flamma caerula.”

A blue sizzle shot out of his wand into the wyvern’s belly. The beast twitched and roared. The momentum of the struggle at last shifted in Titus’s favor. Several minutes later, the wyvern was carrying him toward Black Bastion, while he applied salve to his person to stop the bleeding.

He wished his injury hadn’t happened. If you are cut, you bleed, Hesperia had told him long ago in her classroom. He could only hope his blood wasn’t dripping out of the Citadel’s copy. All those mages in there, looking for the cause of Haywood’s disappearance—a bleeding book in their midst would not go unnoticed.

The wyvern could not fly fast enough for him. He kept looking behind himself, watching for pursuers. Theoretically he knew he had no cause to worry: the knowledge that the Crucible could be used as a portal was passed down only to those in the direct line of succession. But sometimes others in the family gleaned such information by trickery or by accident—the Usurper, most famously.

The weather was turning uneasy. High winds ripped. Shearing currents blew the wyvern left and right. Then came a gust of headwind so vigorous, the wyvern was nearly flipped backward.

Titus flew lower, searching for calmer air. He did not find it. Nor did he find it at a greater altitude. A string of expletives left his tongue, only to be drowned by a roar that shook every bone in his body—the exact same roar that had sent him fleeing from Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

The wyvern screamed. Despite the uncooperative winds, it accelerated, as if driven by sudden fear. Titus pulled the hood of his tunic over his head, covered most of his face with the edges of the hood, and turned around.

The night sky was empty, save for a luminescent dot. He uttered a far-seeing spell. All at once, a huge winged creature loomed—so monstrously sized it would make colossus cockatrices look like sparrows. Even more grotesquely, the beast shimmered against the turbulent sky above.

A phantom behemoth, the steed of Angels.

Was this the change Prince Gaius had made to the story of Sleeping Beauty?

Phantom behemoths were not real. It had been concluded centuries ago that they were creatures of legend, born of the awe and fright of mages witnessing colossus cockatrices for the first time. But when a mage used the Crucible as a portal, everything inside became real.

He countermanded the far-seeing spell. The phantom behemoth faded again to a dot in the sky. It was still miles behind him.

The beast roared once more. The biggest winged creatures did not always fly the fastest. But judging by the roar, the phantom behemoth was closing in so swiftly, Titus might as well be running on foot.

He turned around again and tried to see if the phantom behemoth carried a rider. A smaller creature was tethered to it, a giant peregrine—which looked like a flea next to the phantom behemoth. The peregrine most certainly carried a rider. In the eerie glow of the behemoth, the rider’s eyes were entirely colorless.

The Inquisitor!

And the rider who sat on the enormous head of the behemoth, with his handsome and oddly familiar-looking face, was none other than the Bane.

Iolanthe didn’t know how she managed to bring down the wyvern on Black Bastion’s landing platform without killing them both.

But her feet were on solid stone, and the wyvern was being skillfully led away by a pair of grooms, without erupting into a rage that would roast mages in a hundred-foot radius.

She expected to be challenged immediately, but everyone on the landing platform who wasn’t busy with the wyvern sank to one knee, with murmurs of “M’lady.”

Who knew help was so desperately needed at Black Bastion?

She descended into the bailey. More people paid obeisance to her. And even more dropped to their knees as she marched through the great hall. Who did they think she was? Helgira herself?

She kept pushing farther into the fort. Each time she was faced with a choice of directions, she chose the one that looked more sumptuous.

Opposition came in the form of a nondescript maid. As Iolanthe stepped into Helgira’s richly decorated apartment, the maid cried, “That is not our lady!”

“No?” Iolanthe raised a brow. She snapped her finger, and a bolt of lightning flashed outside the window.

The maid appeared horribly confused.

Iolanthe snapped her finger again and another, even more impressive lightning bolt sizzled across the width of the sky.

“Forgive me, my lady.” The maid sank to her knees, shaking.

Iolanthe ignored her. Inside the bedchamber, she passed through the prayer alcove to the Black Bastion in the Citadel’s copy of the Crucible.

This Black Bastion was much calmer, its inhabitants preparing for bed rather than war. Iolanthe thought its mistress away from home until she saw a woman standing before a window, her long black hair fluttering in the strong breeze.

Helgira.

A woman who lived in warlike times should be more alert to her surroundings. Iolanthe could be an assassin, waiting in the shadows. Helgira, however, remained oblivious to Iolanthe’s presence, her breaths emerging in a series of trembling sighs and gasps. “An Angel . . . I have been blessed. I have been blessed.”