“We’ll be ready to go when you get here,” Paege said.
The two men turned back to the outpost. Caron stood a moment longer.
“I’m all right,” Trysten said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Caron stared a bit longer, nodded, then blew Trysten a kiss. She turned to the outpost and left Trysten and Elevera to do what needed to be done.
As Paege and Jurdun began to shout orders, Trysten climbed back up into Elevera’s saddle and began to fasten her restraints. Her legs ached a bit from the ride out, but it didn’t seem like a good time to stretch them. She looked up to the pass again, half expecting to see the consequences of the morning begin to explode outward.
Little wings flapped, and rocks clattered as Yallit landed on the ground where Paege, Caron, and Jurdun had stood.
“What?” Trysten asked.
Yallit lifted his head and tucked his wings behind his back, then sat. The poor little thing looked utterly exhausted.
“You can stay here. I’ll be back tomorrow. Bright and early.”
Yallit slumped to the ground and laid upon his chest. A puff of dust rolled up around him.
“Suit yourself.”
Trysten knotted her restraints and gripped the lip of the saddle. As she did, Yallit let out a yawn, then rolled onto his side and allowed his neck and head to lay upon the ground. He stared up and blinked at her with his big, brown eyes.
“Oh, fish and birds!” Trysten spat. “Come on.” She patted the back of the saddle behind her.
Yallit leaped into the air, flew around once, and then landed on Elevera’s back behind Trysten. The alpha dragon let out a grunt that rolled into a slight rumble.
“You’re going to fall off when she takes off,” Trysten said over her shoulder. “But if you meet us in the air, you can probably manage this.”
Yallit flicked his tongue out and slapped Trysten on the cheek. She cringed, then chuckled at the ridiculousness of the dragon. As she looked up, ready to take off, she found Paege staring at her, a grin spread wide across his face. He planted his hands on his hips and raised one eyebrow.
“He’s not a pet!” Trysten called out. “Just a friend who needs a ride.”
Chapter 48
The following morning, people loaded up several dragons standing in the clearing at the outpost, while Elevera watched from her spot in the pool, not at all attempting to hide her displeasure. Trysten ignored the alpha as she helped pack equipment and supplies that were going back to the village, in between glancing at the cliff and the pass above.
Only a hordesman, a battle dragon, and a courier dragon would be left behind, along with a few volunteers to finish the remaining work on the outpost and stand watch over the pass. The Western kingdom had apparently decided not to respond to Aymon’s attack, but if they chose to retaliate for Gerig’s invasion, then a courier would be sent at best speed to warn the weyr.
As Trysten patted Leewind on the side and stepped away from the pearl-colored dragon, an urge struck her. She glanced back and up to the peaks. A gust of wind eddied around her, and she squinted against the dust kicked up by Leewind’s wings.
The dragon lifted off, carrying a load of tools, supplies, and a volunteer to return to Aerona. As she rose into the sky, ready to take her place in the horde circling above, Trysten stepped back several steps toward the edge of the clearing. She shaded her eyes against the noonday sun.
A bough of pine needles whispered and shushed as Yallit landed upon it and let out a small whine. Over the bustle of the volunteers and the ringing of a hammer, Trysten still heard the shower of pine needles rain down upon the forest floor. All of her senses suddenly seemed hyper-tuned, prickling with awareness.
A knot tightened in her belly.
Dragons.
Lots of dragons.
Goose flesh crawled over Trysten’s arms. She sucked in a tight breath as the number of dragons swelled in her mind and heart, and rushed her like a red wall of hot iron.
Anger. Rage. A thirst for battle.
“Oh, broken feathers,” she whispered.
She turned to Paege, who was already walking back to the outpost to collect more tools.
“Paege!”
He paused and half-turned back, looking over his shoulder.
“Dragons! Lots of dragons. They’re coming for battle!”
Paege looked up to the pass. People all over the site paused what they were doing. A number of them looked up to the sky. Most followed Paege’s gaze to the pass.
“Hey!” Trysten shouted at the circling dragons above. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hey!” She motioned for their attention.
Vanon waved to let her know he had seen her.
Trysten signaled for him to prepare for battle, and then raced for Elevera. As she passed the other dragons, she barked orders. “Dump the cargo! Get the dragons back into the air!”
As the workers hurried to obey, Trysten splashed into the pool. Elevera lowered herself until Trysten climbed into the saddle. With a whoosh of her wings, Trysten and Elevera circled up into the air. Her jaw grew tight, and her teeth ached with the growing sense of dragons. There were so many approaching that it began to seem reasonable that it was Gerig. Perhaps he was coming back, fleeing a pursuing horde.
If that was the case, however, what would she do with an enemy horde that could chase out a swell of almost two hundred dragons?
She needed to find out what they were up against. Trysten signaled for all available hordesmen to follow her to the pass.
As Elevera approached the opening, Trysten peered in.
Dragons.
They were approaching single file, so it was impossible to see how many there were, but she sensed the sheer numbers of them. She squinted, leaning forward. She rocked with the sway of Elevera’s body and tried to concentrate on what she was seeing.
Hoods. The dragons wore hoods.
There was no way her horde was going to be able to unload all the passengers and equipment before the Western dragons came screaming out of the pass. She would have to do her best to stall somehow.
She motioned for the laden dragons to continue unloading as fast as possible. The rest of the dragons were to deliver a blockading action. She pointed at the pass and hoped that her meaning was clear.
Elevera banked through the sky and flew to one side of pass’s opening. They were outnumbered at least two-to-one, and probably more, but the fact that the Western horde was bottlenecked in the pass gave the Aerona horde a slight advantage.
Trysten and the others would be able to contend with the vanguard before the rest of the horde reached the mouth of the opening. If she was lucky, she might even get an alpha dragon or dragoneer in the opening volley. If she could take the lead horde in the swell, then she could turn the dragons around and use them to block the pass. The resulting confusion might be enough to repel the rest of the enemy swell, or at the least, buy her horde time to offload its equipment and passengers.
Hopefully, it was her lucky day.
Chapter 49
As Elevera drifted before the mouth of the pass again, Trysten pulled her bow from its strap on the saddle, then notched an arrow. As she raised her bow, the scene in front of her grew blurry, and it almost seemed she was seeing double.
The bowstring went slack as she blinked.
No, it wasn’t an illusion, and she was not seeing double. She sensed twice as many dragons as before. They were suddenly there, popping into her mind and heart. It was the reverse of what she had experienced when she chased the horde through the pass days earlier, and it disappeared. These dragons just appeared one, two, even three at a time, out of nowhere, and they were flying at her, crowding the Western dragons already in the pass. The Western dragons tried to dodge the new dragons by climbing higher and clinging to the rocky slope.
All of the dragons in the pass were awash in surprise and confusion. Both sets. They had no more idea of what was going on than Trysten did.
Trysten blin
ked and shook her head, trying to clear her vision and make out the details of what was happening in front of her. What in the wilds? She ordered Elevera to slow into a hover so that she could watch.
Finally, Trysten was able to start making out individual details, and the first dragon she could clearly see, the one closest to her, was white. White as the snow atop the peaks. Royal white. And her white head clearly lacked a hood.
Trysten’s breath stopped.
Kingwind.
The moment she realized what she was looking at, arrows began to zip between the two hordes. The dragons shifted in the air, swooping down or riding up the side of the pass. A large, red dragon wearing a hood crashed into the rocks of the passage. Her back end flipped up with her momentum as she slid chest-first into the ground. Trysten held her breath as the red dragon then tilted inward, toward the center of the passage. The dragon’s tail caught the right wing of a royal dragon as she lifted her wings for another stroke.
The royal dragon was knocked off balance, unable to bring her right wing all the way up for a full stroke of air. As a result, she slid down and to her right, twisting to try and compensate. She reared up and tried to land hard on all fours on the sloping side of the pass. A hooded dragon skipped over the top of her, twisting to her side to gouge the royal dragon and tear the rider from his saddle.
Trysten glanced over her shoulder. She lifted her arm and signaled for her horde to scatter and make room for the oncoming dragons. There was no telling what was going on, but she couldn’t bottle the dragons into the pass now, not while it appeared that Aymon’s swell had somehow joined them.
Trysten spurred Elevera off to the side of the pass. As she brought Elevera around, Trysten drew her arrow back. The rest of the Aerona horde gathered on either side of the opening. Three more Aerona dragons rose up above the cliff face and struggled to join the fray while three more dragons dropped down to the outpost to unload.
For all the sky! This was going to be a slaughter, and there was little she could do about it. She’d have to make quick work of finding the alphas, the Dragoneers, and taking all the Western hordes.
The first dragon erupted from the Gul pass wearing a hood and Trysten released her arrow. Arrows flew from half the Aerona horde. Trysten flinched and grunted with pain as half a dozen arrows found their marks among the dragon flesh. A few more hit the rider. He fell backward, his arrow loosed uselessly into the sky before his bow dropped to the rocks below.
Kingwind followed with Prince Aymon upon her back, bow in one hand, the other whipping back and forth frantically in a signal of distress, a call for help.
He pointed back to the pass.
“You don’t say,” Trysten whispered as she notched another arrow and then held her breath.
Dragons began to stream from the pass. Western and royal. Trysten took aim at one rider and released her arrow as she felt the building up, the rumbling of gas in Elevera.
“Now is not a good—”
The words were ripped from her as Elevera lunged upward into the sky. Trysten grasped the lip of her saddle with her right hand and clung to her bow with the left as the alpha seared the blue above with firebreath and a roar to call her new dragons to her.
Trysten clenched her eyes and teeth as the new dragons flooded into her mind and heart. She frantically sorted through the thoughts and feelings, looking for the new ones, the different ones to tell who they had belonged to, but it was too much. There were too many dragons on all sides for her to sort out which were royal and which were Western.
Trysten’s eyes fluttered open as Elevera’s display ended. She shoved down on the lip of the saddle, and as Elevera began to dip down, Trysten saw several Western dragons rising up to meet her. But they were not Elevera’s dragons. That was plain to see by looking into their eyes.
Elevera’s display had made a target of Trysten and the alpha and pegged Trysten as the Dragon Lord. The Western dragons were coming for her.
“Fish and birds,” Trysten whispered, her voice trembling as she yanked another arrow out of the quill.
Dragons poured from the pass like water from a rain-swollen stream. One dragon spilled out and immediately crashed to the rocks below. She bounced and rolled down the rocks, sending a spray of stone ahead of her and a cloud rising behind her, her rider tossed and crush until the dragon dropped over the edge of the cliff.
Trysten pulled her bowstring taught, then let the arrow fly. Several arrows zipped past her. She clung to the saddle lip with her right hand as her left clutched the bow. With a wish, she sent firebreath bubbling up in Elevera again, only to erupt as a Western hordesman began to steer away.
His screams echoed in Trysten’s ears as Elevera twisted down and away, threading through the chaos beneath them. Arrows bounced off her golden hide. One punched through her wing.
Elevera leveled off and flew out toward the plains a moment before circling around. Trysten drew an arrow and searched for a belly above to plant it in. She sought out the alphas.
Two riders dropped through the chaos, heading straight for her. Each rider drew his bowstring taught. Trysten answered in kind, then with a thought, sent Elevera spinning and twisting around, heading straight for them. They weren’t alphas, but they were after her nonetheless.
One rider released his arrow. It zipped past Trysten. She released hers and missed as well. The second rider drew his bowstring back, and then a solid bolt of white crashed into his dragon with a roar. Kingwind crushed the rider, and Trysten’s back arched with the pain of the Western dragon as it dropped away. As the second Western hordesman tried to veer away, Kingwind pounced off the back of her first victim and grabbed a jaw full of wing.
Trysten groaned with agony. Through squinted eyes, she watched Aymon release an arrow at a dragon above. A second later, Trysten felt the punch of the arrow as it lodged in a dragon’s chest. Kingwind released her jaw, and the second dragon roared in agony as her wing snapped and she crashed to the rocks below.
Aymon met her eyes as Kingwind flapped forcefully to raise herself back up. He nodded in her direction as he drew an arrow from the quiver on his back, and then notched the arrow as he turned his attention to the dragons above.
Several arrows rained down and bounced off of Kingwind’s hide. One slipped through her wing. Another broke a scale near her hip. Trysten flinched, then closed her eyes to try and shield her mind from all the pain, the rage like a rolling fire that swirled around her, threatening to reduce her to quivering ash.
Elevera ripped upwards into the sky again, and Trysten barely had time to grasp the lip of the saddle. She clung to it as the firebreath built up and the alpha erupted into another roar of claiming dragons from another fallen alpha. More dragon thoughts and feelings swamped Trysten. Arrows punched into Elevera’s belly and one hit Trysten in the back. She lurched forward, then reached behind herself to feel for the shaft. Her armor had repelled it.
Snap out of it. Snap out or die.
She shook her head hard and reached for another arrow, looking around for her horde. She searched for the hooded dragons in her mind and found them heading for her. Or rather, heading for Elevera. They were hers now. But the riders, frantic, fumbled for arrows and took up aim.
“Up!” Trysten screamed at them. “Up and away!”
The dragons peeled away from Elevera. A few of the riders released their arrows, but the shots went wide and dropped away harmlessly. Trysten sent the dragons up and out toward the plain, apart from the fray where they would be held captive in a harmless holding pattern.
Several more hooded dragons approached from different directions. Arrows flew from the men. One lodged into Elevera’s foreleg. The alpha roared, and Trysten yanked back on her bowstring and let an arrow fly at the rider. He dropped his bow and clutched at the shaft sticking from his belly.
Three more closed in. Trysten drew another arrow as Sone erupted in a blur of red from below. Claws gouged the side of the dragon and Sone’s firebreath raked the rider. Try
sten grasped the lip of the saddle as pain tore through her side. Sone bounced off of the other dragon and righted herself with her wings. Paege took aim at the third rider.
Trysten began to pull another arrow from the quiver. A wave of pain rolled over her as a dragon smashed into the side of the mountain. Rocks and the dragon rolled past beneath her, and she fumbled the arrow.
Paege let loose. The arrow hit the third dragon’s wing. It punched through the membrane but missed the rider who closed in on Trysten and Elevera.
As Trysten wished for Elevera to roll, to throw her belly up and protect Trysten, a flash of wild dragon dropped out of the sky. Yallit zipped past and snagged the hordesman’s bowstring in his jaw. The string snapped and left the rider with a useless stick.
Elevera whipped upward again, spiraling, the muscles in her wings burning as she raced upward, firebreath building once again. Trysten trembled with the waves of dragon awareness, of suffering, of the pain and ache and rage that buffeted her. She clenched the saddle once again, her fingers numb and tingling. The alpha seared the sky once more.
Trysten looked down. She searched for the tell-tale pattern of dragons rushing in and up toward Elevera. She spotted several of them. They were not hooded. Fish and birds. One of the royal hordesmen took two arrows to the back while trying to regain control of his dragon.
And then out beyond them, at the edge of the fray and moving closer, she saw two dragons, much smaller than the others, and both were darker than night.
Chapter 50
Without a word from Trysten, Elevera banked through the air and began to dive toward the Originals. Around her, dragons and arrows zipped in all directions. Trysten flinched as an arrow shattered a scale on Elevera’s haunches. Several more punched holes in the membranes of the alpha’s wings. One skipped off the back of Trysten’s shoulder and reminded her that she was the human in the pair.
The Originals weaved and dodged through the fray. Arrows bounced off their hides and dropped away. Upon each one’s back sat another Original in human form. They were scanning the dragons, looking for something.
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