I knew that roar, knew—
A golden-furred beast with curling horns tore into the hounds.
“Tamlin,” I got out, but his green eyes narrowed. Run, he seemed to say.
That was who had been running alongside us. Trying to find us.
He ripped and shredded, the hounds launching themselves wholly on him. The king paused, and though he remained far off, I could clearly make out the surprise slackening his face.
Now. I had to go now—
I scrambled to my feet, whipping the arrow out with a swallowed scream. Azriel was already there, no more than a few heartbeats having passed—
Azriel gripped me by the collar, and a web of blue light fastened itself at my shoulder. Holding the blood in, a bandage until a healer—
“You need to fly,” he panted.
Six more hounds closed in. Tamlin still fought the others, gaining ground—holding the line.
“We need to get airborne,” Azriel said, one eye now on the king as he resumed his mockingly slow approach. “Can you make it?”
The young woman was still standing at the edge of the cliff. Watching us with wide eyes, black hair whipping over her face.
I’d never made a running takeoff before. I’d barely been able to keep in the skies.
Even if Azriel took the girl in his free arm …
I didn’t let myself consider the alternative. I would get airborne. Only long enough to sail over that cliff, and winnow out when we’d passed the wards’ edge.
Tamlin let out a yelp of what sounded like pain, followed by another earth-shuddering roar. The rest of the hounds had reached him. He did not falter, did not yield an inch to them—
I summoned the wings. The drag and weight of them … Even with the Siphon-bandage, pain razed my senses at the tug on my muscles.
I panted through my gritted teeth as Azriel plunged ahead, wings beginning to flap. Not enough space on the jutting ledge for us to do this side by side. I gobbled down details of his takeoff, the beating of his wings, the shifting angle of his body.
“Grab onto him!” Elain ordered the wide-eyed human girl as Azriel thundered toward her. The girl looked like a doe about to be run down by a wolf.
The girl did not open her arms as they neared.
Elain screamed at her, “If you want to live, do it now!”
The girl dropped her cloak, opened her arms wide.
Her black hair streamed behind Azriel, catching amongst his wings as he practically tackled her into the sky. But I saw, even as I ran, Elain’s pale hands lurch—gripping the girl by her neck, holding her as tightly as she could.
And just in time.
One of the hounds broke free from Tamlin in a mighty leap. I ducked, bracing for impact.
But it was not aiming for me. Two bounding strides down the stone ledge and another leap—
Azriel’s roar echoed off the rocks as the hound slammed into him, dragging those shredding talons down his spine, his wings—
The girl screamed, but Elain moved. As Azriel battled to keep them airborne, keep his grip on them, my sister sent a fierce kick into the beast’s face. Its eye. Another. Another.
It bellowed, and Elain slammed her bare, muddy foot into its face again. The blow struck home.
With a yelp of pain, it released its claws—and plunged into the ravine.
So fast. It happened so fast. And blood—blood sprayed from his back, his wings—
But Azriel remained in the air. Blue light splayed over the wounds. Staunching the blood, stabilizing his wings. I was still running for the cliff as he whirled, revealing a pain-bleached face, while he gripped the two women tightly.
But he beheld what charged after me. The sprint ahead. And for the first time since I had known him, there was terror in Azriel’s eyes as he watched me make that run.
I flapped my wings, an updraft hauling my feet up, then crashing them down onto the rock. I stumbled, but kept running, kept flapping, back screaming—
Another one of the hounds broke past Tamlin’s guard. Came barreling down that narrow stretch of rock, claws gouging the stone beneath. I could have sworn the king laughed from behind.
“Faster!” Azriel roared, blood oozing with each wing beat. I could see the dawn through the shreds in the membrane. “Push up!”
The stone echoed with the thunderous steps of the hound at my heels.
The end of the rock loomed. Freefall lay beyond. And I knew the hound would leap with me. The king would have it retrieve me by any means necessary, even if my body was broken on the river far, far below. This high, I would splatter like an egg dropped from a tower.
And he’d keep whatever was left of me, as Jurian had been kept, alive and aware.
“Hold them high!”
I stretched my wings as far as they would go. Thirty steps between me and the edge.
“Legs up!”
Twenty steps. The sun broke over the eastern horizon, gilding Azriel’s bloody armor with gold.
The king fired another arrow—two. One for me, one soaring for Elain’s exposed back. Azriel slammed both away with a blue shield. I didn’t look to see if that shield extended to Tamlin.
Ten steps. I beat my wings, muscles screaming, blood sliding past even that Siphon’s bandage. Beat them as I sent a wave of wind rising up beneath me, air filling the flexible membrane, even as the bone and sinews strained to snapping.
My feet lifted from the ground. Then hit again. I pushed with the wind, flapping like hell. The hound gained on me.
Five steps. I knew—I knew that whatever force had compelled me to learn to fly … Somehow, it had known. That this moment was coming. All of it—all of it, for this moment.
And with barely three steps to the edge of that cliff … A warm wind, kissed with lilac and new grass, blasted up from beneath me. A wind of—spring. Lifting me, filling my wings.
My feet rose. And rose. And rose.
The hound leaped after me.
“Bank!”
I threw my body sideways, wings swinging me wide. The rising dawn and drop and sky tilted and spun before I evened out.
I looked behind to see that naga-hound snap at where my heels had been. And then plunge down, down, down into the ravine and river below.
The king fired again, the arrow tipped with glimmering amethyst power. Azriel’s shield held—barely. Whatever magic the king had wrapped around it—Azriel grunted in pain.
But he snarled, “Fly,” and I veered toward the way I’d come, back trembling with the effort to keep my body upright. Azriel turned, the girl moaning in terror as he lost a few feet to the sky—before he leveled out and soared beside me.
The king barked a command, and a barrage of arrows arced up from the camp—rained down upon us.
Azriel’s shield buckled, but held solid. I flapped my wings, back shrieking.
I pressed a hand to my wound, just as the wards pushed against me. Pushed as if they tried and tried to contain me, to hold Azriel where he now flapped like hell against them, blood spraying from those wounded wings, sliding down his shredded back—
I unleashed a flare of Helion’s white light. Burning, singeing, melting.
A hole ripped through the wards. Barely wide enough.
We didn’t hesitate as we sailed through, as I gasped for breath. But I looked back. Just once.
Tamlin was surrounded by the hounds. Bleeding, panting, still in that beast form.
The king was perhaps thirty feet away, livid—utterly livid as he beheld the hole I’d again ripped through his wards. Tamlin made the most of his distraction.
He did not glance toward us as he made a break for the cliff edge.
He leaped far—far and wide. Farther than any beast or Fae should be able to. T
hat wind he’d sent my way now bolstering him, guiding him toward that hole we’d swept through.
Tamlin cleared it and winnowed away, still not looking at me as I gripped Azriel’s hand and we vanished as well.
Azriel’s power gave out on the outskirts of our camp.
The girl, despite the burns and lashings on her moon-white skin, was able to walk.
The gray light of morning had broken over the world, mist clinging to our ankles as we headed into that camp, Azriel still cradling Elain to his chest. He dripped blood behind him the entire time—a trickle compared to the torrent that should be leaking out. Contained only by the patches of power he’d slapped on it. Help—he needed a healer immediately.
We both did. I pressed a hand against the wound in my shoulder to keep the bleeding minimal. The girl went so far as to even offer to use her lingering scraps of clothing to bind it.
I didn’t have the breath to explain that I was Fae, and there had been ash in my skin. I needed to see a healer before it set and sealed in any splinters. So I just asked for her name.
Briar, she said, her voice raw from screaming. Her name was Briar.
She did not seem to mind the mud that squelched under her feet and splattered her bare shins. She only gazed at the tents, the soldiers who stumbled out. One saw Azriel and shouted for a healer to hurry for the spymaster’s tent.
Rhys winnowed into our path before we’d made it past the first line of tents. His eyes went right to Azriel’s wings, then the wound in my shoulder, the paleness of my face. To Elain, then Briar.
“I couldn’t leave her,” I said, surprised to find my own voice raw.
Running steps approached, and then Nesta rounded a tent, skidding to a halt in the mud.
She let out a sob at the sight of Elain, still in Azriel’s arms. I’d never heard a sound like that from her. Not once.
She isn’t hurt, I said to her, into that chamber in her mind. Because words … I couldn’t form them.
Nesta broke into another sprint. I reached for Rhysand, his face taut as he stalked for us—
But Nesta got there first.
I swallowed my shout of pain as Nesta’s arms went around my neck and she embraced me so hard it snatched my breath away.