Page 79 of FoolSilver
“Keep the dragon engaged. Stall it. The girl is what we want.”
“You’re certain it’s her?” the witch asked, in the same tongue.
The mage turned his head. His dark green eyes found me and held, weighing, the way you’d study a rare coin you weren’t sure was real.
“Grab her, whatever it costs. We test her after. If she isn’t the one, we kill her.”
Every word dropped into my skull. I understood the demonic tongue the way I understood my own. I’d told no one, and I wasn’t about to start now.
“Net coming!” Caspian bellowed.
A net of black mesh swung toward me.
The dragon turned his head and breathed.
Blue fire took the net in the air and ate it whole. Whatever they’d warded it against, it wasn’t dragon fire. Burning scraps rained past us.
Caspian fought the rear like a man possessed, death cards shredding the swarm, his longsword taking the heads off two mutant vampires that cleared the gap and scrabbled for a hold. He was blindingly fast. A witch flung a spell at his back and he threw up his forearm—the Coldiron armguard—and the spell shattered against it.
“Shit.” Half a laugh in it. “It blocks nasties.”
Nasties. Nasties.Coldiron preened.
A wyvern had crept onto the dragon’s blind side, a vampire crouched low on its spine, both of them angling for me.
I jumped.
The dragon roared—not fury this time. Fear. Fear for me, the sound raw enough to crack me open.
I touched down on the wyvern’s back, and the vampire came up to meet me.
It didn’t go for my throat but lunged to grab, fingers hooking for my arms, my collar, anything it could use to drag me off and away. My chakram took it across the throat before its handsfound a hold. The ring bit deep and came back to my palm slick and green. Mutants all had green blood, and the made thing’s head tipped from its shoulders. The rest of it slid off the wyvern’s flank.
The mount felt me where its rider should have been and twisted, its wyvern neck whipping around to take my leg off at the knee. I drove my will into the second chakram, and the ring poured long and narrow into a spear between one breath and the next. I buried it through the beast’s skull to the haft before the jaws could close.
The wyvern died under me and tipped toward the ground. I rode it down a beat, then shoved off into open air.
For one weightless second there was nothing under me but a very long fall.
Then the dragon’s talons closed around me, as gentle as a lover’s embrace, and flung me up toward his back. Caspian was already reaching. He caught me out of the air and hauled me down against the scales, one arm clamped around me until my feet found their hold.
“Thanks,” I breathed.
“Badass, lioness.”
Out ahead, the dragon opened the Kharvox down one flank, scales sheeting away in a spray of dark green blood, and the alpha mutant broke off with a furious shriek and fell back into the swarm.
We’d torn a hole in them. The dragon drove through it and climbed, hauling us up over the base, and the ground force answered.
Volleys ripped up from the walls into the enemy rank.
After that it all ran together. Coldiron shrieked in my skull, drunk on the slaughter and still fishing for my praise. The demon kept up a running stream of battle-talk, telling me where to throw before I’d found the target. The dragon roared andpoured fire. Caspian howled, a wild victory note, every time his blade bit through hide and bone.
Hundreds of iron arrows whistled past my ears, some trailing flame, punching wyverns out of the air. Mutants screamed. The mages spat curses in a language only I could understand. A heavy round—one of the old dragon-killers, ballista-fed—burst against a wyvern close enough that the heat slapped my face.
Nikolai’s vampires were good. Their aim was clean. It didn’t kill my stress: one bad shot, one twitch off line, and they’d blow the dragon, Caspian, and me clean out of the sky.
It was fucking mayhem.
