Total pages in book: 295
Estimated words: 282090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1410(@200wpm)___ 1128(@250wpm)___ 940(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 282090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1410(@200wpm)___ 1128(@250wpm)___ 940(@300wpm)
Heat prickles my skin, and I push myself to the edge to imbue, which isn’t as far as I’d like it to be after hours of wielding. Sweat pops on my forehead,and my skin flushes red.
“We don’t have weeks,” Brennan says softly, as though talking to himself.
“I know.”
Roars sound in the distance, and I look up through the chamber’s opening to the sky so far above us. My throat closes at the sight of gray clashing with green. With orange. My squad is up there fighting without me. Xaden is battling at the gates. We’re out of time.
I cut my power, then rest my palm on the stone. There’s a tiny vibration, like the ripple of water after a pebble has been skipped into a vast lake. We don’t have enough pebbles. “It can hold power, but we don’t have enough riders who can imbue down here.”
“I’ll have Marbh put the word out,” Brennan says, and we both look skyward when a flash of red is quickly followed by one of gray.
“We need every rider who can make it.” But who the hell is going to stop fighting and risk the battle on a hunch? My heart careens. It looks exactly like what my mother warned us not to let happen—a full-on melee. A dark shape moves at the top edge of the chamber, and I lower my shields for the first time since speaking to Jesinia.
“Get down here,” I say to Andarna, walking around to the back of the stone so no one coming to help imbue will see her.
“I’m not fond of pits—”
“Now.” There’s no room for argument in my tone.
I put my hand on the stone and call my power to rise while she descends, blacking out the sun momentarily on her way down, where no one else can see. Power flows out of me in a steady drip, buzzing the ends of my fingertips as I feed it into the stone.
She lands, sticking to the shadows the morning light doesn’t yet touch.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her golden eyes blink in the darkness. “Tell you what?”
“I know.” I shake my head at her. “I should have known earlier. The second I saw you after Resson, I knew something was different about the sheen of your scales, but I figured I’d never been around an adolescent, so what would I know?”
“Different.” She cocks her head to the side and steps out of the darkness, her scales shifting from midnight black to a shimmering deep purple. “That’s exactly how I’ve always felt.”
“It’s why you feel like you don’t fit in with the other adolescents,” I note, my hand shaking as I hold the power steady, giving the stone what I can until others arrive to help. “It’s why you were allowed to bond. Gods, you told me yourself, but I thought you were just being…”
“An adolescent?” she challenges, flaring her nostrils.
Nodding, I try to ignore the sounds of battle high above so I can concentrate on saving us, even as anger barrels down the bond from Tairn, and fury… I can’t think about what Xaden’s doing. “I should have listened when you said you were the head of your own den. That’s why no one could fight your Right of Benefaction last year. Why the Empyrean allowed a juvenile to bond.”
“Say it. Don’t just guess,” she demands.
Even a slow breath won’t calm my racing heart. “Your scales aren’t really black.”
“No.” Even now, her scales are changing, taking on the grayish hue of the stone around us. “But he is, and I so badly want to be just like him.”
“Tairn.” It’s not hard to guess.
“He doesn’t know. Only the elders do.” She lowers her head, resting it on the ground in front of me. “They revere him. He is strong, and loyal, and fierce.”
“You are all those things, too.” I wobble under the strain of wielding but keep my balance, keep the power flowing into the stone. “You didn’t have to hide. You could have told me.”
“If you didn’t figure it out, you weren’t worthy of knowing.” She huffs. “I waited six hundred and fifty years to hatch. Waited until your eighteenth summer, when I heard our elders talk of the weakling daughter of their general, the girl forecasted to become the head of the scribes, and I knew. You would have the mind of a scribe and the heart of a rider. You would be mine.” She leans into my hand. “You are as unique as I am. We want the same things.”
“You couldn’t have known I would be a rider.”
“And yet, here we are.”
A thousand questions go through my head, none of which we have the time for, so I give her exactly what I wanted—to be seen for who and what she is. “You are not a black dragon, or any of the six that we know of. You’re a seventh breed.”