Page 106 of The Iron Flower

Diana smiles back—not a friendly smile, mind you, but a wild-eyed, feral grin that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up on end.

The huge rune-scaled Amaz soldier is still glowering at me threateningly as she grips her gigantic rune-axe. Her aggressive posture gives me serious pause.

What are we doing here? These people just tried to kill me. This is a cliff, and we’re about to step right over its edge.

But then I catch sight of another face: Marina’s. Seeming to sense my hesitation, her expression has morphed into one of sheer desperation.

“You can drop the shield,” I shakily tell Trystan. He holds my gaze for a long, questioning moment, then murmurs a spell and the shield fizzes into oblivion, the amber wash over everything fading away.

Yvan’s hand falls away from my arm as I step forward toward the young Amaz, Valasca. “I’m ready,” I tell her.

Valasca grins and reaches down to help pull me onto her horse with a surprisingly strong arm. I settle in behind her and wrap my arms around her waist.

“Interesting company you keep, Gardnerian,” she observes, turning her head to shoot me a wide, mischievous grin. She glances over at Diana, who stands beside us and is watching me closely. “The daughter of Gunther Ulrich. A mostexcellentchoice of bodyguard.”

A nervous tremble kicks up inside me, and I try in vain to still it.

“Relax, Elloren Gardner,” she tells me, an edge of seriousness to her tone. “I’ll protect you, as well.”

I eye her with distrust. “You’ve only just met me.”

Valasca shrugs. “I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, Gardnerian, but only because you freed the Selkie. For over a year now, I’ve been trying to convince my people that we should do something to help the Selkies. I saw one once, when traveling near the Gardnerian border.” Valasca’s heavily accented Common Tongue grows tight with outrage. “They had her in a cage. Her movements, her voice...it was all very seal-like. But her eyes... I only had to look into her eyes, and I knew.”

Valasca looks down at her horse and pats its neck affectionately, her expression lightening. She shoots me a wry smile. “It’s my belief that you have to look past the surface of things to get to the truth of the matter. Wouldn’t you agree, Elloren Gardner?”

She doesn’t wait for my answer, but instead rides forward through the runes and over the border until we’re just past her fellow Amaz. She raises her arm up to the heavens and looks around as the Amaz fall in around her. “Hold tight,” she cautions me before calling out something in another language.

Then Valasca swipes her arm down, and we set off like a bolt of lightning. I glance back over my shoulder quickly, straining for one last look at Yvan and the others. I catch only a brief glimpse of Yvan’s fierce eyes, and a hard rush of his fire, before the thick pine forest closes in around us, like a massive green door slamming shut.

CHAPTER TWO

THE AMAZAKARAN

I’m not prepared for the speed at which we move, the thunderous sound of hooves kicking up soil and snow all around us. At times, it’s like the trees are hurtling straight at us, set to collide. But always, we swerve just in time, like rapids zooming through the forest. It’s both exhilarating and terrifying, and I hang on to Valasca’s cloaked form for dear life.

We ride through the long break in the Northern Spine as the shadows lengthen, and I lose track of time. Before long, a brilliant moon hangs above us, silvery clouds dispersing to reveal brightening stars. The immense Spine rises on either side of us to tower above the black-limbed treetops, and I stare up at it in awe.

I remember riding over those same jagged peaks with Lukas, the Spine staggeringly beautiful from above. But here, below it, I’ve a clearer sense of its overwhelming heft, and it takes my breath away.

It’s bone-achingly cold, our speed knifing the icy air into my body. My fingers are becoming stiff and difficult to bend, and I begin to grow concerned about the dropping temperature, wondering if we’ll all become irreparably frostbitten.

A broader path opens up before us, and suddenly, the forest gives way to a Spine-stone road that cuts through haphazard piles of mammoth white boulders. There’s a borderline of suspended crimson runes just ahead.

Valasca pivots to grin at me, then yells out a hearty order in another language. Everyone’s horses break into a faster run, the animals’ hooves pounding the stone beneath us.

Terror clamps on to me with staggering force.

We’re riding at a faster and faster clip toward what looks like the edge of a cliff. Just past it, splayed out before us, are the lights of an immense city in a bowl-shaped valley, the snowcapped Caledonian Mountains just beyond.

The Amaz border city of Cyme—the largest of the six Amaz cities set throughout the Caledonian mountain range.

My fear-stricken mind absorbs all the details of the scene at once—countless buildings densely covering the central valley, their roofs streaked with illuminated red lines.

And there’s green. Everywhere in the valley. Greenin the dead of winter.

And we’re going to ride straight off a cliff of Spine-stone and hurtle down into it.

I glance pleadingly at Diana, who’s running beside us, her hair flowing behind her like a pennant. Diana meets my eyes and bares her teeth in an invigorated grin.

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