Page 66 of Wings of Cruelty and Flame

Ameirah was mine, and I wasn’t going to lose her to a crush, or to whatever zealots had murdered the man for all to see. No clergy I’d ever met, that was for sure.

I spotted a row of solid stone buildings coming up on my left and began the painstaking process of pushing my way sideways through the crowd. There was little more than a millimetre of space but I forced a path, wincing when bodies smacked mine. I meant what I told Ameirah that first night—I only used my power on our enemies—but this was an emergency. People strained to make room when I barked at them tomove.I ignored the twinge of guilt. If this allowed me to find Ameirah and get her home safely, I wouldn’t feel guilty.

By the time I made it to the tan-stone buildings, sweat dripped off my chin and my tunic stuck to my body beneath my leathers. These clothes were made for the slicing winds of wyvernback, not for a stifling crowd. I pushed through the discomfort and hauled myself up onto the sill of the square window, drawing on years of experience climbing Mak toscale the two-storey building. A man in a ripped brown tunic followed me, scrambling onto the window, trying to replicate my handholds. With any luck, others would see and escape the crush to the rooftops. From here, they’d be stuck, but at least they wouldn’t be trampled to death.

I pulled myself onto the roof with a grunt, my ribs protesting an injury I didn’t remember getting, my foot throbbing with an injury I did—a heavyset man put his entire weight on my boot in his attempt to break free of the crush. I didn’t blame him; it was mass hysteria down there.

Panting on the rooftop, I got down to my belly and threw my hand over the edge, reaching for the man climbing after me. He was only a few feet below me, close enough to make it. Shock charged through my heart and I yelled just as his fingers slipped from the wall. His eyes widened, locked on mine. I screwed them shut when he plummeted, landing among the crush. I didn’t want to know if he died on impact, or if he took others with him. I pulled away from the edge, dragged a shaky breath into my lungs, and reminded myself of my job.Get to Mak, find Ameirah, get us home.

He wasn’t the first person I’d watched die. He wasn’t the first who’d looked directly into my eyes in the moment before death, either. It was the life of a rider with a legion. I hated it, but we couldn’t hold off Kalder and save Ithanysian lives without losing others. It was a lesson I’d learned the hard way at eighteen, trying to save everyone in a small village. I’d spread myself too thin. They all died.

“Ameirah will not suffer that fate,” I bit out, reminding myself what was at stake, grounding myself.

I was the prince of these people, and I did have a responsibility to them, but my highest priority was my wife. I brought her here, was so eager to mark her as mine that I’d insisted on visiting Wyfell instead of flying straight home. Shewas lost in the crowd, injured, potentially—no, I refused to think that—because of me. My obsession with her, my recklessness.

Trying not to choke on that guilt, I braced myself at the edge of the roof and leapt to the next building, then the next, pushing my body near its limit, ignoring my injuries and pain, my exhaustion.

Too much too soon.

“I know,” I snapped. But Ameirah was down there, probably terrified. I had to keep going, and judging by the link between me and Mak, he’d already abandoned the landing field where we’d left him flirting with a pretty ruby. He knew something was wrong, had either heard the people of Wyfell screaming or sensed it through our link. He was close.

I gritted my teeth against the burn of exhaustion in my blood. It felt like I’d pushed my magic too far, expended too much at once, but this wasn’t my power—this was the consequence of riding for three days, fighting a storm, and then getting caught in a crush the following day.

My legion would be thrilled to know they were right, and I should have waited another day. But if I hadn’t, what would have happened to Wyfell and its people? The second we were back in the Red Star, I’d send word to my chief of defence, who could organise legions to handle this. I suppose I’d warn the king too, on the off-chance he hadn’t ordered this to happen. If I hadn’t been here, how long would it have taken word to spread? Longer than hours, I’d bet.

Focus.

I sucked in a shallow breath, ignoring the spike of pain through my ribs and the burn of exhaustion in my blood, making another leap, then another. My head pounded, heat rising from my body, and I jumped again—but this time, my fingers slipped from the rooftop, brick scraping my palms raw as I fell too fastto catch myself. I was used to time slowing when I neared death, but this time passed too fast.

I crashed like a falling star, the world rushing past, the building little more than a golden blur beside me, ripping open graze wounds on whatever parts of me weren’t covered in leather. I tucked myself into a ball to protect my organs when I hit the ground and—slammed into a solid wall that was warm with scales and rumbling bloody murder. A leathery wing buffeted my side when I almost rolled off, and I flung my eyes open, throwing my arm around the nearest spike.

“You could have impaled me!” I yelled at Mak.

His reply was low and furious.

“Yeah, I know I would have died without you catching me,” I muttered, pulling myself into my seat, leaning back against his spike so he could use his right wing again. I panted, waiting for my head to stop spinning, recovering my wits. “Thank you.”

His wings caught air, heavy beats carrying us over the city, avoiding the paths of other wyverns in the sky. My breath froze in my lungs when I watched one unleash wyvernfyre on the civilians. I’d seen it a hundred times and it never got easier to see, and yet this… these weren’t warriors, they were people,ourpeople. Not enemies, not Kalder, not trained riders or ground warriors. If Ameirah was in the line of that wyvernfyre—

I couldn’t draw air.

“Faster, Mak.”

Wherewasshe? And more importantly, how were we going to find one woman in a city full of panicked people crammed in on every street?

It began to rain all at once, not helping my nerves at all. I remembered the storm, almost falling from Mak, losing Fahad…

This is simple rain, not a storm.

Makrukh gave me a pointed look as he swung us around the spire of a mosque, communicating a plan far more elegantthan mine. The marriage mark. I could use it to sense Ameirah’s vague location, maybe even find her using it.

“And grand ideas how this works?” I asked Mak, stiffening on his back when he let out a fierce threat as a silver wyvern passed too close to his wing. The silver, half his size, angled away as fast as possible. There was no rider on its back.

Ice hit my veins and spread rapidly.

Mak hit my shoulder when he brought his wing in, snapping me out of my unease. His grumbled sound told me to trust my instincts like I trusted my magic, but that was overestimating my trust in my abilities right now. Still, I pressed a hand over the mark on my chest and imagined a tether expanding to the matching mark on Ameirah’s arm.

“East, over the meat market, Mak,” I said, not sure I could trust my instincts but never doubting my trust in him. If he thought I could follow the mark to Ameirah, I could.

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