Page 73 of Wings of Cruelty and Flame

“Climb using the braided strap,” he shouted down. “And don’t fall off.”

“Great advice,” I muttered, giving him a dark look and wrapping my hands around the strap he indicated. It ringed Raheema’s body, attaching the seat to her back, the braided leather about the thickness of my arm. Climbing was going to hurt like a bitch, especially when my fractured ribs were still healing, but I’d asked for this. I wanted to learn how to ride, and I refused to be helpless like I was in Wyfell. Riding was the first step.

I gritted my teeth and hauled myself up Raheema’s back, bracing myself with the toes of my new riding boots—custom made, along with new riding leathers that arrived yesterday—as I pulled myself up her side, hand over hand. My ribs erupted in a fire of pain, but when I made it up and strapped myself into the seat, it was bearable. The cocktail of medicine I’d taken helped with that.

“Where were you anyway?” I shouted across to Varidian.

“At the wall, making sure the towers are secure.” His expression was stern, the face of the legion commander.

“Are they?”

He nodded, his mouth in a firm line. “Holding steady, and the guards are on alert for new wyverns.”

He guided Mak as close as he could get, inspecting the buttery leather straps holding me to Raheema’s back. “Tighten that piece there, good. Lean to either side.” He watched me with wyvern-keen eyes as I did. “Good, they’ll hold. I’d usually startoff slow, but with everything happening, I want you to be able to fly fast in case you need to flee another situation like Wyfell.”

“In caseweneed to flee,” I corrected, my voice hardening.

“Right,” he agreed, but I narrowed my eyes at his easy acceptance. “Hold onto the reins when Raheema takes flight. I want you to follow me across the Red Star. I’ll take the outside route, so we shouldn’t cross paths with many wyverns, but if you need to turn either left or right, press your thigh against her side. To go faster, drop your body to her back and she’ll do the rest. And trust yourself—and Raheema. Your bond is based on instinct, and there’s an understanding that flows between you. She’ll know what you need.”

“What if I want to stop?”

Varidian laughed. “When you’re in the air, dearling, if you stop flying you die. To land, angle her towards the ground and tell her you want to land. There’s an intricate technique I want you to learn, Ameirah. It’s called opening your mouth and speaking.”

My gaze flattened. “Funny.”

Varidian’s smile was swift, and it was good to see. Those smiles had been rare since the storm, since Fahad’s death.

“Raheema,” he said in an obvious command as Mak beat his wings, flying higher.

If Raheema could have cursed, she would have. She gave him a dirty look and craned her neck to look at me instead.

“Whatever they do, we do better,” I said, a shot of adventure and excitement hitting my blood—until she leapt off the ground like a comet and I screamed, white-knuckling the reins. It was easier to ride like this than frantically gripping Mak’s spikes and scales, but my fear of heights hadn’t gone anywhere. My stomach still plummeted as we soared into the air, my heart quickening into a frantic beat as I saw the Diamond of the South spread outbeneath us, the gardens at the front flowing to the winding road that led into the city below.

A tremor went through my belly, a strange feeling alongside my fear. Excitement to fly, to explore, to go anywhere in the kingdom. But also a rightness, a feeling that I was finally where I was meant to be, soaring through the sky on the back of a wyvern. My own wyvern.

My family lied to me.Fatherlied to me, over and over. He said my magic was too dark, too twisted, for any wyvern to look at me twice let alone claim me as a rider, and he was wrong. Raheema stretched out beneath me, her talons skimming fluffy clouds as sky blue wings beat, carrying us after Mak and Varidian. On sure wingbeats we soared past the edges of the city and then we were over the wall, the whole world a wonder laid out for us to explore.

I felt like the heroine of an adventure, like we’d traverse the cloud-strewn sky to explore far-flung lands, maybe liberate prisoners captured on false charges, or save wyvern eggs from thieves attempting to steal them in the dead of night. Those weren’t the only stories on my mind, though. My conversation with Shula came back to me, those tales of dark fae and darker magic tangling with what I’d seen—men in black giving kill orders, an armoured tiger slaughtering a boy, wyverns attacking our own people. There were stories of things like that happening before, ancient tales from the time of Wyvara, when tigers, wyvern, fae, and araethawn lived as neighbours. I didn’t know much about the latter, just that they were a type of fae and… they turned dark. Turned on the rest of us. If legends were accurate, the dark queen ruled over an army of them and used them as puppets.

The dark clergy weren’t puppets, though. They were men with their own minds and agenda. I just couldn’t figure out what it was. Did they simply want to hunt the lightning soul, and freeus of its influence? I could understand that, would even support that, but mass hysteria and violence? It didn’t add up.

My stomach dropped when Raheema swooped lower, snapping her wings tight to her sides. I wrenched out of my mind to find us diving down the side of a grey mountain, Raheema’s tongue hanging out of her mouth as she plummeted.

“Raheema!”My voice was a screech. I held the reins so tightly a bone cracked in my hand. My hair blew back from my face, wind grabbing at my clothes. “Slow down!”

Oops,was her laughing response.Can’t.

My heart slammed into my back, my stomach shooting up my throat as we neared the ground at such a speed that I knew it would kill us. Varidian yelled, Mak echoing it with a rumbling command, but my ears were buffeted by a deafening wind, my head spinning, and I couldn’t make sense of the words.

Six metres from the rocky ground, Raheema snapped out her wings like the sails of a great ship and caught the air, the wyvern version of a laugh in her chest.

“Bad wyvern!” I panted, remembering how to think, to breathe.

Fuck, that was terrifying. My blood pumped faster, though, a tingle in my hands. A dazzling mix of fear and exhilaration made me feel alive, a hundred percent present in my body.

Raheema landed elegantly beside where Mak hulked, furious, and gave both the wyverns and fae a sassy little growl.

See? We’d be fine fleeing danger. I’d be fast and Ameirah would be safe.

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