Page 8 of Knight's End
Connor simply raised a brow as Ryan choked back another round of dry heaving. Cerena’s spell must not have completely settled his huge body.
“Is it? Or is it just giving us false hope?”
I swallowed hard and pressed my lips together. I hoped what Connor said wasn’t right. I hoped that my knights could learn their new powers quickly and adjust. That magic that had taken each of them years to master could somehow—magically—take only hours or days. Ugh. I was wishing for the impossible.
A roar interrupted my thoughts, and I glanced sharply to the side, eyeing the gargoyles. They stood as still and unmoving as ever, even the one I leaned against.
The bellow sounded again, and I glanced behind us through the trees. But nothing was there. It was only when Blue tapped my shoulder and pointed straight up that I realized where the sound was coming from. Isla’s flying bears shot overhead. They were in perfect triangular wedge formation, an attack formation I'd studied many times with my mother. And the bears were headed straight toward our capital.
I stumbled through the mud toward the nearest gargoyle. I scrambled onto its back, scratching my hands in the process. "Fly." I commanded. "Take them down."
The creature flapped its wings and I rose into the sky. But not a single other gargoyle rose up with me. My own flying gargoyle didn't heed my second command. I pointed desperately toward the bears that were now receding in the distance, "Attack!"
My gargoyle did not spring forward. He continued to hover just above the tree line, letting me watch as the bears formed a diving formation and swooped downward into the Cerulean forest. Was that just at the border? I could only imagine the terror of my poor villagers.
Another gargoyle finally rose next to me, Ryan perched on its back. "They haven't been trained," he said.
I groaned in frustration. I had no idea how to train a gargoyle. My mother had only given orders. The training had been left to our beast master and our generals.
"What do we do?" I asked frantically. The bears were on their way. Our castle would be next, I was certain.
Ryan shook his head and struggled with his own mount for a moment. His gargoyle tended to list to the right, and he had to verbally correct it and then yank on its neck in order to get it to straighten out and hover at the same height as mine. "Most of our fleet of gargoyles were destroyed when I was a teen. Other than our two old gargoyles, who were already trained, I've never worked with them before. I never trained on gargoyle formations or battle techniques because it was always thought that wizards created the old gargoyles. We thought no one else had enough power to recreate them."
Sard. Ignorance was a blow I didn’t need. My knights had powers they didn’t know how to use, and now we had these beasts, these aerial stones that could act as both attack animals and turn back into boulders to act as huge projectiles. They were fire resistant, resistant to most magics, a boon. Quinn had suffered to give us one of the greatest aerial weapons possible. But not one of us knew how to use them.
I wanted to scream in frustration.
I have a kingdom to protect. How the sarding hell am I going to do that? I wondered.
My heart fell to the earth, as heavy as the stones that had made our gargoyles. Sarding magic. For all the good it did, I once again felt helpless.
