“Rrrrr-argh!” With that ferocious battle cry, Snow heaved out one final glistening wave of heat, this one stuffed with every drop of her rider magic. Only her Pyriebral magic remained, restrained deep in her core.
That last gush of her magic careered over the plain. It hurled those fallen crystals of snow and ice and even a few blades of dry grass and dormant stalks out of its way. The scent of Samhain’s bonfires and fallen leaves streaked with Stormfyre’s molten metal and cinnamon conquered those of cracked glacier and burnt ozone from the wounded tornado.
It was the perfume of victory. Her fingertips itched with the knowledge.
Bbbbb-boooomf! Her magic hit the frostnado.
Rivaling that of any avalanche, a cloud sprang from the collision. It wolfed down the tornado and her rider magic.
From out of the cloud spewed more nuggets of snow and ice. Like before, they plinked down, innocent. Benign even.
With something like a giant’s sigh, the cloud collapsed inward.
Beneath it, the frostnado still twirled. Her magic that had enveloped it now existed in dull, whitish patches, nearly used up.
Was it enough?
In a great gust, the walls of the frostnado crumpled. Slivers of snow and ice rained down on the plain in a musical clatter that tinkled like wind chimes made of winter itself. The glacial gales, once razor-sharp and slicing, perished. Again, a hush spread over the prairie, this time broken by the soft sizzles of melting snow and the songs of the birds and rodents and early-spring insects.
The cold retreated.
Part of her missed it. While battling it and the frostnado, she was alive, wild, free in a way that she never was within the stale air of the castle nor within the warm comfort of Stormfyre’s stable nor within the Guard during or away from their patrols. Not even during her forays into the enchanting, enchanted Shadowmist Woods was she alive like she had been here.
It was strange to say the least.
But she was no stranger to feeling strange.
In the center of the wreckage of the defeated frostnado—in the center of all those twinkling pieces of snow and ice—a wyvern crouched, its scales the colors of an evil rainbow, one composed of the darkest shades of green, blue, and purple like the poison oil that sometimes floated on the Sea of Embers slaying anything it touched. One triangular wing extended over the wyvern’s belly, shielding itself and likely its rider. Although its snakelike body was smaller and thinner than Stormfyre’s and possessed less brute strength than a dragon’s, the wyvern was no less dangerous. Bladelike spikes traced its spine and tail. They could split and shatter a sword. So could the silvery talons edging its feet and forming the claws along the upper points of wings that served as less than graceful arms when the wyvern was grounded.
Right now, most of those talons dug into the snow heaped beneath the creature and its rider, snow that continued to melt from dragon-rider magic.
Did the snow melt because the wyvern was out of its own magic or because it pretended to be?
She must assume the latter. All her training demanded it.
Some instinct whispered that she was safe.
Never. I’ll never be safe as long as a single Wyndaerian wyvern flies free. That she’d heard all her life.
That she knew from experience.
The wyvern tipped its wedge-shaped head downward. Deep violet eyes with unsettling vertical pupils fixed on Snow.
Chunks of ice seemed to tumble down her spine.
Yet that alien gaze didn’t cut or bore into her like she’d expected. Yes, a fierce intelligence shone within it, but something else did too. Fear?
Snow jabbed her chin out. The beast was right to fear her. She’d taken down their frostnado and they were at her mercy now.
Pyrembri had no mercy.
The wyvern’s talons relaxed, and it folded that extended wing close to its torso, in the resting position along its back that was so similar to a dragon’s.
Snow’s stomach flipped.
The wyvern rider lay curled up against the beast’s charcoal-gray belly glinting navy blue like dusk in winter. Against those dark scales, his curly auburn hair almost glowed, almost as bright as her own flames. He wore the forest-green-and-silver of Wyndaerya, the colors of an evergreen woodland after an ice storm.
And he wore no furs. In only that Wyndaerian tunic, a leather jerkin dyed silver, and bark-brown trousers, he was a Wyndaerian through and through. They never minded the cold. Their wyvern riders were the worst about it, as if early spring’s slush flowed through their veins instead of hot blood.
Though the rider’s eyes remained closed and no part of him moved aside from his chest—the muscles of which pulled his clothes taut, something Snow tried and failed not to notice—tension pulsed from him. Readiness perhaps.
And danger.
Despite the appearance of unconsciousness, he lay coiled against his wyvern on that pile of thawing snow, a muscular spring with its raw power barely held in check.
Raw power ready to strike, to hurt, to kill.
The air tasted of it, that foreboding tang of threat and violence on the horizon mingling with the bone-freezing, ice-cold mint of Wyndaerian wyverns and their riders.
Something else tempered it, though, something earthy. Something filled with the promise of spring, of wet ground teeming with life, of the first green shoots of new plants, of rain and thunder and annual rebirth.
For now.
Yes, she had to take care, no matter the handsome sleeping face opposing her. Strong jaw, high, regal cheekbones, the arrogant tile of his head that spoke of nobility, none of it mattered.
Well, maybe that slight crook in his nose mattered. It spoke of at least one fight he’d been in.
As a wyvern rider—and a powerful one at that—he’d almost certainly been in more.
Wait. How had he formed that frostnado while unconscious? Were he and his wyvern so powerful that he didn’t need to be conscious to create a frostnado?
Or had she knocked him out with her own power after he’d forged it?
Magic bloomed, and a yellow-orange blaze crackled over her, an inch from those forbidden Pyriebral flames seething in her core. Shadows fluttered across her face. In that shifting light, her dark hair gleamed like polished obsidian.
Her outlawed magic had refreshed her dragon-rider magic. Now, she held her dragon-rider magic steady. To those Wyndaerian vipers, she’d look like one of the strongest Guard riders with an excellent connection to her dragon.
It wasn’t far from the truth. Snow had the best connection with a dragon out of all of the Guard.
Probably because she didn’t break dragons nor did she command them. She loved them and trusted them.
And Stormfyre loved and trusted her back. They were partners.
No one in Pyrembri believed that possible, not with their rigid rules and their ingrained fear of anything outside their customs and culture.
They’d never believe that was why she was one of the best riders of the Guard.
Of course they couldn’t know she was one of the best riders nor could they know about Snow’s peerless connection to Stormfyre. Snow could never stand out, never excel, never draw attention. That had been the first law of those laid out before her when Stepmother, a woman of fire and ice and cruel ambition, shoved her into the Guard five years ago, Snow still half a child and grieving in the chaos of Father’s sudden death.
In the chaos of her world crumbling to dust.
In the chaos of Stepmother seizing control with claws of iron wrapped in the softest, most expensive black velvet gloves.
Stepmother’s decrees were etched in her mind as though they were the brands in the rumps of the cattle that roamed the plains to the east, and Snow had sworn to uphold them. With each passing season, they suffocated her more.
They don’t matter. Not right now. Snow summoned all of her dragon-rider fire, and it rose and pressed against her skin like the scalding water that pressed against—and often exploded through—the surface of Pyrewing Spout. The air around her hands wavered with heat, and her dragon flames flashed around her. They danced faster and faster. She inhaled the cologne of her own autumn bonfires and of Stormfyre’s forge-heated metal and cinnamon.
And of the sharp ozone the instant before lightning struck.
The time for the killing blow had arrived, the moment she’d prove her worth to the Guard, to the memory of her dead parents, to the blaze burning in her blood.
Inside, fire coiled, twisted around her ribs, and crawled up her throat. Her pulse thudded in her ears. Her entire body smoldered with magic begging to be thrust upon her enemy, and her flames lapped it up.
They begged to slay her enemy.
On its decaying throne of melting snow, the inky wyvern hunched around its unconscious rider. It watched her with that strange violet gaze. It did not again shield its handsome rider, his auburn hair clashing against the evergreen and silver of Wyndaerya.
I’m not fooled. Wyndaerians could switch to vicious in a heartbeat. She had to butcher them before they did.
This is it.
Her hands, wreathed in fire and poised to sentence death this fateful afternoon, quaked. Her breath caught in her throat.
And she hesitated.
She hesitated.
The moment to kill stretched between heartbeats, fragile as spun glass. Her magic drew back toward her, and the blaze covering her body slowed, then faltered like a candle in winter’s arctic gales. Her throat tightened. Copper coated her tongue, the metallic taste of uncertainty that true Pyrembri never tasted before murdering their enemies.
Something inside sprang up, spring’s first wildflower through ice-encrusted snow. Traitorous, merciful, and weak, it whispered, We could capture them. It would be better that way. Kinder. We can prove that Pyrembri can be strong and noble.
It was the part of her that had spent years secretly nursing injured animals back to health, the part that never slayed anything but mosquitoes.
The part that was traitorous, merciful, and weak.
She had to butcher them. She was but one person and even with that forbidden Pyriebral magic churning deep within her, one person couldn’t contain both a wyvern and its viper of a rider on her own. Not safely and not without risking her dragon and her dogs.
Especially when that viper of a rider likely belonged to one of the high houses of Wyndaerya. Only they could forge frostnadoes that strong.
As a member of one of the high houses, he could have their royal, fire-smothering magic coursing through his veins.
Legend had it that those possessing the royal Wyndaerian magic of ice and winter storms could freeze blood with a single look.
Snow’s fingers curled, and she gritted her teeth until her jaw ached. On this final day of winter, she forced steel into her spine.
Her stomach roiled.
She wound up again. Her magic pulsed, built, burned, hot and bright and deadly. Her skin flushed, and sweat beaded on her brow despite the cold. Her flames swirled over her. They congealed around her hands, now bright yellow with whitish centers like the blossoms of late summer’s flamestyr.
Her magic bashed against her, a scream demanding release.
Snow prepared to unleash everything she had.
Everything, including the forbidden Pyriebral magic. It tickled the tops of the icy walls of its icy prison, ready to flow over them the instant she allowed it.
Ready to flow through her and overcome her and destroy her enemies.
If she didn’t restrain it, it could destroy her too.
It would also murder her enemies in one blast.
“No! Please don’t!” a female voice rang in her head, as clear, light, and crisp as the silver bells of Winter’s Solstice.
And as desperate as a prayer.
It was a stranger’s voice, one that felt familiar, like from a dream half-remembered in the morning.
It was a wyvern’s voice.