Manon didn’t show one flicker of feeling. Apologizing would make it worse, as would excuses. “Give me orders, and they will be done.”

“I want you airborne by tomorrow eve­ning. Don’t bother coming back if you aren’t.”

•

“I hate you,” Manon panted through her iron teeth as she and Abraxos finished their grueling trek to the top of the mountain peak. It had taken half a day to get ­here—­and if this didn’t work, it would take until eve­ning to get back to the Omega. To pack her belongings.

Abraxos was curled up like a cat on the narrow stretch of flat rock atop the mountain. “Willful, lazy worm.” He didn’t even blink at her.

Take the eastern side, the overseer had said as he’d helped her saddle up and set out from the back door of the Northern Fang before dawn. They used this peak to train the hatchling wyverns—­and reluctant fliers. The eastern side, Manon saw as she peered over the lip she’d just climbed, was a smooth incline after a twenty-­foot drop. Abraxos could take a running start off the edge, try to glide, and if he fell . . . Well, it would only be twenty feet and then wind-­smooth rock to slide down for a ways. Slim possibility for death.

No, death lay on the western side. Frowning at Abraxos, who was licking his new iron claws, Manon crossed the plateau and, despite herself, winced at the blistering wind that shot up.

To the west was an endless plunge through nothing until the spiked, unforgiving rocks below. It would take a crew of men to scrape off her remains. Eastern side it was.

She checked her tight braid and flicked her clear inner lid into place. “Let’s go.”

Abraxos lifted his massive head as if to say, We just got ­here.

She pointed to the eastern edge. “Flying. Now.”

He huffed, curling his back to her, the leather saddle gleaming. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she snapped, stalking around to get in his face. She pointed to the edge again. “We’re flying, you rutting coward.”

He tucked his head toward his belly, his tail wrapping around him. He was pretending he ­couldn’t hear her.

She knew it might cost her life, but she gripped his nostrils—­hard enough to make his eyes fly open. “Your wings are functional. The humans said they ­were. So you can fly, and you are going to fly, because I say so. I’ve been fetching your useless carcass mountain goats by the herd, and if you humiliate me, I’ll use your hide for a new leather coat.” She rustled her torn and stained crimson cloak. “This is ruined, thanks to your goats.”

He shifted his head away, and she let go—­because it was either let go or be tossed into the air. He set down his head and closed his eyes.

This was punishment, somehow. For what, she didn’t know. Perhaps her own stupidity in picking a bait beast for a mount.

She hissed to herself, eyeing the saddle on his back. Even with a running jump she ­couldn’t make it. But she needed to be in that saddle and airborne, or ­else . . . Or ­else the Thirteen would be broken apart by her grandmother.

Abraxos continued to lie in the sun, vain and indulgent as a cat. “Warrior heart indeed.”

She eyed the eastern edge, the saddle, the dangling reins. He’d bucked and thrashed the first time they’d shoved the bit into his mouth, but he’d gotten used to it now—­at least, enough so that he’d tried to take off the head of only one handler today.

The sun was still rising high, but soon it would start its descent, and then she’d be completely and perfectly ruined. Like hell she would be.

“You had this coming” was all the warning she gave him before she took a running leap, landing on his haunch and then scrambling, so fast he had barely lifted his head by the time she scuttled across his scaly back and into the saddle.

He jerked upright, stiff as a board as she shoved her booted feet into the stirrups and gripped the reins. “We’re flying—now.” She dug her heels into his sides.

Perhaps the spurs hurt or surprised him, because Abraxos bucked—­bucked and roared. She yanked on the reins as hard as she could. “Enough,” she barked, hauling with one arm to guide him over the eastern edge. “Enough, Abraxos.”

He was still thrashing, and she clenched her thighs as hard as she could to stay in the saddle, leaning into each movement. When the bucking didn’t dislodge her, he lifted his wings, as if he would fling her off. “Don’t you dare,” she growled, but he was still twisting and bellowing.

“Stop it.” Her brain rattled in her skull and her teeth clacked together so hard she had to retract her fangs so they didn’t punch right through her skin.

But Abraxos kept bucking, wild and frantic. Not toward the eastern edge, but away—­toward the lip of the western plunge.

“Abraxos, stop.” He was going to go right over. And then they’d splatter on the stones.

He was so panicked, so enraged that her voice was no more than a crackling leaf on the wind. The western drop loomed to her right, then her left, flashing beneath the leathery, mottled wings as they flapped and snapped. Under Abraxos’s massive talons, stones hissed and crumbled as he neared the edge.

“Abraxos—” But then his leg slid off the cliff, and Manon’s world tilted down—­down, down, as he lost his grip and they plummeted into open air.

32

Manon didn’t have time to contemplate her oncoming death.

She was too busy holding on to the saddle, the world flipping and spinning, the wind shrieking, or perhaps that was Abraxos, as they plunged down the cliff face.

Her muscles locked and trembled, but she kept her arms laced through the straps, the only thing keeping her from death, even as it swiftly approached with every rotation of Abraxos’s ruined body.

The trees below took shape, as did the spiked, wind-­carved rocks between them. Faster and faster, the cliff wall a blur of gray and white.

Maybe his body would take the impact and she could walk away.

Maybe all those rocks would go right through them both.

Maybe he’d flip and she would land on the rocks first.

She hoped it would happen too quickly for her to recognize just how she was dying, to know what part of her broke first. They hurtled down. There was a little river running through the spiked rocks.

Wind slammed into them from below, a draft that rocked Abraxos upright, but they ­were still rotating, still plunging.

“Open your wings!” she screamed over the wind, over her thundering heart. They stayed shut.

“Open them and pull up!” she bellowed, just as the rapids on the stream began to appear, just as she understood that she hated the oncoming embrace of the Darkness, and that there was nothing to do to stop this splattering, this doom from—

She could see the pine cones on the trees. “Open them!” A last, rallying war cry against the Darkness.

A war cry that was answered with a piercing shriek as Abraxos flung open his wings, caught the updraft, and sent them soaring away from the ground.

Manon’s stomach went from her throat right out her ass, but they ­were swooping upward, and his wings ­were pumping, each boom the most beautiful sound she had ever heard in her long, miserable life.

Higher he flapped, legs tucked beneath him. Manon crouched in her saddle, clinging to his warm hide as he took them up the face of the neighboring mountain. Its peaks ­rose to meet them like lifted hands, but he wobbled past, beating hard. Manon lifted and fell with him, not taking one breath as they cleared the highest snow-­capped peak and Abraxos, in joy or rage or for the hell of it, gripped clawfuls of snow and ice and set them scattering behind, the sun lighting them up like a trail of stars.

The sun was blinding as they hit the open sky, and there was nothing around them but clouds as massive as the mountains far below, castles and temples of white and purple and blue.

And the cry that Abraxos let out as they entered that hall of clouds, as he leveled out and caught a lightning-­fast current carving a pathway through it . . .

She had not understood what it had been like for him to live his entire life underground, chained and beaten and crippled—­until then. Until she heard that noise of undiluted, unyielding joy.

Until she echoed it, tipping her head back to the clouds around them.