Page 177 of Feralheart

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Of course.” She nodded once, but her smile did not reach her eyes. “We should mount then. The herald will arrive soon.”

She walked back toward where Lord Brimmore stood with his dragon. They exchanged glances, and the lord’s eyes slid across me before flicking away.

Eradin was helping Reece adjust his dragon’s harness. She’d braided her hair back from her face, and all I could think about was how it had looked down when she’d burst into my tent. Feral. Terrified.

For me.

I’d spent thirty years surrounded by people who calculated every approach. She hadn’t calculated anything. She’d just come.

That knowledge sat in my guts like swallowed fire.

My shoulder throbbed harder, but the pain had nothing to do with my wound.

A shimmer of magic announced the herald’s arrival. She materialized in the center of camp, her robes catching light that shouldn’t exist in the gray faelight dawn. Every conversation stopped.

“Today’s trial tests team cohesion,” she said, her voice amplified to reach every corner of camp. “You will navigate floating platforms and shifting pathways. The structures respond to your team’s emotional state. Discord breeds failure. Trust breeds passage.”

She paused, letting that sink in.

“Teams must stay together. That is all.”

She vanished.

Teams clustered together, their voices rising in discussion. I stood beside Aristus, my team nowhere near me.

“Mount up,” I growled, and everyone scattered, rushing toward their dragons.

Aristus was picking up on the tension radiating from every elite rider in camp. He didn’t understand why the humans were now moving like prey.

Huge doors groaned open in the canyon walls surrounding the meadow. Five of them, evenly spaced, revealing darkness beyond.

Teams launched, dragons’ wings beating the air. Leather creaked and riders shouted last-minute instructions.

Mounting one-handed tugged at every stitch. My vision whited out halfway up Aristus’s side. I held onto the saddle horn, breathing through the pain until I could see again.

Eradin sat on Selira nearby, her hands on the dragon’s neck spike. She watched with concern in her eyes.

Lyndie and Reece flanked her, their formation tight.

“Be careful,” Eradin hissed. “I mean it.”

“Will do.”

She nodded, then Selira took off and Eradin guided the dragon toward one of the open doors, her team following.

I cued Aristus into flight and toward the nearest opening. My team flew behind me, Vella on my right, Brimmore, Blair, and Alys bringing up the rear.

We flew through the door together, into darkness that lasted long enough I lost all sense of direction, Aristus’s wingbeats the only fixed point in nothing.

Light exploded.

We emerged into a space that shouldn’t exist, with mirrored platforms floating in a vast pale void, bright surfaces reflecting everything and nothing, pathways shimmering between them in configurations that shifted even as I tried to map them. No visible floor or ceiling, just endless space in every direction.

Aristus’s wings beat three times before he lurched and fell into a sickening, weightless drop. I locked my good hand on his neck spike. His wings caught again, and we jolted upward, both of us breathing harder.

He pulled left, putting distance between us and whatever we’d just passed through.