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The swaying cage made my muscles spasm in the same way it had when I was thirteen. The freezing altitude quaked through my skin and into my bones until shivering became a violent act of defiance. My eyelids closed on their own over and over again, but I forced them open to log the direction we were going. And I wanted to watch the Barren get further and further away—to become a wonderfully insignificant dot on the ground. If the Ruckus really were taking in Annatalians, then they might have shifted from the lands that stood by as our people were slaughtered.

Before we crossed the mountains into the rocky, desolate Wilds, I had unbuttoned one of the woollen under-layers of my dress and wrapped it around my head in a bid to protect it from the YuleMots. It also helped shelter me against the biting wind.

We flew at an unnatural speed, which churned my stomach. But that was what phoenixes were: wholly unnatural. The gods had created them with blistering fire, sight and senses no other bird held, and intense speed. All to stop a war… but there was never any stopping man’s greed, jealousy, or thirst for power.

Terrain that would take days on horseback only took hours in a cage under a phoenix. Perhaps once this had been a blessing, but now the Barren Riders used it as another act of terror. They dived into villages and ruined towns, enforcing the Barren King’s laws and gathering the tithes without mercy.

Below me, miles upon miles of derelict and broken ruins lay blanketed in snow and ice. The huge stone buildings were roofless, and spires reached for the sky in uneven, jagged points. The land had never recovered from what the armies of witches and mages had destroyed when the four kingdoms fought for dominance and fertile lands in the Old War and then again, generations later, in the Kingdoms’ War. Two wars with the same outcome: people died, and the powerful prospered.

My throat was raw, but that didn’t stop me from screaming at Kit and demanding to know where he was taking me. He never answered. Would he really dump me in the Ruckus all for an anklet from Morlan? What did that anklet do? Hide someone’s identity like mine did?

My throat was already bruised and hoarse, but after all my shouted questions, it was raw by the time he looked down, and our eyes met. He only shook his head with a deeply annoying look of pity in his gaze before returning his gaze to the horizon.

Once across the Wilds River, which separated the Wilds from the Ruckus, Kit had shouted back that my noise would attract the young, feral Ash, and it would dive-bomb us. Apparently, the first thing it would go for was the cage. It had happened before, but he couldn’t know that I remembered it well. It was one more reason I hated the vicious birds.

I wrapped my arms around my knees and closed my eyes, fighting the trauma that was shuddering through my limbs. Ember, Thorn, and I had only been children when we were captured. They had flown us inside a cage under the Betrayer’s Smoke Phoenix when a wild, dazzling white Ash Phoenix had attacked, nearly sending us all plummeting to the ground.

Trying to keep the memory at bay, I made myself focus on the horizon and prayed to the fates that I would find a way out of this cage. Above me, Kit glided below the phoenix’s bright orange and red chest with his arms outstretched on a bar and his legs tucked into the long leather pouch. There was a loop on the back of the Riding leathers which hooked into the harness under the phoenix. He swayed right and left with each micro-movement of the bird as if they were one.

Long ago, the Riders had ridden on top of the birds, but when the curse shifted the dynamics and huge silver arrows were shot from the ground, killing too many phoenixes, the flying angle was changed. This way, the bird’s vulnerable underbelly was protected by the Rider, and the Rider had a better view of the dangers lurking beneath them.

The huge phoenix’s claws gripped the handle of the cage, and its multi-coloured feathers rippled with each beat of its wings. They looked magnificent, but they were horrors encased in a beautiful shell.

Gripping the bars of the cage with one hand and shielding my eyes with the other, I studied the land we were speeding over. Maps with vast areas marked with black crosses—places where the magical fighting in the Old War had become too intense, and the land had been contaminated. Earth too acidic to farm, and the air still wafting with magic that would make a normal mortal mad. It was generations later that the kingdoms realised that Annatalia had been spared the worst of it and that our land was ripe for the taking.

“That’s the Wilds?” I tried to get up on my knees against the battering wind.

The Wilds were a kingdom that was no better than the Ruckus beyond their borders. There was only one reason people preferred the Ruckus. They didn’t go to the Choosing to claim a phoenix. They shunned Skyworld magic altogether and worshipped the earth. But the Wilds was one of the last remaining strongholds of Skyworld worship. They revered the sky, the sun, the stars, and the flames. Due to the contamination, they had been forced to live underground in enormous caves no one had ever seen. There was a good reason that the Nomad back in the library had warned me not to encounter Zephyr of the Wilds. Only the Wilds Riders flew throughout Yule nights for reasons they kept to themselves, but it meant that they breathed in copious amounts of YuleMots. Many believed it was why the Wilds Riders’ eyes were always a bright, shining turquoise.

My grip tightened. They had said that Zeph was looking for someone. When we swooped lower, I shouted, “Are you giving me over to the Wilds? Why? Why would you do that? Because of who my uncle was? What he did? I was just a kid!”

Nothing.

Kit didn’t acknowledge me.

Taking a deep breath, I huddled down beside the bars of the cage and turned my back on the ice-sharp gale laced with YuleMots blowing through the bars. The cages were warded against the weather and magic, but both still seeped through. The strain of the last twenty-four hours was catching up with me, and I struggled to keep my eyes open. But I was still aware that I had remained outside on a night of Yule when I should have been hidden behind a door. Perhaps now, the madness would take me too.

***

I woke with a start and instinctively reached out to steady myself against the cage. It didn’t help—my shoulder crashed into the bars. And I cried out, trying to push myself upright and flailing back again. With jarring pain throbbing down my right side, we descended through the snow-tipped trees with branches dripping with icicles. The base of the cage hit the pointed treetops and branches, creating huge puffs of snow that filled my lungs.

“KIT!”

He ignored me, but the phoenix tilted up ever so slightly.

Without warning, the cage started to descend at an alarming speed.

I’m going to die.

Instead, the cage crash-landed in a small clearing in an evergreen forest. Every part of me juddered on impact, and I collided with the bars of the cage with a loud thud that should have broken every bone, but somehow I managed to get away with bruises. Which still felt as if every bone had actually broken.

In one smooth movement, Kit pulled his legs out of the pouch, unhooked his back from the harness, and sprang to the ground next to me. His phoenix towered over us until it spread its wings, which almost touched the farthest tree, and beat them, bringing up all the snow. It covered me, and I breathed it in. Kit remained unflinching until his bird had lifted above the treetops.

His feet crunched in the snow as he walked towards the cage. Ice-covered brambles spiked through the bars, which lay sideways against the large bush—this wasn’t the Wilds.

“Welcome to the Ruckus.” Kit stood before the door, arms crossed, looking incredibly pleased with himself. Which made me reach for my pin, but it wasn’t there. When had I lost it? In the struggle in the desert. The little book hummed in my pocket, and relief calmed my pulse ever so slightly.