get through on foot, and Veronyka would soon follow in the air to help lead them deeper into the rocky wilderness. With any luck, she could get them to Prosperity before the soldiers had rallied enough for a proper pursuit. If there were any soldiers left.
Xephyra’s wall was growing thinner, and soldiers were starting to break through. Veronyka stopped and waved the animages on, pointing at the narrow opening. Again, she spoke to one of the adults. “Take them through, into the Foothills. Keep moving and don’t look back.” She crouched down and handed him an abandoned crossbow and quiver. “Just in case.”
Even if soldiers started to pursue, they’d have to bottleneck and diminish their speed and effectiveness. The animages needed every advantage possible.
The man nodded and shouted at the others, while Veronyka returned to the fight. Picking up a piece of smoking wood, she tossed it onto the now-empty prison tents, watching the fire catch, then spread, licking across the canvas.
Xephyra, she said, calling her phoenix to her side. Xephyra landed in a shower of sparks, her feathers smoking and rippling with waves of blue-white flame. Veronyka climbed carefully into the saddle, feeling the heat against her skin—but it was a pleasant sort of burn. It made her blood run quicker and her muscles tingle.
Wheeling around, she saw the last animages disappear into the stony crevasse, then took to the sky. In the distance, both Val and Sidra were visible again, raining arrows down and flying in dizzying evasive maneuvers. They had known their diversionary tactics would last only until the soldiers spotted the smoke from Veronyka’s efforts, and now that they had, the soldiers turned around and regrouped.
Both Val and Sidra were surrounded, but Val was more outnumbered.
With several pumps of her powerful wings, Xephyra dove toward the fight, shrieking as she shot through the sky like an arrow. Val’s phoenix cried out in response, and Val turned in her saddle. She was perched atop a thrust of stone, holding a spear with both hands as she tried to clear away the attackers clustered below. One in particular was trying to climb the bluff. Veronyka couldn’t figure out why Val’s phoenix didn’t just fly away, but then she saw that part of a net had caught on her left wing.
Val locked eyes with Veronyka, their dark depths shimmering with reflected phoenix fire.
Veronyka was still speeding toward her. Eyes on her target, she nocked an arrow and pressed the tip to Xephyra’s fiery flank. The steel tip was wrapped with phoenix feathers at the base, which caught fire at once—and continued to burn, no matter the speed of the arrow or the integrity of the wooden shaft. Veronyka let the flaming arrow fly, hitting the soldier clambering up the rocky cliff directly in the chest.
Two more arrows, two more bodies, and Val tossed aside her spear with a smirk and hastened to remove the snagging net. Xephyra looped back around, and by the time she steadied her flight, Val and her phoenix were in the air once more.
“Not tired already, are you?” Val asked, as Veronyka wiped the sweat from her brow.
“I’m not the one who almost got caught,” Veronyka called back.
Val grinned, then urged her phoenix back into the fray. Veronyka followed.
Flying with Val was not at all like flying with Tristan.
Tristan was steady, balanced—a practiced flyer.
Val was wilder, looser—more intuitive. It wasn’t that she lacked skill; it was that she gave herself over to the flight. Her hair trailed out behind her, red as the dying sun, and her body moved and shifted with the firebird beneath her. Veronyka saw the edges of her clothing catching fire, but Val didn’t seem to notice or care. She bellowed orders, shrieked battle cries, and laughed with every narrow escape or dazzling recovery. Val loosed arrows with deadly precision and pulled up abandoned spears from the ground in one breath only to throw them down again in the next.
They wove between one another, flying patterns and set pieces without thought or hesitation.
Is this shadow magic? Veronyka wondered as Val corralled a pair of soldiers for Veronyka to dispatch, and afterward, when Veronyka tossed Val some arrows from her own quiver, seeing Val’s was low.
Or is this something else?
Veronyka thought the battle would have been won sooner if she could have dedicated herself solely to the fight. But she was always wary of the escaping animages and the way the soldiers continued to push in that direction. Some had already gotten