who’d forgotten again to keep Kashkari in her sight, grabbed on to her carpet, its motion a hard jerk in her neck.
More wyverns careened into the rebels, forcing each three-mage squad to fend for itself. Kashkari veered them to the right, to avoid being struck by a wyvern’s wing. Iolanthe called for a ten-foot-wide sphere of fire and hurled it at the rider of the nearest wyvern—wyverns could not be harmed by ordinary fire; riders, not so invincible.
The wyvern knocked aside the fireball with its wing. Iolanthe summoned a fireball twice as big in diameter and sent it plummeting from above the wyvern rider.
A few feet from the head of the wyvern rider, her fire went out like a candle flame in a gale. She swore—there were other elemental mages nearby, interfering.
Or at least so she hoped—that it was other elemental mages, and not the Bane himself, as powerful an elemental mage as any who ever lived.
A trio of wyverns dove toward them. Kashkari swerved. Iolanthe hung on to her carpet, a string of spells leaving her lips as she zoomed by a wyvern—all of which, alas, were deflected by the wyvern’s wings.
“Untether my carpet, Kashkari!” shouted Titus. “You get Fairfax back into the base.”
Her beloved never feared anything without cause. But all Iolanthe could see were wyvern riders and rebels on carpets wheeling about. A fraction of a second later, however, it became clear that the three of them had been separated from the rest of the rebels and were surrounded by wyverns.
Without thinking, she willed a mass of sand to rise from the desert floor. The riders wore protective goggles, and the wyverns had hardy but transparent inner eyelids that made their vision impervious to flying specks. Still, sand impeded and sand obscured. If nothing else, a tornado of sand would make her feel less visible, less exposed.
But the desert floor seemed to have melted into a sea of glass. Not a single grain of sand leaped into the air at her command. The wyverns pressed in closer. She called for currents of air to push them back. The moment she did so, however, she felt the pressure of countercurrents—Atlantis’s elemental mages were neutralizing her on every front.
She was not alone in her failure. Titus and Kashkari were trying all kinds of spells to no avail. She didn’t know about Kashkari, but the prince was a veteran of dragon battles—at least in the Crucible, a book of folklore and fairy tales that he and Iolanthe used as proving grounds to train themselves for dangerous situations. But usually, in those stories, the dragons were few in number. And if they should be numerous, as in The Dragon Princess, at least the protagonist had a sturdy defensive position, like a dilapidated but still mighty fort, instead of flying carpets that provided no cover at all.
“Can I vault her into the base, or is that a no-vaulting zone?” Titus shouted the question at Kashkari.
“It’s a no-vaulting zone!”
Titus swore.
Earlier this very night, he had made the two of them jump to the ground from a height of half a mile, with nothing to break their fall but her powers over air, because he hadn’t wanted to risk vaulting her: vaulting so soon after a life-threatening injury could kill her outright.
Were they truly running out of options?
An incendiary idea flared to life. She had always called for lightning from above. But in nature, lightning didn’t necessarily originate from the sky. Sometimes balls of electricity wafted from nowhere. Sometimes lightning traveled from the ground to the clouds.
Could she?
She aimed her wand downward, feeling as foolish as she had when she first attempted to summon a thunderbolt from above. “Lightning.”
Nothing happened.
One particularly large wyvern surged forward and extended a claw—it would grab her off the carpet. The carpet dropped straight down and the claw missed her head by inches.
Two more wyverns followed the example of the first, attacking her from different altitudes, so that even if she were to drop or rise, she would not be able to evade both.
She tried again for lightning. Nothing.
Somehow Kashkari tugged them sideways, with the wyvern’s talons slicing just past the prince’s shoulder.
“Do you want me to vault you to the ground?” Titus yelled.
He and Kashkari shielded her from either side. Beyond the wyverns, the rebels were trying to break through this siege-inside-a-siege, the light of the war phoenix illuminating the anxiety and panic on their faces.
The wyverns advanced ever closer. The force of their wingbeats buffeted her from