edges of enhanced perception.
Dari’s mental strength surged around him, touched him, but didn’t rest in his awareness or restrain him. Her energy felt different. Larger, somehow.
Buried beneath a pile of growling outlaws, Aron kicked against his attackers. He tried to spit the cloth out of his mouth, but the man nearest his face shoved his burly arm harder into Aron’s lips and teeth. Aron ignored the agony. Reached with his mind. Reached harder.
Even as his five senses exploded with furious awareness on the other side of the Veil, Dari’s graal crushed against his in a splendor of colors, more brutal than any bandit’s fist. Aron’s head slammed backward into the dirt as his essence hurtled back through the Veil to normal space and time. The bandit’s arm seemed to sink completely into his mouth, separating his jaws as he let out a shout of pain and surprise.
More shouts rose.
These were terrified.
The arm crushing Aron’s mouth withdrew, and almost as fast, the bandits let go of him. He heard them stumble and struggle, falling backward, falling away as popping and groaning and new, terrible shrieking rose into the night. Blood flowed across Aron’s teeth as he managed to close his lips and roll to his side, then stand and snatch his sword from the dirt.
The nine bandits slammed into one another as they ran, screaming, and flung themselves into the brush.
“Blath,” Aron mumbled through his swelling, bleeding lips, assuming Dari had sent a mental call to the Sabor hiding herself in the trees. He knew people feared Sabor in fighting form, but these men had to be pure cowards. When he heard the telltale whump of big wings, he turned to see Blath soaring across the tableaux of black sky, white stars, and glowing twinned moons—and dropped his sword.
Aron’s knees went soft on him, and he wavered on his feet, coughing up a bloody, hacking gasp of surprise.
Blath sailed downward toward where he was standing, directly in front of a scaled, long-necked beast the size of a castle tower.
The creature was white with dark markings about its clawed forelegs, a barbed tail that seemed as long and pointed as a dantha tree, and massive, outstretched leathery wings. It had luminous eyes like black, liquid pearls, and its mouth was open to reveal rows of teeth like white, curved blades. A thin reed of smoke stretched upward from the beast’s nostrils.
Dari, he thought weakly before his stunned mind began to urge him to move before the beast belched a flesh-eating cloud of fire.
Dari was nowhere to be seen.
You are seeing her, his mind jabbered. You’ve always known she was Stregan. That her other form was dragon, not human.
A sensation like rope unraveling at the fibers overtook him as he tried to keep hold of reality, to accept it, and failed.
“Dari,” he said aloud, hardly able to pronounce the syllables with his damaged mouth.
There was no hint of recognition in the creature’s hungry, enraged gaze. Fire licked around its deadly teeth. Aron’s graal calmly informed him that if he moved, she would cook him and eat him before the smoke died away.
If he didn’t move, the same fate awaited him.
“Dari,” he said again, hearing the loss of hope in his own voice.
In her Stregan form, this magnificent dragon had no inkling of who he was, past an easy meal offering itself to her on this remote Cobb byway.
Blath had landed, and Aron saw that she had shifted back to human form. She was running toward him, full speed, arms outstretched, as if she meant to fling herself at him before he could mount any type of defense.
Fire ripped from the dragon’s throat.
Blath reached Aron, and the flames struck her from behind as she wrapped him in her arms. Heat melted over both of them, singeing his hair, reducing him to a gasping, wheezing child squeezed in Blath’s powerful embrace.
The Sabor had to be dissolving where she stood, but Aron couldn’t smell anything burning beyond cloth and some nearby leaves and branches.
He managed to look up into Blath’s face, and her golden eyes bored directly into his consciousness. “My skin protects me,” she said in a harsh, pained voice. “But not for long. Please. We have no choice.”
Aron understood what he needed to do.
He didn’t think Blath was instructing him, mentally or any other way. No. It was more like he was remembering a moment many cycles ago, when Lord Cobb’s riding party had overtaken the Stone travelers and rescued them from the Brailing