Talons tore and sliced, and she flipped on instinct, whipping her tail so hard that the wyvern went tumbling out into the water.
Lysandra lunged back, getting an eyeful of it as it stared her down.
Oh, gods.
It was nearly double her size, made of the deepest blue, its underside white and speckled with paler blue. The body was almost serpentine, wings little more than fins along its sides. Built not for speed or cruising through oceans, but … but for the long, curving talons, for the maw that was now open, tasting the blood and salt and scent of her, revealing teeth as narrow and sharp as an eel’s.
Hooked teeth. For clamping down and shredding.
Behind the wyvern, the other fell into formation.
Men were splashing and screaming above her. If she did not get those enemy ships down…
Lysandra tucked her wings in tight. She wished she had taken a bigger gulp of air, had filled these lungs to capacity. Fanning her tail in the current, she let the blood still leaking from where the ship’s wood had pierced her hide drift to them.
She knew the moment it reached the wyverns.
The moment they realized she was not just an ordinary animal.
And then Lysandra dove.
Fast and smooth, she plunged into the deep. If they had been bred for brute killing, then she’d use speed.
Lysandra swept beneath them, passing under their dark shadows before they could so much as pivot. Toward the open ocean.
Come on, come on, come on—
Like hounds after a hare, they gave chase.
There was a sandbar flanked by reefs just to the north.
She aimed for it, swimming like hell.
One of the wyverns was faster than the other, swift enough that its snapping maw rippled the water at her tail—
The water became clearer, brighter. Lysandra shot straight for the reef looming up out of the deep, a pillar of life and activity gone still. She curved around the sandbar—
The other wyvern appeared in front of her, the second still close on her tail.
Clever things.
But Lysandra threw herself to the side—into the shallows of the sandbar, and let momentum flip her, over and over, closer and closer to that narrow spit of sand. She dug her claws in deep, slowing to a stop, sand spraying and crusting her, and had her tail lifted, her body so much heavier out of the water—
The wyvern that had thought to catch her off guard by swimming around the other way launched itself out of the water and onto the sandbar.
She struck, fast as an asp.
Its neck exposed, she clamped her jaws around it and bit down.
It bucked, tail slashing, but she slammed her own onto its spine. Cracking its back as she cracked its neck.
Black blood that tasted of rancid meat flooded her throat.
Dropping the dead wyvern, she scanned the turquoise seas, the flotsam, the two remaining ships and harbor—
Where was the second wyvern? Where the hell was it?
Clever enough, she realized, to know when death was upon it and to seek an easier quarry.
For that was a spiked dorsal fin now submerging. Heading toward…
Toward where Aelin, Rowan, Gavriel, and Fenrys stood atop the reef, swords out. Surrounded by water on all sides.
Lysandra plunged into the waves, sand and blood washing away. One more—just one more wyvern, then she could wreck the boats…
The remaining wyvern reached the coral outcropping, gathering speed, as if it’d leap from the water and swallow the queen down whole.
It didn’t get within twenty feet of the surface.
Lysandra hurled into it, both of them hitting the coral so hard it shuddered beneath them. But her claws were in its spine, her mouth around the back of its neck, shaking, yielding wholly to the song of survival, to the screaming demands of this body to kill, kill, kill—
They tumbled into open water, the wyvern still fighting, her grip on its neck loosening—
No. A warship loomed overhead, and Lysandra dug down deep, rallying her strength one last time as she spread those wings and flapped up—
She slammed the sea-wyvern into the hull of the boat now above them. The beast roared its fury. She slammed it again, and again. The hull snapped. And so did the sea-wyvern’s body.
She watched the beast go limp. Watched the water rush into the cleaved belly of the ship. Listened to the soldiers aboard begin shouting.
She eased her claws from the beast and let it drift to the bottom of the sea.
One more ship. Just one more…
She was so tired. Shifting afterward might not even be possible for a few hours.
Lysandra broke the surface, drawing down air, bracing herself.
Aelin’s screaming hit her before she could submerge again.
Not in pain … but warning. One word, over and over. One word for her.
Swim.
Lysandra craned her head toward where the queen stood atop the reef. But Aelin was pointing behind Lysandra. Not at the remaining ship … but the open water.
Where three massive forms raged through the waves, aiming right for her.
37
Aedion’s queen was on the reef, Rowan beside her, his father and Fenrys flanking them. Rolfe and most of his men had made it to the opposite side of the narrow bay mouth—atop the reef there.
And through the channel between them…
One warship.
One sea dragon.
And three sea-wyverns.
Adult sea-wyverns. The first two … they hadn’t been full-grown.
“Oh, shit,” the sentry beside Aedion on the watchtower began chanting. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”
The sea-wyverns that, Rolfe had claimed, would go to the ends of the earth to slaughter whoever killed their offspring. Only being in the heart of the continent might save you—but even then, waterways would never be safe.
And Lysandra had just killed two.
It seemed they had not come alone. And from the cheering of the Valg soldiers on that remaining warship … it had been a trap. The offspring had been the bait.
They had been only slightly bigger than Lysandra. The adults—the bulls—were thrice her size.
Longer than the warship now sitting there, archers firing at the men trying to swim ashore in the channel that had become a death trap for the green sea dragon.
The green sea dragon who now stood between the three monstrous creatures and his queen, stranded on those rocks with not even an ember of magic left in her veins. His queen, screaming over and over and over at Lysandra to swim, to shift, to run.
But Aedion had seen Lysandra take on the two offspring.
By the second, she’d been lagging. And he’d seen her change shapes so often these past months to know she couldn’t shift fast enough now, perhaps might not have enough strength left to do it at all.
She was stranded in her form, as surely as his companions were stuck on the reef. And if Lysandra even tried to climb onto shore … He knew the bulls would reach her before she could so much as haul her body out of the shallows.
Faster and faster, those three bulls closed in. Lysandra remained at the mouth of the bay.
Holding the line.
Aedion’s heart stopped.
“She’s dead,” one of the sentries hissed. “Oh, gods, she’s dead—”
“Shut your rutting mouth,” Aedion snarled, scanning the bay, slipping into that cold, calculating place that allowed him to make decisions in battle, to weigh the costs and risks.
Dorian, however, got the idea before he did.
Across the bay, hand uplifted and flickering bright as a star, Dorian signaled Lysandra again and again with his power. Come to me, come to me, come to me, the king seemed to call.
The three bulls sank beneath the waves.
Lysandra turned, plunging down—
But not toward Dorian.
Aelin stopped shouting. And Dorian’s magic winked out.
Aedion could only watch as the shape-shifter’s shadow soared toward the three bulls, meeting them head-on.
The three wyverns spread out, so huge Aedion’s throat went dry.
And for the first time, he hated his cousin.
He hated Aelin for asking this of Lysandra, both to defend them and to secure the Mycenians to fight for Terrasen. Hated the people who had left such scars on the shifter that Lysandra was so willing to throw her life away. Hated … hated himself for being stuck in this useless tower, with a war machine only capable of firing one shot at a time.
Lysandra aimed for the wyvern in the middle, and when only a hundred yards separated them, she veered left.
They broke formation, one diving low, one keeping to the surface, and the other falling back. They were going to herd her. Herd her to a spot where they’d surround her from every angle and then rip her to shreds. It would be messy and vicious.
But Lysandra shot across the channel. Headed—
Headed right for the final remaining warship.
Arrows rained down on her.
Blood bloomed as some found their mark through her jade scales.
She kept swimming, her blood sending the bull closest to her, the one near the surface, into a frenzy, pushing himself faster to grab her, bite her—
Lysandra neared the ship, taking arrow after arrow, and leaped out of the water.
She crashed into soldiers and wood and the mast, rolling, writhing, and bucking, the twin masts snapping under her tail.
She hit the other side, flipping down into the water, red blood shining everywhere—
Just as the wyvern on her ass leaped onto the ship in a mighty arc that took Aedion’s breath away. But with the jagged stumps of the masts jutting up like lances…
The bull landed atop them with a crunch that Aedion heard across the bay.
He bucked, but—that was wood now piercing through his back.
And beneath his enormous weight … the ship began to crack and sink.
Lysandra wasted no time in getting clear, and Aedion could barely draw breath as she shot across the bay again, the two bulls so horribly close that their wakes merged.
One dove, the depths swallowing him from sight. But the second one, still on her tail…
Lysandra led that one right into Dorian’s range.
She drew in as close to the shore and looming tower as she could get, bringing the second bull with her. The king stretched out both hands.
The bull raged past—only to halt as ice lashed across the water. Solid ice, such as there had never been here.
The sentries beside Aedion fell silent. The bull roared, trying to wrest himself free—but the king’s ice grew thicker, trapping the wyvern within its frozen grip. When the beast stopped moving, hoarfrost like scales covered him from snout to tail.
Dorian loosed a battle cry.
And Aedion had to admit the king wasn’t that useless after all as the catapult behind Dorian sprang free, and a rock the size of a wagon jettisoned into the bay.
Right atop the frozen wyvern.
Rock met ice and flesh. And the wyvern shattered into a thousand pieces.
Rolfe and some of his men were cheering—people were cheering from the docks in town.
But there was one bull left in the harbor. And Lysandra was…
She had no idea where the bull was.
The long green body thrashed in the water, dipping beneath the waves, near-frantic.
Aedion scanned the bay, rotating in the gunner chair as he did, searching for any hint of that colossal dark shadow—
“YOUR LEFT!” Gavriel roared across the bay, magic no doubt amplifying his voice.
Lysandra twisted—and there the bull was, speeding out of the depths, as if he were a shark ambushing prey.
Lysandra threw herself into movement. A field of floating debris lay around her, the sinking ships of their enemy like islands of death, and there was the chain … If she could maybe get on it and climb high … No, she was too heavy, too slow.
She again streaked past Dorian’s tower, but the bull wouldn’t get near. He knew doom awaited him there. He kept just out of range, playing with her as she launched back into the field of debris between the enemy ships. Toward the open sea.
Aelin and the others watched helplessly from the reef outcropping as the two monsters swept by, the bull sending bits of broken hulls and masts into the air—aiming at the shifter.
One struck Lysandra in the side, and she went down.
Aedion shot out of his seat, a roar on his lips. But there she was, blood streaming from her as she swam and swam, as she led that bull through the heart of debris, then cut back—sharply. The bull followed through the blood clouding the water, blasting through debris that she nimbly dodged.