Page 165 of Vicious Is My Throne

“I felt you.” He was shaking almost as badly as I was. “I felt your fear and your pain. You had another vision?” he asked, glancing at the knife lying forgotten beside me. “How bad?”

Bad enough I didn’t tell him, and whatever courage I’d felt when I’d woken evaporated, replaced by the sick, consuming sort of dread that would stay with me the rest of today.

Fine, I told myself. Fear would keep me from getting overconfident and making mistakes.

But I let Raz pull me to my feet and re-sheathed the knife, feeling like a fraud because I hadn’t gotten in a single minute of practice. I mustered a smile, one I was sure Raz could see right through. “No worse than usual.”

Raz took one final look at the room, studying that polished floor before he followed me out.

69

ZORANDER

The Fae called this place the Hammer.

I clutched Anaria tighter, making a second pass beneath the gravity-defying rock formation, searching for a spot big enough for us to set down. But every inch of tumbled stone was slicked with rot.

The mountain’s namesake loomed overhead, an enormous two-sided granite sledgehammer balanced on the eroded, delicate tip of the peak, and beneath that—like a mouth opened in a perpetual scream—was Corvus’s lair.

A faint mist drifted from the dark entrance, rot dripping down the cliff face, turning the area below into a pool of bubbling, oily black. Even up here, the stench was so noxious my throat burned.

“What do you think?” I flapped once, and we rose ten feet higher as effortlessly as if I’d taken a single step. “See anywhere?”

Raz and I had scouted the southern slope last night and chosen the safest route up to the cave—a climb straight up leading to a passable trail at the edge of that parapet. I thought I’d understood how impossible that ascent would be, but now, in the full light of day…I swallowed.

“What about there, Zor?” Anaria pointed to a small area not completely crusted over with twisted vines or seeping black, oily residue. “Get us close and I’ll hit those rocks with enough magic to clear a spot for Tristan to land.”

The wyvern soared somewhere above the clouds, while Raz and Tavion hung back on the other side of the chasm, watching from an untouched outcropping. Waiting for us to scout out a safe landing spot so we could begin our climb.

There were no good landing spots.

Low ground, prone to an attack from above. Uneven, barely enough room for my feet, let alone a wyvern and four of us to maneuver. I flapped higher, looking for something better, but there was nothing for miles but rot.

“What if I fly us up to that trail?”

“We decided last night that’s too treacherous. We have no idea how loose that rock is, and if we cause an avalanche, then we’re screwed.” Anaria tugged on my shirt. “Just…hold this position. A few seconds is all I need, Zor.”

She scalded the rocks with cold fire, blight turning to gray ash, vines writhing as they burned, shrinking away until a section of rock was revealed. The blight didn’t resume its creeping advance.

Her scorched borders held.

The moment we set down, her magic bloomed like winter’s breath, driving the noxious fumes away as Tristan’s shadow passed over us, Anaria dropping the bag slung over her shoulder to the ground with a thump. The wyvern landed, stirring up a cloud of dust thick enough to choke a horse.

Anaria’s face was unreadable as her eyes dragged up and up and up that sheer rock wall, pausing on that dark, gaping opening.

Tristan was still dressing when Tavion and Raz materialized, Raz pointing to the cliff rising before us. “We climb until we reach that midway point, then we take the trail,” he murmured. “This won’t be easy, so we’d best conserve our energy for when we reach the cave.”

Anaria blasted a path to the foot of the cliff face, and Tristan took the lead, finding hand- and footholds that I would have missed. She stayed right behind Tristan, clearing a path for him, blasting away every tendril of black so all we touched was smooth, gray rock.

I gauged the distance before we reached the beginning of that narrow trail.

She’d be drained by the time we reached the top.

Fuck, we all would.

But there was nothing attacking us. No Reapers. No sign Corvus even knew we were here. The mouth of the cave was quiet, only that faint mist drifting out before being sucked away by the wind.

There was no fucking way we were this lucky.

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