The arm around me tightened, and I sucked in a breath.
I never stopped watching between my feet, shivering in the cold as I looked for an opening. I needed a landing that wouldn’t kill me: the lake, ideally, or maybe the river, although that would be dangerous for other reasons. I had to hope at some point, a change in elevation would bring us low enough, over the right terrain, where I could risk trying to force him to let me go. Of course, without the water, or even with it, he might just dive after me.
He changed the orientation of his wings.
We soared back over the forest, making a swooping arc.
Then, suddenly, we plummeted.
It happened fast… mind-numbingly fast.
It felt nothing like the numerous jumps I’d now made from The Eyrie, where gravity alone caused me to fall until my wings flung themselves out, catching me, then guiding me over a smooth pocket of air. In the time since my first leap off the edge, Quicksilver had been teaching us how to turn, how to slow to a near-hover, how to bank and reverse, how to do gentle rolls and how to fly upside down. He worked with us up on The Eyrie platform, teaching us all the different wing positions and what they did, how to refine those movements to get precise effects.
But we’d never done anything like this.
There was nothing methodical or technical about this.
This was pure insanity.
My stomach lurched violently as my throat froze on a scream.
The ground rushed towards me, aided by hard, muscular flaps of those black wings. We were pushed faster by the wind, by will, and eventually, a drawn-in wing position… turning us into a bullet streaking through the sky.
My kidnapper aimed for the tops of the trees, and I choked out a strangled sound.
Whoever he was, he was going to kill us both.
The black wings drew in even more, surrounding me and parting the canopy like a knife. He threaded the two of us between branches without slowing.
I fought to suck in breath, to force out a cry as the ground rushed closer?
And then my captor changed the wings’ orientation, and tilted me up, his legs pointed down. He landed with a grace that shocked me nearly as much as the dive.
He set my feet on the ground, and I let out a shocked breath, lungs burning as I gasped in more air and nearly choked on it.
Then he released me and stepped back.
I fell, face forward, crumpling at the base of a tree.
I turned around as soon as I could make my limbs work, still gasping in hard breaths. I crawled over a few feet of wet earth and sat up against the damp trunk.
I started to get to my feet, once more reaching for my magic, but he stepped towards me, a black-gloved hand held out in an unambiguous warning.
“Stay,” he growled, his voice distorted through the mask.
I bit my lip, but didn’t let go of my magic.
I watched him as he stepped back and shrugged off the wings.
I waited until he had them all the way off. They folded up magically on the leaf-strewn ground, making themselves compact, so they could be carried more like a backpack, or else thrown over one’s shoulders and reengaged as magical wings.
I took that moment, when he wasn’t looking at me, when he no longer had the wings attached to his back, to throw my magic at him, giving it everything I had.
I didn’t think about particular spells.
I didn’t try to remember the defensive shields we’d worked on during my first few weeks of magical combat practicals, or the handful of offensive spells I’d made myself memorize that summer. I put my presence into the glowing, white-gold sun and threw my will behind it, aiming a hard, raw burst of pure magical charge.
I wanted to knock him down.
