Gunther's boot skidded, sending a cascade of shale clattering down the slope. The sound was a dinner bell and the wyverns were coming.

  Behind them, from the cavern's maw, a gout of orange flame lit the dusk, painting the jagged peaks in hellish relief. It didn't reach them, but the heat washed over their backs like the breath of a forge.

  "Move!" Jacob roared, not looking back. He half-slid, half-ran, his feet finding purchase on larger embedded stones amidst the sliding scree.

  Sihar was a shadow, flowing downhill with an unnatural grace, her staff held out for balance. Gunther followed, her lungs burning, every muscle screaming from the climb up and the terror-fueled flight down. The mountain fell away beneath them in a treacherous, shifting avalanche of stone. One misstep would snap an ankle, or send them tumbling hundreds of feet into the darkening pine forest below.

  A shriek split the air not the dragon's basso roar, but a piercing, multi-throated cry from above and to the east.

  Gunther looked up. Three dark shapes, leaner and more agile than the great dragon, detached from a higher cliff face. Their wings caught the last bloody light of sunset as they banked, turning into lethal dives. Wyverns. The cult's faster, sharper hunters.

  "Shield!" Jacob bellowed, skidding to a halt and planting his feet. He thrust his hands out, fingers splayed. The air before him shimmered, coalescing into a pane of wavering, translucent energy the size of a barn door.

  Gunther and Sihar scrambled behind it just as the first wyvern struck. It didn't breathe fire; it raked the shield with talons like black iron sickles. Screeching sparks erupted where they struck, and the shield flared bright blue, shuddering under the impact. Jacob grunted, his boots sliding back an inch in the loose stone.

  The second wyvern swooped low, aiming to go under the barrier. Sihar was already moving. She didn't chant. She spun her staff once, its tip carving a sigil of cold white light in the air. She jabbed it forward.

  A jagged spear of ice, thicker than a man's thigh, shot from the sigil. It took the diving wyvern in the ribs with a wet crunch-thud. The creature screamed, a wet gurgling sound, and tumbled out of control, crashing into the slope fifty yards below in a tangle of broken wings and limbs.

  The third wyvern circled higher, smarter. From its maw, a glob of viscous greenish fluid spat forth. It wasn't fire. It sizzled through the air and struck the scree just in front of Jacob's shield.

  The rock melted. A two-foot-wide patch of mountainside dissolved into bubbling, smoking slag, eating a pit into the slope. Acid.

  "Lovely," Jacob muttered, his jaw tight. The shield flickered for a second as he adjusted its angle.

  "We cannot stand here," Sihar said, her voice flat. "The dragon comes."

  As if summoned, a vast shadow blotted out the stars beginning to prick the violet sky. Ignis launched itself from the cavern entrance. It didn't bother with a controlled glide. It dropped like a falling tower, wings snapping out at the last moment to arrest its fall, before driving forward with powerful, thunderclap beats. Its target was clear: their fragile position on the open slope.

  "Down! Now!" Gunther yelled, abandoning all pretense of controlled descent. She didn't think. She turned, threw herself onto her backside, and pushed off into the void.

  She slid. The world became a roaring, bruising chaos of impacting stone and dust. She bounced over rocks, gripped others to steer, a madwoman sledding on a mountain of knives. She heard Jacob's explosive curse and Sihar's sharp exhale as they followed suit.

  The dragon's fire hit the slope where they'd been standing. The world turned white and orange. Gunther felt the searing heat on the back of her neck, smelled her own singed hair. The concussion of the blast lifted her off the slope for a terrifying second before she slammed back down, rolling, tumbling, completely out of control.

  She came to a sudden, agonizing stop against a gnarled, wind-twisted pine at the treeline. The air exploded from her lungs. Stars swam in her vision. She gasped, ribs on fire, raw scrapes burning along her arms and back.

  Jacob crashed into a bush to her left, swearing with impressive creativity. Sihar landed in a controlled roll and came up in a crouch, staff ready though Gunther noticed the slight tremor in her hands, the sheen of sweat on her brow. Even Sihar had limits.

  The forest. Dark, thick, ancient pines. Sanctuary.

  A wyvern shrieked, diving after them. Gunther fumbled for the hunting knife at her belt a pathetic toothpick against such a creature. Her mind flashed to the villagers she'd helped flee. Finley, with his sharp eyes and the river stones she'd given him. Ciney, practical even in shock. They were walking toward Oakhaven right now, toward a town that didn't know death was flying toward it.

  The nobles want the peasants gone. The dragons are their scythe. And we're the only ones standing in the way.

  Sihar didn't even look up. She pointed her staff skyward, through the gap in the canopy Gunther's slide had created. A silent pulse of force erupted from the tip. It wasn't flashy. It hit the diving wyvern like a giant's invisible fist. There was a muffled crack of hollow bones, and the creature was flung backward into the darkening sky, limp as a sack.

  "Into the trees! Use the cover!" Jacob wheezed, staggering to his feet. He was bleeding from a gash on his forehead.

  They plunged into the forest's embrace. The world narrowed to the thick scent of pine resin and damp earth, the jagged shadows of trunks, the treacherous carpet of needles and roots. The canopy above was dense, blotting out the sky. For a few blessed moments, the only sounds were their ragged breaths and the crunch of their footfalls.

  It didn't last.

  A torrent of fire raked the forest behind them. It didn't penetrate the thick canopy, but the world became a roaring, crackling furnace. The air superheated. Sap in nearby trees boiled and exploded with pistol-shot cracks. A wall of searing wind and embers blasted through the trunks, knocking Gunther forward. She stumbled, her face seared by the dry heat.

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  Ignis couldn't fit between the trees, but it was methodically setting the mountain ablaze to smoke them out.

  "It'll burn the whole range!" Gunther coughed, the air tasting of ash.

  "It's master's lands border here," Sihar said, ducking under a low smoldering branch. "It will be careful. It wants us, not a wildfire it cannot control. The nobles who command it need these lands intact they're wealthy, but not wealthy enough to sacrifice their own holdings. This is… precision herding."

  As she spoke, a wyvern, braver or more foolish than the last, swooped low through a natural break in the trees a rocky gully to their right. Its wings clipped branches, sending splinters flying.

  Jacob spun. He clenched his fist, and a shimmering band of force, like a whip made of sunlight, snapped out from his knuckles. It wrapped around the wyvern's neck mid-flight. With a brutal yanking motion, Jacob slammed the creature into the gully wall. The impact was a sickening crunch of stone and bone. The force-whip dissolved.

  "They're trying to drive us east," Sihar observed, her eyes scanning the flames and the gaps in the forest. "Away from the direct route to Oakhaven. Toward flatter ground where the dragon can finish us."

  Gunther's mind raced, cutting through the panic. The map of the region she'd studied back at the Chapterhouse scrolled behind her eyes. Oakhaven lay southwest. The cult wanted them east, toward open ground where Ignis could end this. But there was another option.

  "There's a river gorge. The Sorrow's Run. It cuts deep, two miles east of here." She hated saying it east was exactly where they didn't want to go. "The bridges are gone, but the cliffs are sheer. A wyvern or a dragon can't fly easily in the narrows. If we can reach it, follow it south..."

  "It leads to the lowlands. A longer route, but possible." Jacob wiped blood from his eye. "Better than being roasted in a pine box. Lead the way, scout."

  Another jet of dragonfire washed over the canopy above, closer this time. The heat was becoming unbearable. The forest was now a labyrinth of firelight and choking smoke. Gunther oriented herself, ignoring the pounding in her skull and the scream of her muscles. She pushed east, toward the growing roar of water she now realized she could hear under the crackle of flame.

  They ran, a desperate weaving sprint through an ever-tightening ring of fire. Wyverns harried them from above, but the dense burning forest was now as much a hindrance to the flying hunters as it was to them. Sihar and Jacob picked them off with grim efficiency a lance of ice here, a concussive blast there. But Gunther saw the cost: Jacob's face was pale with strain, blood flowing freely from his nose; Sihar's hands trembled more with each spell, her breath coming in sharp gasps.

  We're not going to make it, Gunther thought. Not all of us.

  They burst from the treeline not into open ground, but onto the lip of a sheer cliff. The world dropped away into a deep, shadowy cleft. Far below, the Sorrow's Run churned white and furious over jagged rocks, its roar finally drowning out the fire. The gorge was narrow, perhaps forty yards across, but it stretched for miles in both directions, a wound in the earth.

  And the dragon was waiting for them.

  Ignis perched on the opposite cliff, a colossal statue of scale and malice. Its great head lowered, eyes like molten coins fixed on them. Smoke curled from its nostrils. Behind it, the sky was a wall of orange from the burning forest.

  "It predicted the route," Sihar said quietly.

  "Of course it did." Jacob's voice was flat. "It's not a dumb beast. It's a general. And its masters have been planning this culling for months. Years, maybe."

  The dragon's chest began to glow, a deep pulsing amber light shining through the cracks in its scales. It was drawing in breath for a killing blast. They were trapped on the cliff edge with nowhere to go but down.

  Gunther's eyes darted along their side of the gorge. The cliff face was not perfectly smooth. It was weathered, cracked, dotted with tough thorny shrubs growing from fissures. A narrow, treacherous game trail seemed to switchback down along a fracture line to their left, disappearing into the gloom and spray.

  "The trail!" she shouted, pointing.

  The dragon's maw opened. The world narrowed to that glowing chasm.

  Jacob didn't hesitate. He didn't try to block the fire. Instead, he threw all his remaining power into the cliff at their feet. With a wrenching groan of tortured earth, a section of the rock lip ten feet across heaved upward, tilting like a giant shield made of stone and soil. It wasn't a refined spell; it was raw, desperate terraforming.

  The dragon's fire streamed across the gorge. It hit the upturned slab of earth and rock. Stone melted. Soil vitrified into black glass. The concussion was monstrous, knocking all three of them off their feet. But the improvised barrier held for a second.

  "Go! Now!" Jacob screamed, his face corpse-pale, blood flowing freely from his nose.

  Gunther scrambled for the game trail, Sihar right behind her. They slithered over the edge as the dragon, with a roar of fury, ceased its fire and lunged. Not with flame, but physically. It launched itself from the far cliff, massive claws reaching to tear apart Jacob's crumbling earth-shield and the mage behind it.

  Gunther saw what happened next from the trail, her fingers gripping rock, her heart stopped.

  Jacob saw it coming too. His eyes went to the claws tearing through his shield, then to the gorge. He didn't retreat. He threw himself backward into empty air.

  "Jacob!" Gunther screamed.

  The mage fell. But as he fell, he flung out a hand. A rope of shimmering force, like the one he'd used on the wyvern, shot from his fingertips. It didn't anchor to their side of the cliff. It snapped across the chasm and hooked onto a jutting pinnacle on the far side.

  Jacob's fall became a wild swinging arc. He pendulumed through the misty air of the gorge, narrowly avoiding the dragon's snapping jaws as it pulled back from its lunge, and slammed hard into the cliff face on the opposite side, thirty feet below the dragon's perch.

  Ignis, enraged, turned its head to bite this irritating insect smashed against the rocks.

  It was the distraction Sihar needed.

  She had stopped on the narrow trail. She planted her staff into the rocky soil of the cliff face, her free hand moving in a complex furious pattern. The air around her crackled, went deathly cold. Frost filmed the rocks. Her breath plumed white. Her hands shook violently Gunther could see she was running on empty, drawing from depths that should have been dry.

  From the churning river far below, a tendril of mist rose. Then another. Then a geyser of freezing water, ripped upward by Sihar's will, met the super-cooled air she was generating.

  She wasn't conjuring ice from nothing. She was making it.

  A colossal spear of blue-white ice punched up from the river, its tip aimed at the dragon's chest. It crossed the gorge in an instant and slammed into Ignis just as it bent to kill Jacob.

  The impact wasn't fiery. It was a deep, resonant THOOM, like the strike of a god's hammer. Scales cracked. Ignis bellowed in shock and pain, knocked backward off its perch. It tumbled into the gorge, its vast wings beating frantically to arrest its fall, crashing through the ice spear, which shattered into a thousand deadly shards that rained down into the rapids.

  The dragon vanished into the mist and spray below, its roars echoing up the stone walls.

  On the opposite cliff, Jacob lost his grip on his force-rope. He fell again, a shorter drop this time, onto a narrow ledge. He lay there, unmoving.

  Silence, save for the roar of the river and the distant fire.

  Sihar sagged against the cliff, her staff clattering to the trail. She was gasping, utterly spent, her skin pale as parchment. She looked at Gunther with hollow eyes. "That's… all of it. I have nothing left."

  Gunther stared across the forty-yard divide of screaming water and sheer rock. Jacob was a dark lump on a lighter stripe of stone. Alive or dead, she couldn't tell. And with Sihar spent, there was no way across no ice bridge, no rope of force, nothing but the churning river and the vertical cliffs.

  The nobles want the peasants gone. The dragons are their scythe. And now they've cut us in half.

  They had survived the dragon.

  They were alive.

  And they were now separated, one mage down, with Oakhaven still waiting in ignorance of what was coming.

  Gunther pressed her forehead to the cold rock and forced herself to breathe.