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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The wooden library cart squeaks as I push it over the bridge that connects the Riders Quadrant to the Healer, and then past the clinic doors into the heart of Basgiath. Mage lights illuminate my way down the tunnels as I take a path so familiar that I could walk it with my

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN After sleeping in the crowded barracks for the last two months, it’s weird, and oddly decadent, to have my own room. I’ll never take the luxury of privacy for granted again. I close my door behind me as I limp into the hallway. Rhiannon’s door, across the small hall from mine, opens and

CHAPTER SIXTEEN “Absolutely not!” one general shouts loud enough that I can hear her all the way from the little medical station that’s been set up at the end of the bleachers for riders. It’s nothing but a row of a dozen tables and some flown-in supplies to tide us over until we can get

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Terror clogs my throat and stutters my heart. Air rushes past me as I plummet toward the mountainous terrain beneath, and the sun catches the scales of the golden one far beneath me. I’m going to die. That’s the only possible outcome. Vises clamp around my ribs and over my shoulders, stopping my

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Xaden. For the first time, the sight of him fills my chest with hope. He won’t let this happen. He might hate me, but he’s a wingleader. He can’t just watch them kill a dragon. But I know the rules probably better than anyone else in this quadrant. He has to. Bile rises

CHAPTER THIRTEEN October first is always Threshing. Monday, Wednesday, or Sunday, it doesn’t matter where it falls on any given year. On the first of October, the first-year cadets of the Riders Quadrant enter the bowl-shaped forested valley to the southwest of the citadel and pray they come out alive. I will not die today.

CHAPTER TWELVE There are 169 of us by the time the morning is done and, even with my penalty for the rope, we’ve placed eleventh out of the thirty-six squads for Presentation—the piss-inducing parade of cadets before this year’s dragons willing to bond. Anxiety seizes my legs at the thought of walking so close to

CHAPTER ELEVEN The next practice sessions of the Gauntlet are no more successful than my first, but at least we don’t lose another squadmate. Tynan has quit running his mouth, since he can’t seem to make it up fully, either. The buoy balls are his downfall. The chimney is mine. By the ninth—and next-to-last—session, I’m

CHAPTER TEN I look up, and up, and up, fear coiling in my stomach like a snake ready to strike. “Well, that’s…” Rhiannon swallows, her head tilted just as far back as mine as we stare at the menacing obstacle course that’s carved into the front of a ridgeline so steep, it might as well

CHAPTER NINE I’m so completely screwed. Xaden steps forward—all six-foot-everything of him—dressed in midnight fighting leathers and a tight-fitted short-sleeve shirt that only seems to make the shimmering, dark rebellion relics on his skin seem like an even bigger warning, which I know is ridiculous but somehow true. My heartbeat kicks up to a full