Free War of Wizards by Michael Wallace Page B

but Daria had already brought her griffin around, and they screamed between the two remaining wasps to drive them apart. Then, before they could recover, she came in a third time.
    Talon seized one of the wasps by its tail. His beak darted in, tearing. Daria hacked at the creature’s scales. The dragon wasp writhed and screeched and tried to tear itself free from the double attack. As it did, the man on its back lost his spear, too, as he struggled to hold on. Daria leaned out again, slashing. She couldn’t reach the dragon kin, but she could get at the tethers and cords and cut through them. The kin lost his grip and fell with a cry. It was two hundred feet to the trees, and he screamed all the way down, falling silent only when he crashed into the branches. Talon took a final stab at the dragon wasp with his beak, then hurled the dying creature down after its master.
    The final dragon kin and wasp fled for their lives. She let them go.
    Daria didn’t feel triumphant, only exhausted. Defeating wasps and dragon kin was one thing, but the mature dragon, having devoured its rivals and grown to monstrous size, would be another matter. She’d gathered all the riders, fought a terrific battle, wounded it almost at the cost of her own life, and driven it from the mountains. It had retreated to the desert to nurse its wounds, and now, only a couple of months later, was once again terrorizing the skies. She’d spotted it flying in the khalifates.
    Praise the Mountain Brother that she’d seen it at a distance, or she’d be dead now. Instead, she’d raced to the mountains to warn her mother, then gone back to the khalifates to search for it. No sign of the thing, though she guessed it was headed east toward the armies brawling outside the gates of Veyre. Daria had flown around for several days, sleeping in ruined hilltop towers and trying to work up her courage to descend into all of those soldiers again so she could warn Markal and Whelan, when she noticed a column of smoke.
    The smoke came from the city of Starnar. Its walls had been breached, its palaces and bazaars smashed. Starnar was a mass of flames, and the dead were everywhere, both within and outside the walls. Thousands of refugees had been slaughtered, and thousands more were fleeing in terror.
    She found the enemy army the next day. An army of the dead. They were approaching Ter, soon to encircle its walls, too. After that, where? Balsalom? Daria had to summon the courage to land among the flatlanders, no matter her fear. She told herself it was to warn the khalifa of Balsalom about the army of wights ravaging the Western Khalifates. But she’d also hoped to find Darik in the city. He was not there. So that morning, she’d lifted from the palace and flown west, toward home.
    Daria resisted the urge to stop at her aerie. She’d left a young cousin with her fledglings, and though the boy was only eleven, she had no doubt he was caring for them well. Instead, she continued along the mountains until she reached her mother’s home, several miles farther south and higher in the peaks.
    Palina lived in a stone watchtower built next to an ancient and abandoned trade route through the mountains. Here and there you could see remnants of the old road, flat and overgrown with gnarled pine trees except where it passed over bare stone. But most of the road had long since crumbled into a gorge carved by a churning mountain stream. A sheer granite face rose behind Palina’s tower, which was so eroded and overgrown with moss that it was indistinguishable from the mountain itself until you were practically upon it.
    Her mother’s griffin cried a warning as Daria brought Talon in for a landing. The smaller, white-feathered animal cringed back against the far wall when they entered the aerie. Daria dismounted and began to untie her saddlebag, while the two griffins eyed each other.
    Palina poked up through the trap door in the floor moments later, concern on her face. It vanished