Riding a wyvern was supposed to be one of those bucket-list things. Wind in your hair, ground shrinking beneath you, the kind of moment you'd brag about to people who'd never earned it.
This was not that.
This was me, straddling a wingless, one-eyed, thoroughly unhappy lizard, lurching sideways every time it favored its bad leg, with an unconscious pretty boy draped over its back like luggage nobody wanted to claim.
'This is humiliating.'
'You say that like I'm not the one who has to listen to you complain about it,' Wren said. 'Some of us are just a sword. We don't get opinions on dignity.'
'You have opinions on everything.'
'Fair.'
The wyvern grunted underneath me, a low, wet sound that I decided to interpret as agreement rather than a threat to buck me off into the dark. I kept one hand fisted in the ridge of scales along its neck and the other on Wren, and I tried very hard not to think about how far down the ground actually was, broken wings or not.
