Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2)

by Rebecca Yarros

“The scent of others grows stronger.” “Wyvern?” Every muscle in my body clenches. “No. They smell of stolen magic when you get close enough.” She lifts her head, taking up three-quarters of the tunnel. “This smells of…dragons.”

Andarna can smell wyvern

Fetid breath fills the air a second before he curls his tongue, and his throat glows orange with rising fire.

Is this the second time she’s talked about the bad smell of a dragon’s breath? The first being Dain’s dragon maybe?

A dark shape flies at us from the left, sweeping Cat and me into a spinning tangle of limbs and propelling us backward.

Oh this is Andarna

Survive. Survive. Survive. I push the demand down every mental bond I have just in case we aren’t out of range.

Kiralair and Sloane fly into us next, swept in by an unseen force, pushing Sloane and me backward,

What is this unseen force? Andarna? How is she pulling them in?

Pride and worry assault me at the same time, but I can’t force my shields up before Tairn’s voice fills my very existence. “Slayer.”

Tarim is so cute 🥲

“You finally ready to ask me about the deal I made with your mother?”

Whhhhhy does he make her ask??

“And it took reading the entire beginning to know that once a dragon fires a wardstone, their fire can’t be used on any other, and reading the entire end to know they created two wardstones. But it doesn’t say why they never activated this one.

Because if Andarna is the only one of her den, then maybe the same situation happened last time with “the one”.

A heartbeat later, a pulse of magic vibrates through me in a wave, dredging my power to the surface with a feeling slightly softer than the one that had rippled out at the emergence of Aretia’s first hatchling.

What is this magic?

and there are no sound-seekers in Aretia capable of hearing across miles of distance like Captain Greely in General Melgren’s personal unit,

No one else knows.”

“My love isn’t fickle.” I shake my head slowly, keeping my gaze locked on his. “So you’d better live, because I’m ready to ask you all the fucking questions.”

Mom and Dad are fighting, and everyone knows it.

Bahaha

two of whom were Mom’s aides at one point or another.

Who would they possibly be fighting behind the wards?

I am a person who needs information to center myself.”

“She left when I was young. Their marriage contract said an heir had to survive to the age of ten, and then she was free to go, which is what she did. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.”

“It helps that rider of record was thought to be a great uncle, not my grandfather.”

Why would that rider be thought to be a great uncle and not his grandfather?

We do not eat our allies. —Tairn’s personal addendum to the Book of Brennan as quoted by Cadet Violet Sorrengail

He’s so funny 😆

Second Squad, Flame Section, Fourth Wing will remain intact, though you’re welcome to join us.”

She so cute

and I get a single glimpse of her eyes—opaque instead of golden—before

“And if there was, I made mine the second I saw her”—he shoots a glare my way—“bond the most powerful dragon available at Threshing.

When he decided to become Venin

“Why is it that only my daughters speak out of turn?”

Hah!

Though there is some debate, it is greatly believed that turning venin heightens one of the dark wielder’s senses. It is this scholar’s belief that the one responsible for the death of King Grethwild developed keener eyesight. For not even the best of His Majesty’s royal fliers could see through the darkness the venin hid within to slay our beloved king. —Major Edvard Tiller’s Unaccredited Study of the Venin Property of the Library of Cordyn

Hmm 🤔