Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)

by Rebecca Yarros

I know you don’t want to hear this, but sometimes you have to know when to take the death blow, Mira. It’s why you have to be sure that Violet enters the Scribe Quadrant. She’ll never be able to take a life. —Page seventy, the Book of Brennan

“We’ve had the scribes on it since Threshing, and the only reference they can find in the Archives about the power of feathertails is hundreds of years old, which is funny because I remember your father doing a bit of research about the second Krovlan uprising, and he mentioned something about feathertails, but we can’t seem to find that tome.”

melee.

“I avoid that duty like the plague,” Emery answers. “Scribes freak me out. Quiet little know-it-alls, acting like they can make or break someone by writing something down.” I grin. There’s more truth to that statement than most people realize.

“That makes sense. Do you guys get all the information?” “Only what we need. Like, I could have sworn I saw a riot of dragons across the border during this attack.” She shrugs. “But questions about secret operations are above my pay grade. Think of it this way—if you were a healer, would you need to know the details about everyone else’s patients?”

“I know they’re just stories, but I never used to get why the villains would choose to corrupt their souls and become venin, and now…” Her brow furrows. “Now you empathize with the villain?” I tease. “No.” She shakes her head. “But we have the kind of power people would kill for, Violet. Dragons and gryphons are the gatekeepers, and I’m sure that to someone jealous enough, ambitious enough, risking a soul would be a fair price for the ability to wield.” Her shoulders rise as she shrugs. “Just makes me glad our dragons are so discerning and our wards keep the gryphon riders at bay. Who the hell knows what kind of people those furry creatures choose?”

One of the riders down the table whistles low. “Do you boys just want to whip it out and measure? It would be faster.” Liam smothers a laugh, but his shoulders shake. “Enough!” Mira slams her hands on the table.

“You can ride me when the flesh rots off my bones, wingleader.”

I am the sky and the power of every storm that has ever been. I am infinite. A scream rips from my throat just as lightning splits the sky with a terrifying crack of thunder. The bluish streak of silver death slams into the tower, and sparks flare as it explodes in a blast of stone. Tairn banks to avoid the blast, and I pivot in the saddle. Jack falls down the mountainside in an avalanche of rock that I know he can’t survive. From the way Baide cries beneath us, she knows it, too. My hand trembles as I sheathe the clean dagger at my ribs. The only blood to be found is on the rocks below, though I look at my hands as though they should be covered in death. Tairn roars with the unmistakable sound of pride. “Lightning wielder.”

“I’m proud you’re mine.” Andarna’s voice wavers, the blinks of her eyes becoming slower. “Even if I need a bath.” Tairn draws back his wings, and Andarna walks forward, then launches into the sky with steady wingbeats toward the Vale.

“I’m not sweet. Please don’t mistake any part of me for soft or kind. That will only get you hurt, and whatever you do…” He buries his face in my neck, inhaling deeply. “Don’t fall for me.”

When I wake, Xaden is gone, but that’s not exactly a surprise. Him staying the night to begin with? Now that was the shocker. Finding a jar on my nightstand with a handful of spring violets? My heart swells. I’m in so much fucking trouble.

“Interesting.” He jots something down in his notebook with a piece of charcoal. “You’ve wielded lightning besides yesterday’s display during the War Games?” I debate keeping my answer to myself, but my silence isn’t going to help. “A few times.” “And both times were the result of emotional reactions?” Tairn snorts, and I smack his foreleg with the back of my hand. “Yes.” “Well, then start there. Ground in your power and try to feel whatever it was you were feeling.” He goes back to his notebook. “Should I get the wingleader?” Tairn flat-out laughs in my head.

“Problems?” Xaden asks, as if he feels my inquiry. “And what are you doing so far away?” “Training with Carr.” My cheeks heat at the sound of his low voice. “And how do you know how far away I am anyway?” “Get stronger in wielding, and you’ll be able to do it, too. There’s nowhere in existence you could go that I wouldn’t find you, Violence.”

My cheeks are flaming hot as I lift the backs of my hands to my skin. “See, I told you.” Carr lifts the notebook. “The last lightning wielder said it made them overheat. Now do it again.”

“Just remember not to exhaust the physical strength with which you control the power. No one wants to see you burn out. A power like Tairn’s will eat you alive if you can’t contain it.”

My Violet, By the time you find this, you’ll most likely be in the Scribe Quadrant. Remember that folklore is passed from one generation to the next to teach us about our past. If we lose it, we lose the links to our past. It only takes one desperate generation to change history—even erase it. I know you’ll make the right choice when the time comes. You have always been the best of both your mother and me. Love, Dad

The pages flutter as I flip through stories of an ancient kingdom that spanned from ocean to ocean and a Great War among three brothers who fought to control the magic in this mystical land. Some of the fables tell stories of the first riders who learned to bond with dragons and how those bonds could turn on the rider if they tried to consume too much power. Others talk of a great evil that spread across the land as man became corrupted by dark magic and turned into creatures known as venin who created flocks of winged creatures called wyvern and scourged the land of all magic in the thirst for more power. Another talks about the dangers of wielding power from the ground instead of the skies, as one could easily start drawing magic from the earth and eventually be driven mad.

One of the purposes of the fables is to teach children about the dangers of too much power. No one wants to become a venin; they’re the monsters that hide beneath our beds when we have nightmares. And we certainly never want to try to control magic without a dragon to ground us. But that’s all they are, children’s bedtime stories.

Dain smiles as the king takes his leave, then glances over his shoulder, meeting my gaze and heading our way. He grins, and it’s all too easy to remember how many events just like this we’ve attended together over the years. His touch is gentle when he cups my cheek. “You look beautiful tonight, Vi.”

I’m not going to survive this. I’m going to die right here in this bed. “Then I’m going to die with you,” he promises, kissing me. I’m so far gone, I didn’t even realize I said the words out loud, and then I remember that I don’t have to. “More. I need more.” Power simmers beneath my skin and my legs lock.

When we arrive, it takes me a second to absorb the sight. Every dragon from the quadrant fills the field, standing in the same formation we keep in the courtyard, and hundreds of mage lights float overhead like hovering stars, giving the space an otherworldly feel, as though we’re in a great hall instead of on the flight field. It’s beautiful and menacing at the same time.

We fly into the morning and then the afternoon, and when Andarna can’t keep up, she hooks on to Tairn’s harness midflight. She’s asleep by the time Xaden chooses to skirt the thousands-foot-high Cliffs of Dralor that give Tyrrendor a geological advantage over every province in the kingdom—over every province on the Continent, really, and go around instead, heading into the mountains north of Athebyne. There’s a pulling sensation in my chest, then a snap as we cross the barrier of the wards. “It feels different,” I tell Tairn. “Without the wards, magic is wilder here. It’s easier for dragons to communicate within the wards. The wingleader will have to take that into account when commanding his wing from this outpost.” “I’m sure he’s already thought of that.”

“Warn us?” Xaden’s head cocks to the side. “We lost a village in the vicinity to a horde of venin two days ago. They decimated everything.” I startle, my eyes flying wide. She just said what? “Venin never come this far west,” Imogen says from my left. Venin. Yep, that’s what they both said. What the actual hell? I’d think someone was fucking with me if not for the two enormous gryphons looming behind the pair of riders. But no one is laughing. “Until now,” the woman replies, turning her gaze back to Xaden. “They were unmistakably venin and had one of their—” “Don’t say anything else,” Xaden interrupts. “You know that none of us can know the details or we put everything at risk. All it takes is one of us being interrogated.”

“Because the only thing that kills venin is the very thing powering our wards.”

Gods, Dad spelled it all out for me. He’d always told me scribes hold all the power.

For there, in the land beyond the shadows, were monsters that dwelled in the night and dined on the souls of children who wandered too close to the woods. —“The Wyvern’s Cry,” The Fables of the Barren

And as for Mom… The dagger on her desk means she knows and has done nothing to stop it. Guess I’ll be the second child she sacrifices to keep the existence of venin a secret.

“I knew you’d make the right choice,” Sgaeyl says, glancing toward where Xaden approaches with Liam, their footsteps dangerously close to the cliffside at my left. “He did, too. Even if he doesn’t like you putting yourself in danger, he knew you would.” “Well, he knows me a great deal better than I know him.” I lift a brow at her. She blinks. “You’re a far cry from the trembling girl who stood in the courtyard and tried to mask her fear after Parapet. I approve.” “I wasn’t asking for your approval.” If I’m going to die, I might as well be honest in my last moments. She chuffs and nudges Tairn’s head with hers, but he’s solely focused on the trading post.

A screech rends the air, and an enormous gray dragon emerges from a valley two ridgelines to the south…across the Poromish border. It tucks its two legs up under its massive body as it flies away from us, heading straight for Resson. “Do we have a riot nearby?” Liam asks. “No,” Xaden answers. It’s as though the ground beneath my feet shifts. I could have sworn I saw a riot of dragons across the border. Isn’t that what Mira said at Montserrat? The dragon shrieks again, spewing a streak of blue fire down the mountainside, setting some of the smaller trees on fire before it reaches the plains where Resson stands. Blue. Fire. No. No. No. “Wyvern.” My heart launches into my throat. “Xaden, it has two legs, not four. It’s not a dragon. It’s a wyvern.” Maybe if I say it a few more times, I’ll believe what I’m seeing. Holy. Shit. Is this what leadership has been redacting? They’re supposed to be myth, not flesh-and-blood beings. But then again, so are venin.

My eyes flare. “Speaking of knowing you’ll win fights, General Melgren will know what’s happened here. He’ll be able to see the outcome of the battle even now.” He shakes his head slowly and points to his neck, to the rebellion relic snaking around his throat. “Do you remember how I told you I realized it was a gift, not a curse?” “Yes.” Back when I was in his bed. “Just trust me—because of this, Melgren can’t see a fucking thing.”

My gaze sweeps the rooftops of the little post until I see it—him—whatever. There’s a figure standing at the top of a wooden clock tower, wearing purple floor-length robes that billow in the wind while he hurls blue flames like daggers at the civilians below. He’s more terrifying than any illustrator could have depicted, rivers of red veins fanning in every direction around soulless eyes consumed by magic. His face is gaunt, with sharp cheekbones and thin lips, a gnarled hand gripping a long red cane made of some misshapen wood.

The wyvern swings around and heads toward the town’s center, tucking up two legs and beating spiderwebbed wings. It bears a female rider in maroon flight gear that resembles our own, and her eyes are the same eerie red color as the venin on the clock tower.

desiccate

“They’re falling,” Tairn says, and I jerk my gaze from my side to see three wyvern tumble from the sky and crash to the earth. Riderless wyvern. Created by venin. And they all died because I killed one venin. That’s what Liam was trying to tell me. When a dragon dies, so does its rider. But apparently when a venin dies, so do the wyvern they created. All of them. That’s how we can save everyone on this battlefield.

I can’t aim. I’m not ready. Maybe if I had another year or two to practice, but not now. “I need more, Tairn!” “You will burn out, Silver One!” he growls, dodging a flame Xaden misses. “You already walk the edge.” My arms shake as I lift them again. “This is the only way I can save them. I can save Sgaeyl. You just have to decide to live, Tairn. Even if I don’t.” “I will not watch another rider die because they do not know their own limitations. One more strike could be your last. I feel your waning strength.” “I know exactly what I’m capable of,” I promise as energy fills my body once again, and my heart jolts, struggling to find the right rhythm. Hot. I’m so damned hot, I feel like I could burst into flame myself. I’ve taken too much power. “I’m not Naolin.”

She chose me for the scars on my back and the simple fact that I am the grandson of her second rider—the one who didn’t make it through the quadrant.

She can’t die, and not just because there’s a chance I won’t survive. She can’t die because I know I can’t live without her even if I do. Somewhere between the shock of our attraction at the top of that turret to realizing she risked her own life by giving up a boot for someone else on the parapet that first day to her throwing those daggers at my head under the oak tree, I wavered. I should have realized the danger of getting too close the first time I put her on her back and showed her how easily she could kill me on the mat—a vulnerability I’ve allowed no one else—but I brushed it off as an undeniable attraction to a uniquely beautiful woman. When I watched her conquer the Gauntlet, then defend Andarna at Threshing, I stumbled, stunned by both her cunning and her sense of honor. When I burst into her room and found Oren’s treacherous hand at her throat, the rage that made it so easy to kill all six of them without batting an eye should have told me I was headed for a cliff. And when she smiled at me after mastering her shield in mere minutes, her face lighting up as the snow fell around us, I fucking fell. We hadn’t even kissed, and I fell. Or maybe it was when she threw her knives at Barlowe or when jealousy ate me alive seeing Aetos kiss the mouth I’d dreamed about countless times. Looking back, there were a thousand tiny moments that pulled me over the edge for the woman asleep in the bed I always pictured her in. And I never told her. Not until she was delirious wit...

“Violet?” I keep my shields up, trying to respect her privacy as I walk to her side, but gods, I need to know what she’s thinking.

She points to my rebellion relic and says, “Melgren can’t see the outcome when more than three of you are together. That’s why you’re not allowed to assemble.”

Brennan just grins and opens his arms. “Welcome to the revolution, Violet.”