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flight and banked away from the castle sharply. “Even the dragons’.”
    Hearing this made Crimzon and Clover both shiver.
     
    *
     
    Rikky, sensing that Jenka had just bought him some time, had his wyrm use the dragon tear to cast a shielding around them. He didn’t quite understand why Marcherion and Blaze didn’t actually hit the stone-covered street, but he saw they did get injured, and were struggling now. He cast as potent a healing spell as he could from a distance. Jenka suddenly appeared, as Aikira sang out: They are attacking the Outlands in swarms! Then Jenka was blasted sideways by the same mudged-riding bastard that had hammered March.
    Rikky didn’t often use his power to attack. He was a healer and a woodsman at heart, and the idea of this war sickened him, but this was his homeland, and Jenka was his friend, and the rightful king. Richard was nothing but a murderous torturer who was as much demon inside as Gravelbone had been. Rikky’s angst reached a peak, and he shot a blast with his teardrop at the rider’s mudged wyrm, just to trick the thing into position for Silva to let loose a gout of molten pewter liquid that hardened as it flowed around the wizard’s shielding spell.
    Rikky let out a roar of his own. “Tell your foul, demon-riding king that I am the one who killed Gravelbone, and I will kill him , and his hell wyrm, too!”
    What happened next was just as surprising to Rikky as it was to the man on the mudged wyrm.
    The weight of all Silva’s hardened spew caused the man and his wyrm to suddenly flip upside down and fall from the sky, as if they were tethered to the pull of the field inside the bubble.
    Rikky had known the weight would bring them down, but he hadn’t figured on it getting under them. Either way, the men on the ground who tried to fill the rider full of spear holes were shocked to find themselves jabbing their pike blades into nothing but air and a destroyed mudged. At least the bastard dropped his teardrop before he teleported away.
    “Don’t touch that crystal,” Rikky called as a man picked it up.
    The poor soldier shook violently, and then his eyes made a popping sound and slid down his cheeks as he crumpled to the ground.
    Rikky didn’t have to worry about it after that. No one else dared get near it.

Chapter Nine
     
     
    “DO NOT TOUCH THOSE CRYSTALS!” Marcherion yelled. He and Blaze had scorched a few of the mudged fluttering over Jenka’s crunching impact, but when Rikky dropped the rider, the rest of the tainted dragons started fleeing the sky.
    “All of you, get on a ship and go help fortify Freeman’s Reach,” Rikky called down. “They are attacking in force elsewhere. This was but a diversion.” He looked at Jade, who was shaking off their bad landing and stretching his wings, and Jenka, who was moving normally, but glowing a light shade of green all over, as his own magic, or maybe his alien nature, healed him. Then he looked at March.
    “One of you please stay,” a man called from the wall.
    “Yes, we are defenseless against them without you,” another added.
    Everyone seemed to look at King Jenka then.
    Jade knelt and allowed his bondmate to get in his saddle. They rose up to the level of the wall, and Jenka spoke in that slow, drawn-out way that drove Marcherion mad, but here it seemed to emphasize what he was telling these soldiers.
    “A few- hundred-years- ago, less- than- the- lot- of you here- kept us all alive against hundreds of those puny vermin.” Jenka pointed to one of the mudged lying dead against a corner of a stair leading up to the wall top. It had the shaft from one of the dragon guns stuck through it.
    “One of us will return when we can,” Rikky said, trying to hurry it along.
    March added, “You can kill them. They bleed just like you and me.” He put on a leather glove and picked up the dragon tear that had killed the poor soldier with its rush of power. He looked at the men looking at him and said, “Go fortify