A scream ruptured the clash of battle. Kerrigan whipped her head to the side and watched a dragon fall out of the sky. It was horrifying. She’d never seen anything like that. She tried to clear her eyes to make the picture make sense, but it simply didn’t.

She was too far away to see where the rider was or if the dragon was okay. But the noise the creature made as it collapsed onto the battlements, crushing House of Shadows soldiers, was enough to make her stomach turn. The sound was deafening.

“Gods,” she breathed. “We need to be in there. We need to be helping.”

Alura didn’t respond. She simply moved them farther from the archers and continued on their route. Someone else would be there to save that dragon. But Kerrigan’s throat closed up as they moved farther away. Had there been more merit to Arbor’s words than she had given credit?

Alura stopped beside the river that wended through the mountains. She gestured for them to land. The shouts of battle were far behind them. Lethbridge wasn’t a long distance from the mountains, which was how the House of Shadows had reached them so swiftly, but far enough for the battle to feel distant.

“Do you think they’re dead?” Audria asked when they were once again on the ground.

“I don’t know,” she whispered back.

“Our mission is to dam the river,” Alura said. “We’ll use our magic and the dragons to hoist rocks in the way of the river. It won’t do anything to stop it once the snow melts, but it’s good enough for us right now.”

It was grueling, backbreaking work. They quickly moved into an assembly line with the dragons hitting the stones to loosen them and the rest lifting them with their earth magic and depositing them in an array that slowly, throughout the hours, began to recede the river.

No one wanted to admit that they’d rather be in the thick of the fighting, prove to everyone they were worth it. It was hard not to feel like they’d been given this job to get them out of the way. The youngest of the lot of Society members, and they were farthest from the battle.

They spent days working on the dam. Each day, when they returned to camp and found more wounded, the feeling only grew that they could be doing more. But Alura stopped them from ever voicing that opinion. All work was valuable, and what they were doing would make a difference if the House of Shadows tried to retreat. It was a big if.