For a moment she seemed to hang there, suspended in the darkness, her silver form lit by the moonlight as she flew at the great beast, its head thrown back to roar its fury to the sky.

And then she struck, the crash of her armor hitting scales thunderous even over the dragon’s roar. Her sword wedged between two of the armor plates protecting the dragon’s neck. The beast staggered in surprise, one of its arms crumpling beneath it and sending it crashing to the ground. Gwen threw her entire body weight onto the sword, and with a terrible, screeching crunch of blade on bone, the sword thrust home.

The dragon gave an awful, keening, bubbling roar as it thrashed once, wildly, threatening to toss Gwen aside—but she hung on, clinging grimly to the hilt of her sword, the blade buried in the armored throat. Then, with a terrible, gurgling spray of molten flame from the place where Gwen had driven her sword, the beast went still.

There was no sound at all except Isobelle’s heart slamming in her rib cage. Her vision swam, but she found she could not so much as breathe, as paralyzed as Gwen had been when the beast’s eye had found her.

Then a scream of pain rang out across the field, and before Isobelle’s mind had even registered that it was Gwen’s agony she was hearing, she broke into a run.

The burst of rolling liquid fire that had come from the dragon’s mortal wound had lit several patches of grass ablaze, but Isobelle could see something else, a reddish-orange glow on the crumpled form by the dragon’s body. Gwen wasn’t clutching her sword anymore—she was rolling, crying out in pain, the dragon’s death flames clinging like burning leeches to her armor.

Isobelle yanked off her cloak and threw herself down on top of Gwen, smothering the flames with the thick fabric, bunching it up to try to scrub some of the sticky, burning tar-like stuff away. Her fingers fumbled with the buckles of Gwen’s armor, tossing piece after piece away, and she was glad she had learned how to do this after so many of Gwen’s jousts.

Her fingertips encountered a patch of smoldering padding under the last piece, Gwen’s right vambrace. She cried out as the heat burned her skin, though she didn’t let go, grabbing the fabric and ripping it away. Some of the flame had gotten inside the joint of Gwen’s armor, and a long, reddened, blistered strip of skin along her forearm explained Gwen’s pained scream.

Now, shuddering and gasping for breath, Gwen lurched forward to wrap her good arm around Isobelle. Her grip was bruisingly tight, but Isobelle uttered not a word of protest. Instead, she wrapped her arms around Gwen’s neck, clinging and mumbling incoherently.