Violet, Xaden, and their headquarters group take a break on the way to their new base.

My thighs are sore and cramping, but it’s not quite as bad as it was Montserrat. The extra hours in the saddle this last month have helped.

I swear to god, this book would be exactly the same if you took Violet’s EDS completely out of it. She spent her whole life as a bookworm and got thrown into the cavalry and that, by itself, explains all of her problems as depicted in the text.

Violet and Xaden scootch a little bit away from the group to be shmoopy when suddenly! Griffon riders appear! Violet gets ready to attack them, but the others stop her. She suddenly realizes that the whole rest of her group is marked kids, and they clearly know the griffon riders.

Xaden and the riders start having a conversation that Violet (and we) only know half the context of. Xaden and his group and giving shipments of something to the griffon flyers, but they don’t have one ready yet. The fliers showed up early to warn them about a group of venin headed their way.

Violet gets furious about all this traitorism going on right before her eyes. The group tries to calm her down and only halfway succeed. They explain that venin are not only from fables, they actually exist, and the shipments are weapons that the flyers can use to fight the venin.

Venin are kind of like wizards but they get their magic from, idk, The Bad Place or something. They do magic wrong and it turns them into monsters. They create wyvern, which are like dragons but made by humans instead of being their own thing. The venin have been attacking the neighboring country, and the only thing that can stop them is a type of metal that also powers the wards around Violet’s country. Thus all the border raids and failing wards. The country leaders aren’t telling anyone, because the truth makes them look bad.

Violet kind of believes them, but then switches to a new reason to be mad. She’s mad that no one told her before now.

“But we’ll never know, will we? Because you didn’t trust me to know the right thing to do, Xaden, did you?”

Fuck off with this. Not just Violet, but in general. Trust has to be earned, and this is fucking big and also affects a fuckton of people so yes, he kept is secret. I mean, they haven’t even been a couple very long, they haven’t had a chance to get into those hedge-y, circumspect conversations like “so…theoretically…if you saw an enemy that was about to die from a third party, but your commander told you to leave him…would you?” Like, you don’t just make a friend with someone and immediately tell them all your felony level secrets, these things have stages!

And on top of all that, she’s best friends with a guy who can read minds and is obsessive about the rules!

But Violet cares not for the safety and lives of all her friends and thousands more in a neighboring country. No, her boyfriend hurt her feelings so she’s going to mope about it. They let her mope while they fly the rest of the to Athebyne.

Once they get there, the base is abandoned, and they realize they’re in a trap. Xaden thinks Dain learned about the Athebyne info from reading Violet’s mind, but honestly? I feel like this wouldn’t be hard to figure out. Y’all ride big, fuck-off dragons everywhere. Someone’s going to notice that.

Oh, also, the village nearby is being attacked by venin. Xaden finds a note that says he can either save the village (over the border, so in the other country) or stay in the base and prove his loyalty.

The griffon flyers from before show up, and their leader basically says “this is a suicide mission, literally. Me and my people are going to go try and slow them down, but we’re going to die doing it. Y’all should scram while you can.”

The dragon riders do the classic ‘everyone makes a speech and agrees to go on the mission’ thing.

They start by helping evacuate the civilians into the nearby mountains, alternately holding off the venin and their wyvern and ferrying townspeople. Violet is hitting everything she can with her lightening, but them venin are tough bitches. Still, she seems able to lead them away from the city, so she does that.

One of the wyvern on my tail must notice Xaden is out of the saddle… […] One minute Xaden is dandling from the shadow rope and the next he’s back in his saddle as Sgaeyl banks for another low pass through town.

This got through god knows how many rounds of rewrites, edits, and copyedits without someone noticing. Because it’s just that fugging obvious that you should have a saddle when you ride things.

There is more fighting, and then Liam’s dragon gets in a close up tangle with one of the wyvern and does not do well. Liam is thrown free and ends up on Tairn with Violet, but his dragon gets killed. By the rules of this universe, when a dragon dies his rider dies. Apparently it’s on a time delay, though, because they have just enough time to land and get Liam over to his dragon so he can have an emotional and dramatic death scene.

So kind of all those vicious enemies to hold off for a moment while this happens.

A fuckton of more wyvern show up right after Liam dies, because they have a great sense of timing. Our heroes figure out that wyvern and venin aren’t a one-to-one deal, so if they can kill the two remaining venin that will take out all the beasts. So, that’s the plan. Violet has to lightning the venin while Xaden holds off the wyvern. I have no idea where everyone else went.

And tomorrow we get to figure out if they win! But, like, of course they win, it’s the last three chapters of the book tomorrow.