Sisters of the Lizard

Book 2: The Rakada

by Jackson Ford

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

The thrilling continuation of a no‑holds‑barred, action‑packed fantasy series from Jackson Ford where a group of charmingly-named Bone Raiders harness the power of gigantic, fire-breathing lizards to defend their homeland from an invading enemy.

"Awesome. Masterfully executed. Frequently hilarious." — Nicholas Eames, author of Kings of the Wyld on The Bone Raiders

All Sayana wanted was to enjoy her life in the rolling grasslands of the Tapestry. After she and her fellow Rakada managed to ride humongous, fire-breathing lizards to face down the Great Khan’s army, they should have been able to kick back a little for once. Not too much to ask, right?

Instead, the Tapestry is in turmoil – invading armies threaten, the other raider clans are at war, and inside his fortress city of Karkorum, the Khan broods and plots. What’s more, the Rakada’s giant lizards are getting sick, and they have no idea how to cure them. If they die, there's no telling what might happen to the Tapestry.

But then the Rakada receive a vision – apparently from the gods. A deep emerald pool surrounded by bone-white sands – one that may be able to heal their lizards. With no other option, the raiders set out on an epic quest across the mountains and into the desert.

But the danger that awaits them will be one greater than they’ve ever faced before. These guys really can’t catch a break.

Praise for the Bone Raiders Series

"Ford begins this new series with quirky characters, loads of great action sequences, and his trademark brand of humor." — Booklist

"The Bone Raiders is a relentlessly cheeky, ofttimes unserious, and undisputedly rip-roaring bit of fantasy that can only be written by Jackson Ford. Badass female protagonists, found family, and giant lizards — what more do you need? Add this one to your TBR. I fully guarantee you'll be entertained." — FanFiAddict


For more from Jackson Ford, check out:
The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind
Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air
Eye of the Sh*t Storm
A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers

Release date: May 5, 2026

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 464

Sample

Sayana woke up in a tree.

It wasn’t one of the tall, healthy trees that dotted the grasslands of the Tapestry. Shading you from the twin suns, inviting you to stretch out at the base and take a nice little nap. Those trees felt as if the only reason they’d come into existence was to brighten your day.

The tree Sayana was in clung to the edge of a cliff on a frigid mountainside, and only continued to exist because it hated everyone and everything. Its cracked and withered trunk extended out over a drop into white nothingness, and its bark was so black that it actually looked burned.

Sayana knew this because part of the tree was sticking up out of her leg.

She was on her back, suspended between two thick branches – one under her shoulders, the other under her thighs. The branches were close together, which was the only reason she was still in the tree. Well, that, and the snapped spike of wood jutting from the leg of her trousers. It was just on the outside of her left thigh, thick as her thumb, the wound clotted with dark blood – blood that was already starting to freeze from the raging blizzard surrounding both her, and the tree.

When her brain finally registered what her eyes were telling her, pain filled her vision with flickering sparks. Her breathing got very fast, and very ugly.

“Hogelun!” she yelled, voice cracked and dry. “Chimeg! Khun!”

But they were gone. She didn’t remember what had happened to them… but it had been bad. Very bad.

“Princess?” She twisted her head, trying to see if her araatan was anywhere nearby. Surely not even she could miss a gigantic lizard, as tall as two men, even in a storm like this?

But her best girl was nowhere to be found, and somehow that scared Sayana more than anything else. The thought of Princess lying hurt somewhere, in pain, not understanding what happened…

Sayana still had her ox-leather gloves on, but the cold made her fingers hurt almost as badly as her thigh. How was that fair? And how had she even ended up in this tree in the first place? She couldn’t remember how she’d got here, why they were in the mountains at all.

She lifted her head, abs burning, staring at the hideous spike jutting from the meat of her leg. It was an offshoot of the big branch under her thighs, and looked freshly snapped-off.

If she could free herself, shuffle back to the main trunk, she might be able to climb up onto the cliff. Giant emphasis on might. The wind and the howling snow was so severe that she couldn’t even see the top of the fucking cliff.

A massive gust of wind rocked the tree, and Sayana yelped as it made the branch pull against the inside of her leg. She could actually feel it scraping against the muscle. Dimly, she was aware that she was either going into shock, or deep inside it already.

Being a raider in the Tapestry meant that people shot a lot of arrows at you. The best way to remove one that found its target – and unfortunately, Sayana could speak from experience – was to snap the head off and pull the shaft out as quickly as possible. Of course, you had to have someone on hand to staunch the bleeding and stitch you up, or you died. That was pretty important.

Somehow, Sayana didn’t think a second person was going to join her in the tree anytime soon.

Since she didn’t plan on freezing to death, she was going to have to do this herself. She couldn’t roll to either side and let gravity pull the branch free. It was just too long. Gingerly, she lifted her left leg, trying to pull it off the snapped branch. This turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea. She screamed so loudly that even Father Sky and Mother Earth could probably hear her.

Fine. That wasn’t going to work.

Keeping her breathing steady, squinting against the freezing snow, she explored the entry point with her numb fingers: the place under her leg where the branch entered the meat.

Sayana fought with two sabres – a flashy form of combat that the other Rakada gave her endless shit about. There was a very good chance that the impact with the tree had knocked the blades loose, sent them whirling into the abyss. With her heart climbing up her throat, she felt her waist. Her right sabre… gone. Vanished from her sash.

She paused, briefly wondering if she should save time and just start screaming with rage now, then moved her hand over to her second sabre.

At first, her fingers brushed nothing but cold fabric. But then she felt the hilt. The blade was hanging, just barely stuck in the sash.

Finally, a break.

It took more than one try to get her fingers around the hilt, to coax enough feeling into them to pull the weapon. Carefully, so very carefully, she slipped the sharp blade underneath her leg, rested it against the hard wood.

Her first thought was to saw through it, but even before she started, she could tell that wasn’t going to work. There was no possible way she could get enough pressure. The bark had withstood a thousand winter storms, and it wasn’t going to give way to a piddly little blade.

Which meant what came next was going to suck.

For the second time, she thought of her araatan. Princess would have had her out of here in under ten seconds. She would have simply grasped the tree trunk in her giant jaws, and ripped it back onto the cliff, pulling Sayana with it. Or she’d have swung her giant tail, with its big knob of bone at the end, and given Sayana something to hold onto.

But her araatan wasn’t here. Her araatan was probably dead.

No. Absolutely not. Don’t do that.

She took two quick breaths, gritted her teeth, then leaned hard to the right. Her thigh shrieked at her, but it was just enough to leave an inch or so of wood at the base exposed. From the way she was positioned, she thought she had just enough leverage to get this next bit done. Just.

Fighting with two sabres might be flashy, but she’d done an awful lot of it over the past few years. Generally speaking, when she swung a blade, it went where she told it to. She took a quick breath, another, then whipped the blade at the wood under her thigh.

It bit deep, and she yanked it loose. Sayana had so little feeling in her hand that it was a miracle she didn’t cut her own leg off, or simply lose her weapon as it rebounded. Every single part of her soul was screaming at her to lean back the other way, take the pressure off the wound, but she didn’t dare.

It was probably going to take many, many swings to get even halfway. Then again, it wasn’t like she had anything else she urgently needed to get done.

There was another brutal gust of wind. For a moment, Sayana was in the grip of a giant, being shaken back and forth. Tiny, jagged shards of ice drove into her ears and nostrils, her eyes. She had a sudden urge to just stop, to go to sleep, to go into the dark, warm place at the edges of her mind and just stay there.

She didn’t. Screaming, she swung the sabre into the wood again. Fresh blood flowed from the wound, and Sayana was horrified at how good its warmth felt on her skin. When you welcomed the heat of your own blood, you were in some serious fucking trouble.

On her next swing, she almost lost the blade for real. She recovered, kept attacking the wood. A little more. Just a little more…

Beneath her, the tree gave a creaking, lugubrious groan.

It had clung to the mountainside for a long, long time, bearing the weight of tons of snow every year. But it simply wasn’t accustomed to having a raider crash headlong into its outermost branches, then send several jarring impacts through it as she tried to cut herself loose.

Sayana froze. Before she could process what was happening, the roots gave way.

The tree dropped a full foot before it came to a stop, bouncing her in place and sawing the inside of the branch against her thigh muscles. She was too terrified to even register the agony, was only dimly aware of her remaining sabre slipping out of her grasp and toppling away.

Pain be damned. She was going to have to lift herself off the broken bit, and get to safety. And she was going to have to do it right now.

She didn’t get the chance. The tree finally lost its long, bitter battle with gravity, its roots tearing loose from the cliff with a sound like old leather being twisted, and it fell. Taking Sayana with it.

The wind was so loud that she couldn’t even hear herself scream.

Seven days ago

Why were so many raiders dumb as rocks?

Sayana stared at the camp in the valley, rolling this question around her weary mind. It’s not like the job was hard, was it? It didn’t demand intellectual brilliance. If the palace tutors, who had taught Sayana when she was growing up, had given a lecture on How To Be A Raider – which, to be fair, she would absolutely have attended, because that would have been awesome – it would have lasted approximately five minutes. Be scary. Steal shit. Don’t do stupid things that will get you killed.

Apparently, the group of geniuses in the camp below forgot that last part.

This particular raider clan looked to have about fifty souls in it, with about twenty gers between them – the circular tents favoured by those in the Tapestry. Except instead of, you know, pitching their gers on high ground – where they could actually see threats coming – the raiders had made camp in the valley itself, surrounded by hills. Sayana was at the top of one, flat on her belly in the frigid dirt.

To make this particular choice of camp location even more special, there was a nasty-looking collection of boulders on a slope to Sayana’s left – boulders that were probably just a badly angled breath of wind away from toppling to the bottom, flattening the raiders.

Sayana could think of worse places to make camp – a nest of scorpions, perhaps, or in the middle of the Great Desert – but not many.

She stared at the rock pile for a few moments, wondering if the Weavers would take pity on her, and send the rocks tumbling before she actually had to go down there. Then she could pack up her stuff and go home.

“No?” she muttered. “Nothing for your humble servant?”

The rocks didn’t move.

Sayana briefly wondered if she should sneak over and get them moving herself, cut across to the other hill and do what the Weavers were apparently too lazy or smug to do themselves… but that just seemed like a lot of work.

She looked back down at the camp. Right below the boulders, three raiders in furs and dark green robes were playing shagai, idly throwing polished sheep bones. One of the three shagai players had a red slash across his face, which made Sayana even more annoyed. That was a Rakada thing. That was theirs.

It was almost as annoying as the clan’s name. They called themselves the Flaming Death Skulls, because of course they fucking did. What was it with raider clans and awful names? If it wasn’t the Flaming Death Skulls, it was the Brotherhood of Blood or the Screaming Weasels or the Endless Waves of Terror. The corner of Sayana’s mouth twitched; that last one was pretty good, actually.

She was north of the Khar River, the Baina Mountains looming to her west. The suns were setting behind them, the Large Eye and the Small, casting light that felt cold and pale. It was late winter in the Tapestry – a mild one, but still cold enough to cover the brown grass with crusts of frost, to sheathe the lakes in ice. Sayana wore a heavy cloak of yak hair over her deel and her leather armour, along with a thick hat jammed down over her ears.

She normally enjoyed winters. You had to be bloody careful, to be sure, with the temperatures this low, but the place took on a different kind of beauty. The grasslands were silent… but it was the silence of deep sleep, of stopped time. As if the world was taking a deep breath before starting again.

Sayana had planned on spending the winter warm and comfortable, hanging out with the other Rakada, playing shagai and drinking airag, occasionally taking Princess out to hunt for food. But could she do that? Nooooooo. Instead, she was here, after a night where she barely got a lick of sleep, staring down at a camp full of irritating morons with a silly clan name.

She scooted away from the crest of the hill, and down the other side. The thick, black braid that hung down her back had got caught underneath her, and she pulled it loose absently. When the camp in the valley was hidden from view, she stood, and began to make her way over to where Princess was quietly dismembering a horse.

Sayana was not a small woman. She was a shade over six feet, arms and legs corded with muscle. But she was dwarfed by her lizard mount. Princess was double her height, her thick body covered by shifting plates of scales. In the frozen dusk, the scales were a drab green, but when the araatan thundered through the sunslight, they glimmered in a hundred shades of emerald and indigo.

And Weavers, she could thunder. Fast as a horse at a full clip, with stunning amounts of stamina, that big tail with its torso-sized knob of bone at the end swishing the air. If you got in front of her, good luck. Eaten, torched, or simply smashed aside by that gigantic head. Pick your poison. And if someone had told Sayana that an araatan’s bite actually was poisonous, she wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.

She came to a graceful halt at the bottom of the hill. At least, that’s what she tried to do. What actually happened was that her foot caught in a tiny, invisible divot clearly put there to fuck with her. She stumbled, going to one knee, wincing as a sharp pebble dug into her left hand.

Princess ceased chewing on the horse and looked in her direction. One of her eyes was a dark socket – she’d taken an arrow in it during a battle, only a few months ago. The yellow pupil in the remaining one gleamed with what Sayana could swear was mirth.

“Not a word,” Sayana told the araatan. “Don’t act like you’ve never tripped over your own feet. I’ve seen you.”

It wasn’t true. Princess was disgustingly agile, for something so large.

The lizard gave a low, rumbling growl, that big tail swishing through the air. Sayana rolled her eyes. “No, I don’t have another horse for you. You haven’t even finished the first one.”

Princess snorted, and gave the carcass a dramatic little shake. Sayana sighed, rubbing the back of her head.

It had been a bloody long winter.

The whole point of taming the giant lizards in the first place was so that she, and the rest of the Rakada, could live their best lives. The raiders in the Tapestry had been struggling to survive, a dying breed against a much stronger army. When the araatan had left the mountains for the grasslands, in search of food, Sayana had had the bright idea to tame them to use as mounts. Which had been an absolutely wild ride.

But they’d done it. That meant that the Khan – Sayana’s father, thankfully only by birth – should have left them alone. Abandoned his quest to move everyone out of the Tapestry and into his crowded, stinking city.

Anyway, after things calmed down, Sayana and her fellow Rakada had taken a well-deserved break to enjoy the results of their hard work.

It had been quite a restful eighteen hours, all things considered.

Turned out, Sayana’s dream of liberating the people of the Tapestry from the Khan’s rule was all well and good, but some of those people decided that, actually, they’d prefer to remain in city of Karkorum, as opposed to returning to grasslands which not only still had regular raiders, but now also had the kind that rode giant, ravenous lizards.

And since raiders still had to raid for supplies and food, especially with the winter creeping down from the mountains, they were starting to fight one another. Compete over who got to rob who.

A whole whack of those raider clans helped the Rakada win the day, fighting alongside Sayana and Princess. An enormous fire-breathing lizard evened the odds, but Sayana had still needed help to get it done. Those clans began asking the Rakada for favours. Asking for help with raids, so they didn’t lose so many of their own people if things got hairy. Asking for help in conflicts with other raider clans. Asking, quite reasonably, to be taught how to tame lizards of their own.

Before long, Sayana and the others were embroiled in an exhausting, ever-shifting web of alliances, favours, tiresome blood feuds. There was always someone pissed off at them.

It didn’t do any good just to say no. They’d tried that, and it brought no end of trouble. Which meant they’d spent the whole winter running around, putting out fires – ironic, given how easily an araatan could start one – desperately trying to deal with problems so that everyone would just leave them the fuck alone.

And the Khan might have stopped forcing people to move from the grasslands to the city, but he wasn’t just sitting there in a huffy sulk. He still sent his army after other clans, still had his troops show up at the least convenient times imaginable.

The Tapestry wasn’t peaceful. The Tapestry was fucking chaos.

Eventually, Chimeg and a few leaders from some of the larger clans came together in a loose alliance – a very loose one, constantly in danger of collapsing like a badly erected ger. But that only solved half the problem. There were plenty of holdouts causing trouble, including the Flaming Death Skulls.

Oh! And lest anyone forget, the two countries that bordered the Tapestry – Ngu, past the southern deltas, and Dalai, on the other side of the Baina Mountains – had taken a special interest lately. They were sending their own raiding parties, groups of scouts, probing for weakness. There were constant rumours of massing armies, troops poised to take the Tapestry.

It wasn’t the Rakada’s job to deal with invaders. No one could reasonably look at any group of raiders, bristling with blades and bows and bad intentions, and come to the conclusion that they were the ideal defensive force.

But it turned out that the Khan and his army of conscripts were completely useless at dealing with the scouting parties Dalai and Ngu sent. When those scouts started capturing and killing the nomads the raiders needed to, you know, actually raid, it fell to the Rakada to actually do something about it.

Sayana’s mouth twisted. On second thoughts, maybe the Khan and his army weren’t as useless as she thought. Why spend your time fighting your enemies when they could fight each other?

She really did hate giving her dad credit for anything.

Sayana climbed up Princess’s front leg, hands moving automatically to the scales that gave her the best grip. In seconds, she was on the lizard’s back, swinging her leg over the saddle.

It was possible to ride Princess bareback, but only if you were entirely comfortable with the idea of never having working thigh muscles ever again. The saddle she sat on was a wide stretch of oiled leather, with multiple handholds for when Princess was moving at a full clip. Fall off a horse, and you could roll to safety. Fall off an araatan, and you’d be lucky if you could still walk.

There was a safety tether – a wide band of leather with a metal clip at each end – and Sayana made damn sure it was secure around her waist.

She leaned forward, scratching a spot just below one of the grey horns that stuck up from the back of Princess’s neck. The lizard shuddered in pleasure, giving off a groan that Sayana had long since come to recognise as: you are my favourite person in the entire world. At least, that’s what she told herself it meant.

Tuya would probably know. If—

She shook her head. She was not, absolutely not, going to think about Tuya.

The eagle hunter had helped her tame Princess. Well, helped may have been a bit strong: Sayana had kidnapped her and forced her to do it. And in the end, when they’d triumphed, after she’d ridden Princess into battle for the first time, after she’d begged Tuya to stay…

A kiss on the cheek.

A whisper:

I will remember you.

And then Tuya was gone. Heading for the distant mountains.

Princess tensed, her contented growl lowering in pitch, and Sayana pulled her hand away, frowning. “All right, all right, bit much, was it?”

A shiver went through the araatan’s body, its torso shaking from side to side. Sayana hung on – she’d long since got used to the lizard’s movements, but there was something about this one she didn’t like. It didn’t feel like a shiver of contentment; it felt like Princess was trying to shake something off. Was she wounded somewhere? A cut Sayana hadn’t noticed?

“Last one, girl,” she promised. “Deal with these idiots, and then we’ll go home. I’ll find you a nice antelope herd to chase, how about that?”

When she’d first started talking to her araatan, Hogelun had given her endless amounts of shit. She has absolutely no idea what you’re telling her, you realise that? Hogelun had said. You’re just talking to yourself.

Then Sayana had caught Hogs murmuring sweet nothings to her own lizard, and had given her the most satisfying Cut ever, flicking her thumb off the underside of her chin so hard that her teeth actually clacked together.

Sayana took a moment to check her bones. She didn’t wear as many these days; when your primary method of attack was a gigantic lizard, you didn’t really need to wear human bones to scare people. But the Rakada did like to keep up appearances, and it’s not like they could call themselves the Bone Raiders if they didn’t in fact wear bones, could they?

Her main decorations were a necklace of bone chips, and several human ribs woven into the sleeves of her deel. All in place, but looking grey and tired. She really should get around to replacing them…

Maybe I can get myself a flaming death skull or two, she thought bitterly.

Ah yes. The Skulls. They’d refused to ally with the rest of the raiders, demanding tribute and territory. And they’d been doing what Hogelun called evil raider shit: rape and murder and mutilation. Fun times.

Chimeg had asked them, nicely, to reconsider. They said they’d think about it, and Chimeg had pointed to her own araatan – she had one of her own by now, they all did – and said that that was an excellent idea, because she would hate it if any fellow raiders came down with a bad case of cooked alive and then eaten.

Well, apparently, they didn’t think hard enough. The evil raider shit continued, as did the attacks on other clans. It was exactly the kind of behaviour you’d expect from people who spied a nice valley with a big pile of rocks on a hill above it and went, “You know, this is a fabulous place to make camp.”

Right now, the other Rakada were off tracking down a bunch of soldiers from Dalai who had crossed the border. Sayana had gotten back to camp too late to join them, so she’d decided to deal with one of the thousand tasks they were apparently destined to spend the winter doing. That particular task being the Flaming Death Skulls.

A single Rakada trying to take down a camp of fifty raiders would be a quick route to horrible death. A single Rakada and a single araatan would make it a quick route to horrible death for everyone else.

Sayana didn’t even have to kill that many of them; just find the leader, or leaders, and have Princess bite them in half. She didn’t know who the Chief of the Flaming Death Skulls was, exactly, but she’d figure it out. You could always spot the leader of a raider clan. They had a particularly cocky strut. Even Chimeg had it sometimes.

Either way, it was amazing how quickly a group of raiders reconsidered their life choices once the person in charge got eaten.

Kill the Chief, stomp a few tents flat, let Princess snack on a horse or two, go home. That was all Sayana wanted on this frozen evening.

She clicked her tongue, pulled gently on the grey horns to swing Princess towards the hill. The araatan moved reluctantly, and she sighed. “Come on, sweetheart. Who’s my best girl?”

Her best girl grumbled, but began to plod laboriously up their side of the slope. The lizard didn’t move like a horse; instead, it was a kind of heavy, rolling shimmy, those big claws chewing up the dirt, her head swinging from side to side, body swaying.

As they neared the top, Princess began to pick up speed. “There we go,” Sayana growled. She pulled her bow from her back, slipping arrows from her quiver. “That’s what I’m fucking talking about. Let’s do this.”

As Sayana crested the hill, heading down towards the camp of the Flaming Death Skulls, she let out a furious, air-shredding howl. A moment after, Princess erupted with a roar that shook the earth.

Sayana clapped her hands over her ears. She’d forgotten again. Princess liked to roar, and now all Sayana could hear when she tried to sleep at night was a high-pitched ringing noise.

She leaned back as the araatan tilted, as the camp below dissolved into a mad panic, raiders shouting, running every which way. Good. Panic, you stupid bastards. Sayana could practically taste the airag already.

Attacking anything while riding an araatan meant mostly just pointing it at whatever you wanted to destroy. Sayana had tamed Princess, but communicating which attack she wanted, when she wanted it, had proved beyond her. Not that it mattered very much. When you pointed a gigantic, hungry lizard in the direction of something you didn’t like, a claw was as good as a foot stomp was as good as a bite from those tremendous jaws.

The one thing she had worked hard to control was Princess’s fire breath. It was the most effective attack the lizard had, a wonderful combination of lethal and terrifying… but it was more trouble than it was worth. It made for a chaotic, smoky battlefield, and the flames would usually spread to inconvenient places.

Over the last few months, Sayana had patiently trained Princess not to unleash her fire unless she was explicitly told to. It was a mind-numbing, impossibly tedious process – and most mind-numbing and tedious processes didn’t almost get you burned to death, more than once. Sayana hadn’t thought it was possible to be both bored and terrified at the same time, but she’d learned a lot over the past few months.

She couldn’t see the Skulls’ Chief yet. As she and Princess reached the bottom of the hill, the three raiders who had been playing shagai – more disciplined than the rest, perhaps – formed up on Sayana’s right, pulled bows and nocked arrows. One of them, a man of about thirty with a jagged scar on his forehead, was actually smirking as he took aim at Sayana. After all, even if you couldn’t take out a giant lizard, its rider was an easy target.

It was so cute, how they thought they had it all figured out.

As the arrows flew, she smacked the wooden catch on the front of the saddle, and without even pausing for breath, threw herself off the lizard’s left side.

She’d messed this up the first few times, but she had it down cold now. The leather safety harness around her waist had a braided rope secured to the side of it, which took up the slack and pulled tight, letting her find her footing against Princess’s flank.

The movement left her hanging sideways off the lizard, the arrows meant for her sailing past overhead. A few of them thunked off Princess’s side, bouncing off her tough scales.

Archers in the Tapestry often used wooden saddles on their horses – ones that let them lean far over to one side, giving them a sturdier base to shoot from. The saddles had given Chimeg an idea.

Their Chief liked working with her hands, and she didn’t like the fact that they were so vulnerable to good marksmen when sat atop their lizards. Leaning over to one side on something the size of an araatan wasn’t much help, but if you could go further…

Chimeg called the device the Secured Release Mechanism, which was accurate but lacked a certain something. Khunbish referred to it as the Wondrous Rope Swing of Destiny, which Sayana quite liked, but was also quite a mouthful. Hogelun had refused to give it a name, on the grounds that she had yet to use it successfully and that it hurt her ribs, and that she would prefer to stay on top of her araatan and just murder anyone before they could shoot her.

Sayana simply called it the Drop Shot.

She bent her knees, absorbing the movement of Princess’s thundering advance, then nocked an arrow to her bow. She’d been surprised at how easy it was to fire when you were hanging off the side of an araatan in motion. It would have been fantastic if Princess could have turned just then, giving Sayana a look at the archers who had just tried to skewer her, but she hadn’t quite worked out how to communicate her wishes while hanging off the side of her mount.

No matter. She might not have found the Chief yet, but she had plenty of targets to choose from.

Her first two went wide, but the third struck home, punching into a stomach. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted two more of them aiming at her, trembling with fear but tracking her with their bows.

She gave them the Cut, thumb flicking out from under her chin, then hit the second, smaller catch at her waist.

On the opposite side of the saddle, a heavy weight snapped loose with a distant clunk. It jerked Sayana upwards as it dropped down the lizard’s other flank. One of the scales found a gap in her deel, and she yelped as it scraped her side raw.

It had taken Chimeg a long time to perfect the Wondrous Drop Mechanism of Destiny. To her credit, she’d done all the testing herself – a process which had taken most of the skin off her legs and ribs.

The weight came to a stop with a thud, swinging