Nets of Wind
You plant your feet, hold Sera's mane, and call up: “We'll come! We have information about the Pearl!” — which is true, and also the most grown-up sentence you have ever shouted at a flying horse.
The net of woven wind settles over you both, gentle as a parachute landing. It doesn't trap you so much as carry you: the ground lets go of your shoes and the meadow drops away, and you and Sera rise into the sky in a basket made of breeze.
“For what it is worth,” the patrol leader says, flying alongside, and his voice is younger and kinder inside his misty helmet than it was when it was official, “most of us don't believe the guardian turned traitor. But the Queen is angry, and the sky is torn, and somebody must answer for it.”
“Somebody will,” says Sera quietly. “Her name is Vespera.”
The clouds open beneath you like theater curtains, and you see it: the Cloud Court palace, towers of sunset-colored vapor rising from an island of solid white, with waterfalls that fall upward and a thousand windows full of sky.