Would it have happened in this way—this brutality, so many dead—if she hadn’t given in to the sudden call of her curse and stabbed the Wanderer boy?
Sonara could feel the tension building as they watched Jira traitorously stand beside Dohrsar’s enemy. His ownpeople,that had journeyed with him here, soldiers and flagbearers and his musical troupe, kneeling with the others.
“Look,” Markam said. He nudged Sonara. “Movement, in the crowd.”
She swung the spyglass left, where suddenly a group of prisoners sprung to action.
A single, fell swoop of attacks toescape,as one kingdom. Soreians and Wasteians and Deadlanders, all together, lunged at their captors.
But the Wanderer leader scarcely reacted. He simply tapped the side of his armor, a button on his wrist. There was a crackle.
Apopthat sounded like a single bolt of lightning.
The beetles on the backs of the prisoners’ necks constricted. Their lights turned green, a flash of uniform brightness across the entire crowd.
The screams that came after shook Sonara to her soul.
The strongest, fiercest warriors of Dohrsar, who’d been to war and swung blades and rode steeds into battle… they all fell to hands and knees, writhing on the valley floor as the bugs on the backs of their necks began to glow a cool blue.
There was Jaxon in the crowd, his hands clawing at the beetle as his eyes bulged and his entire body shook like he’d been struck with lightning.
Sonara’s curse slammed against its cage, and she hadn’t the strength to hold it back as it blasted through the opening and tried in vain to catch the aura of obliterating pain Sonara knew she would sense coming from Jaxon, if he wasn’t so far away.
His eyes… oh, goddesses, his eyes were bloodshot and wide and that waspanicin them, panic she’d never seen before in all her years of knowing him.
Sonara gasped, ripping the spyglass from her face as she backed away from the ledge, dust scattering around her in a cloud.
“Sonara, getdown,”Markam hissed. “They’ll see you!”
But panic had overcome her, because if the Wanderers were doing this to Jaxon, what had they done to Soahm, all those years ago? Her breath hitched in her throat, and Jaxon’s panic became her own as…
Markam’s arms wrapped around Sonara, pulled her close to his chest. She tried to fight him, shocked and repulsed by the sudden embrace, but when she looked down at where his hands should have been, where she should have seen their bodies pressed close together…
She saw nothing at all.
Only the ledge where they should have been standing.
She felt the coolness of his curse, his power wrapping around them both as he whisked their image right away from the world. If the Wanderers looked up, following a sudden cloud of dust on the mountainside… they would see no one at all.
“Breathe,” Markam whispered.
She felt his breath in her ear, but couldn’t see his face. Felt his warm cheek, the scratchy stubble and even smelled the leather of his hat, but saw only the blue light-wall and the ship towering in the sky.
He rotated her around, pulling her with him, until they were in the shadows of the cave tunnel again.
“I’m going to release you,” Markam said softly. But he held her a moment more, and she did not miss how his own heart hammered against his ribs, how his own voice was changed, as if what he’d seen had shaken him to his bones, too. As if he didn’t want to let go, for fear of his own panic overtaking him. “When I do, you’ll be visible again. And then we’re going to head back to the tunnels, back to Thali and Azariah, and we’re going to come up with a plan to destroy the Wanderers. To make them pay for what they’ve done. Okay, Sunny? Are you with me?”
She nodded against his chest. “I’m with you.”
He released her slowly, and that strange coolness faded from her body. Markam materialized before her, looking every bit as disheveled as she imagined she did. They stood like that, just out of reach of each other, staring in silence.
“Well.”
They both turned, as a flickering torch appeared, and Azariah and Thali emerged from the tunnel. Azariah lifted a brow and passed the torch to Thali. “We came to check on you, to make sure things were going alright with the intel but… it seems you’ve been busy doing something else.”
Sonara backed away.
“It’s notat allwhat it looks like.”
