Time slows to a crawl. Another burning star careens from above. It crashes through the center of the buttress, and I see every growing splinter, watch every falling fragment, as the structure crumbles.
No.
The Sky King screams. Vanesh flails, grasping for a ledge that isn’t there.
I throw myself forward, arms raking across the broken glass, as if I’ll be able to catch them. They fall in slow, eerie somersaults, like the fluttering seeds of a globeflower. The Sky King thrashes while Vanesh tries to reduce their speed with frantic bursts of wind.
From across the divide, Lizbet adds her wind to the current, and I almost think Vanesh and the king will survive. But then another bolt of starfire slams into the battlements of the treasury. An enormous chunk of blue marble breaks away, like a glacier collapsing into the sea. It slams into Vanesh first, wheeling him around, then breaks across the Sky King’s back. His spine twists unnaturally. His face goes slack. Screams flay my throat open as I watch the Sky King of Ashkar, my lord and master, plunge into the darkness below.
I bury my face in my hands, oddly thankful for Enebish’s blackness. So I don’t have to see my king and comrade painted across the cobbles.
Behind me, the Kalima are silent. I can’t even hear them breathing.
Our lungs have been crushed—like the Sky King’s.
He can’t be gone. There has never been a more powerful leader in the history of Ashkar. He is transcendent. A god on earth. And a god cannot be flattened like an insect on the cobblestones. Theycan’t.
Sobs rattle from my swollen throat, and I howl into the quiet. How could Enebish do this? How could shemurderour king?
“Don’t disgrace them with your tears,” Bastian snaps behind me. “This is your fault.”
“My fault?” I whip around, my face so hard with frost that it crackles and pops.
“You shoved him out onto that narrow beam. You probably wanted him to fall. You probably told your monstrous sister to come.”
“If anyone is at fault, it’s you—all of you double-crossing traitors!” I fling my hand at the Kalima, frost shooting from my fingers and skimming over their heads. “If you’d been following my orders instead of conspiring behind my back, we would have caught Enebish and Temujin before they attacked. We wouldn’t have been sitting ducks—”
“Quiet,” Varren says.
“Don’t you dare silence me!” I roar. “How could you betray me like this? After everything? You’re supposed to be my second!”
Varren’s tattooed arm winds around my face and his meaty hand covers my mouth. When I try to scream, nothing comes out.
“Quiet,” he says again in a gruff whisper.
That’s when I hear it. The sound of voices in the courtyard—the rebels undoubtedly discovering their bloody prize. Only the voices sound too smooth and susurrating, the cadence too fluid and lilting, to be Ashkarian.
A new wave of panic dances down my spine.
“Zemyans,” Cirina whispers.
Except that’s impossible. They couldn’t have marched to Sagaan already. And Enebish would never fight with them. They murdered her family and burned her village.
But then I never thought she would align with Temujin, either. Or attempt to kill me. I know nothing about what she would and wouldn’t do. Her starfire is as undeniable as the foreign shouts filling the halls below.
My sweat freezes the moment it leaves my pores and rolls down my face like tiny gouging diamonds.
This changes everything.
Temujin and the rebels taking Sagaan is infuriating but rectifiable—once Enebish’s darkness peters out. The Shoniin hardly have the numbers to hold Sagaan, let alone the empire. And the people weren’t at risk of violence. The Unified Empire wasn’t in danger of collapsing. But if theZemyansare here—if theZemyansare taking our capital—there’s no end to the possible devastation. They’ll raze our cities, imprison our people, and if they manage to capture a Kalima warrior—as they’ve been trying to do for decades—they’ll kill us. Or worse: taint our power with their devil magic. Twist it into poison to use against us.
I stumble back, unable to catch my breath. This is all I’ll be remembered for: the death of the Sky King. The fall of the empire. Not my impressive victories at the war front or my legendary march to the beaches of Karekemish. Not my unmatched leadership or the strength of my ice.
My ice.
I look down at my hands, barely visible in the oppressive dark. If I can forge a blade of ice, why not a buttress?
The thought makes my muscles quake. The ice will have to be ten times longer and ten times thicker than a saber to support the weight of a person, and I’ll have to maintain it for several minutes, which could burn through my power.
