“Make it stop,” she screamed. “Put me down!”
Sudden understanding forced Kamran to look Cyrus in the eye. “You,” he said, hardly recognizing the rasp of his own voice. “You’re doing this to her.”
Cyrus’s expression darkened. “She’s done it to herself.”
Kamran was prevented from responding by the sound of yet another tortured cry. He spun around in time to see Alizeh spiraling toward the rafters—she was without a doubt in the grip of a very dark magic—and promptly lost his battle with sense. He could not fathom this chaos into order, could not answer the multitude of questions that hounded him.
Kamran felt unmoored as he watched her.
Alizeh was a force so powerful she claimed the devil as a friend, knew the sovereign of an enemy nation as an ally. She’d used dark magic to create illusions so compelling he’d truly believed she’d suffered physical blows to her hands, her throat, her face. She’d tricked even King Zaal into believing she was a helpless, ignorant servant girl. And yet, she sobbed then with a hysteria so believable that even he—
“You can see her.”
The statement startled him. Kamran turned back toCyrus, assessing in an instant his enemy’s copper hair, his cold blue eyes. Of all the things Cyrus might’ve said,thiswas particularly strange, and Kamran was too discerning to dismiss it as meaningless. That Cyrus appeared surprised Kamran could see her seemed to point to a simple inverse—
Perhaps others could not.
It was a theory that explained nothing yet seemed somehow vitally important. Kamran wondered then about the source of his temporary blindness, and renewed fear branched up his back.
“What,” Kamran said carefully, “did you do to her?”
Cyrus did not answer.
Lazily, the southern king pushed himself off the column before bending to pick up his sword. He walked toward Kamran with affected unconcern, dragging the blade behind him like a dog on a leash, the eerie exhalation of steel against stone briefly overpowering the sounds of Alizeh’s screams.
“I thought she broke through the fire to punishme,” Cyrus was saying. “I see only now that she did so to protectyou.”
There was a flicker in those blue irises, and for a second Cyrus betrayed himself. Beneath his placid surface was something desperate and unrestrained, if not broken. Kamran cataloged the moment as a kind of mercy, for he realized then that the young man was a king weaker than he appeared.
“You know her name,” Cyrus said softly.
Kamran felt a pulse of trepidation but said nothing.
“How,” Cyrus demanded, “did you come to know her name?”
When Kamran finally spoke, his voice was heavy, cold. “I might ask you the same question.”
“Indeed you might,” said Cyrus, who was lifting his sword by inches. “But then, it’s my prerogative to know the name of my bride.”
A sharp pain exploded in Kamran’s chest just as an earsplitting crash broke open the room. He fought back a cry, clasping his ribs as he fell once more to his knees, heaving through the brutality of the blow. Kamran had no idea what was happening to him, and there was no time to hazard a guess. He could only force his eyelids open in time to witness not merely the destruction of his home but the arrival of an enormous, iridescent dragon, the sight of which seemed to drain the blood from his body.
The Diviners would never have allowed a foreign beast to enter Ardunian skies.
But the Diviners were dead.
Kamran watched the dragon catch Alizeh just as she began a sudden, dizzying descent, the monstrous creature seating the young woman firmly on its back before launching upward once more. The animal gave a stalwart roar, flapped its leathery wings, and, in a blink, both beast and rider were gone, vanishing into the night through the cavernous hole newly blown through the palace wall.
In the proceeding chaos, Kamran could no longer deny the devastation of his mind.
The grief of losing his grandfather had only just begun to penetrate, and each subsequent betrayal had broken him notunlike a series of other small deaths, each one a violent injustice, each one demanding a period of mourning.
Zaal had been false. Hazan had been false. Alizeh—
Alizeh hadruinedhim.
Somehow he still heard the uproar of the crowd, felt the oppressive heat of his cage, the insistent cold of the marble floor under his knees. He lacked the strength to stand; pain was streaking relentlessly across his body in a steady rhythm that showed no signs of abating. Slowly, Kamran lifted his head, looked Cyrus in the eye. He felt so raw his throat seemed to bleed as he spoke.
“Is it true?” he asked. “She’s really going to marry you?”
