“It’s possible—it could explain why they were spying on us to begin with. Before the Zephyrians left the continent, there was a civil war, and our people split apart. Our countrymen wanted the Eagle Riders to stay, but King Taos—the Eagle Rider leader at the time—wanted to go and conquer other lands. To become an empire.”
“So these people in Mistral could have been related to Zephyrians centuries ago when you both lived on the same continent.” When I nodded, she continued. “And it’s interesting that they know of the sorcerer—they even mention old stories about it that the Zephyrians have supposedly forgotten. It’s almost like the creaturecamefrom Darkhan.”
I looked at her in surprise. “It does seem like that, though I don’t know what that means, exactly. Other than this evil has been unleashed here on this continent now.”
“Too many strange pieces to this puzzle, and I’m not sure how they fit,” she said, looking suddenly drained. Her shoulders slumped with fatigue, and her eyes were heavy.
I started to reach out and touch her cheek, but I checked myself at the last second and touched her arm instead. “You should rest up for tomorrow.”
“I’ll try,” she said with a tired smile.
When we got to her room and she saw Baz and three of theemperor’s guards outside, she turned to me, a crease of worry between her brows. “Will you not stand guard tonight?”
The fact that she wanted me there made my chest swell. She trusted me. She wanted me to guard her. “I’ll be back later tonight, but for now, I’ll go and speak with the head steward.”
She nodded, closing her eyes in relief. “I understand.”
After checking that her room was safe, I left her under the protection of Baz and the other guards, with her room securely bolted from the inside. It was hard to leave her. Lord Heron hadn’t been wrong to suggest I wanted to be alone with the First Daughter. She was all I thought about. But I was a soldier. I had to put that all aside and focus on the task at hand. Destroying the Devourer.
Even with the promise of the help of Zara, a woman with intuition and power enough to knock even Neo and me from the sky, I had a feeling this would end badly. My cousin, in his quest to live up to his father’s ghost, had let in darkness itself.
I didn’t think it would leave easily.
There was something about the look that came over Altair right before we left that made me think of the cold-burning rage my uncle used to succumb to. When provoked too far by Altair, which was usually over something as trivial as Altair failing to seem enthusiastic enough about his Eagle Rider training, he would take him away from all the eyes of the palace and beat him. It was always in places that no one would see—chest, stomach, legs, arms—but I saw the aftermath. I tried to stand up for him, to beg leniency or try to distract my uncle, but that would only make him angrier.
“See how your cousin has to speak for you? Pathetic!” he would shout, and he beat him harder for it.
So I held my tongue. I held it when we were young, and I held it even after my uncle’s death.
I thought Altair would be free once the emperor was dead, but he wasn’t. He was still struggling to fulfill his father’s impossible expectations of him, and I knew it had grown into an entity of madness in his mind.
And this was darkness I knew both the Devourer and Lord Heron would take advantage of.
Had I spoken up sooner, none of this would have even reached the point of another potential war. Maybe then I could have saved Altair from Ozul, and himself.
28
Zara
Despite my exhaustion that night, I had a hard time falling asleep. I’d hidden my reaction from Talon, but Altair’s words had shaken me. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, running his reactions through my mind over and over. I could think of only one other person who’d suffered something like that, but I’d never forget the signs. A daughter in our camp had a twin sister who had died, and afterward, she’d lost all sense of reality in her grief. She continued to see and speak to her sister as though she were alive, which had taken some getting used to, but was relatively harmless. But she wasn’t an emperor of an entire people, and one who hadn’t lost a beloved sister, but instead, a sadistic father. What might this ghost of the past emperor be telling his son?
It made me think of when Altair had brought me to that inner sanctuary, and he’d said his father was never wrong. I’d thought at the time that it was strange to speak of his father in the present tense, but that maybe it was just a slip of the tongue. Now, though, it seemed that he believed he could still see and speak to hisfather. Not good considering how much his father had hated my people.
And Lord Heron…even the thought of his name made my skin crawl. He was clearly manipulating Altair into thinking that Talon and I were doing something inappropriate together, which was ridiculous.
Is it though?my mind taunted me.
I thought of Talon’s smile, the way the wind blew through his dark hair, the sunlight on his skin. I covered my face in my hands.
“I hate this place,” I said with a groan.
But the way Talon and I may or may not have felt toward each other wasn’t the real problem right now. Altair would never willingly break his alliance with Ozul. And even if we managed to destroy that demonic creature, I didn’t think I’d be able to uphold my end of the treaty. We would need to renegotiate, considering none of us had known that Altair had allied himself with a monster.
More than anything, though, I desperately wanted to see Ama. I craved her wisdom and guidance, but at the same time, I knew she would never sanction this plan to confront the Devourer. Not when I wanted to use the power of the wind against it.
First chance I got, I was going to see Ama in person. She needed to know what was really happening here. And she owed me answers about my sire. Answers that I realized now she’d long kept a secret.
Assuming I lived through the battle with the Devourer, that is.
