If my dark flame was death forged into flame, this was the burning heart of life itself. The warriors’ light wasn’t the same, but I watched the fire unsettle Xiu, watched the force of power I slammed into her chest finally knock her off balance.
“Get the crown,” I yelled at the people fighting around me. Their fire and light streamed around me, pelting Xiu’s stomach, sides, chest, and a ball of flame hit her throat with enough heat to make her hiss. Someone broke away and ran for where the crown had fallen into the mud and I threw a hand in their direction, ringing them with a shield against the shards of glittering magic Xiu fired at their exposed back.
I jumped when the sky rumbled, light ripping from the clouds. A violent strike that made me weak with relief. Varidian. I couldn’t follow that bolt of lightning to see where it landed, tosee where he was, but I felt him in the bond, as if it had been muted and now roared with full intensity. Rage seared his soul, and murderous intent. It distracted me enough for Xiu to jump the distance between us, a cloud of darkness and stars carrying her.
I threw both hands up, knocking the helmet off her head, baring that hate-twisted face.
“You’re uglier than I remembered,” I remarked, grabbing another dagger from my other thigh, this one ordinary fae steel, and driving it into her forearm as she grabbed my shoulders. Sharp magic had formed claws on her fingers, but the wyvernscale armour protected me from the pain she intended, and I’d never been more grateful for Varidian’s obsessive protectiveness than when I twisted the dagger in her forearm.
“You’re—” she began to retort, but we both froze at a wave of warmth and light. It arced over the mountains like the sun’s first rays in a morning and spilled down to the river, pleasant when the magic washed over us. But the river—all I could do was stare at that silver light that snaked around the base of the mountains, separating Ithanys and Kalder. Silver water—not black.
Varidian did it. With his lightning, his courage, his unfailing heart, he did it. He destroyed the ring.
A laugh rasped from Xiu’s throat, no scrap of mirth in the sound. Resignation and disbelief made the sound heavy. Ashes fell on her hair, collected on her lashes as she glared at me, and drifted around us like snow.
“Destroy as many of my creations as you like,” she said through bared teeth. “Kill all my armies if you wish. But you don’t have the nerve or the power to killme.”
I opened my mouth to laugh, to retort, but it was a grunt that left me. A sound of shock, before the pressure in my stomach bloomed into livid pain.
“Did you think I wouldn’t recognise my own great-grandmother’s armour?” Xiu asked, the fear that had so briefly tightened her features softening into familiar superiority.
The wyvernscale tunic. It belonged to the first queen? I breathed raggedly, teeth gritted as I shoved at her, trying to get some space between us, trying tobreathe.
“Very clever to use the healers’ magic to dismantle everything I’ve built.” She twisted whatever blade she’d buried in my stomach, and a gurgling sound forced past my lips. “But not smart when the only thing stopping me gutting you is made of that same power.”
The tunic was gone. The skeletal wyverns above the river were gone. And on the battlefield beyond the mountains, where there’d been a furore of noise, now there was silence.
Silence, and from the distance, a song. Soft and lyrical and full of beauty. I felt it wash over me again, felt its warmth and comfort, but it didn’t ease the pain splintering through my stomach. I shouldn’t have looked down. My vision swam with dizziness, my legs wavering when I saw the glass-sharp chunk of magic embedded in my stomach, oozing blood.
“What,” Xiu hissed, hooking a black claw in the necklace, “isthis?”
It was still glowing, the medallion radiating warmth and light across my body, across Xiu’s hand as she hissed and released it. She took a solid step back, wary eyes on my chest. She didn’t see the shadow creep up behind her from where he’d landed on the muddy banks when the wyvern carrying him had burst into ashes. She didn’t see him until he was right behind her, driving his sword at her with both hands.
She didn’t see Nabil, but she saw me look at him, and twisted, wrapping her clawed hand around his grip on the sword.
“Go, Ameirah,” Nabil snapped.
I stumbled back, but because strength rapidly fled me in a stream of blood, not because I would leave him.
“Oh, she’ll go,” Xiu jeered, ripping the sword from his grip. “She’ll go to the afterlife screaming. But you’ll go first.”
I lunged forward, wrapping myself in fire when my knees buckled, when pain made the world flash white. But I heard the wet grunt that left Nabil, and Xiu’s derisive laugh grated against my senses.
When my vision rushed back in, I took a step, gripping the glowing amulet at my neck, healing light pouring from it, propelling me forward at the same time she ripped the sword free and Nabil staggered back. His chest—she ran the sword throughhis chestand a sob clawed up my throat when his knees dropped from under him.
Xiu stepped back, cruelty in the bright brown of her eyes as she watched me crash to my knees beside Nabil, pressing the Jiang amulet against his wound, my hands shaking. Pain left his face, but the skin didn’t knit back together, as my wound hadn’t repaired either. This magic had been given to me for one purpose, and it seemed to know that.
“You’re going to be fine,” I told him, shoving down the vomit that rushed up my throat. “You’re going to be fine, Nabil. This is nothing. A papercut, nothing more.”
His laugh brought blood to his lips, but there was no shadow in his eyes and a smile pulled at his cheeks as the amulet’s glow covered him. “I’ll be with her again,” he breathed. “Buchra and I, raising hell again.”
“Stay and raise hell here,” I growled, feeling for that single drop of life magic within myself, but Nabil’s head fell back to the dirt, his chest motionless, eyes staring up at the clouds. Sightless and empty.
CHAPTER 64
VARIDIAN
The ring fought like a sentient person, darkness snapping out to clash with every strike of lightning I charged through the dark river.
