“Your creations are dead, asshole,” Elinour huffed, locking eyes with me again. A silent reminder, or a command. Do it. End her.
I wet my dry lips and lifted the chain from my neck, mud smearing across the black, glittering stones that now glowed with an inner light, a core of gold in each shadow. But true, white healing magic shone from the hammered silver at its heart, reflecting it as I brought my shaking hand up.
End her,I breathed to my magic. Not a scream or a command but a plea.End it all. End everything she’s created, every bit of her evil left tainting every world in existence.
This magic had been given to heal the stain she left on Ithanys, to heal the festering wound she opened in our home. I had no doubt that infection would spread to Cirestia, to the dark world, to anywhere else she could access with the gates, but I would not allow it. Too many people had given their lives to stop this, to protect the bit of good that remained in the world. It was enough.No one else will die because of this woman,I told my magic like a prophecy, like a fact. No one else.
When my fire surged, this time it was different. It wasn’t churning, hissing fury or cold, vindictive vengeance. Like the magic gifted by my family, like the healing power sung into the world by our storytellers, this was the warmth of a new day. Sunlight after an eternal night.
I gasped as it exploded from me, no less powerful with the rage removed, no less potent for this new command: notmurder, not revenge, but healing. Life, as my magic was always meant to be. I might only have a drop of it left after a lifetime of Xiu’s cruelty, but as the deathfyre blast from my hands, my arms, and spread to my entire body, that drop met the magic of the amulet and became a blistering sun.
A killing blow, the Jiang family had given me, one by one offering their power to the repaired medallion. A killing blow, but a second chance, too. A chance for Ithanys to rebuild, to rediscover who we were without the stain of Zalaam manipulation. For too long we’d been swayed by that darkness in secret. For too long had it spread, person to person, commander to farmer to smith to king. What were the Ithanysian people without that bitter taste of violence and greed and power?
Let’s find out, I told my magic, gasping when it flared, a torch against the night, a fireplace in a dark, cold kasbah, a drop of life in an ocean of death. If anyone had looked down from the mountains at that moment they would have seen a cluster of people gathered around a figure kneeling in the mud, light blinding everything except their silhouettes as, for one moment, black fire transmuted into sunshine. If they’d kept watching, they would have seen that light shrink, sucked back into the gleaming stones of a pendant, revealing that cluster of people and only a sword in the mud.
I blinked at the empty space where Xiu had been, trying to think around the hollow silence in my head, trying to feel something that wasn’t the gaping wound Nabil’s death had opened deep inside me. She was gone. Not healed, not cleansed of the evil that had made her wage war on an entire continent. Gone.
Some evils couldn’t be helped or soothed or cured. Some could only be cut out entirely, excised from the world so everyone else in it could begin to heal.
CHAPTER 67
AMEIRAH
“You should take it,” I said, pushing the Jiang amulet across the table to Liwei in the Diamond’s riad. The sun beamed down today, and after weeks of intermittent rain the plants around us reached greedily for the sky, leaves unfurling to soak up every bit of warmth. At the heart of the garden, the stone fountain trickled, the sound calming even if the medallion on the table and the memory of everything it was attached to made my chest tighten painfully.
We buried Nabil weeks ago, but it still didn’t feel real. I was nowhere close to accepting he was gone. I didn’t even notice when we’d become friends, when he’d become so important to me, but his absence was a constant gnawing ache when the Legion of Fyrevein flew. And we’d flown almost every day in the month since the second Zalaam war.
Rogue wyverns and tigers needed to be rounded up—that was the new name given to those who’d been abducted and controlled by Xiu but fled when her compulsion was torn away—and the corrupt gentry needed to be hunted before they got any ideas about making a power grab. The dark clergy who forced true, genuine imams from our mosques had vanished into black ash, as did most of the wyverns and the commanders who led the armies. And the river remained silver, not as black as a void. The amulet had wiped out every last trace of Zalaam power in Ithanys—and Cirestia.
Which brought me back to this, with Liwei shaking his head as my cousin refused to accept the Jiang amulet.
“The women of Riverren guarded the last sliver of the first queen’s crown for centuries. It’s only right that they guard this, too. It wouldn’t even exist without them.”
“Mmhm.” Liwei sat back, arms crossed over his chest. There was no armour present today for either of us, no protections needed. Ithanys was at peace. For the first time in anyone’s living memory, we weren’t at war with Kalder, either. Both sides signed the treaty a week ago, and for now the river was still guarded on both sides, but to ensure no other dark beings walked out of it, not to wage battle on each other.
It felt… strange. Welcome, but strange. Having a family—an entire family, full of aunts and cousins and uncles whose names I could barely remember—was also welcome and strange.
“They won’t have it, you know?” Liwei said with a small smile, brown eyes twinkling with amusement. “Mingyue and Hsiuying shot down the idea immediately. Hongran does whatever makes his wife happy, so he agreed you should be the one to guard it. My mother is the world’s biggest enabler, so you can guess her opinion on the matter. Plus, she likes you,” he added. “She keeps calling youmy heroic niece.”
I groaned. “I never set out to be a hero. I just wanted revenge.” And yet that word met me wherever I went. It followed Varidian and the legion, too, and Kamaal and Silverstorm.
After a battlefield full of winged soldiers and legion commanders turned against us, and a council that had collapsed into ash, people were quick to accept that the king had been betrayed by his council. Murdered bythem,instead of me. I was completely free, not even a whisper of my name in condemnation. The opposite, actually. The reports of Fyrevein battling in the sky over Morysen presented us as defenders, trying to save the king and tragically failing. Kamaal didn’t even have to put his whispers out to create that rumour; it started itself and by the end of the week had cemented itself as fact.
“Tough shit,” Liwei said with a grin, rising to his feet. “You’re a hero, and you’re keeping the amulet. Guard it well. And guard those gentry, too. I don’t buy for one second that they’re suddenly remorseful.”
No, neither did I. Falael Jaouhari was one of them, along with a handful of familiar faces. All of them watching Kaazhim torture my magic out of me. All of them sat there and did nothing, with only the promise of power keeping their asses in those seats, not compulsion like some of the others. A grand total of three gentry, actually—that was how many had been compelled to obey Xiu. The others were willing. The entire power system of our country was corrupt. I hoped Kamaal gutted the whole thing.
“I’ll see you next month,” I said as Liwei rounded the low table, having to look up because he was so damned tall. He still looked like a prince, all golden skin and perfect hair. Part of the family I’d always dreamed of and never expected. “Or will you be too busy gallivanting around Riverren with your guard to come to a family dinner?”
His eyes narrowed. Stayed there as he stared at me. “I don’t know how, but somehow, some way, my mother told you to say that.”
I grinned. “You can’t prove that.”
“I’ve never once heard you say gallivanting before.”
I shrugged. “I’ve used it often. It’s my favourite word.”
He glanced at the door when it opened, Varidian strolling into the garden with his hands in the pockets of his fine trousers, the Marrakchi vipers stitched down the sides continuing up his dark blue tunic, matching the ink on his throat. His hair was loose around his shoulders, his face stubbled, expression relaxed for once. Seeing him so casually—andclean—after weeks of leathers, and mud and sweat did something to me.
