Zaarib rolled his eyes hard. “Of course I’m fucking not. I’m asking, do you know something we don’t about the damn council—and the king? Or was there another reason wyvern young have gone missing and you didn’t bother to ask your nephew, who flies in a wyvernlegion,for help?”
Chakir shrugged. “I had a reason.”
Zaarib threw his hands up. “And yet you refuse to share it!”
“He didn’t want you to go missing, too,” Ghalia said from the other end of the table, her voice dry. A glance in her direction showed her eyebrows raised in challenge, eyes locked with her father. “Deny it. Go on, if you dare.”
Her father sighed heavily. “I only worried because the boy is such a reckless fool, he’d undoubtedly die doing something truly idiotic.”
“You should have told me,” Zaarib argued, arms crossed over his chest as he glared at his uncle. “Especially when we warned you those damned soldiers marched this way. Did it never occur to you to connect the two—the missing and the soldiers?”
“Of course it did,” Chakir huffed. “And you’re here now, no harm done.”
“Did these Zalaam bastards kidnap the wyverns?” Shula barrelled over whatever Zaarib was about to argue.
“Kidnapped or killed,” the until-now-silent Torn Isle rider remarked, his voice lovely yet grave and his expression distant, not a flicker of emotion on his face like he was a ghost. I’d seen the look on many a rider’s face. Shock. After such a brutal battle, he’d need time to piece himself back together. “During the lastZalaam war there were mass slaughters of wyvern and tiger to make us easier to kill.”
Shit. I scrubbed a hand over my jaw. Daurith’s wyverns were mostly children. To have killed achildwas horrific. Our enemy had no morals, no lines they wouldn’t cross unlike our legions of fae and wyverns. A dividing line, certainly, that gave us the moral high ground, but what use were morals in a crushing defeat? I massaged the bridge of my nose, my head pounding.
“Strange times,” the old woman muttered. My heart skipped when I realised those rheumy eyes were onme.It was suddenly impossible to banish the sense that she saw far beyond my body, my physical appearance, and into my very soul. “Very strange times.”
“Emmahin?” Bbiya asked, leaning forward so she could glimpse the woman.
The woman steepled her hands in front of her face, her skin bearing both wrinkles and scars of a long, brutal life. “Missing younglings, wyverns turning on wyverns, peculiar bodies washing up on our isle’s shores bearing marks not seen for centuries, thunder rumbling from caves near the great wall, talks of treaty between two enemies, a prince bearing control magic bonded to a woman with death in her fingertips, and now this. Two aether wielders sat at the same table for the first time in a century, discussing legends and war. Strange times indeed.”
I shared a look with Aliah, but beyond her lips thinning she gave no reaction, no fear betrayed. Though I had no doubt she was as unsettled as I was that Emmahin recognised her magic, through some divine sense no doubt granted to her by aether.
I filed away most of what the woman said for later, when my head wasn’t pounding. “How is my wife relevant?” I asked Emmahin, a chill rippling down my back when her eyes remained unwavering on me.
“Her magic is legend itself. So is yours. Both will be needed to purge the darkness, as it was before.”
A full shudder tore through me before she finally looked away. And I was afraid she meant lightning magic, not control. Somehow, sheknew.
Ghalia shot to her feet, and I was so convinced that Zaarib’s clever cousin had figured it out too, but her stare was fixed on Emmahin, and then it swung to Kanuri with accusation, before finally landing on her father.
“What do you mean,” she asked slowly, “there’s talk of a treaty between two enemies?” Her expression was as hard as steel as she stared them down. “Have you hosted Kaldic people on the Torn Isle? Have you brought our enemy into Ithanys?”
I waited for Chakir to scoff, to reply that of course he hadn’t.
I waited.
And waited.
CHAPTER 7
AMEIRAH
The silver disc of the moon sat low in the sky, its cool ray of light chilling my skin as I stretched out on the flat rooftop of a familiar tower in Red Manniston. I was on the rooftop garden of the Diamond. I was home.
The stone was cold under me, bleeding through the delicate fabric of my sheer underthings, but I stopped caring about that one second later as Varidian covered my body, his skin as hot as the sun and his clothes conveniently absent.
I couldn’t remember how I’d got here, couldn’t remember what led to this moment with my husband’s body pressing mine into the rooftop as his lips found my shoulder, my collarbone, my throat, but I didn’t care.
“Are you real?” he breathed against my skin, dragging his mouth up my jaw. “Am I dreaming?”
Dreaming. That made sense. He wasn’t truly here, or rather, neither of us was.
“It must be a dream,” I agreed. “I know when I fell asleep, I was in my bed in Morysen.”
