VARIDIAN
Is that us?I demanded of the lightning soul, staring at the wash of darkness spilling through the vivid blue skies over the Torn Isle.
No,she replied in an ice voice.It is them. Our eternal enemy. Shield!
I repeated her command with a barked, “Shields up!”
“Varidian,” Nabil hissed, grabbing my arm. “There’s someone inside it. There’s someone in the darkness.”
It wasn’t a storm cloud like I first thought, wasn’t merely darkness. There were thingswithinit. Wings. I saw what Nabil had spotted—a slim woman with long hair streaming like a black ribbon behind her, and wings like a bat, like a wyvern, beating the air. But there were other winged things in the darkness, quick glimpses of mottled skin and the thin membrane of dark wings. Far too small to be wyvern. A shudder went down my spine.
“Nabil,” I breathed. “Were the araethawn winged?”
“No,” he replied, and relief had only a moment to hit before he added, “But the Zalaam warriors were.”
And now a whole swarm of those lethal, legendary creatures flew overhead. Fae so powerful that no one’s magic had ever been able to rival them. So wicked that they’d killed anyone in their path, and mass-slaughtered people for the power in their veins. One would have been terrifying. A swarm of them turned my blood to ice, turned my breath to broken shards, cutting up my chest as I tried to pull in air.
“They’re not landing,” Emmahin noticed, on her feet with a curved blade in her hand.
“What direction are they flying in?” Mohammed asked tightly, edging closer to Kanuri as the woman wreathed her hand in blue flame.
“East,” Amuq’ran answered, watching the sky with hard eyes. “And you’re right, Emmahin, they’re not stopping.”
“Wyfell is east,” Nabil said to me.
“So is the wall,” I pointed out.
“And Kalder,” Mohammed breathed, watching the dark swarm move closer to the fortress.
The black cloud blotted out the sunlight, turned the garden cold and dark, and I was a heartbeat away from reaching for my magic, when they passed overhead. And continued east.
“Where’s the access point for that tower?” Nabil demanded of Kanuri, pointing at the highest point of the kasbah.
“Inside,” Emmahin replied, striding briskly towards the row of arches that led back inside. “I’ll show you.”
Nabil and I followed urgently, and I tunnelled down into my magic with every step, grasping hold of both control and lightning.
You can’t use it,the lightning soul warned.They’ll know I’m here.
If we can bring that swarm down—
More will come. Use control magic only.
I seethed but bit my tongue and raced through the south end of the fortress after Emmahin, following the warrior up a staircase made of sharp angles and chiselled stone to a chamber many stories high, surrounded by arched openings on all sides. The island spread out below us, visible all the way to the ocean.
Nabil wasted no time, thrusting his hands out, air magic sending a powerful ripple through the blue sky, spearing for the black cloud of wings and leathery skin. And that winged woman. Logic insisted she was one of us, fae but corrupted by dark magic. PYet, paranoia told me it was the dark queen, returned to the continent after biding her time for a thousand years, with her ruthless army of Zalaam warriors at her side.
Nabil’s power struck the swarm at the same time I flung out a net of control. I wasn’t surprised when my power slid off every winged body and there was nothing to grasp. Whatever flew within the darkness, it was already under someone else’s ironclad grip.
Sweat beaded on Nabil’s dark brow as he hit the swarm with wave after wave of elemental magic, and Kanuri finally burst up the staircase and rushed to an arched opening, adding her fire to the mix. But the dark cloud was moving too fast, and already too far away. And utterly unaffected by Nabil’s attack.
Unaffected, or merely stronger than him. The thought made me cold.
Someone grasped my forearm, gripping hard enough to make my entire body jolt, to make my magic flare. I choked down crackling, seething lightning when I saw it was Emmahin who grasped me, her eyes cloudy, distant as Aliah’s had been distant earlier. The taste of white-hot power and copper coated my tongue as the magic reluctantly receded.
“They fly east,” Emmahin said, her voice strong, enraged, where I’d expected weakness. “They flyeast.Which means those bastards have come from Daurith.”
There was no other city, no other village on the stretch of land that housed Daurith’s mountains.
