Kamaal. The name plucked a string of memory, but I couldn’t access the full thought. “I think something bad happened,” I whispered. “Dread is crushing my chest, making it hard to breathe, and I think—I think I’m in danger. I think I should have left a long time ago.”
“I thought you’d be safer there,” Varidian said in half a growl, his arms so tight they hurt, not that I complained. “I thought you’d be beyond the threat of those wyverns and their dark riders. I’m getting you out, right the hell now.”
His arms loosened but I tightened mine, refusing to relinquish his embrace. The clouds shifted in the dark sky overhead, a moonbeam allowing me to see the crackle of light and rage in his blue eyes.
“Stay,” I breathed. “As long as the dream will allow you. Stay. Please.”
All the rage drained from him, and he tucked me closer, his chin on the top of my head. “Tell me everything that happenedsince you arrived in Morysen,” he asked, emotion adding gravel to his voice.
So I did, recounting everything from Kamaal’s training sessions to Mihrunnisa teaching me to fly, to the duel between Raheema and Muhannad. Varidian’s jaw clenched so hard at that, I feared he’d snap off teeth.
“I’ll kill him,” he seethed.
“You can’t kill the king. He’sthe king.”
“All power must end.”
I peered up at him, his wrathful face, the mouth set in a harsh line, brows low over eyes that promised death. “You’d make yourself king?”
“Fuck no,” he said on an exhale. “Although,” he added, drawing back to give me a sultry look. “I would very happily serve you as my queen.”
“I would be an awful queen,” I said with a low laugh. “I’d hold grudges for years and forgive nobody for a single slight said against me, you, or our family.”
“Oh, I like that.” He smiled, face angled down to mine. “Our family.”
I planned to reply, but Varidian was already kissing me. The heat of him engulfed me as he crowded me back against the wall of the passage, his mouth pressing reverent kisses to my upper lip, my bottom lip, the curve of my smile, the dip under my mouth. Adoring kisses that nevertheless teased me until I snapped, sinking my fingers into his hair and gripping strands so I could angle his face to steal a deeper taste—
My hands closed around air, and a gasp escaped, followed by a low growl of frustration and grief. This was twice he’d been stolen from my dreams, and as much as I told myself he was fine, he’d simply awoken… the feeling that he was gone forever lingered.
The dread that had tightened my chest choked off all air entirely, startling me out of the alley, out of the square, out of the Red Star—and I awoke in a dungeon cell, cold burning through my leathers.
CHAPTER 19
AMEIRAH
For hours, I sat awake in the vaulted cell, surrounded on three sides by stone the colour of sunlight that drained the warmth from me rather than providing it. The icy temperature bled into my bones, making me shake, and I had to wonder if magic kept my prison as cold as possible.
From where I sat slumped against the wall, another cell was visible through long metal bars. Like mine, it was little more than a half dome of stone. Bleak and unsettling. Others fanned out on either side, arches vanishing as far as I could see, lit sparingly by shafts of light from above that created dark pockets of shadow. The others were empty, as if I’d been placed far from the other prisoners. But I could hear them. Weeping. Begging for help, mostly in a language I’d never heard before.
The call to prayer drifted through the wall from the palace’s nearby minaret, the muezzin’s voice amplified by magic. He hadn’t been conscripted to fight in the war against Kalder unlike my home’s, I noticed. How many other cities and townshad been forced to make sacrifices, while Morysen lived utterly removed from the grit and horror of war? Resentment spread like a fever through me, and though it wasn’t fair, I began to hate every café and bookshop and medina we’d visited.
Fajr was lonely and quiet except for distant sobs and prayers from the other prisoners. The last bit of warmth leeched out of me when I knelt, the golden stone beneath me an unforgiving prayer mat. It began a struggle to even hold onto that flash of resentment as my energy drained.
I went back to sitting against the wall and waited. Waited to see what the king would do with me, waited for another magic torture session from Kaazhim. Unless this was it. Unless he’d thrown me in the dungeon and left me to rot, where Varidian would never find me, where no legion would come to my rescue.
They wouldn’t even if they found me; the legions answered to their commanders, who themselves answered to the king. I’d be forgotten down here, a missing person for the rest of my life. Which may not be long at all unless someone bothered to provide food and water.
I dozed against the wall, slipping in and out of sleep as Morysen’s sounds of life drifted through the stone, as if minuscule gaps had been left to torment prisoners with the freedom we’d never have. I heard hawkers shouting prices, so these cells must run beneath the palace and close to the market on the other side of the walls. And judging by the dungeon that stretched further than I could see, it was even more expansive. Perhaps it flowed all the way beneath the great city, a prison with enough cells for a whole army.
A loud cheer woke me from a fretful sleep, and I stretched out my aching body, getting to my feet to test the stability of the bars—extremely stable—and the stone of the arched opening—unyielding. Running my fingers over every bit of wall I could reach produced the same result. I was thoroughly trapped.
I’d just reclaimed my spot against the wall when footsteps scraped further down the tunnel, sending a rush of goosebumps down my arms. The back of my neck tingled as those steps came closer, unhurried, leisurely.
If they’d been marching, determined steps I might have thought they belonged to Kamaal, might have thought he’d come to liberate me, but my heart sank. It was either a guard or—
Bakshi Saber walked into view in one of those brightly coloured djellabas he used as a disguise, his dark hair slicked back from a face lit with pure satisfaction.
“The lightning soul in the flesh,” he said in greeting.
