With my father at its heart, I presume. And my wife tangled up in all of it. I was a fool for sending her there. A stupid, rash, thoughtless fool.
But if anyone could bring down an ocean of darkness, strike fear into the hearts of even monsters like my father, it was Ameirah. Maybe we’d arrive in Morysen to find her cell obliterated and her revenge unleashed on all who’d harmed her. Fuck, I hoped so.
A thread,the lightning soul blurted, her surprise making me sit straighter atop Makrukh.A thread of fate converges here.
What does it mean?I asked, scanning my legion, then the skies over Earlsorn. Only one wyvern made its way lazily through the skies, its eyes invisible at this distance but no aggression in its body language. The town was quiet, peaceful. As if the shadow of the Zalaam warriors and their wyverns didn’t cast itself here.
It means god is watching,the lightning soul said,and our actions here today will save or doom us.
Kanuri’s informationled us to a narrow, two-storey house with a worn front step and a door that had seen better years. Better decades.
Our wyverns alighted in the grassy hills behind them, hidden in the hollows between mounds, so we moved through the tight, sand-blown streets on foot. Our leathers marked us as different from the busy workers whose quick footsteps carried them down into the town or back up its steep slopes. No one stopped us, though, and beyond wary or curious glances, no one acknowledged our progress across the top of the town, right to that peeling blue door.
A jerk of my chin had Aliah and Zaarib disappearing down a passage that led to the stretch of wilted gardens behind the terraced houses. I tested the front door but wasn’t surprised to find it locked. Someone known as a spymaster wouldn’t leave their door open for anyone to waltz through.
“Care to do the honours?” I asked Shula.
Her grin was sharp and filled her whole face. “Always.”
Three things happened in rapid succession, startling my heart into a riotous sprint. Shula raised her leg and kicked the door in. In the small room beyond, four people leapt to their feet from cushions arranged around a low table littered with teacups, half-eaten plates of pastries, and a map stuck all over with black pins. And my eyes locked with the furious glare of a tall, narrow-faced man who was familiar but vaguely enough that I couldn’t immediately place him.
“Knives down!” he barked at the three others—two men who looked remarkably alike with the same high cheekbones and straight nose, one deadly serious and the other with teeth bared and excitement-bright eyes, and a woman in her fifties wearing well-used leather-armour and a matching headscarf. “Knives fucking down,” the familiar man repeated, harsher, when they didn’t obey.
“Why?” the wilder brother demanded, barely old enough to be called a man, twenty at the oldest with the youthful face and brash anger to go with it.
“Because this is Varidian Saber. And our commander will pitch a fit if you kill his brother.”
“Where’s the silver one?” Shula demanded, just as Aliah and Zaarib burst through the back entrance.
The man crossed his arms over his chest and smirked. His tunic was made of fine material and stitched at the cuff and collars with a pattern of gold scorpions. “Why—are you here to kill him?”
“Yes,” Shula replied, jaw jutting out. “And you, too, if you get in our way.”
The man laughed. “Kamaal is the Silver Rider, you imbeciles. Varidian’s brother. And if you want him dead, you’ll have to go through us.”
CHAPTER 26
AMEIRAH
The manor was made of the same pearl-white stone as the rest of Riverren, with a short, paved walkway that led to a front door surrounded by columns. Purple leaves and flowers wound around them, climbing up the edges of the house, framing windows made up of small, rectangular panes of glass, the style so strange and new.
“Well done, Ameirah,” Kaazhim remarked, his grin oily and smug as he patted me on the shoulder, gazing at the house that had been hidden. “The king will be pleased indeed.”
I couldn’t give a shit what the king thought, but as Kaazhim led the way down the path, his three henchmen following close behind, silent as they’d been the whole journey, I glanced at Kamaal.
This was our chance. If we were going to get away, it had to be now. He grasped my upper arm and pulled me back three steps as we whirled to the gates—in time to watch them slam shut, a milky white magic wrapping around the latch.
“A poor attempt, Ameirah,” Kaazhim remarked from where he stood on the manor’s doorstep, surrounded by violet leaves and delicate columns. He looked at home here, a cunning courtier in a palatial home. Beauty on the outside, but inside… if the house was as venomous as the gentry, we had no business here.
“The door,” Kaazhim said with a smile at me, then Kamaal at my side. We’d shown our hand far too soon, I realised. Now he knew the prince would help me if given the chance. What would Bakshi do to Kamaal once we got back to the capital? “If you will, Ameirah.”
I ground my teeth and approached, pulling the gloves down my arms and tucking them into the pockets of my dirty leathers. I returned his slimy smile with a threatening one of my own, and reached for the handle of the pale, gilt-edged door. I was ready for magic to hit me like a knife to the chest, or maybe a battering ram would shove me back. Something more than the creak that sounded as the door opened easily.
“Wonderful,” Kaazhim said, patting my arm and ignoring the way I shrugged off his touch immediately. “Almost thirty years we’ve been searching for this house,” he mused to himself as he strode inside. “And all it took was you walking in the front door.”
“I thought you wanted the journal,” I said warily, staring up at the huge atrium we’d walked into.
Sunbeams slanted through windows and set the pale stone and a myriad of framed paintings aglow. Vases overflowed with flowers the same lilac colour as the sky and blooms of dark teal, the same colours echoed in the floor, the ceiling, the chandelier dangling above our heads. Unlike the stout, scowling portraits of the Jaouhari family I’d grown up seeing, or the proud paintings of the Saber family that cluttered the Morysen palace, these were gauzy paintings of beaming women and men with smiles so big their eyes turned to half-moons, the use of light and softshadows unlike any style I’d seen. The fact they were happy, and looked ordinary, approachable, was unfamiliar, too.
