“We need to go,” Kamaal grunted, finally clasping my shoulders again as the queen ripped that necklace from Mingyue’s throat. “I’m sorry, Ameirah.”
When I tried to shove his hands off me this time, iron-rigid arms caged my middle, and he lifted me off the ground.
“Put me down,” I snarled, fighting as he walked away. “Put me down!”
I couldn’t find my grandmother, only to leave her for dead. I couldn’t. I’d already lost Varidian.
“Please,” I choked out, a wash of emotions threatening to drown me as Kamaal hauled me behind a bookcase and out of sight. The Zalaam queen would kill Mingyue.“Please.”
But Kamaal hauled me through the hidden door and into a sun-bright garden covered in lilac leaves and deep green flowers, the sight jarring compared to the darkness that hung inside the room. I struggled to escape, but I came too close to touching him with my bare hand, and panic froze me.
“Take me back. Kamaal, take me back.”
The garden blurred as he broke into a run, my head swimming, the pressure of the queen’s dark magic giving way to a rush of blood and panic. The sharp bitterness was replacedwith scents of greenery and plant life, then roasting meats and spices as Kamaal raced through the city, ignoring all my pleas to take me back. Ignoring my every scream and plea.
People watched with judging eyes. Some tried to intervene, but Kamaal knocked them back with a flash of silver magic I couldn’t begin to guess the root of. Not quite light magic, not strength or aether.
A piercing wyvern screech came from the fluffy white clouds above, and I tried to lift my head where it bounced against Kamaal’s back.Mak,I thought with a rush of hope, but the shadow that swept through the lilac sky was silver. Raya. My heart sank so rapidly that my chesthurt,and I couldn’t hold in a sob.
For a second, I’d thought Varidian had come for me. For a second, I thought he’d survived. The crash of that hope allowed a fog of despair to obscure every other emotion. I’d found family, so unexpected and strange, and now my grandmother lay dying in a manor behind us.
“Please,” I breathed, tears running from my eyes and over my brow into my hair. “Kamaal.”
“Almost there,” he said, as if my pleas weren’t for him to turn around and go back. “Almost safe. Raya, take her,” he shouted as the world whirled around me. Small streets gave way to a broad bridge over the bright river, the wingbeats of wyvern wings blocking out the screams of alarm and fear from the Riverren citizens. Had they ever seen wyverns before? I hadn’t glimpsed a single one when we walked through the city. Before we were ambushed bythe Zalaam queen.
It was impossible. She died a thousand years ago, was shattered and eradicated from Ithanys so severely that there could be no doubt she was truly dead.
But her power was unlike any other,a scared voice whispered in my mind. My own. A remnant of her could haveremained. True power like the magic that had filled that room never truly died; it simply found a new home.
“Don’t panic,” Kamaal warned a split second before he dropped me from his shoulder into his arms and lifted me—so Raya could lock her needle-sharp teeth around my waist.
I screamed. I was too worked up to keep the cry inside, to stop shaking as she gripped me with her mouth, however gently she closed her teeth around me, not even pricking my skin. With painstaking care, she lifted me onto her back and deposited me between her shoulder blades, trembling as hard as a leaf and in danger of tumbling free. I was about to leap off, to run back to that manor and the grandmother I’d known for mere minutes, when Kamaal threw himself onto Raya behind me and locked his hand around my arm, like he knew I would try to escape.
In seconds, Raya leapt back into the sky, the cries of the winged Riverren fae falling away as she thumped her grey wings and carried us back to the broad, airy building where we first arrived. Unless I wanted to unseat both Kamaal and I, to drop us both to our deaths, I had no choice but to stay on the wyvern’s back as she flew through the bright glass of the window at the building’s end. The same shape, same colours, same depiction of wyvern, tiger, fae, and araethawn as the building in Morysen.
Light, floral air turned heavy with humidity and grit, the scent of baking sand and olive trees wrapping around my senses. For a minute, as we passed through that gate, that unbelievable magic that even now I struggled to believe existed, there was silence. And then screaming—fae and wyvern roars alike. Noise, unlike any I’d heard since the attack on the Red Star.
“Caution, Raya,” Kamaal said, sitting stiffly behind me and finally releasing his grip on my arm to lift his hands, ready to unleash that silver flash of magic.
When Raya whirled around to face the city, there was no other word to describe what we found than chaos. And flyingtowards us at a rate that would have them upon us in a minute were a legion of spiked, horned wyverns with mouths parted in vicious threat. Every rider atop those wyverns wore black djellaba with a silver insignia on their breast. I couldn’t see it clearly from here, but I didn’t need details to know it was a silver minaret surrounded by stars.
The king’s men, or the Zalaam queen’s?
CHAPTER 28
VARIDIAN
Obviously, we didn’t kill Kamaal. Neither did we kill the four people in that terrace house on the hills above Earlsorn, especially when it became rapidly clear that we were aligned in wanting rid of the wyverns and dark riders who’d invaded Wyfell, then Daurith, Tourlestyn, and as of this morning, Strava.
Four cities.Fourfucking cities, now occupied by araethawn warriors. The question remained—on my father’s orders, or someone else’s? I pinched the bridge of my nose, sitting on one of the floor cushions. I’d had to sit down when Khalid—Ameirah’scousin,the dull soldier who obsessed over war stories—told us my brother had been spying on the king for over a year.Spying.
When I saw Kamaal again, I would throttle him. I thought he’d watch over Ameirah, keep her safe, and now I couldn’t help but think he’d drawn her into a political scheme whose endgoal was, apparently, to remove our father from the throne. And replace him with Kamaal.
And not just any spy.
“A spymaster,” Zaarib said for the second time, disbelief rife in his voice. “Aspymaster.”
“That’s what I said,” Khalid said with narrow-eyed judgement. “Are you lacking brain cells?"
