“Hold your fire!” Kamaal barked, knocking my hand aside with his palm flat to my leather-clad arm. So close to touching my skin, as if the man had a damn death wish.
Or he was driven by a desire to protect that roared louder than his own self-preservation, I realised when I saw who flew towards us. There were three of them. A scarred older man on a black wyvern almost as big as Mak. A woman no older than me wearing leathers covered in brutal scales, riding an angular-faced emerald. And ahead of them: a small wyvern with scales of opalescent ivory, her sharp teeth on display and fierceness in her eyes. Layla. And there, equally sharp-eyed as she sat between the horns curving back from Layla’s head, was Mihrunnisa in a silver headscarf and leathers, metal armour gleaming at her shoulders and wrists.
I dropped my hands to my lap, careful not to touch Raya. I didn’t think my good luck at being able to touch Mak and Raheema would transfer to another.
“My legion,” Kamaal told me. “Two of them, at least.” He raised his voice to shout, “What the fuck is happening?”
“Four legions flew across the city limits,” Mihrunnisa yelled, Layla coming alongside us and the others falling into formation at Raya’s tail.
“Black-eyed wyverns?” I asked.
“No.” Mihrunnisa’s eyes were bright, wild.“Ourlegions. Ithanysian. Someone rallied them to sack the dungeons beneath the palace. I could have sworn I saw Khalid among them. They blasted apart much of the square beside the palace and some of the market. Even now, wyverns and their riders search the rubble.” Her eyes met mine and held. “Searching for someone.”
A shiver went down the back of my neck.
“The black-eyed wyverns came from the edge of the city,” she told us as we soared beyond the industrial district and across a park that remained remarkably green and intact. For now. “They attacked the other legions, as if they’d been stationed there, waiting.”
“Fuck!” Kamaal growled.
“What?” I twisted to look at him and where I expected anger, I found blind panic on his face. It made my heart skip.
“Arresting you, locking you up, it was a trap. You were bait, and the king gathered his legions of those dark wyverns to meet the rescue attempt he knew would be mounted for you.”
He scanned the sky, and I followed suit, my pulse hammering at the base of my throat, my hands shaking as I caught his implications. A rescue attempt. But the Legion of Fyrevein perished at Daurith.
“There,” he snarled. “See, the fighting is concentrated there.Fly, Raya!Everyone, fall in,” he shouted behind him, and the others obeyed like a well-oiled machine. I’d have liked to thank them for coming to our rescue, but I could barely drag air into my lungs and everything happened so fast.
Air streamed past us as Raya pushed herself to her limit, carving a path through the sky, growling at any wyvern whocame too close; allies with ordinary riders, although I knew there were other dark riders in the sky. I sensed them, like an oily sheen over my senses, like a hammering pulse in my blood. Pressure, threatening to build like it had in that manor in Cirestia.
“Over the medina, Raya,” Kamaal bellowed, seeing something I couldn’t glimpse through the pressure wrapping around my chest, squeezing out my air and leaving space only for the dull throb of my pulse. And then pain, quiet and numb at first but growing sharper with every second.
I struggled to suck air into my lungs; to find space for the growing pain, the dizziness that made me waver on Raya’s back.
“Ameirah?” Kamaal demanded, grabbing my shoulder to right me. “What is it? What do you sense?”
Sense…? My tongue was thick in my mouth as I said, “Pain. Pressure. Hammering at my chest like an anvil.”
He didn’t reply for a beat. “He’s here. You’re feeling Varidian, Ameirah.He’s here.”
The words were like drops of sunlight on a soul shut in the dark for so long. Had it only been a day since Bakshi told me Varidian died fighting for Daurith? I hadn’t believed him at first, and I struggled to believe Kamaal now, after hours of that reality, the one where I lost my husband, had devoured every last bit of hope I had.
But if Kamaal was right and this drumming pain behind my ribs echoed to me fromVaridian,if it washispain… I sucked in a sharp breath of smoky air, forced my back straighter, my seat more secure on Raya’s back.
“Where?” One word, guttural, was all I managed.
“I think—maybe—”
“Where?”
“In the heart of the attack,” Kamaal said reluctantly, pointing to the clash of wyverns over the smouldering remains of amarket square. Flame ate at vendors’ stalls and wares—but were they the king’s wyverns or ours? I cringed at the sight of people fleeing on the ground, possessions and children clasped in their arms, but another agonised twist through my chest focused my attention on the wyverns. And I began to search.
Black—burnished orange—dark teal—deep indigo—
There.A burgundy wyvern dipped low to rip at the throat of a black wyvern covered in spikes, the rider’s orange scarf as bright as the flame that swelled in the throat of the larger, golden wyvern beside her, two riders upon his back. Habiba and Aliah. Dahab, Zaarib, and Nabil. A sob caught in my throat.
Not dead. Alive. Violently, defiantlyalive.
I scanned every wyvern, every rider as Raya powered through the sky, screeching a warning at anyone who dared get in her way, blasting hot fire at a dark-eyed wyvern that dared come close. My eyes snagged on a beautiful wyvern with jewel-green scales, another sob tumbling free at the sight of her rider. Rawiya was here. My mother-in-law, my chosen family. Sabira fought beside her on her mammoth, umber-brown wyvern. I opened my mouth to shout a warning as the orange wyvern dove towards her left, but Rawiya’s wyvern slammed her powerful tail into the creature’s wings and sent it wheeling left where—where Shula’s ferocious grey waited with his jaws parted, teeth ready to shred their enemy.
