No,I snarled at my own fear.No. He’s unconscious and nothing more.
“Kaazhim,” Bakshi confirmed, his head tilted as he considered me. “I wanted to see if the famed bloodlines of Wyvara could be bred back into Ithanysian families after those cowards fled to another world.” Cirestia. It had to be. They fled…? Did they open a gate during the Zalaam war and take all that legendary magic to a peaceful world, leaving us to our war and bloodshed? “You were an experiment,” Bakshi said as I spun theories in my mind. “One of many, but the only successful one. Kaazhim was an overachiever, you see. Not content to seduce any Wyvaran bloodline, he tricked the daughter of their royal line into falling for him.”
My mother. He was speaking about my mother. I covered my mouth as horror made my stomach turn. I spent my whole life wondering who she was, and why she’d abandoned me to my father’s family. I spent my whole life hating her for it. And no wonder she never wanted me if Kaazhim deceived her, got her with child not for love but on a foreign king’s orders.
I snarled wordlessly, canines bared, but it didn’t dissuade Bakshi. No, the king of Ithanys loved the sound of his own voice. Loved revealing his grand schemes.
“A shame,” he added with a convincing show of sympathy. “She died only a few months after your birth. If she’d remained in her world, she may have survived, but she ventured into a world of dark power and monsters. They ripped her apart.”
“You killed her,” I realised, jerking forward, rage trembling through my shoulders and down my arms, scattering black flames until the entire rooftop burned with them. “You killed her,” I repeated, my voice small. “What did she ever do to you?”
“She tried to take my power from me. She stole into my world through a gate—the same one you used today, as it happens—and tried to take you back. She might have succeeded, but she made the mistake of attempting to liberate the women we had taken. And when she failed, she had thenerveto seal the gate so we could take no others.”
“The—” It hit me, one truth after another. “You didn’t just send your henchmen to seduce women; you kidnapped them. She came to save them. And to… to saveme,”I breathed, the realisation a kick to the stomach.
Ithurt.Realising I’d spent my whole life hating this woman for never wanting me, only to learn that her life was stolen as she tried tosaveme. It hurt deep in my chest, in my stomach, in my throat and my aching eyes as tears pierced them.
She wanted me. Loved me enough to cross worlds to rescue me from these power-hungry men and was murdered for it. Ripped apart by monsters, he said. Tears fell down my cheeks, and triumph lit Bakshi’s eyes, but he should have known better. He should have known this crushing empathy in my chest, this love and longing for a mother I’d never known, this aching kinship with a family that had been targeted simply because they possessed magic, and others craved it in their greed… it didn’t weaken me. The rage shaped me into a weapon hewn from the fabric of death itself, and my pain, these tears, made me strongenough to slay monsters. I would begin with the one in front of me.
“I will use your gifts to make myself immortal, to give myself power beyond measure,” he gloated, oblivious to the tempest gathering in my chest, shaking its way down my arms to my burning palms. “I will make myself a god, and bow to no one.
All the power he already possessed—an entire kingdom at his command, a council of gentry and clergy who could write any law into effect, make his will into reality. And it wasn’t enough?
The rage crested, my arms shaking with the force of it. Dark, ravenous flame detonated from the core within me, where it had been suppressed for so long in shame. Death wasn’t my curse any longer. Not when I could use it to end someone so greedy that he would unleash evil and darkness across his own empire. Upon the people he’d sworn oaths to protect.
Deathfyre burned so hot the rooftop trembled, and I could have sworn those vibrations travelled down the tower to the street below. Could have sworn the screams throughout the city rose in response to my power’s rage.
“You should have been content with being king,” I snarled, hammering Bakshi with blow after blow of magic, so much that it seemed impossible it came from me.
Had this storm of power lived within me all this time, or was it born now from wrath and defiance at the injustice of what he’d done?
“You rule over the world. Every citizen of Ithanys bows to you. You should have been content with that.”
He held the medallion up as I drove column after column into his chest, the rooftop thick with black fire that rose higher, lashing his calves, his knees, forcing him back a step as I let hatred fuse with love. The love that carried my mother across worlds. The love I saw in my grandmother’s eyes before theZalaam queen ripped her out of my life. The love I had for Varidian. The love I was steadily learning to feel for myself.
“With this power,” he said through clenched teeth, “I can have more than this world. I can have any world,everyworld. The things I can do once I’ve claimed this power as my own, Heir of the famed bloodline of Wyvara.”
Claim it as his own? My next blast of power was sucked into the medallion, and for the first time I considered that it might not simply protect him from my deathfyre butstealit, store it.
I aimed my magic lower, away from that medallion, and hissed when it was sucked into those black stones anyway. I needed to get it off him, before he became as powerful as I was.
I blinked at my own thought. Before hebecameas powerful as I was. But he was the king of Ithanys. The most powerful person in the land. And yet—Kaazhim was the one who tortured me, not the king himself. And I’d never once seen him wield any kind of magic, never even seen him in the skies atop a wyvern. Even now, he stood on a tower to be on the same level as the legions flying over Morysen, rather than mounting a wyvern himself.
“You have no magic of your own,” I whispered in disbelief, and Bakshi startled as if he’d been shot. “It’s true,” I said, watching his reaction. “You, the most powerful man in all of Ithanys, are completely powerless. That’s what she promised you,” I realised, shaking my head. “All this death, all this suffering—for magic?”
“You haveno ideawhat it is like,” Bakshi snarled, spittle flying from his mouth.
“No idea?” My laugh was coarse, as dark as the wave of magic that poured through my veins, seething with rage as it poured from me and struck him hard. Absorbed into that medallion.Shit.I took a few steps closer, ignoring the hairs that rose on my arms. “My power isdeath.I murdered my own sister and washated for it my entire life. You crave magic so badly, butyouhave no idea of the cost.”
“Any cost is worth it,” he dismissed, watching with what I hoped was unease as I moved closer, herding him against the edge of the rooftop. Further from Varidian.
Bakshi stopped four steps away from the edge, like he knew I wanted him to fall.
The fire bathing the rooftop rose, its lashing rage a match for mine as Bakshi held up that hammered disc of silver to intercept my next strike. But I allowed the fury to pour through me like blood, like vital air, and while he caught my next burst of deathfyre, he didn’t see the creeping tendrils rising from the rooftop. I sank them like teeth into his leg and dragged him to his knees, breathless when itworked.
It took mere seconds for me to rush across the distance, seconds for that damned talisman to absorb the blow and protect him again, but then my fingers were around the chain. Fire danced among my fingers as I grabbed the metal in both hands and tore, over and over, ignoring the pinch of pain in my side and the sudden hot fire of my breathing.
I forced that chain to stretch until a link weakened, then gritted my teeth against a scream, and slammed a column of deathfyre into his chest. This time, my head swum. This time, the magic seemed to steal my energy and strength instead of bolstering it.
