But Bakshi, too, weakened as the chain finally snapped. His face turned a little grey when I clasped the silver disc between my hands. I panted as my head swum, my legs weak as I pulled up more magic, but I didn’t stop. Had I ever expended this much, for this long before? In the Red Star, the iron poisoning knocked me unconscious before I could do much more than unleash a wave, but now? The roof was full of it, and flames bledinto the city below as I speared black, furious flames into every stone of the talisman.
One cracked and Bakshi gasped, clutching his chest, as if he was connected to the medallion. I forced the flames hotter, and two stones smashed. When Bakshi groaned in pain, I ignored the dizziness making the rooftop waver around us and shattered the final stones. Through shimmering vision, I watched dark flames pour out of the medallion—and gasped when they snapped back into my core.
“Bastard,” I hissed, using those returned shadows to pin Bakshi to the rooftop. My knees hit stone, but I held on, panting as darkness tore from me like it had a life of its own. It wasangry.The king had tried to steal this magic, and it wanted blood as revenge.
End him,I urged it, welcoming the magic’s dark flow through me.
“You can’t truly think you’ll beat me,” he laughed, but his voice was papery.
“One of your riders told me something,” I said through gritted teeth, grounding my knees on the rooftop as power burned from me like a firestorm, my body merely the vessel it used to unleash itself upon the world. Bakshi stared, the whites of his eyes showing as fear finally reached his black heart. “She said the lightning will come, and darkness will follow and bring only death. And here I have brought it—your death. Together, that rider said, the lightning and my darkness will tear Ithanys apart until nothing remains.”
I smiled, reflecting his cruelty back to him. “And I promise you this. Nothing of what you’ve done to Ithanys, to my home, not a single scrap of shadow or flicker of darkness, will remain. I will burn every bit of your corruption to ash, and you will be remembered not as a great ruler and an immortal power, butas the villain who tried to overcome the courage and faith of Ithanys—and failed. You will be remembered as afailure.”
“You are—insignificant,” he spat, but I felt it—the moment my Deathfyre punched through his chest and into his heart.
I didn’t hear whatever he said next; blood rushed through my ears, drowning out everything except my own pulse, my own dizziness, everything except the fire that burned its imprint into my blood.
Light flared in the deathfyre I forced into the king’s bitter, hateful heart. For a moment, light flared, and Bakshi sobbed, tears lining his eyes with starlight. Then I gritted my teeth, clenched my hands into fists, and finished it. Used that fire to incinerate the heart within his chest.
He killed my mother. Stole me from her and gave me to an abusive monster to raise. Put events into motion that led to my grandmother, perhaps the only blood family I had left, dying at the hands of a queen who embodied pure evil. I watched with fierce satisfaction as the light left his eyes, as the king splayed on the ground, dead.
CHAPTER 31
VARIDIAN
Ameirah didn’t move when I got to my feet. The sword I hadn’t been given time to draw before the harpoon struck me scraped along the rooftop as I stumbled towards her. My chest was mangled, and both blood and darkness had stained my leathers, but my wife knelt on the ground before the dead king, with eyes so distant they were cold, and that was blood leaking down her side, leaving a red trail on the tan stone.
“Ameirah,” I croaked, shutting out the pain that spiderwebbed across my chest. The spike of the harpoon had vanished, but the wound, the blood, the mess it had made of me remained. I clenched my jaw as I took the last three steps, dropping to my knees beside her. A grunt escaped, but she didn’t react.
Nearby, a wyvern screech split the sky, louder than all the others, livid the same way I was at the sight of Ameirah injured.
I took her face in my hands, looked into those vacant eyes. “Ameirah. Dearling, look at me.”
I didn’t know how much time had passed since the shot and the fall ripped my consciousness from me, but judging by the battle still waged in the skies, it couldn’t have been longer than twenty minutes.
“Raheema is coming. Did you hear her?”
I moved my wife away from the lifeless body of my father as gently as I could, trying not to look at his face too closely. He was a monster. He deserved to be dead. But there was no controlling the tight fist around my heart, no sense to the lump in my throat. Dead and monstrous, but still my father. It might have meant nothing to him, but blood, family, loyalty—it meant something to me.
“Ameirah,” I said, brushing hair from her cheek, lifting her face to mine. The emptiness in her eyes scared me far more than the flame and screams in the air. So too did the plumes of darkness that surrounded us. The shadows looked like fire, but no flame burned me. But for her to have expended this much magic… “Dearling, look at me.”
She didn’t blink, didn’t focus her eyes, but her breath did hitch when I kissed her forehead. I seized that like a lifeline, scattering kisses over her brow and into her hair.
“Varidian,” she rasped in the same hoarse voice as our last dream. As if she’d been screaming for so long that her throat was damaged.
“Where did you go, dearling?” I drew back to look at her, relief hitting me like a fist to the stomach when she blinked, those beautiful brown and violet eyes focusing on me.
“I… I killed him.” Her expression cleared, her eyes sharpened with panic. “I killed him. I murdered the king. Oh god, the legions are going to kill me. I’m going to be hunted—”
I stemmed the flow of fearful words with a kiss. “I’ll handle it.”
“But I killeda king.”
I shrugged. “I was going to do it sooner or later. You saved me a job.”
For a moment she gaped at me, looking on the verge of whacking my arm for being so cavalier about his death, and then her face crumpled. Her hands mapped the shape of my shoulders, my chest, and up my neck to my face.
“He told me you were dead,” she cried. “He told me you and the legion died in Daurith, and I—I tried not to believe him, Iknewhe was just fucking with my head but—”
