“I’m okay,” I said instead of the truth, that I was afraid these were our last moments. I told myself it was enough, to lead a legion of wyverns that large to their sure death, to blast a hole in the Zalaam queen’s forces, to give everyone else a chance to fight back. But few knew she’d returned, and no one would know we’d perished here.
As the heat crested, tearing at my hair, making my eyes stream, I knew this was it. This breath would be my last. My heart drummed against my ribs, but those beats were numbered, finite.
I gazed across silver-blue and pearl-white wings until our eyes met, and as a wave of sweltering fire erupted, I refused to look away from him, my husband, my mate.
Light cracked the sky, split the world, and screams followed. Screams of the dark wyverns who’d hunted us. Screams of the Zalaam commanders. Then a white glow blotted out the sky, the mountains, and burned the impression of Varidian from my eyes.
Then darkness.
True, complete darkness.
CHAPTER 41
VARIDIAN
If I had to die, giving my life to protect my mother, my sister, and the rest of Ithanys from a swarm of enemy wyverns wasn’t a bad reason to go. I only wished Ameirah was safe in the Red Star, and that my legion and Kamaal were with her. But Ameirah would never be sent from my side again, never be anything less than my equal, and I couldn’t deny the comfort of her stare locking on mine in those scorching moments before the light devoured us all.
I didn’t look away, not as my vision burned to nothing, not as darkness fell.
No, not darkness. I squinted, my eyes pierced with sharp pain as I tried to focus them. It was that prickle of hurt that snapped me back to reality. I couldn’t see, but IfeltMak beneath me, his wings beating to keep us in place. I could feel the wind against my skin—hot and sticky but no longer blistering.
Mak?I reached for our link, exhaling roughly when I felt his confusion, as cloying and slow as mine.Still with me?
His reply was a grumble, low and sluggish. Alive. He was alive, and so was I.
My next exhale was a groan, and for a moment I revelled in the way my chest expanded. Never again would I take breathing for granted. I’d come near to death before, had almost kissed the other side, but this? This was the closest I’d come yet. I shook, adrenaline rampaging through me.
“Ameirah,” I rasped, staring through a slit in my eyelids, trying to focus my eyes on the last place I saw her, wide eyed and frightened as she clung to Raheema.
“Zaarib? Aliah? Nabil? Shula? Fa—” My teeth clacked together, pain shattering my chest far worse than anything the eruption of light had done. Fahad was gone, and it tore into my heart to realise it all over again. The automatic instinct to call his name was jarring and cruel.
Wyvern began to grumble and call out to each other.
“I’m—I’m okay,” Ameirah said, her tentative voice enough to make my eyes fall shut, to make weakness bow my body for a moment.
Everyone else checked in, one by one. Not a single one of us had been lost. A miracle indeed.
And when the Elani brothers scouted the lake, hiding in the shadow of the mountain that had saved us, another miracle came. The aerial army was gone. The River Eater had blasted them from the sky, each and every one.
CHAPTER 42
AMEIRAH
We gave the lake a wide berth, a daze of shock over all of us as we flew past the green sprawl of Woodsurn and over the treelined hills of Willow Green. We didn’t slow until we reached the site Kamaal had chosen to monitor the situation at the wall. It was a bittersweet relief to see the moss-covered Fortress come into view, to remember all the hours I’d spent fearing my husband was dead, and that beautiful night when he returned to me—before we flew to Wyfell and the hell that awaited us there.
It looked exactly the same as it had then, although the weather was fairer now instead of the relentless downpour that had drowned the towers and the fortified roof. Hewn into the surrounding mountains, the walls were austere grey and solid except for windows that allowed light to peek from within. It could never be described as a welcoming building, but it was a welcome sight, nonetheless. At least these walls could withstand wyvernfyre if another Zalaam legion found us.
The queen’s laughter echoed through my memory as Raheema landed on the long stretch of lawn in front of the fortress, craning her neck to peer around the space.
Eh,she said with the wyvern equivalent of a shrug.I expected it to be bigger.
I snorted, grasping onto that humour to fight back the suffocating sense that doom was upon us, that death itself hunted us right now. Even though my plan worked, and we survived while the enemy legion was obliterated, there would be more out there. The queen burned Xiaoyu’s journal so we could never know what she learned of those warriors. She conquered town after city after town, and assimilated her warriors into our council, our worship spaces, and now the wall had shattered. Every single thing was connected, each one a thread in the spiderweb of her plan, and I knew her end goal was to control all of us, as she failed to do during the last war.
The dread of it pressed on my chest until it threatened to asphyxiate me. We were at war, and most of Ithanys didn’t even know who our enemy was. Not Kalder this time, but true evil.
“Ameirah,” Varidian said when I dismounted in a daze. His hand found my waist, another tilting up my chin until our eyes locked. “It will be okay.”
He could feel it—the suffocating crush of emotion I grappled with. My shoulders slumped, and I admitted, “I don’t think I believe that. We don’t even know how many wyverns she has, or how she evenhaswyverns. Worse, we’ve seen no sight of the tigers you said are missing from Kalder, and her ground army has vanished into the aether, and the council ruling our entire kingdom is now under her total influence—”
