The back of the healer’s hand collided with my shoulder, stunning me enough that I moved back automatically. “You’ll only get in the way. Go wait over there with the other riders if you must.”
A glance at where she pointed showed battered, bloody people of various ages slumped on the grass.
“Save him,” I implored her, clearing my throat when it emerged thick, strangled.
“That’s my job,” the healer replied, bustling me a few steps further.
Resigned, I collapsed in the grass next to the other riders waiting to hear the fate of their mounts.
The noise wasthe hardest part of sitting, waiting. The whimpers and yelps from the injured wyverns were bad enough, let alone screams from within the tents where medics worked oninjured riders. But the wall of sound from the battlefield just beyond the treeline cut through my blood like a shot of lightning. I tried not to flinch as the shouts grew louder, more frequent, as if the Zalaam forces had pushed us back further.
When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I strode across the trampled grass to where Mak slumped, unconscious, while three healers worked on him. I couldn’t feel him through our link, but he was out cold so that wasn’t surprising. That didn’t stop the fear that gripped my chest with ice cold fingers when I saw the extent of the wound. His blood had been cleared away, revealing a slice that went from under his wing all the way to where his leg began. It was a wonder his organs had stayed inside his body all those hours in the sky.
Guilt twisted my stomach until I tasted vomit. I should have brought him here hours ago. Would he be conscious now if the first wound had been treated?
“Don’t even think about getting in the way,” the no-nonsense healer warned me, eyeing me like she expected I’d force my way through to Mak.
“How is he?” I asked, and didn’t recognise the emptiness of my voice.
“Alive, and going to stay that way,” she replied gruffly, her brown hands flat to the wound. “He won’t be able to fly for weeks, though.”
I swallowed. Breathed through the ringing in my head. Forced myself to nod, to thank the woman, and walked away. Numb legs carried me all the way through the trees onto the hill that overlooked the battlefield.
Worse—it was so much worse than I’d dreaded, even with the Torn Isle legions arriving to help. Too many enemy wyverns remained in the air, and too few of ours pushed them back. Still hundreds, but how long until those mounts fell like Makrukh?
More Zalaam commanders had arrived in the time I’d been slumped in the dirt, awaiting Mak’s fate. I picked out twenty of them in the storm-dark sky, then thirty, and gave up at fifty. But the roaring screams hadn’t come from the aerial legions; they came from the ground warriors, and why became clear instantly.
In the mindless chaos of battle, I’d forgotten that the dark army that covered the ground like a shadow wasn’t simply armed, ruthless, and twisted by a magic so dark it was forbidden. They werewinged.Now those soldiers flew through our neat rows of fighters, ripping into faces and throats and tearing limbs clean off. And whatever warriors survived, those Zalaam soldiers left to the next wave—a third wave I’d been absent for. Tigers. Those stolen tigers from Kalder finally revealed, and unleashed on our brave warriors.
There wasn’t a front line anymore; there was only screaming and running. Desperate pulses of magic. Swords turned slick by the rain.
So here it was—the full might of the Zalaam army—and it wascrushingus. Too many gaps lay above, in what had once been a flawless formation. Too many warriors had fallen on the ground, their bodies trampled as Zalaam soldiers ripped into those still alive. So many. My throat closed up. So many people who had answered our desperate plea for help, who’d come to fulfil a promise that our home would not be conquered by evil.
Defeat was so close, it was inevitable. We were disorganised and fear ate through our allies like a poison. All while the Zalaam army remained focused and unfaltering.
What hope I’d clung to that we’d win this, that bravery and courage andgoodwould triumph died when a horn blew.
Retreat, it called. It’s over. Retreat, or we die here.
CHAPTER 49
AMEIRAH
“Nabil!” I cried, lurching up a golden stair towards the gate in the fortress attic. The shattered mirror had sucked him inside and now showed no sign of him in the glass. Was he in Riverren now, or had the gate rejected him because he didn’t carry Cirestian blood?
I reached out for the cold metal surface, but it rippled around my fingertips, feeling more like a warm wind than solid glass. Exactly as I remembered the gate in Morysen—a ripple of magic, a tug of wind, but no pain, no resistance.
“I don’t think so, you worthless little roach,” Kanuri hissed in my ear as her arm snaked around my neck. The fine edge of a cool blade met my throat, a mirror of how my bracelet tore through hers. Still alive—somehow, maddeningly, she was stillalive.
She ought to be dead, but she still had that amulet around her throat…
Maybe I ought to feel bad about wishing my own grandmother dead, but Irefusedto claim that side of my blood. They weren’t family. They were cruel, selfish, manipulative monsters, and I rejected them.
I whipped my hand up, dragging the spikes of my bracelet across the back of her arm, but Kanuri only snarled and didn’t let go. Blood trickled over my throat as she drove the knife harder against my skin. Another hand, another knife, drove into my stomach—and all the breath left my body when no pain pierced my skin, the wyvernscale armour deflecting the blow.
“I won’t let you ruin this for our queen. She’s waiteddecadesfor this day. She had to endure your snivelling, pathetic existence to bring our people out of the darkness. To bringtruepower back to Ithanys where it belongs—”
She choked, a wet sound that made all the hairs stand on my arms, and her arm fell away. The knife clattered to the steps at my feet, ringing against the glass for a moment until it stilled. For a moment, my mind sluggish, I just blinked at that knife, at the droplets of my blood on it, and then I turned, and everything made evenlesssense.
