“What the…” Nabil breathed, releasing me. “Ameirah, what did you do?”
I didn’t know. But the deathfyre that razed across the lines now flickered with a tiny glimmer of pure white. A drop of moonlight among true and total midnight. “I don’t understand,” I muttered, but whatdidI know about this magic? I’d never learned how to use it, never discovered its limits and capabilities. And as I watched winged, grey-skinned soldiers cast off what appeared to be compulsion, I wondered if I could deal more than death to our enemies.
“Whatever you did, keep doing it!” Nabil barked, fanning my flames until they spread, pushing back the front lines of the army as they swarmed closer to the gate.
I grounded my feet, ignored the mix of confusion, unease, and awe that filled my chest. Where magic caught fire, soldiers unfroze, freed from the motionless formation others stood in. And a slow moving, insidious thought took hold—did they choose to be here? Did they volunteer to join this army, or had they been enlisted against their will?
Another roar of fire blasted from me, and when I gasped at the flash of discomfort, the strain across my back, I tasted embers and char.
“Slow down,” Nabil yelled over the sound of crashing flames.
I wanted to tell him I didn’t know how, but when I opened my mouth, more fire poured out, pooling on the dark rock before it bled onto the army below, increasing the screams. So much—there was so much fire I had no hope of containing it. The magic might come from me, but it was wild and beyond command.
Kill them,I tried commanding it.Kill them, or cast off their commands—I don’t care which as long as they’re removed as a threat.
A thought trickled through my mind, a suspicion that came from the magic as much as from my own thoughts. I couldn’t do enough damage from up here. I needed to be down there, in the middle of the army.
“Nabil,” I rasped, spitting sparks and fire. “Can you get me down there with your magic?”
“What the fuck?”he snapped. “No. Are you crazy?”
I was barely clinging to my sanity, but this wasn’t working. Even as more soldiers cast off their control, even as they fled the rows of winged, slack-faced warriors, it wasn’t working. It wasn’t enough.
But I had more.
In the yawning pit of magic that lived in my core—there was more. So much more.
“Get me down there, Nabil.” I let another wave blast into the valley, then turned to face him, letting him see the command in my expression.
He hesitated, panic clearing the grief from his stare. “We’ll die.”
“Not today.” I didn’t know where the words came from, whether they were mine or if they echoed from that dark pit of magic. “Not today.”
Varidian was on the other side of this gate. My family. Our legion. I wouldn’t let a single winged soldier step foot beyond this world, and I knew, now the wildfire incinerated its way across the black mountains, I could protect them. This world was full of throbbing, poisonous magic, severe enough that a headache throbbed within my skull. That miasma of power was tinder to an inferno. Instinct told me as much, and instinct had got me this far. I would trust it again.
Nabil rolled his eyes skyward, sighed heavily, and grabbed my shoulder. A squall of air rushed in around us, carrying us like a tornado through the sky.
When we dropped in the middle of the valley, in the heart of that winged army, I sank as deep into my core as possible and screamed at my magicto kill, to cleanse, to rip the threat of them from existence.
Nabil’s back pressed to mine as a firestorm combusted the air. The blaze hung around us for a split second, as black as ink, as black as the glassy mountains that loomed over us, watchful and still, waiting to see who would emerge from this blast. And again I saw it—a single drop of white light. A secret at the nexus of my magic, hidden even from me.
I didn’t look away, even when the soldiers closest to us shook their heads and stumbled out of formation, wings fluttering. Some shot into the air, flew away from the dark, devouring wave that poured from me. But they didn’t drop dead. Not this time. I’d given my power a choice, and it had chosen to free them of the clasp of command that held them here. Even death could be merciful, it seemed.
But I wasn’t.
I cocked my head as five of the soldiers pumped their wings, flying for the mountain, for the gate. All it took was a single thought and ashes rained down on the motionless army. But those who’d been freed began to panic, and began to run.
“Ameirah,” Nabil cautioned. “Leave them.”
Varidian was on the other side of that gate. Raheema and Mak were. Shula and Aliah and Zaarib. Kamaal and Mihrunnisa. Rawiya and Sabira. I would not risk a single one of them. And maybe it was the dark burn of magic, building and building, but whatever mercy I’d considered giving them earlier no longer existed.
Sweat dripped from my upper lip as I pushed the flames hotter, gathering more and more from my core until I shook with the effort.
“Shield,” I hissed through clenched teeth, all the warning I could manage before I let the tension snap.
Magic burst in all directions, a killing wave that tore through armoured skin and membranous wings and dense bones.
Weakness made me sway, but I didn’t regret it. Nabil scrambled to catch me before my face hit the jagged black stone beneath us, cursing the whole time. A shield of hard air locked around us, but it was unnecessary; the soldiers had disintegrated. All the way to the mountains, there was only dust.
