AMEIRAH
Ihad two choices—decide my long-lost family were utterly mad, or accept that there was some truth in their words. But the truth was hard to accept when I’d been a killer all my life, and every glimpse of my magic had been as black as onyx.
“Cool,” Nabil quipped. “You’re all insane. Ameirah, let’s be off, shall we?”
He rose, but something kept me sitting on that sofa, kept me staring at Liwei’s mother. My aunt.
“I don’t have any lightning,” I told her, ignoring the cool rush moving down the back of my neck.
“Itshouldhave been you,” she replied, not mincing her words, “but you became non-viable. I assume on purpose. The pretender must have known somehow, that you’d bear the lightning of her ancestor’s greatest enemy, and she corrupted your light.”
“Dina,”Mingyue hissed. “Don’t just blurt it out.”
So they all believed this was true.
Dina looked me in the eye and said, “You would have been the lightning soul without her interference. There are always two—”
“Aithnan. I know,” I cut in.
“You would have been the light, and your bondmate would have been fire.”
I frowned. “But—the lightning soul only claimed him months ago.”
“We don’t have proof of this,” Mingyue said, “and Xiaoyu never wrote it in her diary, but I think the pretender found a way to banish the lightning and fire souls, likely decades ago.”
At the risk of being crazy for entertaining this… “Is that why there’s no other soul inside me? She banished them?”
“Or killed them,” Liwei muttered, scowling at the elaborately woven rug between us. “It’s another reason she’s been able to amass so much power; her greatest enemies were defeated.”
“Until the storm,” Nabil sighed, sitting beside me once again. “I bet the pretender queen wasn’t betting on that.”
“No,” I agreed, sitting straighter as I gave him a wide-eyed look. “That’s why everything happened so quickly, why the Zalaam warriors seemed to come from nowhere to claim towns and cities under the guise of clergy. She must have panicked when the lightning soul returned.”
“That’s good news surely,” Hsiuying put in, leaning forward with a light in her eyes. “She hasn’t had time to put her entire plan into action.”
“It doesn’t seem that fucking way,” Nabil muttered, crossing his arms.
“The pretender didn’t realise the lightning soul would take another form,” Dina mused, but that had to be a guess. She glanced at her son, perched on the sofa arm beside her. “How many light and fire wielders do you have in the guard?”
“A handful,” he replied, rubbing his jaw. “There are more in the military, but it would take a while to mobilise them.”
“Do it.” That cool command came from Zonghan, and for the first time I wondered if he was a trained warrior like Mingyue. His voice rang with the steel I’d heard in Varidian’s voice, in Kamaal’s too. “Go to the general now. I’ll write you a letter to give her.”
I tried not to let my hope swell too high, but when Liwei and his grandfather strode from the room, it seemed as if our accidental trip here had been predestined. God was watching over us, guiding us where we needed to be. And this detour may just give us the strength and soldiers we needed to push the Zalaam queen and her army out of Ithanys for good.
So much for not letting my hope grow.
“How many healers do you have in your world?” Hsiuying asked, calculation in her eyes. “Xiaoyu believed healers’ light was the key to defeating the evil—the Zalaam as you call it. She said your world was full of healers, that it helped win the first war and would be essential in this one.”
I shook my head. I had no idea the number of healers in any city, let alone the entire empire.
“The healer’s light,” Nabil said, picking out a phrase from what Hsiuying said. “What kind of light exactly?”
There was something in his tone that made me wary, ready for more bad news.
“There are three kinds of healers,” she explained, those kind eyes moving between us. “At least there arehere.Those who can heal physical wounds. Those who can heal mental wounds. And those who can heal spiritual wounds. Together, they are healers, but separately we know them as menders, soothers, and storytellers.”
“Storytellers,” I echoed. Stories to heal the spirit… I’d survived my childhood by disappearing into the comfort of stories, but I never knew there was true magic to it.
