AMEIRAH
“Nabil,” I blurted, pausing before I mounted Raheema again, wind lashing strands of hair against my face. I pulled out the purple and red fabric I’d had in my pocket this morning—a gift that had been waiting for me at the Red Star, the scarf stitched with suns, moons, and stars I’d admired all those weeks ago in Wyfell before the world began to end. Varidian, it seemed, missed nothing when it came to me. I secured it hastily, recalling how Mihrunnisa tucked it what felt like years ago in Morysen, before the performance that pit my wyvern against Muhannad.
“Yeah?” Nabil asked, already reaching for Maleeha’s leg to pull himself up even though he was exhausted—we both were—from unleashing so much power in the Zalaam world. Even with Hsiuying giving us both an extra shot of healing magic before we left Riverren.
“I need you to take a legion and fly to Morysen,” I told him, trying to keep my hands steady, my chest light so air could flowthrough it. But anxiety threatened to crush me. So much rested on our choices right now. “It shouldn’t take you more than a few hours if you fly directly. There, I need you to find the imams. Explain what my family told us. Beg them. Threaten them if you must, but bring them here. Without their magic…”
“I know,” Nabil murmured, his mouth flat, the planes of his face stark. “We’re completely and utterly fucked.”
Amr dismounted and landed in the rain-slick grass, marching over to us. “Why do you need the imams?”
I met the hard steel in his eyes and my chest tightened. “Bakshi and Xiu hunted them for a reason. They tried to turn everyone against them for a reason.” The suspicion left the older man’s eyes, so I continued, glancing to Varidian because this was new information for him, too. “Their darkness can be beaten by light—sunlight, starlight, lightning, and fire, but it can also be defeated byhealingmagic. I don’t have time to explain it all, but in the other world, in Cirestia, imams are known as healers. Storytellers that can mend a spirit. They can evict the darkness from people. We can take their entire army out of commission.”
“The wyverns,” Varidian blurted, his blue eyes brightening. I startled at the flickers of lightning moving within his irises. “Sometimes, they seem to shake off compulsion and instead of fighting, they flee. If we can do the same to all those winged soldiers and whatever else the queen has created… Nabil, on the other side of this hill is a medical camp. Some of the riders were patched up the last I saw and looked ready to fly out again. Take them with you to Morysen.”
“No need,” Amr cut in, arms crossed over his armoured chest as he measured us, one by one, gazing directly into our eyes. I stood straighter, a zip of awareness, ofmagic,going down my arms. “I can call them from their sanctuaries.”
“How?” Nabil demanded, eyeing Amr as if planning how to take him down.
Amr sighed. Heavily. “I don’t owe you a single word of my story, and for reasons that are mine, I’d prefer not to tell you.” He glanced at Varidian and I as he spoke, including us. “But I was once an imam, before I joined Kamaal’s legion.”
“And you can find them?” I asked hopefully. “You can bring them out of hiding?”
“There is a song,” Amr replied, rubbing the back of his neck. “A call to arms of sorts. I can gather them here. There is no one who wouldn’t answer the call.”
The threads of fate quivered; I swore I felt their vibrations as I clasped the man’s scarred hand and told him what I needed of the storytellers, the healers my family were so sure would turn the tide of this dark war. Not just lightning or fire, but faith. An ever-burning candle in the cold darkness of night that would never be extinguished, that had always been there for me no matter how bleak my life became.
“Can you do it?” I asked, stepping back and brushing my palm over Raheema’s warm scales. Could they snare the entire army in their magic—could they tell a story so detailed and moving and powerful that it would restore Zalaam warriors to uncorrupted fae?
Amr shrugged a brawny shoulder. “I’ll give it a shot.” He pointed over our heads, beyond the mountains, and I whipped around to stare at a dark wave of water, so high it could devour everyone on this plain. “I’ve got as much chance of stripping the darkness from the army as you do dealing with that. Good luck.”
Without another word, he ran to his wyvern and leapt onto their back, shooting into the sky. And with a tight breath, I exchanged a glance with Nabil and Varidian, and mounted Raheema.
It would be the three of us against the queen. Not the true Zalaam queen, not the first queen who almost enslaved the entire continent, almost changed the history of Ithanys intosomething twisted and cruel permanently. But that wasn’t much of a comfort when Xiu had still donethis,rallied a host this large, created an army so vast it swallowed ours.
If I’d had any sense, I would have guided Raheema away from Ithanys, flown to a different continent, and hidden there forever. But my soft, justice-driven heart wouldn’t allow me to desert our people now. There was true evil in this country, and the leaders were rotten to the core, but there were pockets of good, and people worth fighting for, homes worth defending. A land worthy of being saved. I was the Princess of Ithanys, and I would not run in its hour of need.
So I guided Raheema toward the jagged grey mountains, toward the black column of water that now crashed back into the river, and to the queen that had twisted me into the weapon I was.
CHAPTER 60
AMEIRAH
Our flight into the mountains didn’t carry us over the battlefield, but we flew close enough that it hit me in waves.
First, the stench of blood, churned mud, carcasses—somehow already rotting—and burned flesh. It stuffed up my nostrils until I gagged.
Second, the sight of bodies running into each other on the ground and wyverns clashing in the sky. It wasn’t orderly, wasn’t strategic; it was pure pandemonium driven by desperation and necessity. I saw people trampled, wyverns plunge from the sky with their wings splayed, and tigers shred their way through skin to the bone, one ripping apart a winged Zalaam soldier’s rib cage. The brutality of it shocked me into silence and I just stared as Raheema and Maleeha took a wide arc around the very back lines of our armies.
And then came thenoiseof it. The bellowing commands, the screams as people were ripped apart, the wails of the dying orgrieving. The high, bestial shrieks of wyverns and rasping growls of tigers as those ruthless animals ploughed through the enemy, ripping holes into their neat, orderly lines. The thump of metal on metal as the Kaldic army marched, shields locked together, golden spears gripped in fists.
I was glad Varidian rode behind me, glad for his arms around me as the stark reality of war hit me like a punch to the stomach, robbing me of air and making nausea swirl. He didn’t tell me not to look, even though he could feel my emotions through the bond. I didn’t ask how long he’d been fighting in that wailing, screaming chaos, but I was about to ask how badly Mak was injured when Varidian jerked forward.
“What is it?” I asked him, my heart kicking into a rapid beat.
“Kamaal!”
I followed his line of sight and his panic merged with mine when I saw that Kamaal had been knocked off Raya’s back, the silver wyvern’s wings locked with a dark blue, the two of them grappling in the air. She’d been flying low enough, or driven close enough to the ground by the Zalaam wyverns, that Kamaal wouldn’t die from a fall of that height, but my stomach plummeted when I saw where he would land: among the winged soldiers. Surrounded on all sides.
