Chapter 6 #2
“How?” I asked Bbiya, trying in vain to soften my voice.
There was something about the young woman that reminded me of my sister, and I’d rip the head off anyone who spoke to Mihrunnisa with disrespect, but I couldn’t dull the fine edge of my tongue.
“Nabil is right; they were killed centuries ago.”
The first and darkest war on this continent almost wiped all of us out.
Long before Ithanys and Kalder became enemies, long before the wall was built, fae, wyverns, tigers, and araethawn lived together.
Araethawn were a race of fae, but with sharper pointed ears and remarkable power beyond any fae magic.
Magic that could heal a dying man or repair a chasm in the land itself. Magic so strong it could corrupt.
The Zalaam were an infection among the araethawn, greed and fear and selfishness given magical form, and they were allowed to exist unchecked for too long. So long that they named a queen, far ruthless and crueller than any other.
She lived for over a hundred years, as terrible as she was beautiful, and utterly immortal.
There was no end to her greed as she conquered more and more of the continent, once called Wyvara.
No end to the battling, to the death, until wyvern and tiger and fae were finally, after thousands of lives had paid the price, victorious.
No one knew how they finally won, only that they did, and all araethawn, whether innocent or wicked, were slaughtered, giving way to an era of peace.
The lightning scoffed, her voice ringing around my head like a migraine. Or maybe the migraine was from how much magic I expended against the enemy wyverns.
It’s widely known that the lightning soul’s last reign was the darkest time on the continent, yet what could sound darker than being conquered and enslaved by the Zalaam queen?
I blinked. They occurred at the same time?
Yes.
You defeated the araethawn. You ended the war.
Not me, but another. The lightning soul long before me.
I started out of my mind when Bbiya spoke, at once young and weary. “I was studying at the Lapis Temple under the wise women of Wyfell when it was overrun with men in dark clothes, with even darker hearts.”
My mouth went dry. “We know what happened in Wyfell.”
Bbiya nodded, a shadow chasing through her eyes but she didn’t look away from us as she said, “Those men, soldiers, clergy, whatever they want to call themselves, are araethawn reborn. Or maybe what remains of them, descendants from the dark ones who escaped, who hid all this time.”
“They were all killed,” Zarrib insisted, every muscle tight in his body.
“Were they?” she challenged. “Were you there? Did you see it happen?”
“You know we weren’t,” Shula muttered, glaring when Bbiya looked to her. “Are you saying our history is a lie?”
“Maybe,” Bbiya allowed, lifting her hands. “Or maybe that history was recorded by someone who didn’t know. You must have heard how the Torn Isle became sundered. The Zalaam queen herself took her perversion of magic to the earth and the sand and the sea—did you never wonder why?”
“She’d made it her home,” Ghalia said from the end of the table. “She ruled from the island, cast her darkness across the entirety of Wyvara from the Torn Isle.”
Bbiya smiled. Sharp, canines exposed. Scholarly and young and intelligent, yes, but as fae as any of us.
“That is a lie. It was rage that drove her magic into the ground, over and over, until it splintered and slid into the sea. It was fear that beat in her dark heart. Because our city sheltered the only light in Wyvara that could have matched her sheer power.”
Your ancestor, I presume? I asked the lightning soul. She made an affirmative sound. Were you ever going to tell me any of this, or should I learn everything second hand from people I run into by chance?
She sighed. I have given you all the essential information. If you need to know more, I’ll reveal it at the time it is necessary.
“Our island historians have tracked the spread of that darkness, that Zalaam magic, since the war’s victory,” Bbiya said when the table was silent, not even Chakir volunteering a gruff comment.
“There are charts going back centuries, each mark indicating a whisper or story or rumour of the araethawn. For a thousand years, those charts were sparse. Three decades ago, the accounts began again, though quietly and located mostly around the Wall of Hydaran. In the last year, the number of sightings can only be described as a spike.”
“Which brings us to today,” Kanuri took over, eagle-eyed as she watched our reactions.
“Those wyverns we fought are unnatural, in the same way the Zalaam queen and her warriors were unnatural. We are poised on the edge of a second war, and you, Varidian Saber, are at the heart of it. But as luck would have it, so are we.” She smiled, all canines and ferocity, a wyvern herself.
“Why?” Aliah asked, voicing the question that beat at my head like a hammer to anvil. “Why care so much? Because of your island’s history?”
“Because wyvernlings have been going missing for months,” the old woman said in a voice at once papery and ironclad.
Chakir Kissami’s firm nod spoke volumes.
He’d been in touch with these people, enough that their story wasn’t a shock.
He’d heard about araethawn and the Zalaam queen, and recently.
He’d likely requested their assistance to find Daurith’s missing wyverns.
“We didn’t know any of this,” Zaarib bit out, spearing his uncle with a caustic stare. “Does the council in Morysen know of the missing wyverns? Or did you go exclusively to the Torn Isle for help?”
“Are you accusing me of something, boy?” Chakir demanded, muscles bulging in his arms as he bristled. Even ageing as he was, Chakir could match his nephew if it came to a scrap. Not that I’d allow it to get that far; still, I watched their stares clash, in case I had to step in.
Zaarib rolled his eyes hard. “Of course I’m fucking not. I’m asking, do you know something we don’t about the damn council—and the king? Or was there another reason wyvern young have gone missing and you didn’t bother to ask your nephew, who flies in a wyvern legion, for help?”
Chakir shrugged. “I had a reason.”
Zaarib threw his hands up. “And yet you refuse to share it!”
“He didn’t want you to go missing, too,” Ghalia said from the other end of the table, her voice dry. A glance in her direction showed her eyebrows raised in challenge, eyes locked with her father. “Deny it. Go on, if you dare.”
Her father sighed heavily. “I only worried because the boy is such a reckless fool, he’d undoubtedly die doing something truly idiotic.”
“You should have told me,” Zaarib argued, arms crossed over his chest as he glared at his uncle. “Especially when we warned you those damned soldiers marched this way. Did it never occur to you to connect the two—the missing and the soldiers?”
“Of course it did,” Chakir huffed. “And you’re here now, no harm done.”
“Did these Zalaam bastards kidnap the wyverns?” Shula barrelled over whatever Zaarib was about to argue.
“Kidnapped or killed,” the until-now-silent Torn Isle rider remarked, his voice lovely yet grave and his expression distant, not a flicker of emotion on his face like he was a ghost. I’d seen the look on many a rider’s face.
Shock. After such a brutal battle, he’d need time to piece himself back together.
“During the last Zalaam war there were mass slaughters of wyvern and tiger to make us easier to kill.”
Shit. I scrubbed a hand over my jaw. Daurith’s wyverns were mostly children.
To have killed a child was horrific. Our enemy had no morals, no lines they wouldn’t cross unlike our legions of fae and wyverns.
A dividing line, certainly, that gave us the moral high ground, but what use were morals in a crushing defeat?
I massaged the bridge of my nose, my head pounding.
“Strange times,” the old woman muttered. My heart skipped when I realised those rheumy eyes were on me. It was suddenly impossible to banish the sense that she saw far beyond my body, my physical appearance, and into my very soul. “Very strange times.”
“Emmahin?” Bbiya asked, leaning forward so she could glimpse the woman.
The woman steepled her hands in front of her face, her skin bearing both wrinkles and scars of a long, brutal life.
“Missing younglings, wyverns turning on wyverns, peculiar bodies washing up on our isle’s shores bearing marks not seen for centuries, thunder rumbling from caves near the great wall, talks of treaty between two enemies, a prince bearing control magic bonded to a woman with death in her fingertips, and now this.
Two aether wielders sat at the same table for the first time in a century, discussing legends and war. Strange times indeed.”
I shared a look with Aliah, but beyond her lips thinning she gave no reaction, no fear betrayed. Though I had no doubt she was as unsettled as I was that Emmahin recognised her magic, through some divine sense no doubt granted to her by aether.
I filed away most of what the woman said for later, when my head wasn’t pounding. “How is my wife relevant?” I asked Emmahin, a chill rippling down my back when her eyes remained unwavering on me.
“Her magic is legend itself. So is yours. Both will be needed to purge the darkness, as it was before.”
A full shudder tore through me before she finally looked away. And I was afraid she meant lightning magic, not control. Somehow, she knew.
Ghalia shot to her feet, and I was so convinced that Zaarib’s clever cousin had figured it out too, but her stare was fixed on Emmahin, and then it swung to Kanuri with accusation, before finally landing on her father.
“What do you mean,” she asked slowly, “there’s talk of a treaty between two enemies?” Her expression was as hard as steel as she stared them down. “Have you hosted Kaldic people on the Torn Isle? Have you brought our enemy into Ithanys?”
I waited for Chakir to scoff, to reply that of course he hadn’t.
I waited.
And waited.