Chapter 20
AMEIRAH
Raheema was gone. The spooked handler confirmed what I already knew when I was escorted, numb, to the landing yard by six different guards in rich purple uniforms stitched with the Saber wolf. She disappeared overnight and no one had seen her since.
Instead of flying to the journal Bakshi ordered me to retrieve with Raheema, an intimidating silver wyvern stood over me.
Kamaal scowled as he stalked across the yard, dressed in heavy violet leathers adorned with scales of armour at the shoulder, thighs, and wrist.
“This is the only wyvern we have available,” the handler said apologetically—and nervously because a scowling Kamaal was a terrifying sight.
“She will do,” Kamaal sighed, and seemed to read the atmosphere in the yard.
“Jalal Lazrak,” he said, raising his eyebrow at the guard who stood so close his breath ruffled the hairs on the back of my neck.
“I fought alongside your father for ten years. Hatim, you were trained by Aisha Daoudi, were you not?”
Another guard shifted on his feet, and said, “I was.”
Kamaal nodded, striding closer. “I was her commander for the years before she formed the Legion of Embernight.” He crossed his arms over his broad chest when he reached us, looking each of the guards in the eye.
“I also led the charge at the Fall of Ashams, marched in the frontlines at Warda, and fought alongside you, Khaldoun, at the Almas Pass.” His smile was tight, laced with warning.
“My point is, I can handle a single girl without assistance. And I know you have better things to be doing than babysitting.”
“But…” the one he’d called Jalal said with an uneasy glance my way. “She’s the lightning soul.”
“And I’m the Scorpion of Warda.”
“We have orders from the king,” Hatim argued.
Kamaal shrugged and sighed heavily, stalking around them to the handler getting the silver wyvern ready for flight.
“If you’d rather lurk around until we take off, you’re welcome to waste your own time.
” Humour entered his eyes when he added, “But there’s not enough room for everyone on the wyvern unless someone wants to hang from her tail. ”
Now, most of the guards shifted on their feet.
I watched, my mouth glued shut by rage and curiosity.
I’d expected seething hatred when Kamaal looked at me, but there was only his usual hardass demeanour.
I would have assumed he didn’t hear the rumours about me being the lightning soul, but the guards just told him.
Which presented a mystery that held me there, at the foot of his wyvern.
“Up,” Kamaal barked, throwing a quick glance my way. “You have no baggage, I presume.”
“Not physically,” I muttered, and if I wasn’t mistaken, the thin press of his mouth was to hide a smile.
I took a breath, trying not to notice how much bigger than Raheema the wyvern, Raya, was.
I kept my muscles tense and loose in all the necessary places and took off at a run, following both Varidian’s and Mihrunnisa’s lessons and only slipping once before I flopped over the wyvern’s back and pulled myself up.
I made a surprised sound when her head swung around, bright, slit-pupiled eyes narrowed as she gave me an appraising look. “Hi,” I squeaked. “Ideally, don’t eat me.”
She snorted hot air, blowing the hair back from my face, then fixed her gaze on the guards again as Kamaal mounted, sitting behind me.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he growled under his breath.
“What?” I breathed, a tremor going down my arms. Being in the open after hours of captivity made all my hairs stand on end, and the numbness of hearing Varidian had died begin to break.
My heart took up a rapid sprint as I waited for something to go wrong.
The guards had chained my hands for the walk from the dungeon to the aviary, but now my hands were free. Gloved, but unchained.
“Fucking Kaazhim,” Kamaal spat. “I was going to defy my father’s orders and fly you to the Red Star, but it’ll be damn near impossible to give this fucker the slip.”
I was still a little too numb for true amusement to form at his copious cursing, but it was a nice change to the stone-faced bastard who trained me.
“Surely the Scorpion of Warda can do it,” I said.
“Not without giving away my secrets.”
My heart clattered into my bones, and I whipped around to stare at Varidian’s brother. “What secrets?”
“Secret ones,” he muttered. “Face forward; we look suspicious.”
I turned back to face the aerie yard, and for the first time I got the sense that Kamaal was on my side. “I’m not the lightning soul,” I said.
“That’s disappointing. Not surprising if you’ve read Wyvara’s histories, though. Did you know, through time, whenever a lightning soul has been documented, a shadow wielder has risen, too? And I’m not talking about the Zalaam corruption.”
“I couldn’t find much about Wyvara in the library,” I said, admitting I’d been searching. Taking a risk in trusting him with at least that truth.
“Prick,” Kamaal seethed when Kaazhim raised his hand in greeting as a dark green wyvern was walked out of the large aviary doors for him to mount.
And of course he came with an entourage of three other gentry.
I didn’t recognise them, but their wyverns were large, impressive beasts covered in spikes and talons.
“What was it you said about walking a fine line back in Jamaa Square?” I muttered when he didn’t raise his hand to greet Kaazhim.
Kamaal grunted to acknowledge the point, then said, “Whatever they want today, we play along. See what information we can discover.”
“And then get thrown back in my cell?” I hissed, incredulous.
“We’ll get you out.”
“How? And who is we?”
“My legion. And my brother’s legion the moment word reaches them that you’ve been convicted of treason.”
I tensed when Raya shifted her feet under us, wary of the bigger wyverns joining us in the yard. “The only treasonous thing I did was refusing to kill on command.”
Kamaal’s lack of reaction told me he’d guessed as much. “Trust me.”
“No fucking way.”
“Have I betrayed you once since we met?”
“Yes, if you count carrying my unconscious body into this cursed fucking capital against my will.”
“You swear far too much.”
“And you could afford to swear more,” I fired back. My temper was a bubbling vat, ready to overflow. At least I was no longer numb. “Do you know where we’re going?”
“There’s a window on the side of a lantern factory on the outer edge of Morysen. We’re to fly through it.”
I gave the words a second to make sense, keeping an eye on Kaazhim as the bastard’s green wyvern stepped up beside us. The gentry who tortured me gave me a critical stare that made me want to drive my bare fingers into his eyeballs. “Through it. Through the window.”
“Through it,” Kamaal confirmed, squeezing his thighs around Raya’s pearlescent side and sending us shooting into the sky. Her wingbeats were louder than my heart, louder than the screaming terror of my thoughts. Would I never get over this fear of heights?
I grasped for the spike that thrust between Raya’s shoulder blades, much smaller than the barbs along Mak’s spine but welcome compared to the smooth expanse of Raheema’s back.
Yet, my heart squeezed with longing for my wyvern.
Where was she? Again, I reached through our link, but it was like reaching into an open room in the dark. She was nowhere to be found.
“What did he do with my wyvern?” I demanded, whipping my head around to glower at Kamaal, anger overriding my fear and allowing me to sit straighter on Raya’s back as she swept through the sky above the palace, then further, soaring past glittering medinas, roads cluttered with carts, busy shops, and housing districts where children played in the streets.
I was leaving Morysen, but not on my own terms.
“I don’t know,” Kamaal admitted, meeting my eyes with as close to regret as I’d ever seen him muster. “I have to be careful asking questions, but I promise I’ll find her.”
“Why?” I clenched my jaw, wind whipping my hair into my eyes until they ran. “Why do you care?”
“Why did you refuse to kill on my father’s command?
” Kamaal replied, his eyes flinty as he looked across the city, then at the wyverns who fell into formation around us and the dark emerald Kaazhim rode.
I didn’t look at him too closely, but my stomach knotted at his proximity. The ghost of pain tore through me.
“I—” I frowned. “I don’t understand the question.”
“You refused because you’re not a senseless killer, and you have a moral compass.
So do I.” I thought that was all the prince would say until he added, “I allowed fear to hold me back when our bastard father tried to use Varidian’s magic, manipulated him into using that control against innocents.
I won’t sit back and let it happen another time. ”
I blinked against the wind, a shiver chilling me when Raya arced over the edge of Morysen, her wings angled to bring us to an industrial area full of squat, sprawling buildings with silver tiled roofs, others with towers and chimneys that thrust up to the sky, close enough to brush Raya’s underbelly if she dipped a few metres.
Bakshi had manipulated Varidian? Had used his control magic against their people, likely to his own political gain. I knew my husband kept secrets, knew there were monsters in his mind that had claws and teeth and sank both into him, but I hadn’t guessed this. My shoulders shifted with a deep sigh.
“Alright,” I said finally, giving Kamaal an extra scrap of trust. I could understand failing the ones you loved and wanting to do better in the future. “How do we get rid of these fuckers?”
“For now,” Kamaal replied, “we don’t. See the smoke over there?”
It was hard to miss; a black column of smoke rose from a house on the other side of a tree-lined park, staining the air.
“The imam of the Mosque of Morysen lived there, before the king’s guards kicked down his door and tried to arrest him for treachery against the crown and regis. When they realised the family had fled the city days ago, they incinerated his home out of spite.”
“Shit,” I breathed. With the sheer amount of smoke coming from a single house… there had to be nothing left. Again, that question prickled at me: why? Why was the king and his vile retinue determined to smear the name of true clergy? “They’re a threat, aren’t they? To your father.”
“It seems that way,” Kamaal agreed, then: “There’s the window.”
“The window we’re going to fly through.”
“Those were our orders. And something feels… off out here. It always has. There’s something in the air that sets my instincts on edge, a warning we should heed to stay far away.”
Dramatic, but… I felt it. A shiver down my arms, a whisper in my ear to turn back, that only death waited ahead.
I gritted my teeth and fought it, if only because the king wanted the journal that lay on the other side, and if I could find it and keep it from him, it might mess with his plans long enough that I could escape.
Or I could use it to barter for my freedom.
“Call me crazy,” I shouted over the wind, “but maybe that means we should stay away.”
“Hold on,” he yelled back as Raya tilted, her angle bringing us in line with a building far taller and older than even the factories.
It looked like it had been hewn from the sandy hills that rolled away from Morysen as far as I could see, an angular tower with rows of small, arched windows running up and down every solid face of it.
And at the top was our window. There was no doubt about it—it was arched like the others but big enough that even Makrukh would fit through with his wings extended.
Coloured glass caught the ethereal glow of the midday sun, setting aglow the warped shapes that made my breath catch.
“Is that…?” I didn’t speak loud enough to be heard, but I didn’t need an answer.
A sapphire blue wyvern was depicted in that coloured glass, curved in flight over a sleeping tiger.
And if that wasn’t symbolic enough, two figures stood along the left and right sides of the window.
One bore a shield and a mighty sword that had been lost for eons—one of three legendary swords that had belonged to the fae in the old stories.
“Dusk-Breaker,” Kamaal said incredulously.
Dawnfury was broken at the start of the world.
Wildfyre had shattered to defeat the mythical Ghazi, who sailed to Wyvara from a far-off land and sought to invade us.
The third sword, and the one depicted in the stained-glass window, was Dusk-Breaker.
It had been lost for centuries, long before Ithanys and Kalder split.
I knew, deep down, this tower was ancient even before I recognised the other figure—one who bore aether in one hand and void in the other. Araethawn.
“Kamaal,” I said, my whole body taut.
“I see it,” he replied tightly.
“We need to turn back.”
“No.” I wanted to shove his shoulder at that cold, commanding tone, but it seemed unwise with us both on a wyvern over a perilous drop. “We’re meant to find this place. Whatever is here, it’s too valuable to lose.”
But the king sent us. What if we fly to our deaths? I wanted to yell the words, but Raya snapped her wings in powerful beats, sending us flying towards the window, and I only had enough air in my lungs to scream as we crashed into the ancient glass.