Chapter 22
VARIDIAN
For the second morning in a row, a storm dragged me from sleep, gasping and flailing.
Ameirah was so vivid in my dream, I could feel her in my arms now.
I was still reeling from it; from the fact she wasn’t in our bed at the Diamond with me.
It took a long, fuzzy moment for voices to break through the roar in my ears.
They were sharp and urgent enough that I got out of bed to investigate.
My head began to clear, but there was no shaking the tight pain from my chest as I threw on clothes and hastily put on shoes.
The door burst open just as I turned towards it, and Aliah raced inside, bright-eyed and panicked. It was a sight familiar enough to shake off my last cobwebs of sleep, even if longing for Ameirah carved itself into my bones, permanent and deep.
“You need to come. Right now.”
“What is it?” I demanded, but she was already running back into the hall, beckoning me to follow. I followed at a rush, her pace making my heartbeat drum faster.
Wyvern screeches cut through the walls of the Diamond—close. Almost on top of us. A familiar roar answered the cry. Mak. I ran faster, breathless by the time we burst through the kitchen and into the gardens.
“What is it?” ummi called after us, tucking the ends of a crimson headscarf around her face. “I heard yelling.”
Mak roared again, something like rage in the sound. The same bellow I heard when we flew into battle, when we faced our enemies. If those Zalaam wyvern were here…
I skidded across the grass outside, my heart knocking into my ribs as I raced after Aliah.
She led me around the side of the Diamond to where the wyvern stalls were, to where Mak stood tall and bristling on the lawn, his wings flared, teeth snapping when Zaarib and Sabira attempted to get close.
Zaarib jumped back, wariness written all over him at how territorial Mak was behaving, but my fearless head of house did no such thing.
“You snap those teeth at me again, Makrukh, and you’ll be sleeping in a shit-filled stall,” she threatened, her mouth set in a hard line, arms crossed over her chest. “I don’t muck out the stalls of wyverns who snarl at me. Nor do they get fresh meat directly from the butcher.”
That would have worked on Mak ordinarily, but his shoulders rounded, every line of his body threatening.
“He’s been like this since she landed,” Shula told me as I joined them, Nabil giving me a once-over. The line of his shoulders softened, as if he could only relax with all of us in his direct line of sight.
“She?” I asked, but then I saw the silvery-blue feet visible beneath the splayed membrane of Mak’s wings. He wasn’t threatening—he was protective.
Let me see her, I asked him carefully, keeping my tone neutral, mild.
His lip curled back from his teeth, and he growled again, only feral instinct in his crimson eyes.
Makrukh, I said, and took a measured step closer, jerking my chin at Sabira and relieved when she didn’t fight me, falling back with my legion. Mak, let me see her. You know I’d sooner harm myself than hurt Raheema. She’s family. She’s bonded to my wife. I’m not a danger to her.
His teeth disappeared behind the tense line of his lips, but a rumble charged through his chest, and when he lowered one wing enough for me to see Raheema’s head and her long neck, to lock eyes with my wife’s wyvern, I realised why Mak was so protective.
“Someone get Hiba,” I yelled. Hiba was one of my ummi’s closest friends and the most skilled wyvern healer in south Ithanys.
“Shit,” Nabil swore, because there could only be one reason Raheema would need a healer.
Blood poured down her neck, decorated her graceful face, and I knew if Mak lowered his wings entirely, I’d find more injuries. “Who did this?” I asked in a voice of shadows and death, taking another step closer. “Raheema, who did this to you?”
She lurched forward when her silver eyes met mine, a low, mournful sound leaving her, and I drew to a halt, everything inside me going still when Mak told me the meaning of that sound.
Ameirah was taken. They say she’s the lightning soul, and they’ve locked her up where Raheema can’t reach her.
Ameirah was taken. Caged. Locked up.
I didn’t breathe for long seconds, unmoving even as the wind tore at me, even as my legion murmured questions.
When air again flooded my lungs, I used it to say, “We fly to Morysen. Now.”
“Varidian…” Aliah began, grabbing my arm.
“They arrested my wife,” I snapped, pushing her off. Rage gathered, a slow build that would give way to a storm. The lightning soul didn’t warn me to control myself, though. Rather, I sensed a matching rage from her. “They put her in a cell.”
Zaarib grabbed my shoulders, and dug his fingers in until it hurt, until I was forced to stop. “Going alone is suicide. We can’t fly into Morysen without backup. It’s the seat of your father’s power, Varidian.”
“Well aware, thank you,” I bit out, Mak’s protective anger merging with my own, creating something as hot as a freshly forged sword.
“We have allies, Varidian. I know for a fucking fact, my uncle and cousins escaped the flames of Daurith; they’re out there, probably flying here as we speak. There are other commanders who’d stand with us against the king—”
“You’d be asking them to commit treason,” Aliah pointed out. “That’s a lot to ask of someone.”
“The Torn Isle might help,” Nabil said, drawing all our attention. “If we pitch it the right way, make it seem as if they have just as much to gain as we do.”
“Contact them,” I said with a rough nod. “But give them five hours to reply, no longer. Zaarib, Aliah, you’re with me. I want a clear plan to get in and out of Morysen before the sun has even risen. Shula—” Where the stalwart, reassuring presence of my friend usually was, I found only air.
“She went to fetch the healer,” Aliah gently reminded me, as if she could see the way I frayed at the edges.
The dream, Raheema being hurt, Mak near feral, and now this—my wife, locked in the dark beneath the palace.
In cells I knew far better than I’d ever wish.
I pressed my hands to my thighs to force the tremble from them. I would get her out by the day’s end.
No wonder she was afraid in the dream.
We all flinched when the sky darkened, heavy clouds moving in overhead. My throat bobbed, the gulp near painful as Nabil’s rich brown eyes softened on me. “We need to talk about Fahad,” he said with difficulty, his voice the same choked mess as mine.
“We don’t have time. Every minute we delay, Ameirah is at his mercy.”
I waited for them to snap, and whose fault is that? But that was only my own voice, my own loathing.
“Varidian,” Aliah said in a voice so gentle it made the lump in my throat bigger, hurting. “We all miss him. We all—” She paused when her voice cracked. “His absence gnaws at every one of us, every second of every day. You’re not alone.”
I set off toward the diamond, urgency hammered into my blood, into my bones.
“You can afford a few minutes to bathe,” Zaarib said, scrounging up a smirk as he followed. As they all did. “Get yourself all pretty to see your wife again.”
It hurt to admit, “I can’t spare the time.”
“Eat then,” he suggested, changing tack. “Come eat breakfast with us. We can discuss a plan of attack for getting into the dungeons at the table.”
“It will slow us down.”
“Varidian.” Aliah’s voice hardened. “If you don’t slow down for a damned minute and take care of yourself, you will be unconscious by the time we reach the capital.”
“I’m fine,” I snarled, and I didn’t know if it was Mak’s rage or my own brittleness that made me bare my canines.
Thunder grumbled in the dark clouds overhead; I saw Nabil mark the noise and give me a look.
Cold shivered at the back of my neck, but there was no way he could know about the lightning soul.
“Fine?” Aliah grabbed my arm and halted me inside the kitchen, compassion still in her eyes but her expression resolute, unbending. So was her voice when she asked, “When was the last time you changed the dressing on your wounds from Daurith?”
“I—” I didn’t know. Couldn’t remember.
“And the last time you ate?”
Days ago.
“Ameirah’s going to kick your ass,” Nabil told me with a frown, digging through a drawer until he found paper, then disappearing into the corridor beyond, presumably on the hunt for ink and a pen to write to the Torn Isle.
Ameirah was going to kick my ass, he was right. I scrubbed both hands over my face, so damn tired that my eyes hurt, grit permanently embedded in them. That exhaustion weighed on my shoulders, my chest, made it hard work to lift my legs and place my feet in a step.
“One meal,” I relented, my voice hoarser than it had a right to be. “And we plan as I eat.”
Aliah snuck her arms around my waist and squeezed, before she slipped away to plunder our kitchen and stores. Where my mother had gone, I didn’t know.
I sat at the table, the memory of Ameirah sitting in this exact chair making my throat squeeze, apparently full of knives and broken glass.
The same shattered feeling sat in my chest, stabbed at my eyes.
Ameirah was imprisoned. I sent her to Morysen where she ought to be safe, and now she was imprisoned.
“I fucked up,” I croaked, looking at the chips and dents on the table, the Marrakchi family history written on its very surface.
There was where I slammed my knife into the table when I learned of how Bakshi discarded my mother when he discovered she carried me.
Beside it, almost hidden by a bowl of oranges, was the scratch where Nabil and I ended up in the middle of a brawl, before Fahad knocked our heads together and forced us to sit down and talk through our problems.
It cut through my chest like a fracture, the pain of his absence.