Chapter 25
VARIDIAN
“This is total bullshit,” Zaarib snarled under his breath as we flew low over the mountainous region between Morysen and Earlsorn.
Not to mount an attack on the capital, as much as it killed me to ignore the distant city where my wife had been locked up.
Physical pain dug barbs into my chest, gouging through my heart, and I might have thought I was imagining it, but Mak could feel it too—through me.
Ignoring the demand in my soul to protect Ameirah was tearing me apart.
But this, too, would help her. And my legion had yelled and argued and pleaded with me enough that I knew we needed backup, that flying alone, only the five of us, into a city armed to the teeth, was a sure way to die. And with us dead, what in hell would my father do to Ameirah?
He’d arrested her—why? What did he gain?
Raheema had limped away from the healer diligently repairing her wounds, both inflicted on her during a fight to the fucking death staged by the king and during her escape from the palace’s aerie, to give me more information.
To insist I rescue her rider and inform me she was coming with me, wounded or otherwise.
Even now, she flew at the tail of our formation, bearing Nabil, both of them angry and hurt and bristling with loss.
The king had told everyone Ameirah was the lightning soul, so no one but us would rush to save her.
And from what Raheema could sense, she was locked somewhere belowground—right in the path of the cells that sprawled under the palace grounds and the nearby medina.
The same ones that piece of shit locked me in when I refused to bend to his endless hunger for power.
“We can’t actually be considering killing someone,” Zaarib went on, as if we didn’t fly towards that exact task. “It’s insanity.”
“For Ameirah,” I reminded him, trying to smooth the bite from my voice. Trying, but not succeeding.
“But this is ridiculous. We’re a trained legion, not fucking mercenaries—”
“Could you two shut up and focus?” Shula hissed across the sunny sky—too bright for a stealth mission like this, but we couldn’t afford to delay. “According to Kanuri, our target is armed, powerful, and an accomplished killer. Keep bickering and we’ll be the ones getting assassinated.”
I knew all that. Had memorised the entire letter the Torn Isle sent, Kanuri’s promise to support us in attacking Morysen in exchange for eliminating a threat to their safety—that of the leaders, the citizens of the Torn Isle and, if she was to be believed, all of Ithanys.
We knew bare facts, but it was enough to send us into the skies towards Earlsorn and the low-slung, sprawling homes within its walled kasbah.
The sun baked their tan-stone roofs, vivid blue pools, and winding, tree-lined avenues.
Here, the richest of Ithanys lived when they preferred quiet to the bustle of Morysen.
And in one of the far smaller, clustered houses built on the grassy hills above the town, where the cooks and groundkeepers and cleaners of Earlsorn lived, our target could be found.
A spymaster, according to Kanuri, with enough information to blackmail every gentry, high gentry, and leader of not just Ithanys—but Kalder, too.
No doubt, this man had uncovered something Kanuri wanted hidden.
And if taking him out was the cost of her assistance, the cost of saving my Ameirah, I would do it.
The rest of my legion were pissed off, with the exception of Shula who’d simply cracked her knuckles and nodded.
It didn’t escape any of us that the man we’d been sent to assassinate might know vital information about the araethawn, the winged swarm, and the soldiers who dared to wear the clergy sigil while sowing fear.
We could let him live and learn how we might stop the spread of that darkness, or we could kill him and rescue my wife. It was no choice at all. If I damned the entire world to return her, safe, to my side, so be it.
The marriage mark on my chest seemed to tug at me, to wrench me towards Morysen with mounting urgency, but I gritted my teeth and rode on.
What do you sense in Earlsorn? I asked the lightning soul.
Nothing like there lurked in Daurith. Pockets of darkness. But behind us in Morysen… a whole ocean of it.
With my father at its heart, I presume. And my wife tangled up in all of it. I was a fool for sending her there. A stupid, rash, thoughtless fool.
But if anyone could bring down an ocean of darkness, strike fear into the hearts of even monsters like my father, it was Ameirah. Maybe we’d arrive in Morysen to find her cell obliterated and her revenge unleashed on all who’d harmed her. Fuck, I hoped so.
A thread, the lightning soul blurted, her surprise making me sit straighter atop Makrukh. A thread of fate converges here.
What does it mean? I asked, scanning my legion, then the skies over Earlsorn.
Only one wyvern made its way lazily through the skies, its eyes invisible at this distance but no aggression in its body language.
The town was quiet, peaceful. As if the shadow of the Zalaam warriors and their wyverns didn’t cast itself here.
It means god is watching, the lightning soul said, and our actions here today will save or doom us.
Kanuri’s information led us to a narrow, two-storey house with a worn front step and a door that had seen better years. Better decades.
Our wyverns alighted in the grassy hills behind them, hidden in the hollows between mounds, so we moved through the tight, sand-blown streets on foot.
Our leathers marked us as different from the busy workers whose quick footsteps carried them down into the town or back up its steep slopes.
No one stopped us, though, and beyond wary or curious glances, no one acknowledged our progress across the top of the town, right to that peeling blue door.
A jerk of my chin had Aliah and Zaarib disappearing down a passage that led to the stretch of wilted gardens behind the terraced houses. I tested the front door but wasn’t surprised to find it locked. Someone known as a spymaster wouldn’t leave their door open for anyone to waltz through.
“Care to do the honours?” I asked Shula.
Her grin was sharp and filled her whole face. “Always.”
Three things happened in rapid succession, startling my heart into a riotous sprint.
Shula raised her leg and kicked the door in.
In the small room beyond, four people leapt to their feet from cushions arranged around a low table littered with teacups, half-eaten plates of pastries, and a map stuck all over with black pins.
And my eyes locked with the furious glare of a tall, narrow-faced man who was familiar but vaguely enough that I couldn’t immediately place him.
“Knives down!” he barked at the three others—two men who looked remarkably alike with the same high cheekbones and straight nose, one deadly serious and the other with teeth bared and excitement-bright eyes, and a woman in her fifties wearing well-used leather-armour and a matching headscarf.
“Knives fucking down,” the familiar man repeated, harsher, when they didn’t obey.
“Why?” the wilder brother demanded, barely old enough to be called a man, twenty at the oldest with the youthful face and brash anger to go with it.
“Because this is Varidian Saber. And our commander will pitch a fit if you kill his brother.”
“Where’s the silver one?” Shula demanded, just as Aliah and Zaarib burst through the back entrance.
The man crossed his arms over his chest and smirked. His tunic was made of fine material and stitched at the cuff and collars with a pattern of gold scorpions. “Why—are you here to kill him?”
“Yes,” Shula replied, jaw jutting out. “And you, too, if you get in our way.”
The man laughed. “Kamaal is the Silver Rider, you imbeciles. Varidian’s brother. And if you want him dead, you’ll have to go through us.”