Chapter 26
AMEIRAH
The manor was made of the same pearl-white stone as the rest of Riverren, with a short, paved walkway that led to a front door surrounded by columns.
Purple leaves and flowers wound around them, climbing up the edges of the house, framing windows made up of small, rectangular panes of glass, the style so strange and new.
“Well done, Ameirah,” Kaazhim remarked, his grin oily and smug as he patted me on the shoulder, gazing at the house that had been hidden. “The king will be pleased indeed.”
I couldn’t give a shit what the king thought, but as Kaazhim led the way down the path, his three henchmen following close behind, silent as they’d been the whole journey, I glanced at Kamaal.
This was our chance. If we were going to get away, it had to be now. He grasped my upper arm and pulled me back three steps as we whirled to the gates—in time to watch them slam shut, a milky white magic wrapping around the latch.
“A poor attempt, Ameirah,” Kaazhim remarked from where he stood on the manor’s doorstep, surrounded by violet leaves and delicate columns.
He looked at home here, a cunning courtier in a palatial home.
Beauty on the outside, but inside… if the house was as venomous as the gentry, we had no business here.
“The door,” Kaazhim said with a smile at me, then Kamaal at my side. We’d shown our hand far too soon, I realised. Now he knew the prince would help me if given the chance. What would Bakshi do to Kamaal once we got back to the capital? “If you will, Ameirah.”
I ground my teeth and approached, pulling the gloves down my arms and tucking them into the pockets of my dirty leathers.
I returned his slimy smile with a threatening one of my own, and reached for the handle of the pale, gilt-edged door.
I was ready for magic to hit me like a knife to the chest, or maybe a battering ram would shove me back.
Something more than the creak that sounded as the door opened easily.
“Wonderful,” Kaazhim said, patting my arm and ignoring the way I shrugged off his touch immediately. “Almost thirty years we’ve been searching for this house,” he mused to himself as he strode inside. “And all it took was you walking in the front door.”
“I thought you wanted the journal,” I said warily, staring up at the huge atrium we’d walked into.
Sunbeams slanted through windows and set the pale stone and a myriad of framed paintings aglow.
Vases overflowed with flowers the same lilac colour as the sky and blooms of dark teal, the same colours echoed in the floor, the ceiling, the chandelier dangling above our heads.
Unlike the stout, scowling portraits of the Jaouhari family I’d grown up seeing, or the proud paintings of the Saber family that cluttered the Morysen palace, these were gauzy paintings of beaming women and men with smiles so big their eyes turned to half-moons, the use of light and soft shadows unlike any style I’d seen.
The fact they were happy, and looked ordinary, approachable, was unfamiliar, too.
“I—” Kaazhim began, but I decided I didn’t give a shit what his response was.
“The journal’s this way,” I spoke over him, stalking through the atrium and down a marble corridor between the wings of two curving staircases.
Kamaal followed me without a word, his silent protection giving me enough nerve to carry me through this strange house—someone else’s house that we’d broken into—and to a darker room at the back of the manor.
The walls here were the dark teal I’d seen echoed throughout, as if it was the family’s colours, but they were barely visible because of all the bookcases and podiums and displays that were crammed into the room.
“The family collection,” Kaazhim said with a low laugh. “Well, well.”
“Keep your grubby hands off everything except the journal,” I snapped, glaring at the smiling bastard and following the insistent throb in my chest towards the left side of the room where glass displays held marcasite tiaras and plates of hammered silver and a locket of carved jade. “We’re not here to rob this family.”
Just being here made me guilty. It was a beautiful home, and one the family clearly took pride in. But more than that, it was the smiling portraits of people young and old and everything in between, and especially the love that had emanated from them, that made me feel bad about stealing from them.
“Ameirah,” Kamaal said, not a hint of inflection in his voice as he gestured me over to a wooden cabinet protected by a door of glass.
Rows of hand-bound books sat upon its shelves.
The thump in my chest didn’t intensify, but it remained pulsing, insistent, almost urgent.
And for a split second, I wondered if it was Raheema calling to me from Ithanys.
“Will it open?” I asked, surprised the gentry bastard wasn’t breathing down our necks as we carefully opened the glass door and inspected the books within.
I skimmed my eye over all of them, but a green leather book caught my eye simply because it had no title, only a gilded wing. Membranous and veined like a wyvern.
I held my breath as I pulled the book off the shelf but again no defences erupted to snare me.
I exchanged a glance with Kamaal, and strangely enough Varidian’s brother being here with me set my nerves at ease.
It was a shame he wasn’t the king; I got the sense none of our current problems would exist if he were.
A tremor went through me when I ran my hand down the book’s cover, over the gold-embossed wyvern wing, and cracked it open.
The journal of Jiang Xiaoyu, it said on the first page.
“What language is that?” Kamaal breathed, reading over my shoulder.
“What do you mean? It’s Ithanys—” But it wasn’t. I blinked, and the words were written in a beautiful, artistic language I’d never seen in my life. When I blinked again, the words resolved themselves in my head, their meaning clear.
I quickly turned the page, scanning a list of dates and a timeline of events. “This was written during the Zalaam war,” I breathed, quickly turning pages, devouring whatever words I could before Kaazhim returned to confiscate it.
There were sketches among them by an artist’s hand—wyverns and tigers and fae rendered in charcoal. And others too, fae with hands full of shadows and magic, with sharp ears and wings but not like the fae we’d seen on the Riverren streets. The illustrations had eyes as black as coal.
“Zalaam warriors,” Kamaal hissed, scrubbing a hand over his jaw. “Why did the king send us here to find a journal about the araethawn? They were eradicated years ago.”
I’d never seen such detailed sketches of them, had never looked into eyes seething with malice and hunger.
I’d expected them to be empty, mindless, but there was an intelligence to these people.
Commander, it said at the side of the sketch.
On the next page were more drawings, more notes.
These had wings like a wyvern’s but thinner, longer, as if to fit a smaller body, and eyes black but hollow, empty. Soldiers, these said.
On the next page, the same face stared out at me from five different drawings—female, beautiful, and harsh.
Black hair framed a face of pure ivory and devastating beauty, but her mouth was pressed flat in one drawing, curled in a sneer in another sketch, parted in a snarl in another.
Whoever created this art had brought the woman to life with enough detail and realism that a shiver went down my spine.
Queen, it said next to a drawing of her looking straight out from the book. I nearly dropped the damn thing.
“Is that her?” Kamaal whispered, standing as still as stone.
I nodded. “This word here says queen. Don’t ask how I know, I have no idea.”
“Who in the dark realm are you people,” a sharp woman’s voice cracked through the room, startling Kamaal and I apart, “and what are you doing in my family collection?”
Kaazhim laughed. Low, rolling, as ominous as thunder. He strolled out from behind a podium, his hands in his pockets. “Do you not recognise me, Mingyue?”
“You,” the woman seethed, pure murder in her voice.
I shot Kamaal a look and we backed up, shielding behind a solid bookcase, as yet unspotted by the woman whose house we’d broken into.
“I’ll kill you,” she said with enough passion that I believed her. Magic throbbed through the room like a heartbeat, indeed alive with lethal intensity.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Kaazhim replied with the arrogant amusement that made me crave to break his nose. “Or you damn your own granddaughter to death.”
Silence—only silence from the woman. The pulse in the air died.
Kamaal silently beckoned me closer, eyeing a window on the far wall. But to reach it, we’d have to jump from one row of shelves to another, exposing us for fraught seconds. I shook my head. Better that we stay hidden and let Kaazhim hold all her attention.
But the smug fucker said, “Come out, Ameirah.”
I gave my middle finger to the general direction of his voice.
“Only blood of your blood can find this house, can’t they?” he remarked, addressing the woman once again. I barely heard what he said next over the roar of my own blood.
You damn your own granddaughter to death.
Only blood of your blood can find this house.
“Ameirah,” Kamaal hissed as I ducked around his outstretched arm and stormed through the aisle of bookcases until I could lay eyes on the piece of shit who tortured me and led me here—and the woman he addressed.
I recognised her from the paintings in the atrium, the same black haired, seventy-something woman who had smiled out at us from several portraits, but her eyes…
I recognised them from the mirror. From my own eyes.
Nothing else was familiar, beyond a slight similarity in our features, but those eyes, as rich and colourful as a violet.
I blinked my mismatched eyes at the woman and struggled to keep breathing as the implications hit.
She covered her mouth with a trembling hand, sunlight shuddering from the many rings she wore, from the tears that lined her eyes.
“What the fuck,” I snarled, rounding on Kaazhim, “are you playing at?”
His next smile was loathsome. The smile of a man who knew he’d won, who’d finally accomplished his goal.
“You couldn’t find the journal without me,” I spat, holding up the book I still held onto. “Because you needed my blood to find it. Convenient how you left that part out.”
“Daughter of my daughter,” the woman, Mingyue, said as she stumbled three steps forward, silver-lined eyes on me and a dark stone pendant dancing at her neck. A tight pain cut through my chest, wrecking my rage with emotion I couldn’t put into words.
Kaazhim glanced between us, a wyvern who’d caught a goat and was content to play with it before he delivered the killing bite.
“I don’t care about the book,” he said, shaking his head at me like I was slow.
“Neither does the king. We simply needed you to open the gate again, to lead us here, to the hidden seat of power. So I could destroy it.”
“And by seat of power,” Mingyue said in a rough voice, those violet eyes blazing, “you mean you wish to slaughter my entire family.”
“Oh no,” Kaazhim said with a smooth step forward. I jumped when a shadow fell over me, but it was only Kamaal, watching the gentry with a look that bordered hatred. “Not your entire family. I’m only here for the Matriarch.”
She stood taller, her chin high with pride even as her eyes shone with a hatred so deep, he had to have personally wounded her.
She had to be powerful judging by how the air had shuddered, and to have this house and be dressed in the finest silk, she must have status.
Yet Kaazhim spoke to her as if she was dirt.
And if she really was my grandmother… a kernel of rage bloomed in my chest.
“The journal was just a ruse to get you here,” Kaazhim said with a glance at me. “To open the doors for me. I apologise for lying.”
“Oh, don’t apologise for a job well done,” a new voice intruded, a voice alive with power that made every drop of death in me scream and recoil. I flinched back a step, then two, and Kamaal retreated with me, his eyes wide as Mingyue whirled around, revealing another woman.
If I shared any features with this woman they were hidden by the helm she wore of metal so black it devoured the light around her, sucking the dust-spotted sunlight into its dark, shining surface.
My hands shook as I saw the crown atop that helmet.
Not silver or gold but stone. The same stone crown I’d just beheld…
With shaking hands, I lifted the journal, opened it to the page I’d last seen. There it was, the crown of glittering onyx stone sitting on the head of the Zalaam queen, the creator and queen of all Zalaam warriors, the dark ruler who almost enslaved all of Ithanys and Kalder.
It was her.
The Zalaam queen was here.