Chapter 27
AMEIRAH
Mingyue surrendered five steps until she stood close enough to me to whisper, “There’s a secret exit behind the glass case on the wall. When she attacks, run.”
“She won’t be able to move quickly enough,” the Zalaam queen said, as if Mingyue spoke to her. My grandmother? I didn’t have the space in my head or in my aching chest to process that, to even wonder. All available room was taken up by sheer, screaming terror. “Hand me the journal, Ameirah.”
Her voice vibrated, groaning through the air like a rockslide. Monstrous and deep.
My pulse thrummed in my throat, my breath turning sharp as pressure bowed my bones, straining my skin, pressing against my magic until it wilted inside me. The sheer amount of power this queen had… I’d never felt anything like it.
“Come here and give me the journal.”
“No,” I rasped, blinking a tear free as the sharp edge of pain built. I hid the journal behind my back, my hands shaking as the pressure swelled when the queen turned to face me. She was cloaked in darkness that writhed around her, that strange metal helm concealing everything except a slow smirk.
That mouth parted with a full laugh when Kaazhim burst into movement, sprinting across the room and towards the glass case where I’d found the journal. No, to the hidden doorway behind it. I backed up a step, glancing at the prince heir close to my side.
“Coward,” she drawled as Kaazhim fled.
It was bad enough when King Bakshi wanted the journal, but the Zalaam queen herself wanting a book that was written about her and her army?
Another shiver went down my spine, and I got the unshakeable sense that what happened here would tug a thread from the weave of fate.
Either it would unspool entirely and those dark wyverns and the king’s clergy—perhaps her warriors in disguise—would sweep their dark poison across my entire homeland.
Or we could excise that poison like infected flesh.
If this journal was important enough to warrant a visit from a queen of true, mythical evil… I couldn’t let her get it.
“What was that?” She laughed, the sound driving into my head until warmth trickled from my ear. Blood, I knew without looking. I cringed, her magic pressing on my bones until I hunched.
“I said,” I rasped, my voice thick as copper wrapped around my taste buds, “No.”
Her mouth parted to show sharp rows of teeth. A monster’s smile.
I barely even felt it as Kamaal’s hand gripped my upper arm, dragging me back a few steps, angling us towards that door.
“How about we trade?” the queen suggested, almost mildly, as if every sound from her lips didn’t make my magic flinch and my blood flow sluggishly, fighting the oppressive weight of that power. “Give me the journal and I’ll give you your grandmother.”
She moved as fast as an adder, and though Mingyue blocked the queen’s first attempt to grab her, clearly well trained, she didn’t see the second blow coming.
Not from a knife or even from magic, but from the elongated fingernails of the Zalaam queen’s left hand.
I tried to stagger forward, my mind full of static noise as blood shone on the dull black of her nails.
Stone, like the glittering black of the crown around her helm.
She wrapped her bloody hand around Mingyue’s golden throat, and I felt it again—another tug on that thread of fate. Mingyue’s chest heaved, her teeth gritted against the pain, but her eyes locked on mine. Flicked towards the not-so-secret exit in clear instruction.
“Are you truly my grandmother?” I asked, my voice a thin, reedy thing.
“Your mother was Jiang Yishan, my daughter,” Mingyue said, not with pain but with rage.
She whipped her hand up, a razor-edged dagger of solid jade plunging into the Zalaam queen’s wrist and twisting until stone met bone.
The queen hissed, deeper than any mortal voice had a right to be, entirely bestial.
Cold shuddered down my arms, and my surprise, my fear, allowed Kamaal to drag me back another two steps.
“I’m sorry,” he said in my ear. “But I refuse to let you die.”
I fought as he hauled me towards that door, whipping around to stare as the queen and my grandmother met in a horrific clash, the sound of stone nails meeting honed jade enough to make me flinch. Please let her win, please let her survive.
I had a grandmother, and she didn’t look at me with hatred or disgust. Rather an awestruck disbelief that was so soft it felt like a hug.
Though there was nothing soft about the way she fought the Zalaam queen, trying to knock the helmet off her head and when that failed, swiping low with the dagger.
Not just well trained but lethal, and so fast that I knew she must train every day to keep up her strength and swiftness.
“The book, Ameirah,” the queen said, and struck with her magic while Mingyue was distracted by a wide arc of her pale hand.
Pale—not the deep gold or sand skin tones of the Ithanysian people.
Was she from this land, then? Was she from Cirestia?
Had she flown through a gate all those years ago, the way we flew through the colourful window?
Those questions were blasted from my head as if by a destructive wave as black, glittering magic struck Mingyue’s back, bursting through her chest like a parasite.
“The journal,” the queen bit out, watching Mingyue writhe on her magic like a fish caught on a hook. She couldn’t get free, and every movement widened the wound, until blood darkened her clothes, spilling down her flowing, gauzy clothes to the floor where it began to pool. So much blood. Too much.
And it didn’t matter that the threads of fate were tangled. This was my grandmother, a chance to find real family, not whatever Falael Jaouhari and my vicious brothers had been. Something better.
I drove my elbow into Kamaal’s side, called on a lesson Aliah gave me in one of the fortress’s cold, stone rooms, and cracked my hand into his wrist, forcing his fingers open.
Before he could react, I spun, my heart leaping into my throat, killing the air flow to my lungs. I grew lightheaded, but kept moving.
“Enough,” I spat, staring at the slits in the dark metal helmet, fighting a shiver at the oily, poisonous feel of it. As if the metal was every bit as magic as the woman who bore it. “Enough.”
I threw the journal at the queen, half hoping it struck her throat and sent her stumbling back, coughing, giving Mingyue a chance to deliver a killing blow.
The Zalaam queen—the queen who lived in Ithanysian nightmares even centuries later, the queen whose legacy of blood and death and terror had embedded itself in the identity of my home.
She snagged the book from the air with a flicker of dark magic. The pressure in my head, my blood, my bones spiked until a whimper slipped free.
“Now leave,” Mingyue snarled, slashing her jade dagger through the spear of magic piercing her middle, to no effect.
I lifted my bare hands, shrugging off Kamaal’s attempt to grasp my arms as I raced across the room, my movements laboured and slow like I ran through a storm wind.
I reached for the Zalaam queen, as if this moment was why I’d been given this magic, so I might kill her before she could try to enslave my home again.
Fire blasted my hair back from my face, singeing my skin as she incinerated the journal with a thought. A slow, satisfied smile crossed her face when I froze, staring in horror. Nothing remained. She’d destroyed the book entirely.
“Oh, Ameirah,” she sighed, exasperation and hatred twisting her voice into something sharp, something that plucked at my throbbing mind.
“How do you know my name?” I spoke with effort, fighting against the tide of the sheer power that hung in the air, pushing me back, away from Mingyue. She’d begin to twitch, impaled on the dark spike of magic.
“I know every member of this hateful family,” the queen hissed, her mouth tightening as she looked down just as Mingyue collapsed to the ground.
I jerked forward as if I could stop her, my palm in front of me as if the deadly touch might stop the tide of power shoving me away. But nothing stopped the queen tearing free her dark spike of magic and thrusting it into Mingyue’s stomach this time, until blood bubbled up on her lips.
“I raised the alarm the moment I saw you,” she said with a husky laugh that gave way to violent coughing. “The entire city will be upon you. The entire realm.”
The smile on the Zalaam queen’s face didn’t slip. Neither did her helm or the crown atop it as she bent and wrapped black-nailed fingers around the pendant around Mingyue’s throat. A sliver of stone as dark and glittering as the crown, I realised with a sharp drop in my stomach.
“Don’t,” I snarled, terrified for reasons I couldn’t put into words, like deep in my soul I knew she could never get her hands on that pendant. I struggled against the magic keeping us apart. “Don’t!”
“We need to go,” Kamaal grunted, finally clasping my shoulders again as the queen ripped that necklace from Mingyue’s throat. “I’m sorry, Ameirah.”
When I tried to shove his hands off me this time, iron-rigid arms caged my middle, and he lifted me off the ground.
“Put me down,” I snarled, fighting as he walked away. “Put me down!”
I couldn’t find my grandmother, only to leave her for dead. I couldn’t. I’d already lost Varidian.
“Please,” I choked out, a wash of emotions threatening to drown me as Kamaal hauled me behind a bookcase and out of sight. The Zalaam queen would kill Mingyue. “Please.”
But Kamaal hauled me through the hidden door and into a sun-bright garden covered in lilac leaves and deep green flowers, the sight jarring compared to the darkness that hung inside the room. I struggled to escape, but I came too close to touching him with my bare hand, and panic froze me.
“Take me back. Kamaal, take me back.”
The garden blurred as he broke into a run, my head swimming, the pressure of the queen’s dark magic giving way to a rush of blood and panic.
The sharp bitterness was replaced with scents of greenery and plant life, then roasting meats and spices as Kamaal raced through the city, ignoring all my pleas to take me back. Ignoring my every scream and plea.
People watched with judging eyes. Some tried to intervene, but Kamaal knocked them back with a flash of silver magic I couldn’t begin to guess the root of. Not quite light magic, not strength or aether.
A piercing wyvern screech came from the fluffy white clouds above, and I tried to lift my head where it bounced against Kamaal’s back.
Mak, I thought with a rush of hope, but the shadow that swept through the lilac sky was silver.
Raya. My heart sank so rapidly that my chest hurt, and I couldn’t hold in a sob.
For a second, I’d thought Varidian had come for me. For a second, I thought he’d survived. The crash of that hope allowed a fog of despair to obscure every other emotion. I’d found family, so unexpected and strange, and now my grandmother lay dying in a manor behind us.
“Please,” I breathed, tears running from my eyes and over my brow into my hair. “Kamaal.”
“Almost there,” he said, as if my pleas weren’t for him to turn around and go back.
“Almost safe. Raya, take her,” he shouted as the world whirled around me.
Small streets gave way to a broad bridge over the bright river, the wingbeats of wyvern wings blocking out the screams of alarm and fear from the Riverren citizens.
Had they ever seen wyverns before? I hadn’t glimpsed a single one when we walked through the city.
Before we were ambushed by the Zalaam queen.
It was impossible. She died a thousand years ago, was shattered and eradicated from Ithanys so severely that there could be no doubt she was truly dead.
But her power was unlike any other, a scared voice whispered in my mind. My own. A remnant of her could have remained. True power like the magic that had filled that room never truly died; it simply found a new home.
“Don’t panic,” Kamaal warned a split second before he dropped me from his shoulder into his arms and lifted me—so Raya could lock her needle-sharp teeth around my waist.
I screamed. I was too worked up to keep the cry inside, to stop shaking as she gripped me with her mouth, however gently she closed her teeth around me, not even pricking my skin.
With painstaking care, she lifted me onto her back and deposited me between her shoulder blades, trembling as hard as a leaf and in danger of tumbling free.
I was about to leap off, to run back to that manor and the grandmother I’d known for mere minutes, when Kamaal threw himself onto Raya behind me and locked his hand around my arm, like he knew I would try to escape.
In seconds, Raya leapt back into the sky, the cries of the winged Riverren fae falling away as she thumped her grey wings and carried us back to the broad, airy building where we first arrived.
Unless I wanted to unseat both Kamaal and I, to drop us both to our deaths, I had no choice but to stay on the wyvern’s back as she flew through the bright glass of the window at the building’s end.
The same shape, same colours, same depiction of wyvern, tiger, fae, and araethawn as the building in Morysen.
Light, floral air turned heavy with humidity and grit, the scent of baking sand and olive trees wrapping around my senses.
For a minute, as we passed through that gate, that unbelievable magic that even now I struggled to believe existed, there was silence.
And then screaming—fae and wyvern roars alike.
Noise, unlike any I’d heard since the attack on the Red Star.
“Caution, Raya,” Kamaal said, sitting stiffly behind me and finally releasing his grip on my arm to lift his hands, ready to unleash that silver flash of magic.
When Raya whirled around to face the city, there was no other word to describe what we found than chaos.
And flying towards us at a rate that would have them upon us in a minute were a legion of spiked, horned wyverns with mouths parted in vicious threat.
Every rider atop those wyverns wore black djellaba with a silver insignia on their breast. I couldn’t see it clearly from here, but I didn’t need details to know it was a silver minaret surrounded by stars.
The king’s men, or the Zalaam queen’s?