Chapter 29 #2
“There,” he snarled. “See, the fighting is concentrated there. Fly, Raya! Everyone, fall in,” he shouted behind him, and the others obeyed like a well-oiled machine. I’d have liked to thank them for coming to our rescue, but I could barely drag air into my lungs and everything happened so fast.
Air streamed past us as Raya pushed herself to her limit, carving a path through the sky, growling at any wyvern who came too close; allies with ordinary riders, although I knew there were other dark riders in the sky.
I sensed them, like an oily sheen over my senses, like a hammering pulse in my blood.
Pressure, threatening to build like it had in that manor in Cirestia.
“Over the medina, Raya,” Kamaal bellowed, seeing something I couldn’t glimpse through the pressure wrapping around my chest, squeezing out my air and leaving space only for the dull throb of my pulse. And then pain, quiet and numb at first but growing sharper with every second.
I struggled to suck air into my lungs; to find space for the growing pain, the dizziness that made me waver on Raya’s back.
“Ameirah?” Kamaal demanded, grabbing my shoulder to right me. “What is it? What do you sense?”
Sense…? My tongue was thick in my mouth as I said, “Pain. Pressure. Hammering at my chest like an anvil.”
He didn’t reply for a beat. “He’s here. You’re feeling Varidian, Ameirah. He’s here.”
The words were like drops of sunlight on a soul shut in the dark for so long.
Had it only been a day since Bakshi told me Varidian died fighting for Daurith?
I hadn’t believed him at first, and I struggled to believe Kamaal now, after hours of that reality, the one where I lost my husband, had devoured every last bit of hope I had.
But if Kamaal was right and this drumming pain behind my ribs echoed to me from Varidian, if it was his pain… I sucked in a sharp breath of smoky air, forced my back straighter, my seat more secure on Raya’s back.
“Where?” One word, guttural, was all I managed.
“I think—maybe—”
“Where?”
“In the heart of the attack,” Kamaal said reluctantly, pointing to the clash of wyverns over the smouldering remains of a market square.
Flame ate at vendors’ stalls and wares—but were they the king’s wyverns or ours?
I cringed at the sight of people fleeing on the ground, possessions and children clasped in their arms, but another agonised twist through my chest focused my attention on the wyverns. And I began to search.
Black—burnished orange—dark teal—deep indigo—
There. A burgundy wyvern dipped low to rip at the throat of a black wyvern covered in spikes, the rider’s orange scarf as bright as the flame that swelled in the throat of the larger, golden wyvern beside her, two riders upon his back.
Habiba and Aliah. Dahab, Zaarib, and Nabil. A sob caught in my throat.
Not dead. Alive. Violently, defiantly alive.
I scanned every wyvern, every rider as Raya powered through the sky, screeching a warning at anyone who dared get in her way, blasting hot fire at a dark-eyed wyvern that dared come close.
My eyes snagged on a beautiful wyvern with jewel-green scales, another sob tumbling free at the sight of her rider.
Rawiya was here. My mother-in-law, my chosen family.
Sabira fought beside her on her mammoth, umber-brown wyvern.
I opened my mouth to shout a warning as the orange wyvern dove towards her left, but Rawiya’s wyvern slammed her powerful tail into the creature’s wings and sent it wheeling left where—where Shula’s ferocious grey waited with his jaws parted, teeth ready to shred their enemy.
And beside her, huge and bristling and enraged, was Makrukh. My bottom lip caved in, and tears slid down my cheeks in an endless wave as I saw the rider atop him.
Clothed in brutal leather armour, embellished at the shoulder with tough scales, with orange fire stitched on the chest and thigh.
The emblem of the Legion of Fyrevein. His dark hair was bound in a tight knot atop his head, his face bearing nothing but rage and murder, and the sight was so beautiful, so precious, that my shoulders curled and I broke.
“Alive, Ameirah,” Kamaal said, his voice rough despite his unwavering belief. “He’s alive.”
The sight of Varidian was a gift. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
My entire body jerked when a dark violet wyvern swung towards him, fire peeking through the scales at its throat.
But just as I raised my hands for more deathfyre, lightning tore down from the sky, illuminating every wyvern, every building.
He wasn’t hiding. His lightning power was on full display. Why wasn’t he hiding?
“I fucking knew it,” Kamaal hissed, and when I flung a wide-eyed look at him, a vicious grin was on his face.
“Amr, freeze the air in their lungs,” he yelled across the wind to the rider beside us, a hardened man in his fifties with scars on every inch of the dark arms he lifted.
Not scars from a long life of war; scars that bore stories of capture and torture.
I expected the wyverns to become motionless in the air, but it was ice that gathered, that drove spikes through the thinnest parts of wings, that had black-eyed wyverns wheezing for air as he tore through their throats.
It was ruthless, and sympathy squeezed my chest for those wyverns.
Enemies, yes, and certainly a deadly threat, but weren’t all animals innocent in war?
When the first wyvern dropped from the sky, struck the towering walls of the medina below us, and shattered on impact, the Legion of Fyrevein whirled around in the skies. To face us, as if we were a greater threat. Rawiya spotted us first, and her joy crackled through the air in a bright laugh.
It hurt—the emotions compressing my chest at the sight of my family, so soon after losing the grandmother I’d only known for minutes.
Seeing Rawiya’s happiness at the sight of me and Kamaal and his legion, it hurt.
That pain distracted me, and the sight of us distracted them, distracted Varidian as our eyes locked across scale and sky and wing.
When the blow came, it wasn’t from parted wyvern jaws, or even a rush of inferno. It was an arrow of darkness fired from the stout rooftop of a nearby tower, flying so fast not a single one of us saw it before it punched through Varidian’s chest.
“No!” The word tore from my very soul, from the same place Kaazhim ripped my magic out of me, and my hands shook with it—with fear and fury and power.
Not an arrow, I realised as that spike through Varidian’s chest seized him from Makrukh’s back.
A string of dark, oily magic pulled taut to drag my husband through the air, close enough to an enemy wyvern’s jaws that its teeth snapped mere inches from his arm.
Not an arrow, but a harpoon. It had hooked Varidian like the snare of a predator, and breath froze in my lungs as if Amr’s magic worked on me, when I saw who had fired that harpoon.
Who even now raised a bow of dark, glittering stone and aimed into the cluster of wyverns battling in the skies to hook more of us.
“Drop!” Kamaal roared. “Get lower, get out of range!”
The words drew out, heady and distorted as Varidian was dragged onto that rooftop where Bakshi reeled him in. Bearing a bow made of the same stone as the Zalaam queen’s crown. Final, irrefutable proof that they were allied. And now he drew my husband into his trap.
Time slowed, as if an hour stretched between Varidian being shot and him crashing onto the roof of that tower, when in reality it was mere seconds.
Raya was already firing across the souk square like an arrow herself, and Kamaal’s silver magic arced from him in daggers that missed their mark, dissolving into drops of ineffective magic. But I locked eyes with the monster who’d shot my husband and flexed my hands, just once.
That was all it took for a dark wave to erupt from me, pouring over the square, the covered market, the buildings between me and my husband, between me and the man who marked himself for death the moment he shot Varidian.
I didn’t check to see who fell when that wave washed over them, my stare unwavering from Varidian.
Didn’t look at who began screaming, their agony pouring through the city as powerfully as my magic.
I loosened my tether on the death I held, ripped off the bindings I’d kept around that part of myself since I was seven years old, and let it reign.