Chapter 38
AMEIRAH
“That’s what the whistle did,” I breathed, grasping Varidian’s arm. “It summoned the wyverns. How can we evade them?”
“This close?” His eyes were like chips of blue ice, cold and clever.
Something told me we wouldn’t make it to Shyra, and I had to wonder if that was the point.
“We need to call for backup,” Shula said, watching shadows lift into the skies. So many. There were so many wyverns, just beyond the wall. They’d be upon us in minutes.
“We don’t have time,” Zaarib argued, stalking towards us with an expression even harsher than that one time I tried to kill him. “Burhan is dead, and his wyvern is down,” he told Varidian. “We await your orders, commander.”
“We’re outnumbered,” Varidian said. “We’re—”
A horrible, rending groan filled the air, filled the mountains, filled the world.
I exchanged a wide-eyed stare with my husband and our legion.
It began at the top of the continent, far out of sight, but the breaking, groaning filled the aching space in my head where the whistle had just tortured me.
Me, not the others. Because I had deathfyre? Or because I was Cirestian?
The dust reached us before anything else.
A plume of ash-grey swallowed everything on the horizon, roaring closer in a destructive wave that made my heart stop.
It came not from Kalder, but from above—from the coast, from the edge of Ithanys.
We were already scaling our wyverns, already leaping from the ground back into the skies to assess the threat.
That was when I saw what followed the plume of ashes—magic. Black, glittering magic.
“Shield,” Kamaal yelled, as he and his legion raced for their wyverns. “Shield!”
Because we’d seen that magic before, when the Zalaam queen killed my grandmother.
She was here.
And as we rose into the clouds, my chest so tight I struggled to catch a breath, I saw what she planned. No, what she’d already done.
The wall was falling.