Chapter 42 #2
“If things get dire,” Kamaal began, glancing behind me to the flaps of the tent as a blast of rain-laced wind forced its way inside, followed by a short, curvaceous woman with curly black hair and golden skin bitten pink by the chill.
Her yellow wings were battered by the wind, tucked close to her back, and threaded with pure metallic gold.
I recognised her from the dungeons; she was one of the women we liberated from Morysen.
The last time I saw her, she was little more than skin and bone and wore stained rags, but now she’d dressed in simple, reinforced leathers.
Even with the wings, the beauty, the leathers suited her.
“Nianjia,” Kamaal greeted warmly, motioning for her to come deeper into the tent. “Thank you for coming.”
“I wouldn’t make anyone else relive their captivity,” was her reply.
Not soft-spoken as I expected from the way she moved, the way her eyes flitted around, but rough and forceful—a battering ram of a voice.
The voice of a warrior who had stared down the bowels of hell itself and walked away.
“You want to know how we were captured.”
“And anything you might have seen or overheard during your captivity,” the prince—king—confirmed, his voice gentler than I’d heard it. It was easy to see how he and Varidian were brothers in moments like this, when he showed not simply strength and command but compassion.
Nianjia nodded, her stare flowing over the map on the table as she neared, her back straight and chin high even though she’d come here to share details of a harrowing, traumatic experience. She looked my way when she came to a stop beside the table.
“I thought you’d still be in the Red Star,” I said, biting back a comment about her needing weeks, if not months, more to recover from the dungeon.
Her eyes narrowed, just slightly. “The call was for anyone who wished to fight. And as I understand it, your late king worked alongside the woman who brought down the wall, and the army who are poised even now to sweep over this land.” Fire lit her eyes—not true flames, but rage, burning like embers in brown eyes. “I wish to fight and destroy them.”
Nabil looked sideways at her, appraising. “You want revenge.”
She smiled, though it was more a baring of teeth. Sharp, canine teeth, like her ears were sharp. “I do.”
Nabil jerked his chin at Kamaal. “You should give her one of those fancy knives. If there’s anyone who’ll cut through a swath of those bastards, it’s her.”
Kamaal said, “I’ll consider it.”
Nianjia didn’t inquire about the knives, and I saw why a moment later; her attention had been captured by the journal pages. “Where did you get these?” she breathed.
“From Riverren,” I answered, my tone carefully even. Was that many-bridged, lilac city her home? Would its name deal a wound to her heart?
Her head snapped up, eyes wide but surprise, not pain. “You’ve been to Riverren?”
“On the king’s orders,” I confirmed, and quickly added, “The last one. The prick. Not this one.” I gestured at Kamaal, whose stare twinkled with amusement that he quickly shut down.
Whatever life had entered Nianjia’s eyes died, her stare going flat.
“How long were you…?” I asked without tact.
“Years. I was in that prison for years. I was a girl when they took me, no more than sixteen.”
I swore filthily. She had to be in her thirties now. So… twenty years? Longer, if she wore her age well. “I’m so sorry,” I breathed, brushing her hand with my gloved one. “You deserve revenge more than any of us.”
Nianjia sucked in a shuddering breath and nodded, a shutter going down over her eyes as she straightened, chin high, and became a warrior once more. “This is how they entered this land originally,” she said, pointing at the word etched next to the wall. “Through the gate.”
“The—” I exchanged a swift glance with Nabil. “Did you say gate? Not grave?”
Nianjia seemed to sense its importance because she quickly explained, “This word can mean grave, this way.” Then she rotated the page, turned it upside down. “But this way it reads gate.”
Holy shit. I covered my mouth, reeling. Xiaoyu wrote the word upside down. Or was the map upside down, too? I quickly scanned the page, matching it to the map spread over the table.
Nianjia realised it at the same moment I did. “And it—well, my Ithanysian geography isn’t the finest, but it looks close to here. See, that coastline lines up with this at the base of your continent.”
It did. The sketch was no longer an abstract collision of lines, but a very accurate portrayal of our land. Upside down! The page had been upside down this entire time. Who decided it was a good idea for a word to be legible from both sides? I shook my head, disbelieving.
I could place every city and town perfectly on the journal page now, and the wall… the marker for the gate—not grave—was on our side of the dismantled wall. Or was that the wall in the sketch at all? Was it the river?
“Let me see,” Kamaal commanded, and accepted the page from me, frowning as his stare flicked between the paper and the map on the table. “The gate isn’t in Shyra. It’s this side of the Reaper’s Pass, which would put it…”
“In the mountains,” Nabil said quickly, urgency and excitement brightening his eyes to chocolate brown. “Those mountains.” He stabbed a finger at the tent wall, the forest beyond it, and the stalwart peaks that overlooked the old trees where we’d camped. “Nianjia’s right. It’s close. It’s here.”
I felt it again—that shivery sense that what we found here would tug on a thread of fate and unspool the entire thing. Or simply smooth out a knot. Cold tingles ran down my arm as I held out my hand for the page.
“Can I see it?”
Whatever he heard in my voice, Kamaal handed over the page instantly, watching me like a hawk as I mentally adjusted the scale of the small paper to the span of the map.
It placed the grave in the mountains around Willow Green as Nabil said or clasped between woods and mountains. The shivery sense intensified.
“Who made the gates?” I looked up, met Nianjia’s stare. “Where did they come from? Do you know?”
“They were stolen,” she replied, her brows forming harsh slashes over her eyes. “We built them. They were a gift from a master craftsman to a king millennia ago, so he might visit the daughter he missed so much, who lived in a distant city far from the capital.”
“The distant city—was it Riverren?” I pressed.
She knew what I was getting at immediately.
“You’re right, it still opens into Riverren.
In a different building than the original gatehouse, but the pathway remains.
But the glass itself was stolen from both Riverren and Idelasia and brought here, to your lands.
We never knew where they were taken, not until we were taken. ”
“King Bakshi wasn’t the one to steal it. It happened far earlier,” I guessed. “Around the first Zalaam war.”
She blinked. “The timing does line up,” she agreed.
“Bakshi must have found the gate by chance,” Kamaal input. “Or been told where to find it by the queen pulling his strings.”
That made sense. “So one gate was moved to Morysen and opens into Riverren. That means there’s another gate that leads to your capital.”
Nianjia shook her head. “Not just there. The gates could take you anywhere, lead you to any city.”
“The queen could use one to appear anywhere she wanted?” Kamaal growled, dragging a hand along his jaw. “Large enough for wyverns to fly through,” he added to himself. “An entire aerial legion appearing from nowhere, with no warning.”
“We’re doomed,” Nabil declared.
“Not if we destroy it,” I reminded them, but I fixed my attention on the Cirestian woman when a phrase she’d said jarred something loose in my mind. And I knew, then. My suspicions weren’t simply a hunch. “You said the glass itself. Were the gates both made of glass?”
Nianjia nodded. “There have been others made since. It’s how we travel between cities at home.
Walk through one glass gateway and out another.
” A network that could carry you anywhere.
The thought made me breathless, triggered that aching desire to explore, to set off on an adventure and travel the entire world.
Only now I yearned for other worlds, for cities I’d never even dreamed of.
“They’re always glass?” I pressed. “But they’re not always windows, are they?”
“No,” she confirmed, not understanding the gravity of her reply, or why I’d focused on her like a hawk on prey. “Sometimes the backs could be painted silver, so they appeared to be mirrors.”
I nodded. Looked at the page, the map, and the woman beside me. “Nabil,” I said slowly. “What is the old name for Willow Green?”
I knew, but I needed to hear it, to know I wasn’t going mad.
His eyes were wide, his mouth parted when he looked at me. “Shar,” he breathed. “Gate.”
“The gate is here,” I said, wetting my dry lips. “It’s in the tower of the Fortress.”