Chapter 47
AMEIRAH
“Aren’t they our allies?” I hissed, watching the two leaders cross the room.
“They were,” Nabil replied, “until we didn’t kill the Silver Rider for them. We broke a deal.”
And broken deals were sacrilege on the Torn Isle.
I sized up the man and woman, a single glance at the bearded, sixty-something man telling me he was a warrior with decades of experience.
The woman was twenty years younger, but she moved with a lethal grace that made me glad Aliah and Shula had spent the past three weeks reinforcing my training.
I didn’t have years of experience like these two, but I knew the basics.
And where combat failed, I had deathfyre.
“I’ll take the woman,” I said out of the corner of my mouth, sucking in a slow breath and releasing my tension on the exhale, the way Aliah trained me.
“Bad idea. She’s the worst of the two,” Nabil replied, colder with every word.
“Good thing I have deathfyre then,” I said, and called across the room, “This isn’t an open-invite party, I’m afraid.”
Nothing.
“Where are the others?” Nabil asked when they didn’t respond, merely came towards us at an alarmingly fast pace. A minute—or less—and they’d be right in front of us, and something told me they hadn’t come to lend their moral support in breaking the gate.
It was the woman who replied, her voice every bit as beautiful as the way she moved, though just as sharp. “Emmahin has fled to join our enemy.”
Nabil and I exchanged a wide-eyed glance.
“And Bbiya and Idir are dead,” she added.
It was the lack of feeling in her voice, the stark contrast to how Nabil’s voice had just roughened with grief, that made me adjust my grip on my dagger.
I should have practised throwing blades more; I couldn’t remember enough to hit my mark now, but I was convinced that these two Torn Isle leaders walking towards us were the true enemy.
“Emmahin is on our side,” Nabil whispered, coming to the same conclusion. “How close do you need these two fuckers to strike with your magic?”
“I can hit them now,” I replied at the same volume.
I thought of the fear in Varidian’s eyes when he heard the army had begun to march.
I thought of the people who died at Daurith, and the traitors who’d lived in Morysen right under our nose, exposed by my deathfyre.
That was whose screams had filled the streets that day—Zalaam warriors, blending into ordinary life.
Waiting for a command from their queen. Fury tore through my chest, and with it came a roar of dark, living flame.
“Who killed Bbiya and Idir?” Nabil asked the two people now close enough to see the details on their salt-grey clothes, the dozens of weapons that practically dripped from their leathers. More than Nabil and I had for sure.
“Their own stupidity killed them,” Amuq’ran replied, his voice gruff and louder than I expected. It filled up the room, echoed from the high ceiling until my nerves shuddered.
“You killed them,” I accused, thinking of what Varidian told me of the other leaders, the intelligent, kind woman and the quiet, solemn man. Both dead.
“They got in the way,” Kanuri replied dismissively. A confirmation. They killed their own people, their friends and colleagues. Had likely attempted to kill Emmahin, too.
Hatred and rage turned Nabil into a stranger as he threw a hard glance my way. “Do it.”
I wasn’t an executioner or assassin. I’d never killed without provocation.
“She looks nothing like you,” Amuq’ran said to Kanuri, his dark gaze scouring me from head to toe. “Too much of that pathetic blood has diluted yours.”
His words hit me like a slap to the face. I looked from the bearded, scowling man to the woman just as her attention fell on me. Her stare seared beyond my skin into bone, and I hated how easily it threw me into the past. How easily I became small and ashamed, how my stomach tightened and twisted.
“Oh, fuck you,” I hissed, both at these judgemental pricks and the people in my past who had taught me my differences made me less than them. I had a wyvern, and a husband, and a magic I was proud, not ashamed, of.
Amuq’ran opened his mouth to respond, but I drove my fist forward, opened my fingers, and let a sphere of blackened fire erupt.
It struck his chest hard enough to force him back a step, and I held my breath as he smiled, glancing down at the medallion resting on his chest. He was protected, like King Bakshi and—
He began to scream.
Nabil flinched beside me, but I only frowned and called up another pulse of deathfyre. He shouldn’t be burning, not with that amulet around his neck.
“You—” he howled. “Betrayed me.”
My upper lip curled, canines exposed, but it hit me when Kanuri laughed, a staccato sound that lacked sadness or sympathy. Not even rage that her friend was dying. She had betrayed him.
“It’s not a true amulet,” I guessed, holding the red-handled dagger in front of me as she kicked Amuq’ran aside and left him to die.
“Of course it’s not real,” she scoffed. “Why would my queen grace him with protection?”
Her queen. The bitch who killed my grandmother.
Well, that drew the lines between us as surely as any attack would have.
I threw my hand up and a dark wave crashed from me, shuddering through the air before it slammed into her—and was absorbed into a pendant exactly like Bakshi’s.
Hammered silver, surrounded by crudely faceted stones that glittered like stars trapped in a night sky.
This was real, I knew instantly, not a fake like she’d given to Amuq’ran.
“Why would Ameirah have your blood?” Nabil demanded when I didn’t speak, calling up more magic even though I knew exactly what it would take to destroy that medallion.
“Because my son and greatest pride fathered her.” Kanuri left her friend as a pile of ashes behind her and didn’t look back as she advanced, prowling like a Kaldic tiger.
My lip curled back further. “Kaazhim,” I spat, and drove both hands forward, deathfyre blasting from me so potently that Nabil and I were both forced back a step, boots squeaking on the gleaming silver floor.
“You’re not old enough,” Nabil argued.
“I’m older than I look,” Kanuri replied, and seemed to be enjoying the verbal sparring as much as my failed attempts to kill her. “I am Her Majesty’s first handmaiden. Her most loyal friend and subject.”
“Weird brag, but okay,” I muttered, teeth gritted as another wave of fire crashed from me, making sweat prick my upper lip. This time, we surrendered space to her by choice; she was close enough now to see the sheen of black across her eyes.
“Her eyes never looked like that before,” Nabil said in a tight voice, angling his sword as he readied to fight. A distraction, I realised, when an arc of air burst across the room and would have crushed her bones to fragments if it wasn’t deflected.
“An illusion,” Kanuri answered Nabil, as if he wasn’t speaking to me. “Another gift from my queen—the sheer wealth of power that lives in my veins. I could bring this building down around us.”
Nabil sent a punch of hardened air at the same time a dark wave of fire blast from me, both combining in the air into something that would have obliterated an ordinary person. “Weird brag,” he snarled, echoing my words. “But okay.”
A smile settled in cruel lines around my mouth, and I rapidly assessed the way Kanuri moved.
“We both fight her,” I whispered to Nabil, not looking away from the Torn Isle leader. “With magic and steel.”
He jerked his chin in a nod. But I couldn’t decipher if that nod meant he understood my hidden message—keep her distracted with magic, keep her attention away from the true death blow.
Kanuri’s laugh was a slide of vellum over wood, the soft ring of a sword drawn from well-oiled leather. “I must say, you’re much less fun than your cousin.”
“She’s goading you,” Nabil muttered, but her words struck me with more success than any of my magical blows hit her.
“Naila and I were the best of friends,” Kanuri told me, her dark eyes tracking every play of emotion across my face.
She delighted in it, exactly as Bakshi had—in my pain and rage and grief.
Was this what taking that dark magic into yourself did, or did this evil have to exist for Zalaam magic to make a home inside your body?
“She spoke of you in many of our little chats. She told me all about the books you read together, and the times you’d sneak away from stuffy events to steal shebakia from the kitchens, and those sweets you loved so much that you begged her to get more. Did you know they came from Blennisor?”
I’d guessed they were Kaldic, and retrieved on her spy missions, but to hear she’d visited the capital, that I’d unknowingly consumed delicacies from the enemy’s city made me sick. The sheer number of our people that Kalder had killed…
“Why?” I demanded, clearing my throat when it clogged. “Why did she do it?”
“For power,” Kanuri answered, closer now, forcing us back. “What else? Power can buy a woman security, safety. It can buy a man untold respect and a life of riches. Riches can shape the world however a person wishes.”
“Shame riches can’t glue your mouth shut,” Nabil sneered.
“She was so devastated when she learned the truth of her birth,” Kanuri went on, undeterred as her salt-stained boots ate up the last distance between us, until the tip of Nabil’s sword would touch her if he extended his arm.
“So conflicted. To learn she wasn’t just a child of Ithanys, but of Cirestia too.
To realise that was why her magic was so diluted.
It had the opposite effect to your magic, you see.
The crossbreeding enhanced your power, but it weakened hers. ”
I began to shake, the grief, the rage, so immense that I struggled to contain it within myself. Naila was Cirestian. Was her mother deceived like mine, or was she stolen, captured and kept in the dungeons like the women we freed?