Chapter 49
AMEIRAH
“Nabil!” I cried, lurching up a golden stair towards the gate in the fortress attic. The shattered mirror had sucked him inside and now showed no sign of him in the glass. Was he in Riverren now, or had the gate rejected him because he didn’t carry Cirestian blood?
I reached out for the cold metal surface, but it rippled around my fingertips, feeling more like a warm wind than solid glass. Exactly as I remembered the gate in Morysen—a ripple of magic, a tug of wind, but no pain, no resistance.
“I don’t think so, you worthless little roach,” Kanuri hissed in my ear as her arm snaked around my neck. The fine edge of a cool blade met my throat, a mirror of how my bracelet tore through hers. Still alive—somehow, maddeningly, she was still alive.
She ought to be dead, but she still had that amulet around her throat…
Maybe I ought to feel bad about wishing my own grandmother dead, but I refused to claim that side of my blood. They weren’t family. They were cruel, selfish, manipulative monsters, and I rejected them.
I whipped my hand up, dragging the spikes of my bracelet across the back of her arm, but Kanuri only snarled and didn’t let go.
Blood trickled over my throat as she drove the knife harder against my skin.
Another hand, another knife, drove into my stomach—and all the breath left my body when no pain pierced my skin, the wyvernscale armour deflecting the blow.
“I won’t let you ruin this for our queen. She’s waited decades for this day. She had to endure your snivelling, pathetic existence to bring our people out of the darkness. To bring true power back to Ithanys where it belongs—”
She choked, a wet sound that made all the hairs stand on my arms, and her arm fell away.
The knife clattered to the steps at my feet, ringing against the glass for a moment until it stilled.
For a moment, my mind sluggish, I just blinked at that knife, at the droplets of my blood on it, and then I turned, and everything made even less sense.
“Go,” a woman panted. Tall, beautiful, and elegant in a way that only a woman who’d been queen for thirty years could be. Not the Zalaam queen in her helm and that horrible black crown. This was Queen Aleela, mother of Kamaal and Mihrunnisa, wife and widow of King Bakshi Saber.
She wasn’t dressed in the finery she wore the last time I saw her; her gown was absent the glimmering, luminous fabric from Morysen’s souks, instead woven of solid black and reinforced at the shoulders, chest, and neck by purple leather armour.
The queen was dressed for battle, and the fierceness of her expression reflected that brutality.
“Go,” she repeated in a harsh whisper, and everything snapped back into focus.
She twisted her hand, driving the bejewelled dagger deeper into the back of Kanuri’s neck.
That was why she’d released me, why she’d dropped the knife.
The queen—our queen—had driven a knife through her neck.
And when I faltered, struggling to process that, Adeela nimbly unlatched the necklace from Kanuri’s throat with a single hand.
The practised, effortless movement of a royal.
“Get the fuck off—” Kanuri hissed, but Adeela twisted the knife deeper, choking off her words. In shock, I watched her face go slack. All the colour drained from her skin, leaving her sallow and grey in moments. The medallion was no longer around her neck…
“Find Nabil,” Adeela commanded, soft but every inch a queen. She threw the amulet to the ground down the steps, and it skidded across the room. Where it could never bring Kanuri back. “I’ll protect the gate and make sure she stays dead.”
She certainly looked dead. Kanuri looked several decades older than she had minutes ago. “How?” I asked, staring at the Queen of Ithanys. “How are you here?”
“You said anyone who wished to fight should come here.” She met my eyes, and though they held a spark of life and anger, there was something bone tired about the woman. “I’m ready to fight.”
How many years had she suffered, married to Bakshi?
Had he always had that medallion, always had Zalaam evil running through him?
My paranoia insisted she could be the same, and this might all be a trick, but she’d killed Kanuri.
She saved my life. And Nabil was on the other side of that gate. I couldn’t leave him.
“Be careful,” was all I said before I rushed up the final few steps and took a tight breath, diving into the mirror, into Cirestia.
But when its magic danced over my skin, when I was sucked through the glass onto the other side, it wasn’t the pearly bridges and lilac clouds of Riverren.
The sky was true black, the light that filtered through its heavy clouds a listless grey, and around me spread a rocky wasteland full of monsters all lined up in rows.
An army, far larger and worse than anything that attacked us in Ithanys now. We wouldn’t survive it. Nothing would survive it.