Chapter 53
AMEIRAH
The dizziness returned before we even reached the manor gates where the illusion of a park gave way to a sprawling white house.
It hadn’t changed since the last time I was here, which seemed impossible.
So much had happened since, but there it stood with its columns intact, so much purple wisteria covering its exterior that the building itself looked alive.
“You’re a shit healer,” Nabil told Liwei as I leaned on him heavier with every step up the path towards the manor. My ancestral manor. My mother’s home.
My stomach twisted into knots. What if Mingyue’s eyes had lost that softness I’d remembered every day since the last time I was here? What if now they’d darkened with hatred, sharpened with reproach?
“I told you it was temporary,” Liwei sniped, matching Nabil’s glare as he held the door open for us.
With my head a blur and weakness ravaging my muscles, I stepped through. But it wasn’t just Mingyue standing in the atrium. She leaned on a walking stick made of luminous jade, carvings covering every inch of the precious stone except for the polished handle she gripped tightly as our gazes locked.
“I’m so sorry,” I blurted, tearing my eyes away from my grandmother to look at the others who’d gathered.
There were nine of them, most younger than her except for a man with long silver-white hair slicked back from his face, smile lines cut deep around his mouth and eyes.
The others were all of varying ages, some my age, some older, some younger, but they regarded me with the same surprise I watched them with.
“Sorry for what?” Mingyue asked with a note of laughter as she came forward, leaning on her cane and trailed immediately by the white-haired man. “For surviving the dark queen? For living? You’re right, how positively awful of you.”
She was amused, not accusing, but I couldn’t let it go. “I ran away. I left you.”
“You were thrown over that strapping man’s shoulder and dragged away like a sack of flour if memory serves.” Amusement glimmered in her violet eyes. “And here is yet another young man.” A wicked smile split her face. “Good for you, girl.”
I spluttered, my ears burning. “No, they’re—Kamaal is my brother-in-law and Nabil is—”
“A prick,” Liwei said under his breath, but loud enough for us all to hear.
“Takes one to know one, asshole,” Nabil hissed.
“Stop flirting with our guest,” chided the man who had to be Mingyue’s husband by the way he held onto her elbow.
“It’s very impolite.” There was true warmth in his eyes when he smiled at me, as if I wasn’t a pariah or a coward.
“Hello, Ameirah. Shall we move into the lounge? We have so much to tell you.”
I threw a glance at Nabil, because I had no idea what was happening and I needed the reassurance of someone familiar. He shrugged, jostling me. My dizziness flared until the ground threatened to collapse under me.
“Healing first, talking after,” Nabil barked.
I whacked him with the back of my hand. “Be nice.”
“Tell me that as much as you wish; it won’t change anything,” he muttered, giving the family, my family, a suspicious glare.
We were ushered into a large room full of soft green sofas, elegant glass lamps, and a fireplace that was made entirely of marble.
Above us, a chandelier glittered with jewels in purple, pink, and green, throwing confetti lights over everything.
A low table between the sofas overflowed with cups that Mingyue filled with green tea, sliding one across to me.
“I can’t stay,” I said, frowning when my voice slurred again. I took another sip of tea, as if it would magically restore my ability to speak. “My husband needs me. He’s fighting a war.”
“Can we send reinforcements with them?” Liwei asked Mingyue, perching on the edge of a sofa beside a big woman who had his exact face. Kind smile, keen violet eyes, and a rigid posture. His mother, it must be. My… aunt?
“How bad is it?” Mingyue asked Nabil and I.
“Bad,” I answered, my tongue thick, heavy.
“They have wyverns ridden by Zalaam commanders,” Nabil explained succinctly, sitting beside me on one of the tufted sofas. “And half a dozen towns under their command.”
“And the wall,” I slurred. “It’s gone.”
“The Wall of Hydaran?” I peered at the man who spoke, but my vision was turning spotty again and all I glimpsed was silver wings and a broad chest. “If it’s fallen, the river is exposed.”
“And things came out of it,” Nabil confirmed. “Soldiers, according to the pages Ameirah ripped from that journal.”
“You saved pages of it?” Mingyue breathed. She might have been looking at me, but the room was getting darker by the minute. “Zonghan, could you retrieve Hsuiyang? Our dear granddaughter is going to collapse.”
Her husband rose to his feet and marched from the room far faster than I was used to men his age moving. The sofas and chandelier moved in and out of focus, and I was distantly aware of the Zalaam army’s weaknesses being discussed, even if I couldn’t hold the information in my mind.
I don’t know what Zonghan did to speed up the healer’s arrival, but in minutes a stout woman with gunmetal grey wings, black hair arranged into a beautiful dome atop her head, and warm eyes that assessed my physical state arrived.
Nabil managed not to snap her hand off when she laid it on my shoulder, and unlike when Liwei used his magic to clear my head, I felt this.
It was like an ocean wave, powerful and cleansing but capable of great destruction.
A glow spread over my skin, emanating from her palm.
My stomach twisted and I squirmed, but she tutted and held me still.
“Any more magic and you’d have been unconscious for weeks,” she chided, meeting my eyes when my vision cleared. I felt raw, like I’d been scoured clean, my stomach tender as I sucked in a slow breath. “You’re lucky.”
“Thank you,” I breathed, because the dizziness had vanished. My eyes focused on a round face filled with the same kindness as her brown eyes. “Are you family too?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she agreed with a grin. “I’ve known your grandmother since she was a girl. Some could say, I’m more of a Jiang than others.”
“Stop trying to steal my wife, Hsiuying,” Zonghan huffed.
“Never,” she fired back cheekily. She patted my shoulder and took a seat beside Liwei’s mother. “Now, what did I miss?”
“Doom, gloom, and the end of Ameirah’s world,” Liwei answered. “Unless we share what we know and help them rid that world of evil.”
Hsiuying gave a double thumbs up. “Let’s do that. I’m all for ridding the world of evil. I presume this has something to do with the bitch who attacked my best friend.”
Three people gasped her name at once.
“What?” The healer gave them all a wide-eyed look. “She is a bitch. So what are we doing to kill her?”
Mingyue’s smile faded as she faced me. “Her soldiers, commanders, and creatures are all tied to a single tether—her. Her life sustains them. With it gone, they’ll no longer be a threat.
Some will die. Others will have the darkness ripped from them.
But she is clever, and she will hide, as she has hidden for years. ”
“A thousand years,” I muttered.
But my grandfather said, “No, not a thousand. The queen—the true queen—was killed. All this death and violence now comes from her descendant, her many-greats granddaughter.”
I blinked as I processed that, adjusting my view of this war. A new queen?
“But if she gets a big enough army, she’ll use the dark magic generated from the war to summon the first queen from beyond the grave. She’s… fanatic.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked, horror making me cold. Ithanys was overrun with dark wyverns and warriors, and this wasn’t even the queen. This was her descendant. If she managed to raise the first queen… we wouldn’t survive. It was a certainty.
“Xiaoyu was a seer. It’s how she knew so much, and how we were so successful in banishing the darkness the first time.”
I didn’t point out that they appeared to have fled Wyvara when it seemed the war was hopeless. Maybe that was another lie, another piece of misleading information Bakshi used to manipulate me.
“Everything we know is from her journal, passed down through the family along with warnings and the final piece of the crown,” Mingyue explained, fingers brushing the empty spot on her chest where her necklace had hung.
The queen ripped it off her… “Yes,” she confirmed with a sad smile.
“The crown is now complete. From what Xiaoyu saw, the pretender queen has been collecting the pieces for decades and—”
I frowned when she didn’t finish. “What?”
“Just tell her,” Liwei’s mother urged. The sympathy in her expression made my heart race faster, my palms damp. “Fine,” she sighed when no one else spoke. “You deserve to know what’s been done to you,” she told me, “but it’s not pretty.”
“What’s been done to her?” Nabil demanded, sitting stiffly beside me. Even if he hadn’t called me part of the legion earlier, his protectiveness would have told me as much now.
“The pretender queen is someone you know,” the woman told me, holding my stare with eyes so remarkably similar to mine, down to the exact colour.
“She’s someone who would have been close to you all your life.
A cruel, dark influence.” She took a breath before she said, “Your magic was never supposed to be this black fire. Your magic is life itself. But it was manipulated day by day, year by year, until it became what it is today.”
I recoiled from her sad eyes, from her gentle voice and the vile things she suggested. “I’ve always had this magic,” I breathed after a pause, the room too silent around us. “Always. I hurt my—I killed someone when I was young. I’ve never had life magic.”
The thought was laughable. My magic had always been cruel and lethal, since the moment Shahzia’s screams echoed down that hallway in the Jaouhari family kasbah.
“Darling,” she breathed, “you were meant to bear the lightning soul. It was meant to be you.”