Chapter 54
AMEIRAH
Ihad two choices—decide my long-lost family were utterly mad, or accept that there was some truth in their words. But the truth was hard to accept when I’d been a killer all my life, and every glimpse of my magic had been as black as onyx.
“Cool,” Nabil quipped. “You’re all insane. Ameirah, let’s be off, shall we?”
He rose, but something kept me sitting on that sofa, kept me staring at Liwei’s mother. My aunt.
“I don’t have any lightning,” I told her, ignoring the cool rush moving down the back of my neck.
“It should have been you,” she replied, not mincing her words, “but you became non-viable. I assume on purpose. The pretender must have known somehow, that you’d bear the lightning of her ancestor’s greatest enemy, and she corrupted your light.”
“Dina,” Mingyue hissed. “Don’t just blurt it out.”
So they all believed this was true.
Dina looked me in the eye and said, “You would have been the lightning soul without her interference. There are always two—”
“Aithnan. I know,” I cut in.
“You would have been the light, and your bondmate would have been fire.”
I frowned. “But—the lightning soul only claimed him months ago.”
“We don’t have proof of this,” Mingyue said, “and Xiaoyu never wrote it in her diary, but I think the pretender found a way to banish the lightning and fire souls, likely decades ago.”
At the risk of being crazy for entertaining this… “Is that why there’s no other soul inside me? She banished them?”
“Or killed them,” Liwei muttered, scowling at the elaborately woven rug between us. “It’s another reason she’s been able to amass so much power; her greatest enemies were defeated.”
“Until the storm,” Nabil sighed, sitting beside me once again. “I bet the pretender queen wasn’t betting on that.”
“No,” I agreed, sitting straighter as I gave him a wide-eyed look. “That’s why everything happened so quickly, why the Zalaam warriors seemed to come from nowhere to claim towns and cities under the guise of clergy. She must have panicked when the lightning soul returned.”
“That’s good news surely,” Hsiuying put in, leaning forward with a light in her eyes. “She hasn’t had time to put her entire plan into action.”
“It doesn’t seem that fucking way,” Nabil muttered, crossing his arms.
“The pretender didn’t realise the lightning soul would take another form,” Dina mused, but that had to be a guess. She glanced at her son, perched on the sofa arm beside her. “How many light and fire wielders do you have in the guard?”
“A handful,” he replied, rubbing his jaw. “There are more in the military, but it would take a while to mobilise them.”
“Do it.” That cool command came from Zonghan, and for the first time I wondered if he was a trained warrior like Mingyue. His voice rang with the steel I’d heard in Varidian’s voice, in Kamaal’s too. “Go to the general now. I’ll write you a letter to give her.”
I tried not to let my hope swell too high, but when Liwei and his grandfather strode from the room, it seemed as if our accidental trip here had been predestined.
God was watching over us, guiding us where we needed to be.
And this detour may just give us the strength and soldiers we needed to push the Zalaam queen and her army out of Ithanys for good.
So much for not letting my hope grow.
“How many healers do you have in your world?” Hsiuying asked, calculation in her eyes. “Xiaoyu believed healers’ light was the key to defeating the evil—the Zalaam as you call it. She said your world was full of healers, that it helped win the first war and would be essential in this one.”
I shook my head. I had no idea the number of healers in any city, let alone the entire empire.
“The healer’s light,” Nabil said, picking out a phrase from what Hsiuying said. “What kind of light exactly?”
There was something in his tone that made me wary, ready for more bad news.
“There are three kinds of healers,” she explained, those kind eyes moving between us.
“At least there are here. Those who can heal physical wounds. Those who can heal mental wounds. And those who can heal spiritual wounds. Together, they are healers, but separately we know them as menders, soothers, and storytellers.”
“Storytellers,” I echoed. Stories to heal the spirit… I’d survived my childhood by disappearing into the comfort of stories, but I never knew there was true magic to it.
“Your home is full of them, or so Xiaoyu wrote. You have whole buildings full of them, guided by a lead storyteller whose magic is so impressive it attracts people from their houses to hear their tales multiple times a day.”
My mouth fell open. Closed. Then opened again. “You mean our imams? But—they’re not magic. They’re not healers.” I looked to Nabil, who shrugged.
“Sounds insane, but so does everything else that’s happened since that lightning storm,” he said, running a hand through his hair.
“Those three groups—menders, soothers, and storytellers carry the same light that you were meant to have, Ameirah.”
“Yeah, about that,” Nabil cut in, in that same tone that made my stomach churn. “What would it look like? Bright white, maybe? A glow, like moonlight?”
“Exactly,” Hsiuying confirmed, exchanging a glance with Mingyue. “You’ve seen it?”
“I have.” Nabil pointed at me, and I all but jumped off the sofa. “I just saw it in Ameirah’s deathfyre, in that Zalaam world.”
The pale light at the heart of my darkness. The crushing weight that had sat on my chest since I learned I was never supposed to have this deathfyre, since I was supposed to have life magic, and be the lightning that shattered the darkness from the world… it lifted, just slightly.
“She didn’t take all of it,” I breathed. “She couldn’t corrupt all my light to darkness.”
“A drop of life in the ocean of darkness,” Mingyue murmured, and it took me a long moment to realise it was pride in her voice, and shining in her violet eyes. I’d seen it so rarely that I only recognised it because of Varidian.
“What does it mean? Can I use it?”
“No shit you can use it,” Nabil laughed, elbowing me. “Your magic didn’t kill all of them. It was like they woke up, and the first thing they tried to do was run. What if you healed the Zalaam magic out of them?”
“But that world is Zalaam.”
Nabil shrugged. “Someone’s gotta be controlling them, and you undid it. Let’s assume you can do the same back in our world. Heal any corrupt warriors back to fae.”
“With the storytellers’ help, it’s possible.” Hsiuying nodded encouragingly, and gave me a thumbs up when I met her gaze. “You can do it, Ameirah.”
“The only problem is,” I murmured, “our storytellers have been targeted. They had to go into hiding. We’d have to find them first.” I remembered the dark column of smoke rising from that house in Morysen. Because they could destroy the Zalaam army as well as Varidian or I could.
Air filled my lungs, and this time it was relief that made me shaky. The world didn’t rest only on Varidian’s and my shoulders; we could bear this weight together, fight back the darkness with others.
If we could find them.
“You won’t be the only ones searching for them,” Dina sighed. “The pretender will eradicate any threat to her and the first queen. You’ll have to be quick.”
I didn’t even know where to begin, but it was more direction than we’d had when we came to Riverren.
“It’d help if we knew who this pretender was,” Nabil grumbled. “She could be anyone, hiding in plain fucking sight. She could have joined the legions—”
“She hasn’t.”
Everything they said about the woman who’d twisted my life into darkness could only describe one woman. “It’s Xiu. My old handmaiden. She’s the pretender.”