Chapter 60
AMEIRAH
Our flight into the mountains didn’t carry us over the battlefield, but we flew close enough that it hit me in waves.
First, the stench of blood, churned mud, carcasses—somehow already rotting—and burned flesh. It stuffed up my nostrils until I gagged.
Second, the sight of bodies running into each other on the ground and wyverns clashing in the sky.
It wasn’t orderly, wasn’t strategic; it was pure pandemonium driven by desperation and necessity.
I saw people trampled, wyverns plunge from the sky with their wings splayed, and tigers shred their way through skin to the bone, one ripping apart a winged Zalaam soldier’s rib cage.
The brutality of it shocked me into silence and I just stared as Raheema and Maleeha took a wide arc around the very back lines of our armies.
And then came the noise of it. The bellowing commands, the screams as people were ripped apart, the wails of the dying or grieving.
The high, bestial shrieks of wyverns and rasping growls of tigers as those ruthless animals ploughed through the enemy, ripping holes into their neat, orderly lines.
The thump of metal on metal as the Kaldic army marched, shields locked together, golden spears gripped in fists.
I was glad Varidian rode behind me, glad for his arms around me as the stark reality of war hit me like a punch to the stomach, robbing me of air and making nausea swirl.
He didn’t tell me not to look, even though he could feel my emotions through the bond.
I didn’t ask how long he’d been fighting in that wailing, screaming chaos, but I was about to ask how badly Mak was injured when Varidian jerked forward.
“What is it?” I asked him, my heart kicking into a rapid beat.
“Kamaal!”
I followed his line of sight and his panic merged with mine when I saw that Kamaal had been knocked off Raya’s back, the silver wyvern’s wings locked with a dark blue, the two of them grappling in the air.
She’d been flying low enough, or driven close enough to the ground by the Zalaam wyverns, that Kamaal wouldn’t die from a fall of that height, but my stomach plummeted when I saw where he would land: among the winged soldiers. Surrounded on all sides.
“Can you do anything?” I shouted to Varidian as the wind kicked up, the storm worsening.
“Not without striking him, too,” he replied roughly.
“Shit,” I breathed. I was one moment away from guiding Raheema out of her path, even if it would give Xiu more time to raise the queen, when Varidian jolted again.
“That tiger,” he breathed as the wind dipped, the clouds around us releasing their burdens in a heavier shower of rain. “Look!”
I tracked where he pointed, watched the flash of orange carve a path from the back lines of the Zalaam army.
Atop the giant, striped cat rode a woman in silver armour, her hair streaming behind her like a black banner.
Something glimmered at her brow, catching a watery ray of light that made it through the dense clouds. A circlet? A crown?
“She’s too far away,” I said, choking on a gasp as Kamaal collided with the ground, enemies on all sides. “She’ll never reach him in time.”
“I’ve never seen a tiger move that quickly,” Varidian murmured, and Raheema slowed, swinging her head around to watch as that orange tiger cut a straight line through the army, its crowned rider cutting down any Zalaam warriors who drew close.
They left a path of corpses in their wake.
Kamaal had climbed to his feet, still in possession of his sword.
He used both weapon and silver streaks of magic to push back the enemy, but he was too far away from our allies, and there was an endless supply of winged Zalaam soldiers around him.
She’ll make it, Raheema said, her eyes on the tiger rider. Nothing can stop that force of nature.
The way she spoke… Do you know that rider?
She rumbled a wordless reply, but I couldn’t extricate any sense from the sound, only a feeling that she had history with those snarling cats. With that rider in particular. Her past was still shrouded in mystery, but here was the first clue: she’d come from Kalder.
She’ll make it, Raheema repeated.
And she did. We slowed our pace only long enough to see the tiger and its crowned rider cut a swath through the field to Kamaal.
She ripped through the soldiers around him long enough for Raya to swoop down from the sky and catch him in her mouth, swinging him onto her back as she did with me that first time in Riverren.
I watched, stunned, as she closed her talons around the tiger too, and carried it, rider and all, into the safety of our own lines.
“Another thread,” Varidian murmured, and I gave him an alarmed look.
“You feel them, too?”
“The lightning soul does,” he replied. “One pulls us that way.” He pointed to the mountains, the river. The descendant of a dark queen. “Our fate will be determined here.”
“I know,” I agreed as Raheema beat her wings, catching up to Maleeha. I twisted to face Varidian, fitting my palm to his chilled cheek. “Better make this a kiss to end all kisses then.”
Despite everything, a grin crossed his face, as forced as it was real. His hand curved around the back of my neck, his lips like fire as they pressed to mine. Hot, frantic, wild. It wasn’t a slow, loving kiss; it was devastation and hope and the knife of knowing this could be our last kiss.
We didn’t speak when we parted, only dragged in gasps of shared air. Every wish, every fear, had passed from his lips to mine and back; there were no words left.
“Look!” Nabil shouted ahead of us as we crested the last mountain between us and the river where the Wall of Hydaran had stood. “On the water!”
My heart clanged when I saw her. It was impossible to see her face from here, to get that final confirmation that this was the handmaiden who belittled and sneered at me all my life, who’d shaped me into pure death when I should have been life, blinding and healing.
She stood on a tiny stone island in the middle of the vast river, the water eerily still and utterly black.
Her hands were raised to the sky, full of magic that made me recoil even this far away.
The helm covered her face again, that awful crown around her head.
As if she wasn’t deadly enough by herself, on either side of the river banks were wyverns, but unlike any I’d seen before.
Skeletal, in the shape of wyverns, but without a single scrap of flesh, only blackened bones on show. Their wings were bare, eery spokes.
I drew a breath, then another, filling my lungs with air at the same time I filled my core of power with rage.
I remembered everything that had been done in the name of the Zalaam queen and her foul army, both the first time and now.
And I let that fury blaze, let it call up a firestorm of magic as we sailed closer to the river. Closer, closer…
She tipped her head back and my heart jolted even without eye contact.
The oily thump of magic I remembered slammed into me, but this time she wasn’t using the power to kill my grandmother.
Instead, she was calling her own ancestor from beyond the grave.
And in everything we’d spoken about in Riverren, no one had said what to do if she succeeded.
Maybe because there would be nothing left of us if she did.
“Let me—” Varidian began, but the world dropped from under us before he could finish.
Raheema screamed wordlessly as we fell, her wings forced to her sides by the hand of a giant.
Or by that sick sheen of magic in the air.
It no longer filled the sky in a black column, but it was everywhere.
Like it had been everywhere in the dark realm, but worse, concentrated, thick enough to choke on.
My nose dripped blood as we fell, a crimson blur beside us as Maleeha plunged towards the river, too. She fought it, like Raheema fought it. Nabil’s air magic pushed at us, trying to stop the descent, but the queen’s power was too strong. The pretender’s magic was too strong.
And we crashed into the dark water, sucked down into its depths.