Chapter 66
AMEIRAH
Icouldn’t swallow right. My throat was full of broken glass, so it hurt to swallow, hurt to breathe.
“Varidian,” I rasped, tears running hot over my cheeks when I blinked. “She just—it happened so quickly. I tried to stop it, but she—”
“I know,” he murmured, his voice rough as he brushed a tear from my cheek. “I know, dearling.”
“Varidian,” a husky female voice snapped, and I stared beyond my husband to see a small, pale woman clad in scraps of light. She locked eyes with me, a look of both sympathy and urgency, then gave Varidian a scowl. “It has to be now. Stop fucking about.”
“Who… who is this?” I breathed, my voice hoarse like I’d been screaming. My legs shook when Varidian grasped my shoulders and pulled me to my feet, his eyes on the medallion still glowing on my chest.
“The lightning soul,” he replied, and quickly added, “I’ll explain later. Or she will. But we have one chance to end this war, dearling, and we’re rapidly losing that chance.”
I tried to swallow again, and gained nothing but pain for the attempt. “I looked at him,” I confessed, a fist squeezing my chest until agony wrote itself across my heart. “I looked at him; that’s how she knew he was behind her. If I hadn’t—”
Varidian kissed my brow and leaned me against him, on my feet in the mud. I was covered in the stuff now, even muck smeared on my neck, but I didn’t care. Nabil hadn’t moved, hadn’t blinked, hadn’t breathed in minutes.
“She’s… fighting,” the lightning soul said through gritted teeth. “I can’t hold her much longer.”
I looked at the woman and startled when I realised her hands were wrapped around the hilt of Dusk-Breaker, the same fabled sword depicted in the stained glass window that carried me to Riverren for the first time.
Was that truly not years ago? It felt like a lifetime.
A lifetime when Nabil was still alive, smirking as he playfully insulted me or went on a swear-filled rant about the king, or the military, or the state of public libraries.
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see as tears poured over my eyes like the waterfall glimpsed from the fortress.
Another world, maybe even one we’d never visited.
I allowed Varidian to guide me closer, to where the lightning soul had all her weight thrown into that sword, keeping Xiu pinned to the ground like a butterfly pinned to a board.
“Nice to meet you in the flesh,” the pale woman, the lightning soul said with a tight smile, grunting when darkness flared from Xiu, her back arching as she fought the sword spearing her. “I’m Elinour. You threatened me that one time, remember? Let’s be friends when this is all done.”
“Sure,” I agreed in a flat voice. Dead—I sounded dead, as Nabil was dead.
“Do you know how to do it?” she asked, her gaze flitting between Varidian and I as the light wielders closed in around us, hitting Xiu with fresh streams of fire, blinding sun, and cold starlight. Xiu hissed, bucking, but didn’t succeed in throwing off the sword or the lightning soul.
“I will shred every last one of you to ribbons and feed them to my creations,” she threatened in a deep, bestial hiss.
“Your creations are dead, asshole,” Elinour huffed, locking eyes with me again. A silent reminder, or a command. Do it. End her.
I wet my dry lips and lifted the chain from my neck, mud smearing across the black, glittering stones that now glowed with an inner light, a core of gold in each shadow. But true, white healing magic shone from the hammered silver at its heart, reflecting it as I brought my shaking hand up.
End her, I breathed to my magic. Not a scream or a command but a plea. End it all. End everything she’s created, every bit of her evil left tainting every world in existence.
This magic had been given to heal the stain she left on Ithanys, to heal the festering wound she opened in our home.
I had no doubt that infection would spread to Cirestia, to the dark world, to anywhere else she could access with the gates, but I would not allow it.
Too many people had given their lives to stop this, to protect the bit of good that remained in the world.
It was enough. No one else will die because of this woman, I told my magic like a prophecy, like a fact. No one else.
When my fire surged, this time it was different. It wasn’t churning, hissing fury or cold, vindictive vengeance. Like the magic gifted by my family, like the healing power sung into the world by our storytellers, this was the warmth of a new day. Sunlight after an eternal night.
I gasped as it exploded from me, no less powerful with the rage removed, no less potent for this new command: not murder, not revenge, but healing.
Life, as my magic was always meant to be.
I might only have a drop of it left after a lifetime of Xiu’s cruelty, but as the deathfyre blast from my hands, my arms, and spread to my entire body, that drop met the magic of the amulet and became a blistering sun.
A killing blow, the Jiang family had given me, one by one offering their power to the repaired medallion.
A killing blow, but a second chance, too.
A chance for Ithanys to rebuild, to rediscover who we were without the stain of Zalaam manipulation.
For too long we’d been swayed by that darkness in secret.
For too long had it spread, person to person, commander to farmer to smith to king.
What were the Ithanysian people without that bitter taste of violence and greed and power?
Let’s find out, I told my magic, gasping when it flared, a torch against the night, a fireplace in a dark, cold kasbah, a drop of life in an ocean of death.
If anyone had looked down from the mountains at that moment they would have seen a cluster of people gathered around a figure kneeling in the mud, light blinding everything except their silhouettes as, for one moment, black fire transmuted into sunshine.
If they’d kept watching, they would have seen that light shrink, sucked back into the gleaming stones of a pendant, revealing that cluster of people and only a sword in the mud.
I blinked at the empty space where Xiu had been, trying to think around the hollow silence in my head, trying to feel something that wasn’t the gaping wound Nabil’s death had opened deep inside me.
She was gone. Not healed, not cleansed of the evil that had made her wage war on an entire continent. Gone.
Some evils couldn’t be helped or soothed or cured. Some could only be cut out entirely, excised from the world so everyone else in it could begin to heal.