Chapter 16 Aiz
Aiz
Aiz never thought she would miss the chill of the cloisters, but in truth, Kegar’s bone-numbing cold forced clarity into her brain. Antium’s summer had been mild and beautiful by comparison, even warm. It was dangerous because it lulled one into a false sense of safety.
And you are not safe, Ruh’s voice whispered from the chambers of her nightmares.
As she flew above the night-cloaked mountains of the Nevennes, hunting for the traitor Cero, clarity once again struck Aiz. A swiftness of thought that had served her well as she grappled with her magic. As she grappled with the cost.
Lives, of course. Lives, for this magic was a gift from Mother Div, and Div always tested her most loyal servants. She always demanded a price.
Of course, the creature that had joined with Aiz and fed her magic had not been Mother Div.
Not in truth. But this did not mean that the true Mother Div didn’t exist. Perhaps Mother Div’s spirit had sent the creature in her stead.
After all, the creature had helped Aiz. Mother Div was the persona the creature took on, the face she wore.
So Mother Div was how Aiz still thought of her.
When Ghaz defied Aiz in Antium, her rage had her turning instinctively to her magic. But instead, there was nothing. A gaping void. A moment when she stared into Ghaz’s triumphant face and thought she was finished.
But then there was a wrench within her body, like she was tearing away an old, withered limb. The magic followed, a flood of it, as familiar as her reflection. She heard a voice. That of Div, speaking as if she were beside Aiz once more.
A parting gift, dear Aiz, the voice whispered. For freeing me from my prison.
Aiz took control of the magic immediately, her lessons with Div coming back in a rush. It was only when she had Ghaz by the throat, hovering above the ground, that she understood where she’d drawn the magic from.
Cero.
She immediately released the connection between them. But in that time, she saw his life force, like a second shadow made of light. Taking it felt like drinking warm soup from a bowl, and Aiz slurped it greedily and instinctively, as if the skill had always lived within her.
Cero’s life force had filled her with power for days. It allowed her to fly south to meet Raani U’qaya, as Ghaz had been planning to. It allowed Aiz to hold her head high when the Raani asked Aiz to destroy the Ikfa. The magic allowed her to face Quil unafraid.
Of course, when she realized Cero had betrayed her, she wished she’d drained him dry. Once Aiz ran through the power she’d taken from him, she’d stolen the spirit of another Kegari pilot. But he’d died and she felt ill after, as if she’d eaten rotten food. As if he’d been tainted.
After that, she was forced to find other sources of power. More pure and potent.
Now, as the wind buoyed her and shielded her, she sipped on that power but with delicacy, as if it were piping hot tea. She needed it to last.
Ahead, Ghaz signaled—they were nearing the Resistance hideout. His scouts had tracked fighters into these mountains a few weeks ago. He’d been waiting for the right moment to attack.
Cero fled there, Ghaz had told her. He took Sisters Noa and Olnas with him. Willingly, perhaps. Possibly as prisoners.
Aiz couldn’t countenance the former. The clerics raised Aiz, breathed the Nine Sacred Tales into her as a child. They survived prison with her. They wouldn’t betray her. Never.
Then again, she’d thought the same of Cero. And look what he’d done.
Her blood seethed as she looked below to the forest where, no doubt, Cero was hiding. As the first bomb fell and screams and shouts erupted, Aiz wondered if he would die in a bombing or if she’d have to kill him herself.
The latter soured her stomach. It must be done. Traitors make you weak.
The trees were a dense black tangle beneath, but the moon shone blue on a few clearings near the cave where the Resistance rats were lurking, including one with a Sail. Cero.
Aiz circled down, following Ghaz. When Aiz landed, the general was waiting.
“Cero is mine,” Aiz said. “Do not interfere.”
“I’ve assigned a squadron to protect you.”
“I don’t need it.” Aiz alighted from her craft. Her magic still felt fulsome, a well in no danger of running dry.
Because you killed a child, Aiz. Ruh’s voice again. A flash from the corner of her eye, dark hair and silver eyes. She did not know if this was her imagination or her guilt. He was long dead and yet his voice sounded real. And that realness made the world feel less so.
“We’ve seen what happens when I have no magic, Ruh,” Aiz muttered as she left a sputtering Ghaz behind to make her way through the woods. “More death. Highborns thieving power. The children whose lives I take are hungry. Destined for death anyway.”
She’d discovered the first child by accident. After Ghaz failed to kill Cero in Antium, Aiz visited the kitchen where Noa and Olnas had been feeding the city’s orphans.
She was pacing behind the building, furious at Cero’s escape, when she saw the child, curled up beside the kitchen’s back door. He hadn’t gotten his rations before Ghaz arrived to take Cero into custody. He was thin. Weak. Almost unconscious with hunger, and yet his spirit…
Aiz drew a shaky breath as she cut through the brush ahead of her, squinting in the darkness, alert for any movement.
The boy’s spirit had burned so bright that she still shivered at the feel of it within her own skin.
She thanked the boy for the sacrifice. She made sure that when she drained his life force away with her newfound skill, it was quick and painless.
The power had lasted a whole day. The lesson she learned was more valuable still. If she needed magic, her sacrifices must be young.
“—get into the Sail or we’ll be dead before we can carry out the mission. Musa ordered us to leave now—”
“Hang the mission, sky-dog, we have to fight—”
Aiz went still at the first voice. Cero. She’d known for days that he sold her out to the Empire. Yet hearing from his own mouth that he was working with the Resistance felt like an icicle through her chest.
She crept through the trees and spotted a dark-haired girl with her back to Aiz, brandishing two blades. Aiz recognized her instantly, for Karinna Veturia had tried to teach Aiz scimcraft long ago. Moments later, Cero stepped into view.
Aiz forgot about the girl. Anger surged through her body so fast she was breathless with it. After everything they’d survived—everything she’d saved him from—he repaid her love with betrayal.
Karinna disappeared into the woods, perhaps to help her friends back at the main hideout. Cero was alone.
Breathe, Aiz. She would have one chance to kill Cero. She knew his power, and her limited supply of magic wasn’t a match for it. But Div’s parting gift allowed Aiz to siphon spirit. She’d drained Cero once. She would do it again.
Aiz had hardly formed the thought when she felt a shield of wind shoot up around Cero. He turned, searching the darkness.
“Aiz,” he said.
How did the blasted man know she was here? She could run. She should run. But her fury was wild and untamed. He’d been her best friend. Her closest confidant. Her safe place. But none of that mattered to Cero bet-Dafra.
Karinna had disappeared, and Cero moved away from the Sail. Aiz bared her teeth and slashed at the canvas with her wind, but he blocked it.
“Why?” she whispered. “You think you are so much better? Because you haven’t made the sacrifices I made?”
“Because I love our people first, Aiz,” he said.
“It’s Tel Ilessi, damn you!”
She leapt at him because he never called her by what she was. Only a few times, at the beginning. And only with a look on his face as if the words tasted of offal.
She had her hands around his throat for one glorious second before he shoved her off and sent her reeling into the dirt.
“What is this power within you, to drain the spirit of others?” he said. “And what have you done with it?”
“What I must!”
“You cannot hide forever, Aiz. Our people will learn that you sold our children for power. They’ll learn that you’re doing it again.”
How does he know? “Our people believe in me. They know I would give up anything for them.”
“You’ve given up nothing but your own soul.
And don’t you dare say it was for our people.
Neither of us deserve to say that.” His face twisted, and she knew that look well.
The look when he’d gone to market but failed to bring anything back for the cloister.
The look after bombing runs when he’d just become a pilot.
“These Empire rats will never trust you.” Aiz softened her voice, trying a different tactic. “They’ll only try to learn about the Kegari from you and use that knowledge to destroy us. They don’t fight fair, Cero. They live and die by the sword.”
“And we live and die by the wind,” Cero said, and Aiz felt herself grow strangely breathless. “But not anymore, Aiz. Our people deserve better.”
That’s what I’m trying to give them. She tried to speak, but he was stealing her air. That’s what I’m fighting for, you fool! We’re on the same side.
Desperately, she pushed back at him, trying to break through his shield with her magic. But Aiz’s power was not strong enough. She gasped and collapsed, clawing at the dust as darkness closed in.
When Aiz came to, the clearing was empty. Boots pounded the forest floor and arms came up around her.
“Tel Ilessi,” Ghaz said. Blood gleamed on his face, his armor. “What happened—”
She waved him off; she could not tell him of her failure. It would only embolden him. It was a victory she was alive. Cero didn’t kill her. A surprising act of mercy that she’d make him regret.
“The rebels?” she asked.
“Scattered to the mountains,” he said. “But we recovered Noa and Olnas. They said they were taken against their will.”
“Of course they were,” Aiz snapped, and forced herself to stand. To look alert though her mind was muddled. Ghaz and the other highborns would be watching her. Searching for weakness.
“We also captured someone I think you should meet.” Ghaz smirked, a flash of his smug, highborn self rearing its head.
Watch him, Ruh seemed to whisper. He cannot be trusted.
Aiz nodded and trailed Ghaz, head held high, as if she hadn’t just been beaten into the dirt by her former best friend.
Even as dawn broke above them, the canopy was so thick that only a little light trickled through.
The trees were ancient and huge, and Aiz wondered, briefly, if Ghaz was truly leading her to the prisoners, or if he planned to murder her out here.
She sought out the little magic she had left, fashioning it into a blade of air.
Let’s see him try.
He did not. Instead, the trees thinned and they entered a clearing that sprawled before an enormous mountain cave. Dozens of pilots and Kegari soldiers milled about, removing supplies and weaponry from the cave. A Kegari squad encircled a dozen men and women, bound and kneeling—rebels.
It was clear that Ghaz was concerned with only one of them.
That man knelt at the far end of the line. His dark hair fell into his face, swollen from the beating Ghaz had personally administered, no doubt. Aiz recognized him. Quil had described him often enough.
Musa of Adisa.
When Aiz slowed in front of Musa, he shook back his hair and peered up at her. He was a handsome, strongly muscled man in his forties, silver at his temples, with unlined brown skin. Exactly what one might expect a Resistance leader to be.
All the way to the sneer playing across his mouth and the disdain in his dark gaze.
“You’re the little Snipe causing all the trouble,” Musa said. His voice was rich and resounded through the clearing. As if he were the one in charge and not Aiz. “I expected someone taller.”
Ghaz leveled a kick at Musa’s stomach, and the rebel doubled over, grunting.
“You will address her as Tel Ilessi,” Ghaz said in a perfunctory manner.
“You’re pathetic, Aiz,” Musa said, straightening. “Even for a sky-dog.”
“I’m not the one on my knees in the dirt,” Aiz said. “And I won’t be the one singing my people’s secrets in a prison cell.” She leaned down, grabbing Musa by the hair and yanking his head back. He winced, and Aiz smiled grimly.
“More of that coming, Musa of Adisa,” she said. “Much more.”
She released him and looked to the other prisoners.
“Kill half of them here, in front of him,” she ordered Ghaz. “Make him choose who dies. Take the other half to question.”
She turned to Musa, who was looking in horror at his fellow rebels. “Not smiling now, are we?” she said. “I’ll see you in Antium, Musa. I look forward to our conversation.”