Chapter 48
Today might be the day I die. But at least I will have loved.
At least I will have fought for our freedom.
—Letter from Kiyan to his family, unsent
Kiyan
“Yaseema!” I shouted her name, but she didn’t hear me. Or didn’t want to.
I fought off two of the soldiers behind me, the ones that seemed to sprout from the earth where my own power should have been. My magic was so weak the vines and roots I called were only enough to restrain a handful of soldiers and pierce the hearts of a few.
I could feel the thread of life in everything on the battlefield—feel it but not call on it. I tried, sweat pouring out of me, using more concentration and focus than I had, and for one small moment I could get it to listen.
And then it slipped through my fingers once more.
With the limits placed on our power by Rusul’s crown I couldn’t do enough.
Reza had orchestrated an ambush, knowing this would be the last chance we had to attack him, and he’d been successful.
The one advantage we’d had, destroyed. If we didn’t take the crown today, we would lose everything.
I tore off after Yaseema, chopping down soldiers in my wake. She was remarkably good at dodging attacks, but I wasn’t letting her go after him alone. She shouldn’t be running after him at all, but now she was, I was going to be beside her.
Her feet pounded into the earth, and I used my magic to call on her life, to stay in tune with where she was. Her heart was beating so fast, but it was not from fear or exhilaration.
Rage.
Good. We would both need to channel that anger right now.
This wasn’t just about the crown for her, nor her torture at his hands. She was tearing down the side of the pass with an unholy vindication, as if it were righteous wrath fueling her veins.
Reza was just below her now, and he raised his head to look at her. His mouth curled into a smile I knew too well, even from this distance. I swore, raising my sword high, my own rage flooding my veins.
I wasn’t going to let Reza take one more thing from me.
My other hand summoned my magic, the vines bursting from the ground spearing the Salt soldiers around me through the heart.
Years of stilling my blade, freezing my hand, and turning my head while the abuses continued, while I worked against Reza in secret, smiling to his face. Years of being contained, being his dog, his tool.
And this was the first time I’d truly allowed myself to fight back. The satisfaction was intoxicating.
Now, I unleashed my fury.
Yaseema wove through the battle, and I struggled to keep up as every Salt solider homed in on me as soon as they caught sight of my silver hair.
I cut them down swiftly, keeping my focus on Yaseema’s own wild hair, feeling her thread of life in my own heart, keeping my steps quick and efficient.
One of Reza’s soldier’s rose up behind Yaseema, his curved scimitar raised, poised to slice it across her neck. Black anger spread across my vision, my power rising toward the surface with the vehemence of my emotions, every instinct in my blood screaming at me to protect her.
I shouted a battle cry, rolling forward and tackling the soldier to the ground before staking him to the earth with my sword. Then I rose up without waiting a moment, ripping my sword out of his armor and continuing on.
Yaseema had stopped, however, and was staring at me with her mouth slightly open.
“I didn’t know you were behind me,” she said, taking in my appearance.
I looked down at myself, the blood soaking into my tunic, and wiped a hand across my face. It came away wet.
“I’ll always be behind you when you need me,” I said, simply. The battle raged around us, and yet it was her eyes I was locked onto, her face the only one I wanted to keep watching. She lifted a hand to my cheek, brushing a smear of blood from it.
“Thank you.”
“Next time, let me know before you start running down the gorge. Especially when the entire Salt army is here.”
“He’s got my mother’s bangles.” She pointed to Reza, who was moving closer to the bottom of the Mountain and through the pass. “I want them back.”
“He won’t let us get near him and we don’t have surprise as an advantage anymore.”
“Can you use more of your magic?”
I shook my head. “I am doing the most I can. And if he touches the vines, they’ll wither. I have no ability to get near him.”
“Not with life magic, you don’t.”
I stared at her, not understanding.
Until I did.
If life no longer obeyed me, then I would command death.
“Death magic.” I shook my head. “But that took me months to prepare last time. I gathered power slowly, in bodies found at the bottom of the forest. Where am I going to find the death I need for such a creature again?”
She looked at me incredulously, waving her arms around us. “We are on a battlefield!”
My eyes flitted to the dead, the bodies of the silver-armored Salt soldiers laying prone on the floor.
“I don’t know . . .”
Could I use the bodies here?
The rotting process would have begun, but I don’t know how much magic I could pull if they were freshly dead. The ones I had used before had always been partially decomposed, so I could access the power of the death-life cycle.
Unless I accelerated it.
The last time I had done that it had depleted me so much, I hadn’t been able to create another, to test my limits to their maximum.
Maybe now was that time.
A soldier ran to us, and I crossed blades with him, pushing him back, calling forth a tree root behind him so that he fell backward, onto an upturned scimitar on the ground. Someone else came to my side and I swung my sword up.
“Kiyan, it’s me,” shouted Mishah, her face splattered with blood, her mask askew. Her leather tunic was torn and blood ran down the side of her arm. “What are you both doing here?”
“Trying to get to Reza, but he’s got an army between us. I’m going to try something—Yas gave me the idea. But I need cover.”
“I’ll cover you—I’ll bring my unit around you.” She whistled three times, and rebels clustered around us, staving off the Salt soldiers. They extended their hands, roots rising from the ground at their call, twisting together to form a shield with me in the center.
“If I do this,” I called out to Mishah, “I need you to go with Yaseema. Make sure she’s not alone.”
“She won’t be alone.” She nodded back, then met my gaze. “Ever.”
“Good.” My eyes locked with Yaseema’s and I tried to pass everything I had felt about her in that look. She nodded and gave me a tremulous smile before whirling around and continuing toward the Viceroy with Mishah.
I concentrated, holding my hands high, starting the process of summoning death.
I could feel it, the life inside the dead, the spark of rot that had already started, desperate to return to the soil. I took those threads—hundreds already—and sent them ribboning into the void.
Until they were all mine.
I called them to me, whispering words of encouragement, coaxing it to obey, to work with me.
We will.
Something snapped into place, and this time, it felt more natural to call upon death and make it mine.
Move, I told them. Fight.
Screams sounded around me, and great thuds made me open my eyes, my hold still on the decomposing bodies that littered the field.
And now those bodies were moving, rising up from the ground, walking unnaturally, in a twisted, grotesque way.
I summoned the death in them, the beginnings of decomposition, the spark of life wrapped up in the loss of it that Reza couldn’t keep me from.
And it answered.
I could feel it growing, the decay accelerating, as the bodies moved faster, climbing on top of one another, forming a bigger, larger enemy, one that Reza couldn’t possibly destroy.
The dead soldiers climbed on top of each other, until twenty of them formed a leg, and then another.
Then more formed the body of a beast, shoulders, arms, and a head.
Until the creature was as tall as the River Palace.
It was a rotting creature of death, greater than any army Reza could call, and he had no hope of killing it.
For how does one kill death?
Body parts began falling off the giant creature as it moved toward Reza and the guards around him, a silver—armored army of his own soldiers rising from the dead against him.
Reza reared back, his eyes wide at the monster built from the bodies of the Court of Salt.
It was harder to control than the dead halmasti I’d summoned at the palace, because that was made of material in a further state of decay.
Here I had to push all my power into accelerating its decomposition to exert more control.
As a result, it lumbered like a slow-moving deo, a giant out for Reza’s blood.
Rebels and soldiers alike began to flee from the rotting monster, screams rising up from the battlefield in its wake.
As I wielded it, I saw Mishah and Yas still running toward Reza, but he was too distracted by the dead to notice.
If Yaseema managed to capture the crown, then that would be worth it.
If they freed my family, if they restored our power, it didn’t matter what Reza did to me, as long as our Court was free.
I closed my eyes again, the rebel guard around me moving tighter together when the Salt soldiers figured out who was controlling the beast. I could hear the battle raging around me, but I trusted my soldiers, trusted the protection I’d built to alert me if anyone got through.
For now, I concentrated on moving the beast, knocking down Salt soldiers in its path, until it finally reached Reza.
Reza turned to face it, and I gave him far more credit for his courage that I previously had. But now he didn’t have me to do his dirty work, so it was all up to him to go against my death magic.
He raised his arms and tried to funnel the magic from my creature, touching one of his own dead soldiers that I commanded. I could feel him pulling against it, just as he did with my dead creature at the palace, using King Rusul’s crown to channel his magic through.
But the crown only controlled the thread of life magic in the Court of River. Even with the twin crowns, he couldn’t stop my manipulation of the dead.
Yaseema was right about that.
At my thoughts, I searched for her in the battle but couldn’t see her or Mishah anymore.
I bade my creature swing its great arm forward, knocking Reza and his guards off their feet.
All my concentration was being pulled to controlling the beast and I could feel my strength waning, my arms shaking.
No.
I needed to hold on for her. There was no way I was going to let her face him alone.
My concentration broke as a shout sounded—too close.
I looked to my side to see Salt soldiers break through the branch barrier around me, still fighting my rebels. My creature made of dead bodies was still standing, but my focus was now split.
I pulled my sword from its sheath on my back, raising the blade and pushing the first soldier back while keeping the monster upright. I killed the second swiftly, being reminded of my time in the fighting pits with Talal as they threw five Salt soldiers at us for sport.
And we had defeated them.
I had one hand raised, holding my creature aloft while I fought off the Salt soldiers with my other hand.
But it was an impossible feat—my beast needed too much singular focus, and I couldn’t keep the level needed when more soldiers poured through the barrier.
Instead, I stepped back, holding the creature up as long as I could before tearing my hands away and giving all my attention to the soldiers who infiltrated the circle.
I slammed my sword against the scimitar of the first soldier, ducking the blade of the other and kicking against his shin so he lost his footing, which bought me precious time.
I tried to summon my life magic, but I was already conjuring death—it was too much. A sapling grew from the ground, until it sputtered and died, shriveling black.
My sword sliced through the belly of the first soldier, and he slid to his knees, dark eyes blown wide beneath his silver helmet. The other soldier came at me, his tail wrapping around my sword arm and yanking it down before he charged with his own blade, aimed at slitting my throat.
I sidestepped his attack, hitting him in the head with the hilt of my sword. He dropped to the earth, and my hand pressed to his back, pulling him forward to impale him on his own blade.
Blood was pumping through me, my pulse racing with adrenaline and magic and death and fight. It felt surreal to take on the Salt soldiers directly, to look them in the eye when I felt the thread of their life drain from their bodies, as I had wanted to do so many times.
My gaze wrenched up when I began to hear the screams, hundreds of them echoing in my head, all around the battlefield.
Without my control, the creature I’d created had begun to crumble, the decaying parts of the soldiers falling to the ground, slamming into the battlefield and Reza below.
I tried to find Yaseema and Mishah in the chaos, but it was impossible—bodies fell all around the pass, and both soldiers and rebels ran from the avalanche of death coming for them.
I broke through the shell of branches surrounding me, racing toward the creature, evading falling pieces of dead Salt soldiers falling from the sky.
I concentrated on the beast, trying to conjure the threads of rot once more, feeling my power flood through my veins with every step closer to it.
And in the din, I caught sight of wild dark curls as she charged the Viceroy, a blade flashing in the sun.