I didn’t trust his easy acquiescence, but I dragged myself away from the shop of jewels and focused on the pull in the centre of my chest. The emptiness on my ring finger was more evident than ever, and I was conscious of it, conscious that I would probably never get it back. The ring Varidian gifted me, along with soft, obsessive words more precious than any stone.
I’m quite tempted to give you all my weapons. I like the sight of you armed.
I like you Ameirah, genuinely, and I don’t remember the last time I liked someone.
You are not defective. It’s not your fault your family are monsters.
I’d never hear his voice again, would I? Never see that crazed light in his eyes as he watched me brandish a dagger or threaten his life. Never feel the beat of his heart against my cheek as he held me close.
“Ameirah,” Kamaal tried, but I shook my head, flicking tears off my cheeks. I knew he believed Varidian was still alive, but I couldn’t get Bakshi’s words out of my head. Unwavering, confident, and smug. Like he’d finally excised a thorn from his side.
“It’s here,” I said, clearing my throat minutes later when the tug in my chest became an insistent pulse. Like a second heartbeat I felt as keenly as the organ inside my own chest.
“In the park?” Kaazhim clarified, his gaze shrewd as he assessed the empty, treelined park and its purple benches, the lilac leaves that had drifted from spindly branches to form a carpet over grass the colour of jade.
I ignored the gentry and stepped up to the wrought arch over the entryway, the same violet metal as the benches inside. Kamaal kept close by my side, silent but reassuring. Was Varidian guiding him, wherever he’d ended up once he passed? Once the dark wyverns blasted him from the sky, along with Mak and the legion.
The lump swelled painfully in my throat. I would never see any of them again, never make bargains with Mak over jewels, never fly with the legion. I hadn’t realised I wanted to, but now they were gone, the loss hit me like a brick to the chest.
I pushed open the gate and walked under the arch without a word. I wasn’t sure my choked throat would allow me to speak anyway.
But a single step over the threshold and the scene in front of me changed. The sleepy park with its winding paths and lilac leaves vanished, replaced by a two-storey manor house.
The park had been an illusion, and the journal was here—inside this manor.
CHAPTER 25
VARIDIAN
“This is total bullshit,” Zaarib snarled under his breath as we flew low over the mountainous region between Morysen and Earlsorn. Not to mount an attack on the capital, as much as itkilledme to ignore the distant city where my wife had been locked up. Physical pain dug barbs into my chest, gouging through my heart, and I might have thought I was imagining it, but Mak could feel it too—through me. Ignoring the demand in my soul to protect Ameirah was tearing me apart.
But this, too, would help her. And my legion had yelled and argued and pleaded with me enough that I knew we needed backup, that flying alone, only the five of us, into a city armed to the teeth, was a sure way to die. And with us dead, what in hell would my father do to Ameirah?
He’d arrested her—why? What did he gain? Raheema had limped away from the healer diligently repairing her wounds, both inflicted on her during a fight to the fucking death stagedby the king and during her escape from the palace’s aerie, to give me more information. To insist I rescue her rider and inform me she was coming with me, wounded or otherwise. Even now, she flew at the tail of our formation, bearing Nabil, both of them angry and hurt and bristling with loss.
The king had told everyone Ameirah was the lightning soul, so no one but us would rush to save her. And from what Raheema could sense, she was locked somewhere belowground—right in the path of the cells that sprawled under the palace grounds and the nearby medina. The same ones that piece of shit locked me in when I refused to bend to his endless hunger for power.
“We can’t actually be consideringkillingsomeone,” Zaarib went on, as if we didn’t fly towards that exact task. “It’s insanity.”
“For Ameirah,” I reminded him, trying to smooth the bite from my voice. Trying, but not succeeding.
“But this is ridiculous. We’re a trained legion, not fucking mercenaries—”
“Could you two shut up and focus?” Shula hissed across the sunny sky—too bright for a stealth mission like this, but we couldn’t afford to delay. “According to Kanuri, our target is armed, powerful, and an accomplished killer. Keep bickering andwe’llbe the ones getting assassinated.”
I knew all that. Had memorised the entire letter the Torn Isle sent, Kanuri’s promise to support us in attacking Morysen in exchange for eliminating a threat to their safety—that of the leaders, the citizens of the Torn Isle and, if she was to be believed, all of Ithanys.
We knew bare facts, but it was enough to send us into the skies towards Earlsorn and the low-slung, sprawling homes within its walled kasbah. The sun baked their tan-stone roofs, vivid blue pools, and winding, tree-lined avenues. Here, the richest of Ithanys lived when they preferred quiet to the bustleof Morysen. And in one of the far smaller, clustered houses built on the grassy hills above the town, where the cooks and groundkeepers and cleaners of Earlsorn lived, our target could be found. A spymaster, according to Kanuri, with enough information to blackmail every gentry, high gentry, and leader of not just Ithanys—but Kalder, too.
No doubt, this man had uncovered something Kanuri wanted hidden. And if taking him out was the cost of her assistance, the cost of saving my Ameirah, I would do it. The rest of my legion were pissed off, with the exception of Shula who’d simply cracked her knuckles and nodded. It didn’t escape any of us that the man we’d been sent to assassinate might know vital information about the araethawn, the winged swarm, and the soldiers who dared to wear the clergy sigil while sowing fear.
We could let him live and learn how we might stop the spread of that darkness, or we could kill him and rescue my wife. It was no choice at all. If I damned the entire world to return her, safe, to my side, so be it.
The marriage mark on my chest seemed to tug at me, to wrench me towards Morysen with mounting urgency, but I gritted my teeth and rode on.
What do you sense in Earlsorn?I asked the lightning soul.
Nothing like there lurked in Daurith. Pockets of darkness. But behind us in Morysen… a whole ocean of it.