T here was an entire navy in the bay. So many ships blotted the horizon that I could see nothing but blood-red sails. I recognized those sails.
These ships had once belonged to Esmaris Mikov—one of the grandest fleets in the world, even though his territory was landlocked. To Esmaris, the usefulness or functionality of such a fleet did not matter. He had the money for it, and the power to flaunt it, so it became his.
And then, in a cruel twist of fate, it became Nura’s.
When I saw those sails, my first thought was, Fitting. Esmaris’s final knife to my back from beyond death.
People stood in the streets in shock, mouths open in horror. At the armada, yes—but also at the sky. Red streaks ran across it like cracks through stone or wounds in flesh.
“Fuck,” Max whispered. “How did she get so many people?” I couldn’t even speak.
It looked like the end of the world. Even the air was hot and cold, damp and dry, all at the same time. An indescribable toxicity filled my lungs with each breath, something that the deepest reaches of my magic recoiled from. I had felt this sensation before—in the presence of Nura’s failed experiments and in the presence of the Lejara. Even now, too, from the shards of the broken heart that sat at my hip, which seemed more volatile than ever.
Max and I looked at each other. He lifted our entwined fingers and kissed the back of my hand.
“Whatever happens now,” he said, “I’m very glad that we got to do that.”
I gave him a wry smile. “When I promised you I would fight for our future, I knew I would have to do it soon.”
“Noble of you.” His voice lowered, a shade more serious. “I forbid you from dying on me, Tisaanah. I would make a pathetic widower.”
“I won’t if you won’t.”
The corner of his mouth quirked. “Deal.” “Deal.”
His smile faded, and I watched his face morph from that of my friend, my lover—my husband—to that of Ara’s leader. I wonder if he saw the same transformation in me, too.
Nura sent a falcon to the shore requesting an audience with Max. Iya relayed this information as if it was a ridiculous proposition, but before the words even had left his lips, Max said, “Yes. We’ll go.”
Sammerin’s brows lowered in concern. “There will be no reasoning with her. We all know that. Are we sure we want to do this?”
“There is always something we can learn from a conversation,” I said.
Max lowered his chin in agreement. “I don’t know how she managed to get an army this big, but judging by this fleet, we are outnumbered. We owe it to the Arans who are about to die for this to take any possible chance, however small, at avoiding more bloodshed.”
To call that chance “small” was an overstatement. Nothing short of a miracle would stop Nura. But at least if we faced her, we would have an idea of what we were about to come up against. Maybe we could learn something.
Max extended his hand to me. He did not bother trying to tell me to stay behind.
“Tisaanah and I will go. And give me any Syrizen we have left. I need people who can get out of there fast if we need to.”
 |
WE MET Nura on a naval base, a tiny island about half a mile away from the shore. The first thing I noticed when we landed was the smell—it hit me like a wall, so thick I nearly gagged at my first breath. The noxious sensation weighing on my magic was so much stronger here. Max clearly felt it, too, as did the Syrizen to a lesser extent.
Nura was waiting for us. A gangway had been laid from her ship to the docks. When she approached, I had to fight hard to keep the shock from my face.
She looked nearly as bad as Zeryth had when he died. Black veins surrounded her eyes, sickly dark against her Valtain-pale skin. Her irises seemed so light in contrast that they looked like the milky glazed-over eyes of a corpse. She wore white, bloodstained trousers tucked into tall boots, and a sleeveless jacket that she left open to her sternum. She no longer hid her burn scars. Nor did she hide the darkness on her hands, crawling up her burnt flesh to her elbows.
Light fell over the faces of the soldiers that accompanied her—and this time, I couldn’t choke down my gasp. One of the Syrizen pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. Max’s nose wrinkled with disgust.
Now I understood how she had populated this armada.
The soldiers behind her were not human. They were not Fey. They were not even alive.
No, Nura’s soldiers were corpses—living death with empty faces, every part of them a little bit wrong, eerie light emanating from beneath their skin. Unlike the versions of Nura’s creatures that I had seen before, these were not decomposing or spiraling out of control. They stood, soullessly and obediently, behind her.
I realized that this was what Nura’s success looked like. This was what she had been trying to create all along.
Nura stepped onto the docks and gave us a chilling smile that did not reach her eyes.
Something is wrong with her, I thought. Like Zeryth. She has lost control.
“Hello Max. Tisaanah.” Her voice was smooth and melodic. “What an
honor, to be greeted by people of your elevated station.”
“Nura… what did you do?” Max could not look away from the corpses. “I succeeded where you failed. The Fey had something important, and I
took it from them.” Her smile faded. “And from what I hear, you thank me for this by trying to turn my own country against me.”
Max stepped forward—I had to resist the urge to grab him and pull him away from her.
“Look at yourself,” he murmured. “Look at what you’re doing.”
Her lip twitched. “I see you must be your old self again. Back to your moral judgements. You look.” She gestured behind her. “I’m waging a bloodless war. Just like you and your bleeding heart always wanted.”
“You sent Lightning Dust to your own people. You blew up your own country.”
“I didn’t—”
But then Nura’s gaze fell to Ara’s burning skyline behind us. Anger and grief warred across her face in erratic twitches.
“There is no room for dissidents in wartime,” she spat. “You were beside me when we learned those lessons in the Ryvenai War.”
“Stop pretending this is about the greater good. I fucking see you, Nura. I know you better than any other living person does. And maybe you’re right. Maybe you do have every right to be angry at Ara. But—”
“I love this country,” Nura snapped.
“I’ve seen what you do to the things you claim you love.” He thrust his hand out, gesturing to Ara’s smoking shoreline. “We can’t survive your Ascended-damned love, Nura. And I think you know it, too. Don’t tell me you think this is right.”
For a split second, Nura looked hurt. The lines across her face were like cracks, revealing more of her emotion than she had ever let slip before.
“I watched Tisaanah burn Lady Zorokov alive,” she hissed. “What a terrible death. I was there in the rubble as I listened to her scream. What did you have to say about that?”
Movement stirred behind Nura, at the rail of her ship. Crazed eyes and messy white hair poked up from between the soldiers. Vardir drew in a gasp, then hurried down the ramp. He barely looked at Max and I—only gaped past us, at the Aran coastline.
“Get back on the ship, Vardir,” Nura barked, without looking at him. Vardir did not appear to hear her. He lifted a shaking finger to Ara.
“Look—look at that!”
“Vardir—” Nura snapped.
“Look at that!” His round eyes snapped to Max, and then to me, landing there and holding my stare. “Do you feel this? Surely, with the connections you have to deep magics, you must.”
I realized what he was pointing to was not the wreckage, but the stream of red, shimmering smoke that rose from the ruins of the Tower—where the
heart had been smashed in the explosion. Even after Max and I had gathered the shards, the strange tear of magic still yawned there.
The sheer intensity of Vardir’s alarm made me pause. He was mad—but he also knew more about deep magic than nearly anyone else in the world.
“You feel it?” he said. “The cracks?”
The noxious sensation. The sense of instability, like the earth a thousand layers down was shifting. I did feel it.
Vardir seemed to find this silence validating. “You can’t,” he said to Nura, all the words running together into a single panicked sentence. “It would be a mistake, I miscalculated, it will all collapse. We have been drawing too deep, far too deep, you can’t—”
“Get back on the boat.” “But my—”
“Get back on the boat!” Swirls of murky shadows flared at her clenched fists, as if her magic momentarily escaped her grasp.
And despite the corpses, despite the Fey, despite the armada, it was this
moment—Nura’s loss of control—that scared me more than anything. “What is it, Vardir?” Max said, with a note of unease.
“It—” Vardir started, but Nura flung her hand up.
The burst of magic was unnatural, fitful. A flick of her fingers, and Vardir’s body was hurled like a rag doll backwards up the ramp, colliding with a wall of corpse soldiers and sending them staggering. They corrected themselves with uncanny precision, too-long limbs bending to balance their weight, faces blank.
When she whirled back to us, her eyes were a little wilder.
“We both want the same thing. The Fey are coming. I stole their greatest weapon, but they are still a force to be reckoned with. They won’t listen to reason.”
She outstretched her hand. Three fingers were now stumps. The ones that remained had blackened, pulsing blue and violet beneath the intensifying blood-red of the sky.
“I’ll ask you one last time to help me. The only way Ara survives this is if we do it together.” Her expression changed too fast, as if all her muscles rearranged in the span of a blink. Now she looked like a child, afraid and pleading. “We can still do this together, Max.”
Nura believed her own lies, her own false intentions. But I knew what it looked like when someone wanted power. I’d seen it in Esmaris, Ahzeen,
Zeryth. Even Reshaye. This was Nura’s revenge against a world that had been cruel to her. She was lost, just like so many others, and there was no guiding her back home.
There was a long silence, filled only with a high, soundless buzz that grew louder and louder, somewhere in a world beyond this one.
Max took a step closer.
“Max,” I hissed, reaching for him, but he slipped from my grasp. My heart was in my throat as he placed his hand in Nura’s.
“Max,” I said again.
A wobbly smile spread across Nura’s lips. “We always made such a good team.”
Max’s fingers tightened around her slender hand.
“I shouldn’t give a fuck,” he said, “but funny how even after everything, it still seems so important to me that you know I never wanted it to end this way.”
I’d watched Max fight countless times now, and yet the speed and accuracy of the strike still shocked me. Nura did not have time to react as the knife slid between her ribs the first time. Her body barely jolted.
The second time the knife entered Nura’s body, she started to fall.
Seconds, it seemed, became hours. Her army all moved at once, as if in a perfectly synchronized dance.
I had been waiting for this moment. I struck the first soldier, the one closest to Max, before he even had time to move.
Max did not release Nura’s hand as she collapsed, blood staining her white clothing. She gripped his shoulders as she fell, a wrinkle of confusion between her brows, as if, still, she did not expect him to do this.
I relished that confusion. I allowed myself to think, We got her.
Stupid.
Because then, a cruel, pained smile spread over Nura’s lips. “It hurts to be underestimated by you, of all people, Max.”
My satisfaction soured to dread. The soldiers began to move for us. I stabbed one, and then the other, rot spreading over already-decaying skin.
We needed to get out. I knew, implicitly, that we needed to get out now.
The heat on my face, the light, was not from Max’s flames. Nura had something in her hands. A stone—a stone of amber, with something inside. What was that?
A stab of pain through my palm. I looked down.
The wayfinder on my flesh glowed bright. It was a Lejara. She had a Lejara.
“No, you stupid child, no!” Vardir wailed, from the ship. “You’ll doom us!”
But Nura just smiled. The stone in her hands floated from her grasp, its light now blinding. I felt the magic beneath our world slipping like sand through an hourglass.
I grabbed Max, and Stratagrammed away—
—Just as the explosion hit, and the world went white.
