“What was that?” She laughed, the sound driving into my head until warmth trickled from my ear. Blood, I knew without looking. I cringed, her magic pressing on my bones until I hunched.
“I said,” I rasped, my voice thick as copper wrapped around my taste buds, “No.”
Her mouth parted to show sharp rows of teeth. A monster’s smile.
I barely even felt it as Kamaal’s hand gripped my upper arm, dragging me back a few steps, angling us towards that door.
“How about we trade?” the queen suggested, almost mildly, as if every sound from her lips didn’t make my magic flinch andmy blood flow sluggishly, fighting the oppressive weight of that power. “Give me the journal and I’ll give you your grandmother.”
She moved as fast as an adder, and though Mingyue blocked the queen’s first attempt to grab her, clearly well trained, she didn’t see the second blow coming. Not from a knife or even from magic, but from the elongated fingernails of the Zalaam queen’s left hand. I tried to stagger forward, my mind full of static noise as blood shone on the dull black of her nails. Stone, like the glittering black of the crown around her helm.
She wrapped her bloody hand around Mingyue’s golden throat, and I felt it again—another tug on that thread of fate. Mingyue’s chest heaved, her teeth gritted against the pain, but her eyes locked on mine. Flicked towards the not-so-secret exit in clear instruction.
“Are you truly my grandmother?” I asked, my voice a thin, reedy thing.
“Your mother was Jiang Yishan, my daughter,” Mingyue said, not with pain but with rage. She whipped her hand up, a razor-edged dagger of solid jade plunging into the Zalaam queen’s wrist and twisting until stone met bone. The queen hissed, deeper than any mortal voice had a right to be, entirely bestial. Cold shuddered down my arms, and my surprise, my fear, allowed Kamaal to drag me back another two steps.
“I’m sorry,” he said in my ear. “But I refuse to let you die.”
I fought as he hauled me towards that door, whipping around to stare as the queen and my grandmother met in a horrific clash, the sound of stone nails meeting honed jade enough to make me flinch.Please let her win, please let her survive.
I had a grandmother, and she didn’t look at me with hatred or disgust. Rather an awestruck disbelief that was so soft it felt like a hug. Though there was nothing soft about the way she fought the Zalaam queen, trying to knock the helmet off her head and when that failed, swiping low with the dagger. Not justwell trained but lethal, and so fast that I knew she must train every day to keep up her strength and swiftness.
“The book, Ameirah,” the queen said, and struck with her magic while Mingyue was distracted by a wide arc of her pale hand. Pale—not the deep gold or sand skin tones of the Ithanysian people. Was she from this land, then? Was she from Cirestia? Had she flown through a gate all those years ago, the way we flew through the colourful window?
Those questions were blasted from my head as if by a destructive wave as black, glittering magic struck Mingyue’s back, bursting through her chest like a parasite.
“The journal,” the queen bit out, watching Mingyue writhe on her magic like a fish caught on a hook. She couldn’t get free, and every movement widened the wound, until blood darkened her clothes, spilling down her flowing, gauzy clothes to the floor where it began to pool. So much blood. Too much.
And it didn’t matter that the threads of fate were tangled. This was my grandmother, a chance to find real family, not whatever Falael Jaouhari and my vicious brothers had been. Something better.
I drove my elbow into Kamaal’s side, called on a lesson Aliah gave me in one of the fortress’s cold, stone rooms, and cracked my hand into his wrist, forcing his fingers open. Before he could react, I spun, my heart leaping into my throat, killing the air flow to my lungs. I grew lightheaded, but kept moving.
“Enough,” I spat, staring at the slits in the dark metal helmet, fighting a shiver at the oily, poisonous feel of it. As if the metal was every bit as magic as the woman who bore it.“Enough.”
I threw the journal at the queen, half hoping it struck her throat and sent her stumbling back, coughing, giving Mingyue a chance to deliver a killing blow. The Zalaam queen—the queen who lived in Ithanysian nightmares even centuries later,the queen whose legacy of blood and death and terror had embedded itself in the identity of my home.
She snagged the book from the air with a flicker of dark magic. The pressure in my head, my blood, my bones spiked until a whimper slipped free.
“Now leave,” Mingyue snarled, slashing her jade dagger through the spear of magic piercing her middle, to no effect.
I lifted my bare hands, shrugging off Kamaal’s attempt to grasp my arms as I raced across the room, my movements laboured and slow like I ran through a storm wind. I reached for the Zalaam queen, as if this moment was why I’d been given this magic, so I might kill her before she could try to enslave my home again.
Fire blasted my hair back from my face, singeing my skin as she incinerated the journal with a thought. A slow, satisfied smile crossed her face when I froze, staring in horror. Nothing remained. She’d destroyed the book entirely.
“Oh, Ameirah,” she sighed, exasperation and hatred twisting her voice into something sharp, something that plucked at my throbbing mind.
“How do you know my name?” I spoke with effort, fighting against the tide of the sheer power that hung in the air, pushing me back, away from Mingyue. She’d begin to twitch, impaled on the dark spike of magic.
“I know every member of this hateful family,” the queen hissed, her mouth tightening as she looked down just as Mingyue collapsed to the ground.
I jerked forward as if I could stop her, my palm in front of me as if the deadly touch might stop the tide of power shoving me away. But nothing stopped the queen tearing free her dark spike of magic and thrusting it into Mingyue’s stomach this time, until blood bubbled up on her lips.
“I raised the alarm the moment I saw you,” she said with a husky laugh that gave way to violent coughing. “The entire city will be upon you. The entirerealm.”
The smile on the Zalaam queen’s face didn’t slip. Neither did her helm or the crown atop it as she bent and wrapped black-nailed fingers around the pendant around Mingyue’s throat. A sliver of stone as dark and glittering as the crown, I realised with a sharp drop in my stomach.
“Don’t,” I snarled, terrified for reasons I couldn’t put into words, like deep in my soul Iknewshe could never get her hands on that pendant. I struggled against the magic keeping us apart. “Don’t!”
