Page 17 of Dance of Stars and Ashes

“I was wondering if you had any questions for me,” Row asked, breaking through Zarya’s inner monologue and maybe the graphic image of Rabin lying in bed naked, his muscles glinting in the morning sunlight and his long hair tousled against crisp white sheets.

“What?”

“Questions? For me? About everything you learned? Maybe about your magic?”

Zarya focused on Row and then sat up straighter.

“Yeah. My magic. I only know what I learned from a book that Professor Dhawan wrote about Aazheri magic. But I’m lost. I don’t know how I created the nightfire, and I’m not sure how to do it again.”

“Five Anchors,” Row said, “that represent the five elements—air, water, fire, spirit, and earth. You already understand this part?”

Zarya nodded. “I do. I have them all.”

He nodded. “You would have to in order to possess such a rare gift.”

“Nightfire really hasn’t been used in all those years?”

“It’s true,” Row said.

“And all this time, you actually thought I might have it?”

He shrugged his wide shoulders. “I couldn’t be sure, but it made sense with everything else I knew.”

“What about the thing I could do with the stars?” she asked, referring to the benign way she could draw starlight from the sky when she lived at the seaside cottage. “You always seemed so interested in it but also scared of it.”

“I wasn’t sure what nightfire was exactly,” Row said. “I’d never seen it before, nor could I find anyone who had. The books describe it as an absence of light, but I hadn’t realized how much it looked like the night sky. In retrospect, your strange gift was most certainly another clue, but it wasn’t confirmation of my fears.”

“And this is why you didn’t want anyone ever seeing or knowing about it.”

“It was. That’s why I was scared. It obviously wasn’t typical Aazheri magic—but I couldn’t be sure of what it was.”

“Why—” Zarya stopped. She wanted to ask why he couldn’t have told her any of this. He’d explained himself upon his return—that her mother had been hiding her from her birth father, the northern king of Andhera, who might be angling to steal her magic—but it still didn’t feel like a satisfactory answer. She wasn’t sure she’d ever receive an explanation that felt like enough.

“Zarya—”

She lifted a hand. “You told me, and I won’t pretend I understand. But I wish you could have trusted me.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t trust you,” he said. “It was everyone else. I didn’t know who I was protecting you from.”

“Okay,” she said, brushing past it, for now, feeling yet another wash of tears pressing in her throat. It would take time to get over this—to move past the lies she’d been fed for so long. “Tell me more about the anchors. Five of them.”

Another question burned on her tongue, but she didn’t dare voice it out loud.

What if there are six?

Both Row and Dhawan seemed so sure that only five were accessible. That the sixth was lost. Koura was so sure the darkness had been banished forever. What did it mean that she could touch it?

Row had claimed nightfire was a way to control the darkness, but Zarya had the disquieting sense it was capable of much more than that. If she could control it, then did it have some part of the darkness itself? And why did Row and Dhawan not see that? She was sure that being captured by the giant winged demon had been the catalyst that forced her nightfire out—they were connected.

This was why her magic had called the naga in the swamp. They, too, were born of that same dark magic and must have been responding to a kinship with those ribbons of starlight, even in its inert form.

As she’d lain awake last night, still pumped full of adrenaline, she’d discovered she could push the sixth anchor behind the others. Lock it away by lining it up behind her fire anchor so a perfect five-pointed star remained.

Darkness. It whispered to her with a seductive purr.

“Every Aazheri has a unique signature,” Row said, following up on her question about the anchors. “Their anchors manifest themselves as images or avatars.”

“What’s yours?”