Page 41 of Wings of Cruelty and Flame

I turned and pressed my cheek to the cold window, choking down nausea.

Shula hovered, still holding the plate. I wanted to strike it from her hands, wanted to slam her against the wall and drive one of my knives beneath her skin, but three words held me back, kept me in place.I loved her.

“She joined our legion three years ago,” she said, with the tortured air of a person recounting a tragedy. “She pissed me off for the first few weeks. Too bubbly, too happy. She smiled too damn much.”

My eyes stung. That sounded like Naila. She was always making me smile, even when I wanted to hide and cry for a whole day after someone made a snide remark about my hair or my eyes or my features. Or my mother—it didn’t matter who she was, the staff at our home had a hundred theories and delighted in whispering them loudly enough for me to overhear. Naila was the only person who made it bearable.

And this legion murdered her.

“Naturally, everyone liked her,” Shula continued, her voice distant, guarded. “The whole fucking world revolved around her, and it pissed me off. She could do no wrong with the others. Even the wyverns liked her. On our first assignment with her inthe legion, I waited for her to crumble and fall apart at the reality of war.”

Like I did today. I swallowed the lump in my throat, hearing the mother scream, watching her son shredded to bits. I flinched.

“But it was Nabil who collapsed. He’d been with us two years by then and he’d seen enough horrors to last a lifetime, but Buchra was injured, slit from belly to asshole.”

She had such a lovely way of storytelling. “The green wyvern is female?”

Shula nodded, her eyes unfocused, seeing the past instead of the cold tower landing. “She nearly died, and Nabil with her. Kaawa cared for him, made sure he ate while the healers worked on Buchra, even coaxed him into leaving the wyvern’s side to bathe. That pissed me off, too. I’d never met anyone so sickeninglynice.Even Aliah has sharp teeth when provoked, but Kaawa…” She shook her head. “Naturally, I picked a fight with her. And you know what she did?”

“What?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“She knocked my fists away and hugged me. It stunned me to silence. I was so ready to fight her and she disarmed me with ahug.Even that pissed me off, but after that I couldn’t resent her as much.” Shula laughed bitterly, making me jump. “It was all a fucking game to her—the sweetness, the way she cared for us, cared for me.”

I shook my head. “No. Naila was always like that. She was kind.”

“She was a manipulativebitch,”Shula snapped, startling my back into the window frame. “When we evacuated refugees from the Fallow Gate, she left us to deliver a missive across the wall. When we were digging children out of the rubble of Jamil’s great nurseries, she fed Kalder information that enabled them to make a precise and efficient strike on the Paper Flower.”

I sucked in a knife-sharp breath, cold deluging my blood. Everyone had heard about the sacking of Paper Flower, the botanical city named for the bloom that grew on its forested hills. A hundred women and children had been taken as prisoners of war, men slaughtered on sight. The women were returned three months later when Ithanys refused to bow to their demands, their bodies ripped apart by tiger claws, eyes hollowed from their skulls, ribs parted and left as twisted sculptures on every last body.

“That’s…” I didn’t have the words. “Naila wouldn’t do that.” It emerged as a whisper. “She wouldn’t.”

“She might not have known what they planned, but she gave them the means to do it.”

“Did you see—”

“Yes,” Shula bit out. “We were in the four legions who buried the dead.”

I swallowed a bitter taste. “I’m sorry. No one should have to see that.” Kaldics were brutes, violent and ruthless with no lines they wouldn’t cross.

“She kissed me for the first time when we returned from the mass burial,” Shula said, her voice as hollow as her gaze. “I thought it was because she was traumatised like me. I thought she needed the connection, the reassurance of another living fae.” Shula dragged a hand down her face, pressing her fingertips into her cheeks until they dimpled. “She was covering her actions, distracting me.”

I felt sick. I couldn’t reconcile her words with my bright, loving cousin. But doubts crept in like poison vines, spreading, spreading with every word. I remembered the times Naila went to the capital to study, and remembered the weeks she’d travel to Basilienn to care for those sick with poppy fever. One time she was away for six weeks and returned with hollow eyes andstories of patients dying while she tended to them. Had that been after she saw the carnage at Paper Flower?

“How long ago? Two years? October in sixty-four?”

She missed my birthday that year and returned with orange blossom sweets from a far-slung city. I’d nagged at her to get me another box of them but she said I’d become a pig if I ate another box, and it was impossible anyway. I’d never quite wonderedhowit was impossible or dwelled on where those sweets had come from.

Now I was wondering if they were Kaldic.

“No,” Shula replied. Relief hit me like a slap until she said, “I remember that month; it was fucking hell. Rained constantly, dumping a whole year’s worth on the wall as we patrolled it. The stone was so slick people fell to their deaths. Even a wyvern broke her neck, unable to open her wings in time. There were threats of a new Kaldic general breaching the gates, so we were never far from the wall that year.”

Relief turned to ashes. “She was with you that October?”

Shula nodded. “At that point we’d been together in secret for months, although I reckon Aliah knew. She sees everything, that woman. The whole legion was stuck on the wall, fending off raiding parties and tiger packs, hunting down the few that managed to slip through. Why is that month important?”

I swallowed, staring out the window at Zaarib as he stabbed and slashed the air with his heavy sword, icy rain slicking his clothes and hair to his body. He’d been out there for hours. I almost hoped he caught hypothermia. “I don’t remember many other dates when Naila was gone, but I know she missed my birthday that year.”

“Your birthday’s in October?”

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