Page 68 of Wings of Cruelty and Flame

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

AMEIRAH

Riding was agony, every bump and jolt driving shards of pain through my bruised tailbone and up to my ribs. It took three hours of weaving around sharp grey peaks and low slung mountains to finally lose the wyverns stalking us. Varidian only allowed us to pause for five minutes for me to mount Makrukh in a rush of frantic movement and desperate jumps. He’d held me so tightly to his body since that my ribs screamed at me. I could have told him to loosen his grip at any time, but I needed the reminder that I made it out, that I was alive. I’d been so convinced I would die.

I kept my right hand curled into a fist even as the wind pulled at me, refusing to touch Makrukh without a glove, gripping his spike with my other. Varidian might have been immune to my magic but that didn’t mean Mak was.

When the wind slammed into my face, air aggravating my smoke-sore airways, a cough rattled my body, bringing tears to my eyes. My ribs felt shattered, mangled inside me, butthe coughs weren’t helping. I still had smoke stuffed up my nose, lurking in my lungs, every inhale a reminder of what had happened at Wyfell. It didn’t matter that clean air surrounded us now, that the mountains offered calm and safety; there was no forgetting the sound of the souk burning, or of people screaming, or the sight of the farmer murdered on the platform like the first act in a horrific play. Had Masuma and her mother made it to safety? My eyes stung.

“Ameirah,” Varidian began.

“I’m fine,” I cut in, the same answer I’d given half a dozen times since we entered the mountains. I hadn’t seen any other wyverns for an hour, except the silver-blue that followed Mak so close he kept snapping warning with his teeth. She was undeterred, pressing as close as she could get. As close to me, I suspected. I didn’t have the space in my mind to think about what she suggested, that I was her rider. Of course, there was plenty of space for all my father’s, brothers’, and Xiu’s remarks about me being so vile and evil that no wyvern would allow me within ten feet of them, let alone permit me to mount.

“I can feel your turmoil. Talk to me,” he urged, covering my bare fist with his hand, heat bleeding into me.

“How many people died?” I asked finally, my voice a rasp barely audible over the whistle of air through mountain passes.

Varidian was silent, the quiet charged between us. “Too many,” he said eventually, his voice raw. “But we survived. We survived.”

At what cost,I wanted to ask, but that wasn’t fair. I didn’t know what would have happened if he and Mak hadn’t found me, if they hadn’t carried me away from the burning souk, from the dark clergy who had multiplied like rats in Wyfell’s streets. I knew others must have run to their wyverns and flown to safety like we did, but there were thousands of fae left. Thousands whohad no wings, no escape. My breath shuddered in my chest, sending a flash of pain through my middle.

“It feels like this every time,” Varidian said, resting his chin on my shoulder, his voice subdued. “When we survive and others don’t. It should feel like relief, but instead it’s air crushed from your lungs, a pit in your stomach, and endless black thoughts.” His lips found the side of my neck. “I feel it too, dearling, you’re not alone.”

I screwed my eyes shut for a moment. “There was a woman and her daughter. We hid in a doorway while wyverns flew over us and—I don’t know if—if—”

“That’s the part I hate,” he confessed, stroking my stomach in small circles. “Never knowing. Even if we could track down the woman using her name, a city the size of Wyfell would have dozens, and after an attack on that scale…”

“I know,” I murmured, my eyes stinging as Makrukh’s wide wings carried us around the sharp edge of a grey mountain, the rock familiar—we must have been close to the Red Star.

“There are people I think about, some of them everyday,” Varidian said sombrely. “I don’t know if they made it, if the tigers got them, or if Kalder had killed them but—Aliah sat me down and gave me a stern talking-to one day. Not knowing works both ways—good and bad. We can choose what to believe. We don’t have to believe the worst. Even if we never know what happened, we can choose to believe they found a way out, survived, and rebuilt their lives somewhere new. It doesn’t work on the worst days but I focus on what Aliah told me. I remember we can choose.”

I bit the inside of my lip, the sting in my eyes fiercer. I chose to believe Masuma’s mother waited until Mak and the blue wyvern chased off the emerald, and then they ran for safety. I chose to believe they made it to the outskirts of the city, where people had begun to evacuate. I chose to believe they survivedand were being taken care of even now. Maybe someone had given Masuma a wooden doll like the one I owned when I was young, with a knitted blue dress and gold edging and long, black hair.

“Thank you,” I said after a moment, my voice hoarse.

Varidian kissed my shoulder in response. “Will you tell me if you’re okay?”

I inhaled a slow, cautious breath, trying to avoid more spikes of pain, and asked, “If I agree to tell you, will you promise not to let go of me?”

“There’s no force or magic in this world that could make me let you go.”

His wild declaration almost made me smile. He was one of the most dramatic, crazy, romantic men I’d ever known, and I’d known fictional men.

“I’m not okay,” I admitted, blinking back tears, the mountains swirling ahead of us. “I keep seeing that man get killed, and the clergy marching through the city like an army, and the wyverns circling in the sky for prey, setting innocent people alight. I can’t think of anything but that, and I want to cry, or scream, or maybe unleash my rage on those wyverns with my bare hands. I can barely think for pain because my ribs got crushed and I think—I think they might be badly damaged. And I was so, so afraid you were killed in the crush. I saw someone go down and never get up again and I thought—what if the same happened to you? Even with you here, with your arms around me, I remember that fear and I can’t breathe.”

“Ameirah, look at me,” he said, his voice the calm to my panic.

I turned my face, meeting his eyes through a blurry veil. He kept one hand on my stomach, the other lifting to my face, his thumb caressing my jaw. “Those feelings are completely normal, dearling. If you want to cry, I’ll hold you. If you want to scream,scream—the mountains won’t judge you and neither will I.” His lips pressed to the spot between my eyes.

My next inhale shuddered. “I can just… scream?”

“As loudly as you want.” He kissed the bridge of my nose this time, then my lips.

“What should I scream?”

“Fuck usually works.”

I laughed, ignoring the way my stomach swooped when Mak dove around the edge of a mountain, trusting Varidian not to let me go as I kissed him softly. I didn’t think I could laugh, but somehow Varidian brought it out of me. He made me feel okay even for just a second, and that thought made me kiss him harder.

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