Текст книги "The Serpent and the Wings of Night"

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

“Sleep,” he said. “Let yourself recover.”

Sleep. Sleep sounded good. Not as good as sex. But good.

I allowed Raihn to lower me gently to the ground. And I allowed him to lay down beside me, the warmth of his body, big and solid, curling around mine.

My eyelids immediately began to flutter. His hand rested on my waist, offering quiet stability and nothing more.

But then his hair tickled my face. His mouth, warm and now too-familiar, brushed against my cheek. And his words shivered over the crest of my ear as he whispered, “Thank you.”

“It was the practical thing,” I choked, like we were just talking about the blood and not the—the—everything.

He lay back down behind me. The world started to blur. And the last thing I heard as sleep took me was Raihn’s voice, so quiet it seemed like he might be speaking to himself.

“You are the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen, Oraya.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

I woke up warm. Unusually warm. Pleasantly warm. The sort of warm I dreamed about in the crooked bed with the scratchy blanket.

Safe warm.

Except I wasn’t in a bed, I was lying on hard, gritty stone. And the source of the warmth wasn’t a blanket but a wall of a man, whose chest was pressed to my back and chin rested on the top of my head, arms loosely holding me.

The events of the day before came back to me slowly. Raihn’s body under mine. His mouth against my throat. My hips rolling against him and—

A flush rushed to my face. I stirred, suddenly too conscious in too many different ways of Raihn’s arms around me.

Apparently, he was already awake. I rolled over to see him looking down at me, hair hanging around his face in red-black tendrils, a smirk at his lips.

“Did you know that you snore?”

Spoken with the casual lilt of our usual banter on the surface, but I heard the note of awkwardness beneath it. Like he didn’t quite know how to interact with me after that, either.

I cleared my throat and sat up as he stood. I was… disheveled. I ran my fingers through my hair, which I was certain looked as messy and undone as I felt. The effects of the venom had worn off, leaving me strangely well-rested, slightly groggy, and extremely self-conscious.

“Well.” I eyed him up and down. “You seem better.”

That was an understatement. He looked like himself again, rather than the shade of a person he had been the night before. His wounds had already healed dramatically, and he moved around unencumbered.

“I feel it,” he said.

I stood, and the silence stretched. Raihn looked like he was getting a little too close to giving me another “thank you” that meant too much and lingered too long.

Who knew the man was such a sap.

“I—” he started, right on cue.

“This is meant to be Nyaxia’s rescue of Alarus, right?” I cut him off, curt and businesslike. “When they captured him.”

The darkest part of Nyaxia’s story. She and her husband had broken out of prison once, but Alarus was lured back to the White Pantheon with the promise of amnesty for Nyaxia. Instead, the other gods dragged him out to the empty plane between the divine and mortal worlds. When Nyaxia realized what had happened, she tore apart the deadlands looking for him.

But she was too late. By the time she reached him, her husband had been decapitated and left to rot.

“These are the deadlands,” I said. “There must be an end point that we need to reach.”

Raihn’s face shifted. For a moment, I thought he was going to try yet again to talk about what had happened between us the night before.

I breathed a sigh of relief when instead, he just nodded. “Probably.”

The two of us went to the mouth of the cave, our weapons drawn. Unlike last night, it was now eerily quiet—so quiet I questioned whether the poisoned contestants had all died off. There were no voices or screams, only distant wails of animals and a hissss that slithered through the air as smoke rolled in waves over the gray dirt. That deadly mist was worse than last night—soupy and thick, stinging my eyes even from this distance. It even pooled in the sky, a blanket covering the stars and moon completely.

A few minutes later, it dissipated just enough to reveal the ghostly silhouette of the landscape. Not that there was much to see. Only a few gnarled, broken trees dotted the land, emerging like silent, mournful sentinels. Jagged rocks dotted the empty expanse, vicious as bared teeth.

Last night, this place had seemed dead. Now? It seemed more than that—not just dead but murdered, grieving in violent death throes.

A strange sensation prickled at the back of my neck. A nagging thought that lingered just out of reach.

“There.” Raihn’s voice was very close to my ear. I followed his pointing hand. “There’s something over there. Gold. See it?”

I couldn’t. “Your eyesight is better than mine.”

“It’s there. It must be the end.”

“How far?”

“Miles.”

Fantastic.

“The smoke is…” I rubbed my arm, where the leather bubbled. “I don’t know what it is, but it hurts.”

And worse, there was now so much more of it than the night before.

“I remember,” Raihn said, touching his own burnt armor.

“So we can’t just walk through the center. And you can’t fly above it, because it just collects up there.”

I craned my neck around the opening of the cave. The cliff—if that was even what this place was; it was so hard to tell when everything was so jagged and formless—extended straight in both directions, before devolving into an unstable-looking pile of rocks. But, the land was raised along its edge—as if the broken forest before us was a crater, and we had found shelter at the edge of its rim. The ridge curved in both directions, gradually climbing up, before my weak human eyes lost track of it in the darkness.

“Could we climb along that?”

Raihn followed my gaze. “It’s less direct, but it would take us to the gate. And there would be less smoke.”

Less, but not none. I watched the smoke billow up from the ground in puffs. Thicker for several seconds, then thinning as the breeze shifted it. Then thicker again, as a new wave rose from the earth.

I started counting silently.

“What if—” Raihn started, but I barked, “Shh!” and tried not to lose my count.

There.

Ninety seconds.

“It’s predictable,” I said. “The way the smoke moves. Look.”

This time, Raihn watched with me.

“See?” I said, when the billow swelled again. “Ninety seconds. It’s predictable. And it takes a long time for the cloud to get up there.” I pointed to the crest of the rim. “We would be able to see the wave coming.”

“And do what?”

“Hide?”

“Where does one hide from smoke?”

“Behind… a rock?”

I knew even as I said it that it was a stupid idea.

Raihn gave me a look that said, That’s a stupid idea.

I threw my hands up. “Well, what’s your brilliant suggestion, Raihn?”

He was quiet for a long moment, thinking. Then his mouth curled. “The man I killed yesterday was Shadowborn, wasn’t he?”

I couldn’t believe we were risking our lives for a fucking cloak.

The only reason I didn’t object more to this was because Raihn’s fight had not been far from here. Still, we had to do some strategic guessing to figure out where the body might be—if it was even still there at all—and the consequences of being wrong were dire.

We decided Raihn would go alone. He could fly faster than I could run, and the smoke would affect him less than me.

“Wait until it’s thinnest,” I told him. “And if you don’t find him, come back right away. Don’t waste time.”

“I know.”

All I could think about was how weak Raihn had been just hours ago—how, even now, I could see the remnants of it.

I swallowed and said, as coldly as I could manage, “Don’t do anything stupid.”

He looked back, narrowing his eyes at me. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were worried, princess.”

“I don’t want to have to make that climb alone on foot.”

He just chuckled. “Sometimes I have my doubts, but you really do like me, don’t you?”

And before I had time to snap at him again, he was gone. His magnificent wings spread as the smoke thinned, and he soared down into the pit.

Ten seconds passed.

Twenty. Thirty-five.

I unsheathed my blade.

If he wasn’t back by sixty, I would go, I decided.

My eyes ached from not blinking as I stared into that smoke.

For some reason, my mind went to Nyaxia. How she must have felt fighting her way across the deadlands, all alone, desperate to save her husband. It struck me with sudden clarity just how terrible it must have felt to be out of reach of someone you cared for—to feel utterly powerless to protect them.

Fifty-five seconds.

That was it. I was going.

I drew in a deep breath and held it. As if that would do anything.

I started running—

–And then something knocked me away. I was ready to fight, but a low laugh and a now-familiar hold on my shoulders stopped my hand before it moved. Raihn had yanked me back away from the smoke, a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. His wings were still out, glistening every shade of night like melted paint in the darkness.

“Were you coming to rescue me?”

“For a second time,” I muttered, and sheathed my blades.

“I’m touched. No need, though. Look.”

He released me and grabbed the fabric he’d bunched up in his other hand, letting it fall. It was dark silver—a favorite of the House of Shadow—and looked as light as air. It shimmered and rippled like moonlight itself.

“Avathrian silk,” Raihn said. “Just like I thought. One of the Shadowborn’s finest creations. Looks fragile, but this shit filters out everything. A bitch to cut through, too.”

I thought of the Shadowborn man’s corpse, practically split in two. Hadn’t stopped Raihn last night.

“Why don’t they make all their clothes out of it?”

“It’s expensive and very hard to work with. So they tend to use it for simple things.” Raihn affixed the cloak to his shoulders, then raised the hood. He looked as if he was covered in molten steel. Even dirty and wounded, he was a sight to behold. Fearsome and majestic.

“Will it be enough?” I asked.

He shrugged, making the silken fabric ripple. “Let’s hope so.”

“That inspires confidence.”

“Oh, right. My idea is the stupid one. Let’s hide behind a rock instead.”

I pursed my lips. Fair. It was the best option we had.

So, we decided, Raihn would wear the cloak, carry me, and move us both as quickly as possible across the rocky crest in ninety seconds. Then we would stop, take cover beneath the cloak, wait the next ninety counts for the wave of smoke to dissipate, and continue. We had no idea what we would encounter up there—monsters, competition, or both—and Raihn would be unable to defend us while moving. That would be my job. He’d be the wings. I’d be the teeth.

Repeat, until we arrived at the gate.

Or until someone else attacked and killed us.

Or until the smoke penetrated the Shadowborn fabric and ate us alive.

Fabulous.

We prepared ourselves, and Raihn scooped me up in his arms again, holding me tight to his chest while I readied my blades. From the first time he held me this way, it had felt… different than I expected it to, even if I wasn’t ready to admit it. Now, in the wake of last night, I was very conscious in a very different sort of way of all the places our bodies touched.

His lips ducked close to my ear. “Ready?”

Not really. But as close as I was going to be.

“Ready.”

And then we were rushing into the deadly mist.

CHAPTER FORTY

This wasn’t flying. This was just hurtling ourselves through the air, all finesse stripped away in favor of speed. My eyes burned and face stung as bugs, dust, and stray branches clawed at us. Raihn had to move erratically, not in graceful arcs but messy jerks to dodge trees and piles of rock while keeping us low enough to avoid the cloud of acidic smoke above us—and all while fighting with the flowing fabric that threatened to tangle in his wings. I struggled to keep my eyes open and weapons ready, barely blinking.

Thirty counts, forty, sixty-five, seventy—

“Now!” I shouted.

Raihn held me tighter, and we slammed to the ground. He pushed me down first—hard enough that I let out a strangled oof—and braced himself above me, throwing the cloak over us both.

“Smaller,” he grunted, and I pulled my legs up tight to my torso and rolled to the side, making myself as tiny as possible beneath him.

I’d never been so grateful to be as short as I was. It was the only reason why this worked. Raihn had said that he would magic his wings away so they didn’t get in the way, but he must not have had time, because he ended up pressing them down tight to our sides, the cloak coming down around us. My heartbeat quickened at the suffocating closeness—I was pinned, the ashy ground beneath me, Raihn’s body above, his wings on either side.

I couldn’t see anything. But I felt it, when the smoke rolled in, because Raihn tensed.

I pressed my hand to his chest in a wordless comfort.

“Shut your eyes,” he commanded, just before the burning started.

I squeezed them shut tight, but I still felt it. On my flesh, too—first in the exposed skin, like my wrists and hands and neck, and then the rest of me.

Ten seconds in, I thought, Maybe this will kill us.

But it didn’t. The pain remained unpleasant, but far from deadly.

Ninety endless seconds.

When Raihn finally lifted off me, my skin, lungs, and eyes stung, but I was otherwise unhurt. He would have gotten the worst of it. I had no time to even look at him, though, before he grabbed me and we were flying once more.

My mind emptied of everything but counting. We had to make it miles like this, in ninety-second spurts. I lost track of how many times we repeated it, my body slamming against the ground again and again.

We were lucky at first, encountering no danger other than that smoke. But then, about halfway to our destination, Raihn threw back the cloak and we were immediately attacked by three wolves, foamy-mouthed and visibly starving. Raihn didn’t have time to grab his sword, instead unleashing an immediate burst of magic to force them back—far weaker than usual, considering his still-fresh injuries.

Fifteen seconds.

I had to react fast. I gutted one while it was still stunned from Raihn’s blast, and the other when it exposed its throat to me as it dove.

Forty seconds.

The third refused to die. It lunged for me while I was still pulling my blade from its companion.

Fifty-five.

I fought, and I counted. Raihn leapt in to help, taking a nasty bite intended for me. The wolf clung to life, thrashing back at every wound.

Sixty seconds. Seventy.

Eighty, as I finally killed it with a strike and a burst of Nightfire—just in time to look down the steep incline of the crater and see a wave of misty black coming for us, ten seconds early.

Raihn threw me down roughly. I saw him wince as the smoke rolled over us. We were nose to nose. The fabric didn’t cover all of him.

“You were too close,” he whispered.

“Blame the wolf.”

This time, when those ninety counts were up, Raihn didn’t move quite as quickly. As he scooped me up again, I eyed his wings. The tips had been poking out of the cloak. Now the feathers there were slightly ragged, the black flecked with what I at first thought was blood, and then realized were actually spots of red coloring.

We flew again, again, again. We were getting tired. Moving a bit slower when we needed to be going faster. I knew that the burns on Raihn’s wings and legs were bothering him, as was the wolf bite.

At last, the arch came into sight. My eyesight was so poor in the dark and the fog that we were surprisingly close by the time I could make out that gold gate cutting through the night. Maybe two more sprints.

“I see it now,” I said, relieved.

Raihn’s hands were already at my waist, preparing to carry me again. “You should be ashamed of that terrible human—”

He stopped short.

I turned. He was looking down at something. We had climbed high, the rocky ridge now looming far above our starting point, and farther still above the deepest parts of the crater below. From this distance, it looked like a cauldron of mist. It had been difficult to see the curvature of the landscape at the bottom, but up here, the shape of it was unmistakable, the circle so well defined that it seemed as if it had been man-made.

The hairs rose at the back of my neck. Once again, an odd sensation of familiarity passed over me.

I glanced at Raihn, and his expression made me stop breathing. Anger and fear and devastation, painted over every feature.

I had only seen that once before. When he thought Mische was dead.

Something silver glinted in the dirt. He kneeled down and picked it up. Stared at it.

“This is…”

He sounded as if he didn’t realize he was speaking aloud. The silver in his fingers glinted as his hands shook. I realized it was a street sign—or part of one.

We were running out of time.

“Raihn, we have to go before—”

He rasped, “This is Salinae.”

Salinae?

I almost laughed at him, because it was so outlandish. Salinae was one of the biggest cities in the House of Night. When the Rishan had been in power, it had been their second capital. I’d researched it obsessively, preparing for the day I could storm it. I’d studied every drawing, every map.

“Salinae? That’s…”

Ridiculous, I started to say.

But I’d studied every map.

And suddenly, there it was, superimposed over this desolate wasteland. Piles of smashed rock became buildings—the city hall there, the church there, the library there. Veins of packed dirt through the landscape, dismissed before as natural rivulets in the earth, became roads.

My lips parted in sickened shock.

This wasn’t a wasteland. It was ruins of a city that no longer existed. The ruins of a city that had been thoroughly, systemically devastated—as if by one of the most powerful militaries in the world.

And finally, I realized why the air felt so familiar.

It smelled like the aftermath of Asteris. Asteris and explosives, power stripped directly from the stars itself, wielded by thousands of warriors.

It smelled like this very place had smelled, sixteen years ago, the night Vincent had taken me home.

I was numb as the realization fell over me.

I will spare no one, Vincent had said. I will not spare your wives or children.

And he hadn’t. Not just the Rishan. But the humans, too.

Vincent had killed them all.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

My ears rang. My hands went cold and still. I didn’t move. Just stared at this place. This dead, broken place, where countless people had once lived.

Any family I had left.

Gone.

I couldn’t think. Raihn was saying something, but I didn’t know what. I wouldn’t understand the words, even if I could hear him, which I couldn’t.

Salinae is gone.

Gone.

Gone.

Go—

“Oraya, get down!” Raihn roared as he rammed against me.

We had been distracted. We’d stopped counting. Pain seared my left foot, which jutted out beyond the cloak that Raihn had hastily thrown over us both. I felt his body tense, too. It didn’t cover either of us.

For ninety long seconds, we remained that way.

Everything inside of me turned to ice, and I was grateful for it. I would rather be cold and hard and feel nothing than confront this, even though I could feel my grief there, burning under the surface, far too hot to be contained by even a lifetime of frigid control.

Vincent wouldn’t have done this. He couldn’t.

I couldn’t help but think of Nyaxia. Mother, she couldn’t have set it up more perfectly. We were acting out a morbid caricature of the worst moment of her life, when she fought through the wastelands in desperate search of her husband, only to find that he was already dead.

She had been too late. And now, so were we.

Ninety seconds passed. Raihn pulled the cloak away, slowly rising. Yet he still struggled to tear his eyes from the ashy ground. It was littered, I realized now, with little glints of silver and broken metal. Skeletal remains of the city.

“Half a million people,” he choked out. “Half a million people lived here.”

Distantly, a voice whispered in my ear, You need to move. You need to move right now, little serpent—

I looked up to see a figure moving fast towards us over Raihn’s shoulder. A streak of silver, coming right for us.

No time to dodge.

I pushed Raihn out of the way and collided with Ivan at full force.

My back slammed to the ground. Ivan was on top of me, every part of his face but a sliver over his eyes covered by torn strips of fabric. I’d had time to get Raihn out of the way and stop Ivan’s attack, but that meant I had no good counter of my own. My blades had been knocked from my hands. Something cut across my abdomen, shock dulling the pain to a distant throb.

Ivan’s eyes crinkled with a satisfied smile.

And then the pain was suddenly excruciating, like all my blood was being boiled within my veins. Little droplets of red rose into the air, hovering around Ivan’s pale face—my blood, as his magic wrung it from my body.

“For the Halfmoon,” he whispered, and I prepared to meet death fighting—

But then Raihn ripped him off me, hurling him to a pile of rocks with enough force to snap a spine.

“Don’t fucking touch her,” he growled as black light cracked through the air, his Asteris awoken with fresh power.

I tried to move and couldn’t. My strength drained, seeping into the ground like rainwater. I only managed to turn my head—turn it enough to see, through blurring vision, Raihn on top of Ivan, sword raised, getting ready to deal the killing blow.

Behind him, another smear of silver emerged from the smoke. Angelika. Unmistakable, even in the darkness. Like Ivan, she covered her entire body save for her eyes. Still, every line of her radiated power.

“Raihn!” I tried to scream as she raised her bow. It came out only as a strangled grunt, but even that was enough for Raihn’s head to snap up.

“Let him go!” Angelika bellowed.

Through my blurry vision, I noticed something strange: her arrow did not point at Raihn.

It pointed at me.

“Let him go right now or I’ll fucking kill her, Raihn! Another Nessanyn. Do you want that? Let him go!”

Raihn stilled.

Everything went gray and blurry. The voices distant. Vincent’s seemed closer as it whispered to me, You made it so far, little serpent. But at least your bones will lie in your homeland.

My palm pressed to the gritty, ashy sand, fingers loosely closing around a handful of it. I wondered if the bones of my family were here in this dirt, too, ground down to nothing but dust.

I blinked enough to make out Raihn’s form, gripping Ivan’s limp, injured body by the collar. “Fine,” he said, at last. “I’ll let him go.”

And then he ripped Ivan’s mask off his face and hurled him down the steep incline, directly into the incoming wave of deadly smoke.

Raihn threw himself over me. My throat released a whimper as his weight fell across my injured body. A distant wail of agony cut me to the bone—Angelika’s.

At first I thought perhaps she had been caught in the mist, too. Then I realized, no—it was because of Ivan. She was screaming in grief.

Raihn pulled me close to him. When he touched my wound, I let out a weak, involuntary keen, and he stiffened as if with awful realization. He murmured into my ear, “We need to run right now.”

“I’m alright,” I tried to say, even though he didn’t ask me that. I was losing my fight to keep my hold on the world.

“Hold your breath,” he said. And then I was being lifted into the air, and my face was tucked against a solid wall of warmth, and we were flying fast fast fast.

Everything hurt, like my exposed skin was being flayed away in little chunks. Angelika’s scream echoed behind us.

We wouldn’t survive this. Not even a few seconds of it. We were being consumed.

But I forced my head up just in time to see the gate rushing towards us—

–And then it was silent.

Raihn’s land was far from graceful. He’d been moving so fast that he had to stop short to avoid hurling us both against the stone barrier opposite the gate. We ended up in a heap on a packed sand ground.

I tried to push myself up while Raihn’s hold steadied me. My eyes adjusted to familiar gold-and-silver lights over an endless sea of seats.

The colosseum looked so different like this—completely empty. There were no screaming crowds, no cheering voices. Not a single spectator on those countless deserted benches. Only menacing silence.

Before us, a bloody figure sat on the sands with their knees pulled up to their chest, a dark red blanket around their shoulders. They were covered in so much blood. It took me a moment to make out who they were, until their gaze lifted to meet mine.

It was Ibrihim.

And the blanket was not a blanket, but his wings—tattered and bubbling with oozing burns that matched those around his eyes. He’d covered his face as much as he could and had covered the rest of himself with his wings, now destroyed.

Perhaps the look on my face betrayed my horror, because he smiled, a humorless twist of his lips. “The most useful they’ve been in years.”

The Ministaer stood in eerie stillness, four of his acolytes behind him with their heads bowed.

“Welcome, Oraya of the Nightborn and Raihn Ashraj,” the Ministaer said. “Our Mother of the Ravenous Dark is pleased by your service. You have progressed to the final trial.”

I had imagined that I would feel more when I heard those words. Instead, they were met only with a numb sense of dread.

“There has been a change,” the Ministaer said. “The New Moon trial will not take place in three weeks. It will take place tomorrow.”

My brow knitted. What? That was unheard of.

“Tomorrow?” Raihn repeated.

“Why?” I croaked. My fingers dug into his arm. I hoped I was hiding how heavily I was leaning on him.

“It is very important that the Kejari concludes,” the Ministaer replied, simply, as if that answered our question.

Raihn said, “Well, of course. But why—”

“Nyaxia recognizes there is no certainty that Sivrinaj will exist in three weeks.”

The Ministaer’s face lifted in the faintest hint of a nod to the distance.

We turned to follow it.

The gates of the colosseum were wide open, revealing a grand tableau of the city. My eyes rose to the upper stretches of the colosseum walls and the skyline of Sivrinaj beyond them.

“Fuck,” Raihn breathed.

I couldn’t even bring myself to speak, not even to curse.

I knew what Sivrinaj looked like. I’d memorized every shape of this landscape in a million mournful moments at my bedroom window. And though I never forgot that this was a city—a kingdom—of brutality, I never thought that my lethally beautiful home could become… this.

The city of Sivrinaj had always been as sleek as a weapon, but now, the blade had been drawn, and it was covered in death.

Bodies lined the colosseum walls, propped up on stakes. Some still twitched in their final death throes, the life draining from them for Mother-knew how long. There were hundreds of them. So many they stretched into the distance, too far for me to make out the shape of their bodies. But my father did not start anything he could not finish. I knew they would continue for the entire length of the walls, even when I could not see them.

And pinned below each stake, stretched out in garlands of death, were their wings—countless feathered wings, staked through ancient stone. Red-black blood dripped down white marble in deceptively elegant rivulets, glistening in the torchlight beneath a rainbow of brown and gold and white and gray and black feathers.

We had been locked up in the Moon Palace, isolated, for weeks. More than long enough for the war against the Rishan to escalate. Still, the sheer scale of this was staggering. Sickening.

I’ve had three hundred years of practice, Vincent whispered in my ear. It is always important to be decisive and efficient.

“You may want to rest while you have the opportunity,” the Ministaer said, as if nothing of note was happening here. He gestured to another door, which offered a glimpse of the Moon Palace’s great room. “Much has changed.”