Page 108 of A Kingdom of Sand and Ice (Kingdom of Gods #2)

Kai heard nothing more. Her voice became a ghost behind him as he ran, ran as though his lungs might tear, his heart burst. He summoned his horse with a sharp call, leaping onto its back and urging it towards the road with reckless abandon.

But he didn’t get far.

A blast of magic struck him squarely in the back, ripping him from his shadow and hurling him through the air.

He crashed hard into the roadside, the impact jarring his bones and forcing the breath from his lungs.

Pain flared through his arm where the full weight of his body had landed.

Not broken, thank the gods, but close enough.

He cursed aloud, fury igniting in his chest as the witch approached.

‘You can run as much as you want,’ Dawn said. ‘I will stop you, every time.’

‘You knew,’ he growled, pushing himself upright despite the searing ache. ‘You knew all along…’

Dawn hesitated, biting her lower lip as though it might hold back the truth. She took a cautious step forward, guilt etched across her face.

‘I knew what Hagan intended,’ she admitted softly. ‘He’s trapped the wyverian and wolverian armies in the wastelands. My plan… was to be trapped in there too. With Ash.’

Kai spat at her feet.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Save your apologies,’ he snapped, staggering to his feet with clenched teeth. ‘Why agree to travel to Fireheart? We could’ve reached Ash. We might’ve made it to him.’

A glint of something unreadable passed through Dawn’s eyes. Guilt perhaps. Or longing. Or something far more dangerous.

Kai saw it. And he didn’t trust it.

Yet, some small, traitorous part of him warmed at the thought that perhaps Ash no longer held her heart after all.

‘When the witches attacked the city of Spark,’ Dawn said, arms wrapped tightly around herself as though bracing against a storm, ‘Hagan wanted the dragons. But they fled, all of them. Even the wild ones that nested in the volcanoes ended up leaving later on. They vanished, as if the skies themselves had swallowed them whole. The last sighting placed them flying south. I want to find them.’

Kai let out a derisive snort.

‘I ought to kill you, witch.’

‘Stop calling me that!’ she snapped, her voice cracking as her fists pounded against his chest.

‘I call you what you are.’

Dawn stepped back, fury igniting in every line of her slender frame. She jabbed a finger at him, her hand trembling with indignation. The gesture might have amused him under different stars, but in that moment, she looked like something divine and wrathful, like the storm before the ruin.

‘You judge me because of my eyes,’ she hissed, poking him again, harder this time.

Kai’s fingers itched with the urge to grasp her wrist, to draw her close and look into those defiant purple eyes.

‘Well then, commander,’ she went on, her voice like steel wrapped in silk, ‘ I judge you by your actions.’

Kai cursed under his breath and spat into the dust.

‘Charming,’ Dawn muttered with a dry glance.

‘This isn’t a laughing matter.’

‘And I’m not laughing, commander.’

He exhaled heavily, turning his attention towards the distant wall, the great, unyielding barrier that shimmered faintly in the light. ‘How are they trapped? They could climb it.’

‘Magic,’ Dawn breathed, pressing her fingers to her brow, weariness threading her voice. ‘No one gets in. No one gets out. Not from the Kingdom of Magic.’

Kai frowned. ‘Why? What’s the point of all this?’

‘Hagan now has free reign,’ she murmured, her voice bitter.

‘With your army and the wolverians caged within my kingdom, he can turn his hand in whatever direction he pleases, and no one can stop him.’ She straightened her shoulders, a flicker of resolve in her stance.

‘Going back to the wall will achieve nothing. They’re lost to us, for now.

But if we find the dragons… we shift the balance. We change the game.’

They stood suspended in silence, their stares locked like blades poised before a duel. And in that strange, charged moment, Kai understood with a clarity that made his stomach twist. He would not be returning to the wall. Not to his army. Not yet.

No, he would be following her .

This infuriating woman with fire in her veins and fury on her tongue.

He would trail her into ruin if she asked him to, willingly tethered to her descent.

For he knew, deep within the marrow of his bones, that she was concealing something.

He could see it in her eyes, the cadence of her breath.

She was lying. Of that, he was certain. But what remained cloaked in shadow was which truth she had chosen to twist.

‘Why the dragons? How can they stop Hagan?’ he muttered, eyeing the glimmer in her gaze.

Fragile hope, maybe, for his forgiveness, and something more perhaps.

A part of him longed to crush it, stomp it out like embers beneath his boot.

And yet, gods help him, another part wished to cradle it in his hands.

He could not fathom turning his back and walking away from her.

He told himself it was because he knew, without question, that she was scheming, that some hidden game played behind those eyes.

Yet deep down, in the quiet chambers of his heart, he wondered… was that truly the reason?

That wicked smile curved across her lips then, the one he loathed with every breath, and yet could sketch in perfect detail from memory alone.

‘The thing about witches, commander,’ she purred, her voice velvet laced with smoke, ‘is that we burn .’