Page 28 of Crown of the Dunes (The Ballan Desert #2)
Chapter ten
Erix
T here she was. My feral little fighter.
It was like waking up from a terrible nightmare. One where my existence was nothing but the desert screaming in pain and fire consuming my entire being.
My blurred-out vision filtered back in to the sight of golden eyes, just as full of wildness and depth as the first time I’d seen them. Awareness of my body came back next, and I found my hand locked around Keera’s neck, my saber bearing down on hers.
The wave of battle had overtaken me, driving me to advance, telling me that my goal was close—so close that I hadn’t realized she was right in front of me.
I didn’t even remember arriving in the palace courtyard or the start of my fight with her.
My vision had been nothing but a red cloud and my thoughts a chaotic tumult of screams—but when she pulled the mask free of my face, it had been a break in the storm, and my vision had finally focused on her familiar, beautiful face.
A clatter of steel against stone told me that I had dropped my sword.
My grip loosened and my thumb drifted over the pulse point in her throat, straining to feel it, to reassure myself that she was alive and well before me.
After the crush of the desert’s magic had completely overwhelmed my consciousness, fear overtook me that this was just one of her cruel tricks.
A shock ran through my bones as my knees hit the stone ground, my forehead falling forward to rest on Keera’s stomach, right between her hip bones. This close, and with my mask removed, I could smell the sunshine and earth scent of her skin. My heart hammered in relief.
She was here, and she was whole.
The tether at the top of my spine glowed and pulsed with bright light, no longer pulling me along like a raging beast. Stillness spread, and I realized it wasn’t just the quiet of the desert’s power in my mind for the first time in weeks.
The sounds of battle around me—the chaos I had hardly paid attention to before—now subsided.
I tilted my head up, despite wanting to bury my face in Keera’s torso and crush her to me, not letting go until my muscles gave out. I met her eyes again, this time paying closer attention to the emotions that passed over her face—expressive and unguarded as ever.
Anger. Relief. Pain. So many contradictory feelings that the conflict tangled in my own knots of magic.
The gazes of all the warriors in the courtyard lay heavily on me as she slowly raised her saber—my saber, I recognized—to point at my neck.
“Do you surrender the rule of Kelvadan?” Keera’s voice was firm.
My brow furrowed. Something about the question didn’t make sense, but I couldn’t parse out why. The wildness that had calmed in my blood urged me to lash out and fight. To never allow defeat or surrender after I had given so much—endured so much—to see Kelvadan destroyed.
My lip curled into the beginnings of a snarl, but Keera’s question from a dream echoed in my head.
Would you surrender if that’s what it took to get me back?
In a split second, it dawned on me with striking certainty that I would do anything . And while I had prepared to take on an entire army by myself if I had to, this might be the more difficult challenge.
My heart leaped into my throat even as I bowed my head. “I surrender to you, Keera of Kelvadan, the true Champion of the Desert. ”
I said it loud enough that the whole courtyard would be able to hear.
A ripple like a shockwave ran out from where I knelt before Keera, the statue of Kelvar towering behind her. Clattering filled the air as riders began to drop their swords. The sound was interrupted by a raged yell.
“Traitor!”
Izumi’s face contorted with rage and pain, and she spurred her horse toward me with her sword held aloft. Before I could grab my own weapon or jump between her and Keera, another horse cut her off.
Badha’s bay gelding stamped at the ground before me, acting as a shield between me and Izumi. For a moment, I thought Izumi would cut down her own warlord, but she hesitated, although rage was still written into every line of her face.
“Coward,” she spat at me, the word hitting me like a punch to the gut. “You promised to restore the desert, but it was a lie. I trusted you, and it was a lie ! You just wanted her, and you don’t care about the losses the rest of us have suffered.”
Rage boiled in my blood again, and I made to stand up, but the tip of Keera’s blade dug into my collarbone in warning. Badha grabbed Izumi’s arm.
“We can still restore the desert to the old ways, but we will not win this fight divided,” the warlord said to Izumi, her voice quieter, so that only those of us in the immediate vicinity could hear.
For a moment, everybody stood still, waiting to see how the bones would fall. Then Izumi wrenched free from Badha’s grasp and raised her saber in the air. “Retreat! All riders who remain loyal to the desert, pull back!”
Before anybody could stop her, she spurred her horse into motion, leading the way out of the palace courtyard. She repeated her order to retreat as she went, and almost all of the clan riders in my eyeline followed her.
A familiar roan horse moved to follow, but Keera’s fist shot out, signaling Aderyn to halt. I frowned that the captain of the Kelvadan riders was taking orders from Keera, but a tendril of relief ran through me at Keera’s next words .
“Let them retreat. The day is won for Kelvadan,” she said, although something about her tone made it sound like a question. As sure as she was in a fight, she seemed hesitant to command those around her now that the battle was over—almost as if she doubted that they should follow her orders.
As the sounds of hoofbeats retreated down the main road, I sent a silent thanks to the sands that the clansmen would be safe.
Conflict gnawed at my heart after Izumi’s outburst, but at least I would be relieved of the guilt of thinking I had led the clans to their imprisonment—or their graves—here in Kelvadan.
At last, I looked away from the scene of the aborted battle to stare back up at Keera.
A deep line was embedded between her brows as she looked at me, frustration and anger written into her expression.
But in her eyes, I saw a hint of the molten gold that had drawn me in when it was just the two of us out under the open desert sky—when she had told me I just needed to be loved.
I held on to that as I met her gaze, wanting nothing more than to pull her into my arms and drag her back out to the sands where it could just be two of us without the complications of war once more. But I tensed every muscle, willing myself to be still as she came to some sort of decision.
After all, I had surrendered to her, and there were no prisoners in the Ballan Desert.
Eventually, she opened her mouth, but her voice was not the commanding one which had demanded my surrender. “Take him to the holding cells in the riders’ quarters.”
Two warriors of Kelvadan I did not recognize grabbed me by the arms and began to lead me away. I didn’t look away from Keera, until they hustled me around a corner and she was lost to my sight. She hadn’t looked away either, and the tether in my skull shivered when our line of sight was broken.
As doubt and confusion clouded my mind, only one thought held certain. Something had happened in Kelvadan since I had last seen Keera.
My fingers dug into my knees where they rested on my crossed legs.
With great effort, I breathed evenly, trying and failing to fall into the meditative state that had been one of my few sources of control throughout the years.
Instead, my eyes kept skittering over the gray stone walls surrounding me, outside of the wooden cell in which I sat.
I wasn’t inside the mountain thankfully, but in an outer building where I could still feel the hum of life around me.
Still, I hadn’t been surrounded by walls like this in many years, and they seemed to close in the longer I sat.
My shoulders had involuntarily drawn up toward my ears and my breath came in short, sharp pants. So, I had sat down to meditate.
It hadn’t been more than half an hour since I was left here, and I refused to let my mind wander to what came next. Instead, I focused on the movement at the other end of the tether tugging at the magic in my brain.
Keera was alive, and she was moving around nearby. I had no idea what had caused the connection to her to be suddenly severed before—or even what the connection truly was—but I clung on to the reassurance that I had seen her with my own eyes with every fiber of my being.
She was more than alive—she was still fighting and untamed and as beautiful holding a sword to my throat as I remembered.
It was a vast improvement on the last time I had laid eyes on her, bleeding and unconscious on the floor of Lord Alasdar’s tent—a memory that still choked me with rage and desperation.
I had successfully gotten to Keera as I had promised, but now I was trapped here, in yet another prison of my own making.
Keera hadn’t responded to any of my messages, and despite being closer to the Heart than I had been in years, I somehow felt farther away from my goal than ever.
Even if I were in the same palace as the Heart, I couldn’t retrieve it without Keera’s help.
But instead of being her ally, I was now a prisoner.
And I had done it all for Keera.
Of course, Kelvar had reshaped the mountains and destroyed the desert for Alyx .
My stomach twisted, and I wrenched my attention back to my breathing as best I could. I had only drawn a handful of shuddering breaths before the sound of a commotion outside the room drew my attention.
I stood at the sound of voices. Although I couldn’t make out the words, the tone was angry, and something about the gruffness was familiar. Whoever it was, they could only be discussing me, for the rest of the wooden cells in the otherwise barren room stood empty.