Page 39 of Every Spiral of Fate (This Woven Kingdom #4)

Thirty-Eight

NOT FOR NOTHING, THE ARYA mountains were legendary.

Sheets of snow fell in disorienting spirals around them, the winds so violent its lashes were almost electric, each gust like the shock of a whip.

Cyrus could already feel frost forming along his eyelashes, visibility reduced near to nothing as he forged forward, head bowed against the heft of the blizzard.

They were all of them kitted out in dense furs and wraps, tightly bundled against the glacial temperatures, yet Cyrus still clenched his teeth painfully against the bitter cold.

No people had been able to survive the brutal weather patterns of these notorious alps—none save the ancient Jinn communities, whose souls were forged from fire, and who could survive on nothing but water.

But then, their people had been left no choice but to seek refuge in the inhospitable climate.

After the fall of the devil, humans had felt entitled to categorically inherit the earth.

It didn’t matter that Jinn still walked the land into which these Clay beings had been newly born; in their arrogance, humans considered Jinn nothing more than descendants of Iblees, denying humanity to an entire civilization in the pursuit of global colonization.

It had long been the aim of ancient Clay kings and queens to exterminate Jinn from existence.

Vast yet surgical inquisitions scourged them from every corner of the world, and the few remaining Jinn had been forced to flee and flee again—until, finally, the Arya mountains had proven their salvation.

So savage was the cold—and so unforgiving was the frost—that Clay sovereigns had eventually given up the hunt.

Were it not for Arya, Jinn might never have survived.

Now, snowy gusts assailing them, it seemed surreal to Cyrus that his life could be so devoted to the effort of restoring a Jinn queen to her lost kingdom.

He’d transported the queen in question—and her five friends—as close to the possible entrance as the rock face allowed.

They were seven of them altogether, too many to cluster at once on the precipitous edge of a cliff, and Cyrus led them now on a short but serpentine hike up the steep mountainside.

The eerie howls of relentless gales made it so that they were all but deaf to one another, and though Cyrus had done his best to prepare the group for the brutality of the wintry tempest, he didn’t know how they weathered the storm now.

He glanced, with great difficulty, over his shoulder, and through whorls of thick white flakes he could almost see Hazan’s mouth moving in an effort to speak, snatches of sound dissolving into whistling screams.

Alizeh, meanwhile, was a miracle.

She followed just behind him, staring up as he looked back, and it didn’t seem to matter how many times Cyrus had turned to check on her; he was wonderstruck each time.

She was the only one of them who could hold her head up against the wind.

Blustery gusts diminished to a gentle breeze as they approached her; the violence of the blizzard softening, impossibly, to little more than powder as it neared her body.

She was very nearly blinding to behold, for a blast of soft light had illuminated her from behind, gilding her edges as she moved easily through the storm.

She was, herself , magic.

There was no other explanation for the way the elements softened for her alone; the way the snow cleared before her feet; the way the colossal mountain seemed to sigh as she approached.

There was something ancient and essential running through her veins; and Cyrus, who’d dedicated his entire life to the study of divination, had never seen anything like it.

He tore his gaze away from her, adjusting the fur about his face so that it nearly covered his eyes.

The few inches of skin he’d exposed to the cold had already begun to sting and burn; and Cyrus couldn’t help but marvel at how fire and frost, so different, were both capable of searing the human flesh.

Not long now, at least, before they reached the entrance.

Every day since they’d arrived, Cyrus had launched himself fully to the effort of locating the imperceptible chink in the armor of the mountain; and while it was true that he might’ve made this effort for Alizeh regardless, it was also true that, presently, he had no choice in the matter.

Several months ago, Cyrus had been tasked by Iblees to accomplish five things:

Crown himself king of Tulan

Pinpoint the location of a venerated strain of magic located in Ardunia

Kill King Zaal of Ardunia

Kill the royal Diviners of Ardunia

Marry a bride of the devil’s choosing

Upon receiving this list of demands, Cyrus had nearly laughed in relief at the simplicity of the last line item. Naturally he’d assumed that an arranged marriage among royals would rank as the easiest of the five; instead, it had proven by far the most torturous.

The devil, of course, had not only failed to mention that his bride of choice was unaware of the arrangement and therefore entirely unwilling—but he’d also neglected to explain that she was a prophesied savior whose presence in his life would provoke the mass migration of an entire civilization, while inspiring the vicious enmity of the known world.

But then, Cyrus of a year ago had been terribly naive.

Desperate.

Guileless and untested.

Indeed he could hardly even remember who he’d been a year ago; his dreams had been so different, his hopes so peaceful.

Never, in his wildest imaginings, could he have envisioned this life—this fate—for himself.

Now he was marred beyond recognition, tortured beyond description, and bracing every day for the moment he might at last be allowed to kneel before his wife, so she might finally kill him.

Of course, it had all been a calculated trick.

In satisfaction of task number five, Iblees had included a list of qualifications that Cyrus had immaturely diagnosed as simple and achievable: he was to ensure his bride’s safety and secure her anonymous passage to Tulan; he was to collect the old book tucked away among her possessions; he was to show her the Ardunian magic once he’d found it.

All of this, in the abstract, had seemed easy enough.

Cyrus had been so preoccupied with the orchestration and execution of a plan that might allow him to murder, in the same night, with impunity, a quorum of Diviners in addition to the king of the largest empire on earth, that it had not occurred to him to worry about the woman he might marry.

Hells, but he should’ve worried.

A particularly strong gust nearly took his hat off then, and he held tight to the fur cap as he took a sharp bend in the path, beyond which the destination came into greater focus.

Cyrus slowed to a stop.

There, nearly obscured through curtains of falling snow, he glimpsed a shimmering cluster of small black spots.

This had been his only indication that something here was not like the others: a group of flickering dots, which, upon closer inspection, had resolved into the familiar shapes of fireflies.

Fireflies , perched on the side of a mountain several thousand feet in the air.

Cyrus hadn’t been certain he was right about this possible entrance into the heart of Arya—for he could not cross such a threshold on his own—but the fireflies had seemed a promising sign.

And then, when he’d run his hand along the jagged face of the icy bluff, he’d felt the slight tremble of resistance.

In fact, it had felt like a warning.

Now he turned to face the group, where everyone save the queen was bundled to the point of obscurity.

He could not speak for all the sound and fury of the moment, but when Cyrus offered Alizeh his gloved hand she took it without hesitation, and this moment of trust was not lost on him as he drew her forward, ahead of him.

Cyrus felt a little breathless as she stepped up to the mountain face.

For all the hell he’d endured, there was a part of him that felt a convoluted thrill as she neared the entrance.

Should he be right about his discovery, Alizeh might finally claim her magic.

But then, it was also the last task on his list.

If all went according to plan, Cyrus might finally be set free from the devil.

His father would be restored to the world; his parents might be reunited; his brother might come out of hiding; an ancient debt would be cleared from the record books of history; and, more importantly, Iblees would not massacre the entire population of Tulan.

This was the bargain he had struck.

This was the bad deal he had taken.

This was the generational debt Cyrus had inherited: kings and kings before him enjoying the spoils of a dark wager and all the while deferring the cost.

It had been about a century ago that the Nara family line—his family line—came into power at possibly the lowest, darkest point in Tulanian history.

The empire, while small, was a known jewel; among other things its soil was rich, its rivers strong, its mountains pulsing with magic.

For millennia the kingdom had been under attack by rapacious enemy nations; not only was Tulan replete with natural resources, but it had long been a haven for Jinn who’d felt called to the vibrations of its magically dense mountain ranges.

As the Jinn population had grown more concentrated, external forces saw greater and greater opportunities for the expansion of their own empires into a land not only thick with riches, but also primed for indentured servitude—by a class of people they believed to be subhuman.

Century after century, Tulan had been under attack.

Century after century, enemy nations had fought like jackals over this stretch of land as if it were but a discarded bone, not a breathing, storied kingdom inhabited by a people rife with their own history, their own traditions, their own dignity.

For too long, the people of Tulan had known nothing but war, bloodshed, and tyranny, as external forces attempted to strip the land for parts.

For too long, Tulan had lacked the manpower to fight back.

It had been an act of desperation that prompted the first newly crowned Naran king to accept a devil’s bargain, and it had been a black offer indeed. Cyrus had only heard the story for the first time less than a year ago, when his father had appealed to him in a wild, desperate panic—