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Chapter Twenty-Four

S he came to seconds later, the base of her skull protesting at the very notion of opening her eyes as the world faded back into view.

She coughed, the Midwood’s grainy dust coating her throat as her ears rang.

Shuffling feet and cracking twigs—no, was it bone?—revived her from wherever her mind slipped when she hit the ground. Everything hurt as she rolled to the side and shoved herself upright, her boots tangled in the overgrown ryegrass.

“Get down, As!” Lux roared as his arms swung over her head, Ameera’s dagger clutched in one hand and his sword in the other.

Ameera! Astra glanced around frantically, searching for her.

Behind you! She panted back, a strange echo around her words. Gods, her head was a mess. Astra spun, locking onto Ameera a few dozen paces away, scrambling through the brush to gather as much as she could from Astra’s pockets.

Astra twisted back at the sound of metal on leather to find Luxuros tangled with a large wall of a man.

They blurred into two bronze ghosts grappling with one another’s speed.

Lux kicked him square in the chest, sending him flying, a streak of crimson fury and disdain lighting up the Midwood as he landed with a thud to her right.

Astra reached for her pin, but everything she’d had on her was gone.

“You hit the ground hard ,” Ameera called out, throwing her pin at her. She pointed to the grass, Astra’s various belongings strewn about.

“Shit!” Lux screamed as his arm twisted behind his back.

The man used his weight to spin and throw the commander to the ground.

He skidded across the clearing, hardly coming to a stop before he rolled over his shoulder and popped back up, ready for another hit.

There was just enough space between them to make out the man’s face, grizzled in the same deep tones as Lux, a recognizable heat rolling off him in waves.

Astra glared, the fire in her blood sparking at the sound of Lux’s pain. She let it boil and build in a crest she rarely permitted, ready to send it across the clearing?—

You’ll hit Lux! Ameera cried against her skull.

She was right. Fuck .

She watched as her assailant’s eyes fluttered in her direction, his chest alive with a fluorescent rage—no attempt to hide his hatred for her behind a wall. But there, in the center, a small twisted knot of something else.

Fear.

Fear was the quickest route to desperation, and desperation scrambled even the most dangerous of minds.

The man’s eyes widened as she let sparks fly from her fingertips, wincing at the shock.

He struck his sword into the commander’s ankle, a blunt thud sickening Astra’s stomach.

Luxuros hissed in pain, reaching for the injury as Astra let another flare cut through the clearing, distracting the Solarian.

She tried to focus it, to bottle up the fire and still everything else around her.

She let her mind hold the flames, concentrating them into a direct line the way Luxuros had taught her before.

She let the Solarian slip into the space in her mind as well, his hatred and fear and vicious pain whirling into a funnel of reds and oranges around her unholy light.

His eyes raked over her once more and she let it all break away from her control, pushing it into his chest.

He knew, she realized, from the moment he saw her glowing palms. He knew it was coming, but he also knew there was nothing he could do to stop her.

The fear combusted, sending a ripple of fire and smoke through the soft flesh of his lungs, consuming them. In her mind, he burned from the inside out, the cloud of anger in his chest churning brightly into something like ash, floating down to the forest floor.

His eyes turned on her once more, frenzied as a scream left his lips.

“As!”

Her shoulders shook under his touch, but she was trapped somewhere liminal, not quite hearing him as she watched a tendril of smoke rise from the Solarian’s throat.

He collapsed to the clearing, his knees hitting the floor with a muted thud—so much quieter than she’d imagined death to be.

“Astra,” Luxuros said again, his hands gripping her shoulders tightly. “Come back,” he whispered.

Her eyes fluttered open to a hand clasped over Ameera’s mouth as she took in what Astra had done. She risked a glance to the clearing. The lifeless body of the spy toppled over, smoke still rising and dissolving from his lips.

The horror of what she’d done tied her veins into knots as her vision blurred, searing white at the edges. Everything in her drained somewhere ethereal, somewhere she hadn’t just immolated a man, pulling her energy into another dimension altogether.

“It’s alright,” the commander murmured against her, but she was no longer present to hear his words.

Her mind spiraled in on itself, and she was gone.

* * *

“You have to wake up,” Luxuros whispered against her neck as his hands lifted her knees and shoulders. “Please, wake up.” He jogged across the palace gardens, her head bouncing with each step in a way that made Ameera’s stomach churn.

“I’m awake,” Astra tried to say, her eyes unable to prove it. “I’m right here.”

“Please,” he hissed, setting Astra on her bed as the room filled with maidens. Shadows crossed over her as an herbal scent filled her lungs, the smoke sticking to the walls of her ribcage the same way it rose over the Solarian.

She felt sick again.

“As,” Luxuros pleaded, but his voice was distant, slipping away as she fell deeper within herself. Heat consumed her feet and ankles as she fell into a lake of fire, the raw flames licking at her thighs and hands, scraping her flesh.

She opened her mouth to scream, but only smoke came out.

“Astra! Wake up!”

* * *

“How long has she been out?”

Nayson’s voice was the first she heard as her eyes fluttered against her cheeks, the moonblossom scent of Lunaria slipping in through her nose, soothing her.

“A little over six hours,” Luxuros said, his voice low, strange.

Scared, she realized.

Scared of what she was.

It came rushing back at once. The twisted expression on the Solarian’s face as he crumbled to his knees, the putrid stench of singed flesh. The wisps of smoke or soul leaving his corpse, perhaps both.

Ameera hovered at her feet, the tides in her chest vacillating from violet terror to navy regret.

“Astra!” Her father’s voice cut through the buzzing between her ears.

She blinked as the bedroom came into focus.

Several sets of eyes peered back at her as she pushed herself up, the pain in her back jarring any remaining haze from her mind.

Nayson clasped her hand between his, scanning every fragment of her as she shuffled to rest against the headboard. “Darling?”

“Did I?—”

“Yes,” the commander cut her off, his head tilting softly at Tula, the High Priestess, resting a hand on the foot of her bed. She was already trying to spin this for Oestera’s ears should the queen return soon. “You fell off your horse,” Luxuros explained.

“Are you all right?” Nayson asked.

“I think so. No? My head,” she groaned, reaching for her forehead and finding a silk bandage wrapped around it. A throbbing pain at the side of her skull demanded attention.

“Here,” Ameera said, offering her something in a glass cup. “It will help with the pain.” Astra took a long sip and regretted it immediately as the bitter tea burned a path down her throat.

Was that even a fraction of what the Solarian felt as she roasted him alive? Had she killed him? What if there were more?

As if he read her mind, Lux stepped forward. “You hit your head on a boulder, Princess. You may not remember for a few days, but you are safe now.”

Safe. It felt demonstrably untrue.

“I did?” she asked, unsure if she was playing along or genuinely confused.

“There was a snake,” Ameera chimed in. “Your horse got spooked. You couldn’t have done anything to avoid it.” She sounded much more like herself within Astra’s mind now than she had in the Midwood as she beamed to her, Get that guilty look off your face, As. You saved our asses .

“I’m so glad you’re awake, Princess,” Tula breathed. “You gave us quite the scare. I’ll have dinner sent up, stay in bed and rest.” Tula faded quietly out of the room, but Nayson remained by her side.

She tried to piece together what she remembered, but the second her eyes closed, the pain reverberated around her head in a cursed halo and she saw two hateful eyes staring at her. Perhaps Luxuros wasn’t lying about the boulder. It certainly felt like she’d smashed her head on something.

Nayson placed a kiss on his daughter’s hand.

“I’ll be back in a bit with dinner.” He glanced toward Ameera and then Luxuros. “You three better get your story straight before Tula asks questions. Astra could ride Riverion blind through a storm. A snake?”

“Father,” she whispered, tightening her grip on his hand.

“I’ll buy whatever you sell me, my love. As long as you’re okay. But your mother will want answers when this reaches her.”

Astra nodded, Nayson’s cerulean haze retreating into the hall.

“Don’t let it consume you,” Lux said quickly, her breath coming in ragged gasps. He sank into Nayson’s now empty seat. “He was going to kill you.”

“He was going to kill you ,” she said, the rage that flashed within her when Lux screamed in pain still lingering in her blood. “Is your leg okay?”

Luxuros shrugged. “Don’t worry about me. Though I have taken quite a bit of damage in your honor lately.”

“I think we’re even now,” she whispered, her eyes hollow.

Lux nodded solemnly, the smile falling from his face as Ameera shuffled around the room, fussing with anything she could. “How did you do it?”

She shook her head, unsure she could relive it, or even articulate it.

“It was… impressive,” Ameera said.

“Impressive!” she cried, a miserable violet bloom choking her. “It was awful. I killed him!”