Page 38

Ours

Cainis’s eyes go wide with shock, and on a sob that wracks his entire body, Cain wraps his free arm around his father’s shoulders, pulling him into a hug. To not have to watch as the life seeps out of him.

But I see the way the zariph’s eyes turn glassy with death. I see his last breath.

Cain must feel it because he steps away, shoulders back, head held high. Cainis’s corpse falls to the black marbled floors in a heap at Cain’s feet.

“No!” The scream from Magda is like rending of bone—a terrible sound that strikes deep. She runs across the room.

Chaos erupts all around us.

Pella’s on the floor beside her father. Hakan, behind her, can’t even look at her, though he’s hooked his pinkie finger through hers, no doubt careful not to shock her. I drop down beside Pella just in time for her to look up at Cain with brimming eyes pleading for understanding.

“I had to,” she says, as tears slip down her cheeks. “ You had to. If he won, he’d kill our rightful queens and you, too, maybe. If you did this on your own, it would have killed you.”

Impossible to miss the way Cain swallows hard, his throat moving with it. “I know,” he says. “I…” He looks down at his father’s face, then at the knife still grasped in the zariph’s hand. “I know.”

Magda, meanwhile, kneels by her bondmate’s head in a position Wanderers use for prayer, her head bowed. Her shoulders heave. Just once. Before she makes the sign of the sun over her heart.

Then with a screech to wake the dead, Magda grabs Cainis’s knife and lifts it to plunge into her own heart.

Pella moves with the lightning speed of a born and bred fighter, tackling her mother to the floor and knocking the knife out of her hand, but Magda goes wild, thrashing in her daughter’s grasp. “Let me go with him!”

She wrenches herself from Pella’s hands and crawls to Tabra, hands on the floor, supplicant, begging. “Don’t leave me here without him,” she pleads. “Let me send myself to the afterlife, my queen. Cainis and I are bonded. We’ll find each other again. But if I’m here, we’ll remain separated for longer. I can’t—” Her voice breaks and she trembles, head still down. Then takes an audible breath. “I can’t.”

Quiet takes over the room. Not soft but weighted. And in that quiet, Tabra nods.

“Mami,” Pella whispers into the silence. “Please.”

Magda straightens and looks at her daughter with all the love I’ve ever imagined a mother can feel for a child. “We’ve raised you well. You don’t need me anymore.”

Pella makes a sound that might be a whimper. “I will always need my mother.”

Magda’s chin quivers. Pella takes a stuttering breath, then picks up the knife from the floor and holds it out to her mother. “Go. Find him in your afterlife.”

“May the grace of the sands be with you always,” Magda whispers as she takes the blade.

Pella passes her trembling hand in front of her chest in a waving motion as if tracing the flow of sand dunes. Her answer.

With a sharp inhale, Magda plunges the knife into her own chest. As she falls forward, her body drapes over Cainis. It only takes a few gasps, like a fish out of water, before she stops breathing.

And I think the rest of us stop for a moment, too.

I don’t know what I expect. Definitely not for Tabra to step between all of us and smooth her hands over her clothes.

Her face is pale and drawn with shock and regret, but my sister lifts her chin. “Is this over?”

She’s asking Cain if the revolt is finished.

He must realize the significance of the question, because he faces her and formally bows. “As leader of the Cain Zariphate…”

Leader of the zariphate. Zariph.

The shock of those words hits all at once, and I suck in a breath.

Cain, my friend, who I’ve played with in the sand since I was five summers old. The boy who always felt like home, who taught me to ride horses and use my knives, and who put a scorpion in his father’s bed after Cainis said something mean about me that I can’t even remember now.

That boy just killed his father and is now the leader of the largest, most powerful zariphate in Aryd.

Things had already changed, but this is so much bigger.

The childhood we had together? That’s gone forever.

He clears his throat. “As Zariph, I pledge to our queens our loyalty.”

Hard-won loyalty that we’d thought we already had. I can’t help the bitterness seeping through me like a venom.

Behind him, Ledenon and the leaders of the other zariphates line up, shoulders back, heads proud. They stand with Cain. With us.

Tabra gives a nod. “Then it’s time to present us to our people.”

Us?

She holds her hand out to me, and I take it, getting to my feet.

“Ready?” she asks.

No.

But I nod.

We leave Cain and Pella behind with the Wanderers, Tziah and Hakan staying with them to help them through their grief, but the others follow as we make our way through the palace. Then, a half-dressed princess and her bedraggled sister still dressed as a Wanderer walk out onto the wide protruding balcony overlooking the mall where it seems as though the entire city has gathered in silence. Waiting for us.

I don’t see a single pop of Tyndran white armor anywhere among them.

“People of Aryd,” Tabra calls out. Her voice, clear and true and steady, seems to lift into the skies and roll outward. “I am Queen Tabra Eutheria I of Aryd. And this is my twin sister, Mereneith Evangeline XII, kept secret from you all these years.”

An audible gasp surges through the crowds.

Tabra waits a moment for it to quiet before she continues. “We know that under our grandmother’s rule you have suffered the slow descent into poverty as our desert world gets hotter and hotter. And these last months have only worsened our plight with King Eidolon in command, holding both me and my sister hostage with the threat of death.”

A second, louder gasp passes through our people.

Tabra lifts her hands, like she’s beckoning our people to us. “But we have returned to you now.”

Tabra is everything a queen should be in this moment, not needing queenly raiment to show her true worth, and I can see the expressions on the faces nearest us slowly changing from shock, horror, and suspicion to wonder, surety, and trust.

To belief.

That is what Tabra inspires without trying. Belief.

“We have fought for and reclaimed our throne,” she announces. “We have formed allies among the zariphates of Wanderers, the Vanished of the Shadowood, and with the dominion of Wildernyss, and we will form allegiances to stand against Eidolon. We wish you to know that we fight for you . For the people of Aryd. Always.”

She lowers her hands to place them on the rail in front of her, leaning toward her people as she shouts not a request but a demand. “Will you fight with us?”

With. Not for.

For at least ten of my heartbeats, the people are silent. Then a single voice rings out from the back. “To Queen Tabra and Queen Mereneith, ever may they reign!”

A resounding surge of cries of the same words and cheers rises into the skies, cut off harshly by the flash of a shadow overhead. Many of the people duck, and a few even scream as Bene lands on top of the palace roof directly over our heads, wings spread wide, and trumpets a call of triumph…and maybe a warning.

The queens of Aryd—both queens standing side by side like I never could have imagined—have a Devourer on their side.

Another beat of silence and the people erupt in a frenzy of applause and shouts of support. Tabra steps back and takes my hand, lifting our clasped hands to the skies, and the crowds only grow louder with their praise. She looks at me and smiles, even as up close I can see the toll of the day in her eyes that no longer shine at me with innocence.

But we did it. With the help of our friends and allies, we did it.

The dominion is ours.