Page 18 of Wings of Cruelty and Flame (Heir of Wyvara #1)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

AMEIRAH

T wo hours turned to four, and four turned to eight. Night descended on the fortress in Willow Green, enclosing the old stone walls in a sheet of drumming rain. The sky blackened, very few stars speckling the darkness. The air sat heavy in my lungs as I replayed the day, lingering more on the words I spat at my husband with every hour.

I leaned against the stone sill at the window in one of the tower staircases, where the fourth floor gave the best vantage over the woods, the fortress, the storm. Cold soaked through my clothes into my bones, cool dread settling in my heart. Where was he?

I’d changed from my leathers into a simple maroon djellaba for prayer, but standing at the window, shaking from the chill whistling through gaps in the old stone, I wished for sturdy leather. No, I wished for warm arms.

I banged my head against the old warped glass with a groan. I’d known Varidian two days. He should mean nothing to me. But he’d been kinder to me than most people all my life, and I found his humour, smiles, and maddening remarks addictive. I wanted to believe he was enamoured with me, wanted to believe he wanted me the way he seemed to last night. I remembered the way he marched into that room down the hall from his, threw me over his shoulder, and hauled me back to his room so he could sleep beside me all night.

He was my husband, and he might be a veritable stranger, but that meant something to me. Our marriage meant something to me. If he didn’t return… the thought made me sick with panic. He had to return.

Outside, moonlight flashed on the sharp edge of a sword, and I flicked a tear off my cheek, peering down at Zaarib. He’d been out there for hours, at first sitting beneath the arched entryway with the door cracked open, watching the skies for his friends, and now leaping and spinning over the grass, stabbing at invisible assailants with a barely restrained rage that gave me chills.

What if Varidian never returned? What would these people do with me? I wasn’t a traitor, so they had no reason to punish me, but I refused to believe my always-smiling, always-laughing cousin had betrayed Ithanys. Maybe they’d invent a reason to kill me, too. I brushed another tear off my cheek, the tips of my gloves stained wet.

“Aliah said you were up here,” Shula’s rough feminine voice made me jump and turn, watching her crest the final few steps to the landing where I watched the sky. “She also said you refused food, but I’m not as easily swayed as our sweet Aliah. Here. Eat.”

The words were a command. I gave her an unbending stare and curled my hands into fists at my sides. Eat, so they could poison me? No, thank you.

Shula sighed, coming to lean against the tall, arched window beside me, the hot coal of her wrath subdued compared to hours ago. “Do you have any idea what Varidian will do to me if I let his wife starve to death?”

“Shit scooping?” I asked dryly.

“More like hang me upside down and slice my stomach so my innards fall out.”

I blinked. “That paints a vivid picture.”

Shula snorted.

I eyed the hand-painted plate in her hand but refused to get distracted by the slice of pastilla in her hand, even if the scent of warm, flaky pastry and shrimp made my mouth water. I hadn’t eaten since this morning, and hunger gnawed at my stomach. Pastilla was my favourite, a food that brought to mind celebrations and holidays, but I resisted temptation.

“What’s the occasion?” I asked, facing the window again, trying not to show how rattled she made me. Unlike me, she’d redressed in her brown leathers after prayer and looked every bit the warrior, with her fierce scowl, scarred knuckles, and bulging biceps. Her scarf was as black at pitch, probably to hide bloodstains.

“Aliah made it. She’s pre-empting Fahad and Varidian’s safe return. It’s a thing she does. Like their return is a foregone conclusion.” I felt Shula’s eyes on the side of my face but didn’t give her the satisfaction of reacting. “You must be starving.”

“Nope.”

She snorted. “Fine, be stubborn. You’re a perfect match for Varidian; he’s one of the most bull-headed people I’ve ever met.”

My frown deepened. I scanned the dark sky again, searching for spots of inkier darkness where wings might blot out the light.

“You care so much after such a short time?” she asked, refusing to leave me alone.

“Trust me, I’m trying not to.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “It’s inconvenient.”

“Feelings usually are,” she muttered. “I didn’t only come to force you to eat something lest you drop to your death. I wanted to talk to you about—Kaawa.”

It took me a moment to remember she meant Naila, and then I stiffened. “I don’t need to know the gory details of her murder, thank you very much.”

Shula’s reply was just as clipped. “I didn’t kill her. I fought for her to be spared, for all the good it did me. I loved her.”

I startled so hard my forehead knocked into the glass, then turned to stare at the huge, muscular woman. “You… what?”

“You heard me.” Shula glared at me, daring me to start a fight, or to insult her, I wasn’t sure.

“But that’s…”

“Forbidden? Shameful? Punishable by death in other kingdoms?” Shula flicked me a dry look. “I’m aware.”

I blinked, processing that fact. The sad truth was I was so overcome with panic for Varidian and rage that he was involved in my cousin's murder, I didn’t even know how I felt about this. “You’re certain Kaawa was my cousin? I never heard anyone call her that name.”

“Because she only used it to fool us,” Shula replied bitterly. “And I’m sure. Zaarib says he only ever carried one person into the square, and you saw him carry your cousin’s body so… yes, it’s her.”

A buzzing started in my head. I became very aware of where I’d used the leather straps Varidian buckled to my body earlier to hide three knives under my clean dress. “Did you have a hand in it?”

“I was the one who realised she was a spy,” Shula said, suddenly quiet, her voice a raw whisper. “So yes, I had a hand in it. Everything that happened was because of me.”

I looked at her. I couldn’t stand not to. The expression on her broad face was wretched, misery turning her brown eyes bleak. Whatever else had happened, I believed her pain. There was no way to fake misery that acute, no matter how good a performer someone could be.

“You weren’t the one who cut her up like that? You weren’t the one who executed her?”

Shula’s bronze throat bobbed. “It was supposed to be Varidian, as commander of our legion, but Saif got there first.”

I jerked like I’d been struck. “Your wyvern?” The wyvern I rode today. The wyvern Varidian had told me to ride, knowing all along that he had murdered my cousin. “Fuck.” I was going to be sick. “Fuck.”

I turned and pressed my cheek to the cold window, choking down nausea.

Shula hovered, still holding the plate. I wanted to strike it from her hands, wanted to slam her against the wall and drive one of my knives beneath her skin, but three words held me back, kept me in place. I loved her.

“She joined our legion three years ago,” she said, with the tortured air of a person recounting a tragedy. “She pissed me off for the first few weeks. Too bubbly, too happy. She smiled too damn much.”

My eyes stung. That sounded like Naila. She was always making me smile, even when I wanted to hide and cry for a whole day after someone made a snide remark about my hair or my eyes or my features. Or my mother—it didn’t matter who she was, the staff at our home had a hundred theories and delighted in whispering them loudly enough for me to overhear. Naila was the only person who made it bearable.

And this legion murdered her.

“Naturally, everyone liked her,” Shula continued, her voice distant, guarded. “The whole fucking world revolved around her, and it pissed me off. She could do no wrong with the others. Even the wyverns liked her. On our first assignment with her in the legion, I waited for her to crumble and fall apart at the reality of war.”

Like I did today. I swallowed the lump in my throat, hearing the mother scream, watching her son shredded to bits. I flinched.

“But it was Nabil who collapsed. He’d been with us two years by then and he’d seen enough horrors to last a lifetime, but Buchra was injured, slit from belly to asshole.”

She had such a lovely way of storytelling. “The green wyvern is female?”

Shula nodded, her eyes unfocused, seeing the past instead of the cold tower landing. “She nearly died, and Nabil with her. Kaawa cared for him, made sure he ate while the healers worked on Buchra, even coaxed him into leaving the wyvern’s side to bathe. That pissed me off, too. I’d never met anyone so sickeningly nice. Even Aliah has sharp teeth when provoked, but Kaawa…” She shook her head. “Naturally, I picked a fight with her. And you know what she did?”

“What?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“She knocked my fists away and hugged me. It stunned me to silence. I was so ready to fight her and she disarmed me with a hug. Even that pissed me off, but after that I couldn’t resent her as much.” Shula laughed bitterly, making me jump. “It was all a fucking game to her—the sweetness, the way she cared for us, cared for me.”

I shook my head. “No. Naila was always like that. She was kind.”

“She was a manipulative bitch,” Shula snapped, startling my back into the window frame. “When we evacuated refugees from the Fallow Gate, she left us to deliver a missive across the wall. When we were digging children out of the rubble of Jamil’s great nurseries, she fed Kalder information that enabled them to make a precise and efficient strike on the Paper Flower.”

I sucked in a knife-sharp breath, cold deluging my blood. Everyone had heard about the sacking of Paper Flower, the botanical city named for the bloom that grew on its forested hills. A hundred women and children had been taken as prisoners of war, men slaughtered on sight. The women were returned three months later when Ithanys refused to bow to their demands, their bodies ripped apart by tiger claws, eyes hollowed from their skulls, ribs parted and left as twisted sculptures on every last body.

“That’s…” I didn’t have the words. “Naila wouldn’t do that.” It emerged as a whisper. “She wouldn’t.”

“She might not have known what they planned, but she gave them the means to do it.”

“Did you see—”

“Yes,” Shula bit out. “We were in the four legions who buried the dead.”

I swallowed a bitter taste. “I’m sorry. No one should have to see that.” Kaldics were brutes, violent and ruthless with no lines they wouldn’t cross.

“She kissed me for the first time when we returned from the mass burial,” Shula said, her voice as hollow as her gaze. “I thought it was because she was traumatised like me. I thought she needed the connection, the reassurance of another living fae.” Shula dragged a hand down her face, pressing her fingertips into her cheeks until they dimpled. “She was covering her actions, distracting me.”

I felt sick. I couldn’t reconcile her words with my bright, loving cousin. But doubts crept in like poison vines, spreading, spreading with every word. I remembered the times Naila went to the capital to study, and remembered the weeks she’d travel to Basilienn to care for those sick with poppy fever. One time she was away for six weeks and returned with hollow eyes and stories of patients dying while she tended to them. Had that been after she saw the carnage at Paper Flower?

“How long ago? Two years? October in sixty-four?”

She missed my birthday that year and returned with orange blossom sweets from a far-slung city. I’d nagged at her to get me another box of them but she said I’d become a pig if I ate another box, and it was impossible anyway. I’d never quite wondered how it was impossible or dwelled on where those sweets had come from.

Now I was wondering if they were Kaldic.

“No,” Shula replied. Relief hit me like a slap until she said, “I remember that month; it was fucking hell. Rained constantly, dumping a whole year’s worth on the wall as we patrolled it. The stone was so slick people fell to their deaths. Even a wyvern broke her neck, unable to open her wings in time. There were threats of a new Kaldic general breaching the gates, so we were never far from the wall that year.”

Relief turned to ashes. “She was with you that October?”

Shula nodded. “At that point we’d been together in secret for months, although I reckon Aliah knew. She sees everything, that woman. The whole legion was stuck on the wall, fending off raiding parties and tiger packs, hunting down the few that managed to slip through. Why is that month important?”

I swallowed, staring out the window at Zaarib as he stabbed and slashed the air with his heavy sword, icy rain slicking his clothes and hair to his body. He’d been out there for hours. I almost hoped he caught hypothermia. “I don’t remember many other dates when Naila was gone, but I know she missed my birthday that year.”

“Your birthday’s in October?”

I nodded. “Twelfth.”

“A month after Kaawa’s,” Shula said almost absently, sending a jolt through my heart.

Naila’s birthday was September twelfth. Kaawa really was Naila. My cousin really was part of this legion.

“Why would she do those things? Why would she carry sensitive information to Kalder? I don’t understand. She was a hundred percent Ithanysian.” Unlike me. “She was loyal, and proud of it.”

Shula glanced away when I looked at her, begging for answers. “I don’t think I ever really knew her, so I can’t guess at why she betrayed us. She joined the army and the legion with the intention of treason.” Shula shook her head, exhaling a hard laugh. “We should have seen it, but she was a fucking good liar. Even when she told Kalder’s forces where to find us, even when she left us to the slaughter of seventeen armoured tigers and their riders…”

She shook her head, biting off the words.

“You still love her,” I murmured, a tight sensation pinching my chest. I wasn’t sure I could accept this about Naila, wasn’t sure I’d ever believe it fully, but enough doubt lingered that I softened my tongue against Shula. She fell in love with someone who only pretended to get close, and now she was mourning both a love and a life dreamed of.

“I always will,” she agreed bleakly. “It was false for her, but everything was real for me, right up until the moment she took to the sky and left us to be decimated.”

I covered my mouth, wishing I could keep denying it. But I remembered all the times Naila left Strava, and I remembered the hollow stare I’d caught on her face more than once. Because she regretted her actions? Because it weighed on her?

“I never knew she even liked women. We were close; she would have confessed that to me.” Wouldn’t she?

Shula sighed. “It’s impossible to know who loves you unconditionally or whose love will turn to hatred when they learn the truth. That at least has an easy explanation.”

“Her father would have tried to kill her,” I muttered. My uncle wasn’t known to be accepting of all. Most weren’t.

“My father did try to kill me,” Shula remarked, shocking my heart into a stutter. “I knew he would. I knew I’d need to defend myself one day. That’s part of why I trained and gathered strength.”

“He truly tried to kill you?” I breathed, staring at the woman.

Against all odds, Shula smiled. “It was too late to hurt me at that point. I took my brother’s place in the legions years before, so I was stronger than him then. Plus, I had a legion at my back who promised to roast him to bones and blackened flesh.”

With those fierce wyvern and the scowling people who rode them, I could well imagine.

“Why did she do it?” I murmured, returning to that over and over. I could understand why Naila might conceal a lover, but hiding a legion? Hiding treasonous thoughts?

“Let me show you something,” Shula said, pushing the plate at me. This time I took it, folding my fingers over the cool, ornate pottery. “Everyone else thinks I’m paranoid and mad but—I have a theory.”