I was on the ground. My head was ringing, but I didn’t feel any pain. I struggled to my feet, and someone touched me. Kairos. His mouth was moving.
Shalia. Shalia. I saw him mouth my name. “Shalia!” he yelled.
Shaking my head, I nodded. “I’m fine. I’m fine,” I said, turning sharply. We couldn’t see anything but a thick reddish cloud of dust and ash.
I couldn’t think of anything else. We ran forward, and my feet were strong and sure, even as my head was foggy and thick.
My feet will never fail me.
I saw Galen first. His horse was writhing on the ground, and he had been thrown. Galen was groaning and starting to move, and I didn’t wait to see if he was all right. I didn’t care.
The boy’s arm was the next thing I saw. It was at a strange angle, a layer of dirt on it, and stretched out like he was reaching for me still. Like all he wanted was to get to me.
Before I knew what I was doing, I slid to my knees and pushed the rock off his small body with my power, and it rushed away from him. “Gav?” I whispered. I pulled his body to me, and it was leaden and still. His back was covered with blood, misshapen where the big rock had hit him. I turned him over and pulled him against me. “Gavan!” I yelled. “Gavan!”
He didn’t move. His face was scraped and bloody, his nose broken. His eyes were open, but they couldn’t see me.
“I’ll find the others,” Galen said.
I hadn’t known he was near me, and just as soon, he disappeared into the dust.
The others.
I wiped desperately at the dirt on Gavan’s face, trying to pull it off. There was too much of it, and my hands were trembling. Why wasn’t he moving? Why couldn’t he just move?
“Gavan!” I cried, shaking him.
“Shalia!” Kairos yelled. “Someone could still be alive!”
Alive. Gavan was dead. I knew that, but—but—
I stood, feeling sick and dizzy, pushing forward into the cloud that shrouded my family.
I saw Kairos, crouched and throwing rocks off a small body. I saw her hair. “Catryn!” I screamed.
Kairos looked up at me. “Find the others!” he said, his eyes wild, his chest heaving.
Nodding, I ran into the smoke.
Galen was pushing a large boulder that was near the start of the pass. All around me, I felt the threads, angry and pulsing, curling around my fingertips and squeezing. I pushed the boulder off with my power like it was a pebble, sending it flying into the crevasse under the land bridge, and Galen turned and looked at me for a moment before dashing in. As soon as I could see the rocks, I moved them out of my way, and in moments, we had uncovered a tangled mass of bodies: my father, my brothers, my whole family.
I dove forward, but Galen shook his head at me, going to each one and carefully checking them.
When he reached the last one, he closed his eyes for a moment, and picked up my mother’s body.
“What are you doing!” Kairos roared, trying to climb over rocks to get to him. “Don’t touch her! Don’t you touch her!”
Galen stood tall with her broken body in his arms. “She’s dead, Kairos. Let me get your family out of here.”
She’s dead.
Galen took a step, and the movement suddenly seemed sideways to me, twisted wrong.
I am a daughter of the desert.
The world took a vicious spin, and then Kairos’s arms were around me. “Shalia!” he yelled. “Shalia!”
Something hurt. I am a daughter of the desert, and my feet will never fail me.
Lightning crashed somewhere around us, and the moment froze, the light illuminating the dust in a distended vision. In the flash I saw Catryn, the moment she had been born. I had been the first to hold her, secreted away in the caves below Jitra, where the fires were stoked high to fill the cave with heat and smoke so the spirits of our ancestors could walk among us and greet the baby. I brought Catryn, the tiny thing who hadn’t cried yet, to my mother.
When we touched, the three women of our clan, I felt something. Something otherworldly and powerful, filling my body. Filling the space.
And then the flash of light ended, and the smoke was full of nothing but the dead.
“Kairos, help me up,” I said, but something was wrong. My arms weren’t moving. The words sounded foreign and misshapen, even to my ears. Everything was wrong. The threads around me felt like they were strangling me, bloated thick and grotesque, tugging the world at odd angles.
There was pain. My power was turning on me, clawing at my throat, wrapping around my hips, and causing a deep ache that made me cry out.
“Shalia, you’re bleeding,” Kairos told me, and his eyes were stark, wide open and wet.
Bleeding? No. No—they were bleeding. They had stopped bleeding, because without a beating heart they would never bleed again.
I am a daughter of the desert, and my feet will never fail me. I couldn’t feel Kai’s hands on me. I felt weightless, ungrounded, like I couldn’t tell the sky from the stones.
“Shalia!” he screamed at me, and my heart burst at the terror plain on his face.
The threads pulsed, rippling with anger, with hurt, with fury. The pulse came into my hands, touched my fingertips, and pushed.
My power ripped out of me. It felt like retching, like my body was fighting my mind for control and my mind was losing badly. I saw rocks, from pebbles to boulders, rising up into the air and beginning to swirl around me.
I felt the ground beneath my feet, and I tried desperately to focus. Kairos wasn’t touching me anymore. He was on the ground, his hands curled around his face. Dirt was thickening the curtain of moving rock, responding to me, waiting patiently for my command.
I gave my mind over to my power. I rushed out along the rocks, along the land bridge, along the pass. It wasn’t as simple as seeing, but where the rocks and dust existed, I could feel. The pass was blocked by rocks, but not gone completely. The mountains still stood.
I reached out farther until I could feel Jitra.
What was left of Jitra. I could feel the wounds in the earth where the caved-out rock had broken, where heavy stone collapsed on yielding bodies. I pulled it off. I could feel the heartbeats where people were clustered together, holding one another tight, praying for safety.
And all that stood between them and my husband’s yellow powder were a few rocks in the pass.
I saw soldiers at the edge of my vision, through the rotating cloud of boulders that encircled me, and suddenly I knew what to do. The desert would not be at risk. The desert would not fall, and whatever treasures my people protected, Calix would never touch them.
A scream tore out of me as I reached for the land bridge. Breaking, snapping, tearing the rocks to pieces like a twig over my knee. My work was rough and crude, but all I wanted was to cut the desert off from the Bone Lands, to collapse the pass into the mountains it came from.
The land bridge broke in the center first, and with its support gone, the rocks began shearing off in huge, heavy boulders. My power clawed at them, crashing them down one after the other until the land bridge was nearly gone, a jagged mouth of teeth laughing at Calix’s audacity, his hate, his mortality.
My work faltered, and it took several seconds for me to feel the pain.
Something was burning in my shoulder, and my power was slipping from my hands. I twisted, looking at my shoulder to see the shaft of an arrow sticking out strangely behind me.
My flying boulders tumbled down into the crevasse, and a crack formed in the ground near my feet. The moving dirt and rocks wobbled in their pattern, flying out, evading my grasp.
My knees went weak, and I fell, and suddenly all the rocks dropped to the ground with me. It was then that I saw the blood Kairos must have seen, seeping down my skirts.
My baby. My daughter.
A new scream came out of me, frightened and trembling and wild, shaking my lungs and my hands and my skin. Then I saw boots striding toward me, and then another set.
I looked up and saw my husband, still a distance away while his soldiers closed in on me.
My hands trembled and I realized, He knows.
The soldiers grabbed me and pulled me up, and I thrashed against their hands. Their grips didn’t even tighten as I fought, and I realized I could barely control my limbs. I had nothing left.
I cast around, searching for Kairos in the clouds of dust. I heard Osmost shrieking over the shouts of the soldiers, but I couldn’t see my brother.
“Kai!” I screamed. “Kai! Kai!”
I heard a roar, and I looked over to see Zeph fighting off at least seven of Calix’s men. I couldn’t see Theron. Zeph drove his elbow into the face of one man, and the guard dropped so fast I wondered if Zeph had killed him. Galen jumped in between them, tackling Zeph down to the ground. Zeph fought him, but it wasn’t like he fought the guards. Galen said something to him, and my big protector stopped.
Both men looked at me, and I shook my head. “Help me!” I screamed. “Please, help me!”
Galen’s eyes met mine for a long moment. He was filthy, his handsome face covered in dirt and dust, making his green eyes stand out more. He looked devastated.
But he wasn’t moving. He kept Zeph pinned, and even Zeph had stopped fighting. Galen never moved. He didn’t even have the decency to turn his face from mine.
“You coward!” I shrieked. “You damned coward!”
A hand struck my cheek, and I turned forward to see my husband. He grabbed my chin. “Did you really think that my own brother would betray me?” he snapped. “For you?” His words were so forceful that spittle landed on my face. I flinched, but his fingers were gripping me too hard to move. “I swear to the Three-Faced God,” he growled at me, “if our child still lives, I will tear it out of you, and then I will wipe your existence from this earth. Never will a queen of the Trifectate be a filthy sorceress.”
Calix pointed to a carriage, and my heart seized. He wouldn’t take me back to the City of Three. If I went into that carriage, I would never leave his grasp alive—I was sure of it.
I called for my power, waiting for the threads to curl around my hands as the men pushed me farther. I made my hands into fists, bursting the pain from the arrow in my shoulder. I shook my fingers out.
Nothing.
I remembered Kata’s advice, and I tried to call up my memories of Gavan rubbing his face into my stomach.
Gavan’s tiny arm covered in blood and dirt.
Catryn, not far from him, twisted and broken.
My baby. My baby. My baby.
The guards shoved me into the carriage and brought rope to tie me to the floor. I curled around my knees.
I had no power left.