Page 112 of Wild Flame

Amir.

The prince was awake. And he was grinning.

“It was you?” I breathed in shock. I looked at Salim, then back to Amir. “But I thought . . . Salim—"

Amir laughed. “Salim isn’t involved. Though I know why you might assume so. I’ve been careful to implicate him at every turn.” He stood, straightening the cuffs of his tunic as he contemplated me. There was a sharp, calculating light I had never seen in his expression before.

“What did you do to them?” I asked, voice calm, trying not to show how unnerved I was.

Amir!Amir was the third conspirator.

“They’re fine, I assure you,” he said. “The only reason you and Nilfren are not affected by this version of the drug is because you are not dragon riders. I learned that through trial and error.” Amir grinned, and it was a decidedly unpleasant thing.

“This wasn’t the plan,” Nilfren protested, staring around at everyone with wide eyes. “What have you done? Your brotherwill have our heads for this.” He rose to his feet and raked a hand through his thinning, gray hair. “No one was supposed to find out.”

Amir just stared back at the man with a bland, saccharine smile and strolled slowly over to Nilfren. He put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Oh, Alistair,” he said conversationally, “that’s where you are wrong. It was always my plan.”

I saw the gleam of the knife an instant before Amir stabbed him in the chest. Nilfren’s whole body jerked, and his eyes went wide.

I didn’t move as the prince yanked the knife out and Nilfren sank to the floor. Blood began pooling around him, and I didn’t look away as he died. Even though I had never liked the man, and even with my history, watching him murdered in cold blood like that still made me ill.

I swallowed. “Why kill him now?”

Amir sighed while wiping the blood off his weapon using Nilfren’s clothing. “I hate when people question me, and his usefulness has come to an end. Initially, I needed his access to the Halmarish forges in order to make our beautiful Fleshfire, but no longer. He was only ever interested in making money. He had no idea what I was truly doing.”

“And what was that?” I demanded, trying to remain calm as I gestured around. “What did you do to them? What is the point of all this?” I had to keep him talking and distracted while I came up with a way to get us all out of this.

Amir gestured with the knife. “Oh, this is just a little potion Princess Mercedes and I cooked up before she died. Though admittedly, I have been refining it since then into what you see now.” He gestured nonchalantly around the table of living statues.

It all clicked into place.

“You were the dragon rider Mercedes was working with!” He was the partner she had mentioned to Rin—the dragon rider who had snuck her into the trials and told the princess how to find Three Points.

His eyes lit with surprise. “I see my brother has been sharing his theories with you.” He shrugged, as if revealing the information was unimportant now. But I got the sense that he was enjoying revealing all to me. He wanted someone to know what he had done. “Several years ago, just after the war had ended, my father put me in charge of the obsidian trade. Mercedes approached me requesting a regular order of obsidian, but she wanted it kept quiet. Only wanted it shipped privately to her. Against my will, I found myself intrigued, and after only a little prodding, she told me all about her potions and the experiments she was conducting with that alchemist. Mercedes was trying to come up with a way to force the bond and create more riders. But a side effect of the elixir was that people who took it became suggestable. That was what truly intrigued me. So I offered to help her, and she accepted.

“At first, I thought it only partially worked to control its recipients because the bond they had formed with their dragons wasn’t a true bond. I wanted to know if I could make it control true dragon riders. But it didn’t work on them. So, I began experimenting with different ingredients. Manticore venom proved very effective, just not in the way I had planned. It didn’t allow me to control riders, but it did make for a very powerful high.”

“Fleshfire,” I murmured.

Amir grinned and nodded. “And though producing Fleshfire in Halmar and shipping it to Zehvi has been profitable, that was not my true goal. I continued my search for the right combination until I discovered the missing ingredient—Moonstone. It was the key to controlling riders. When crushed into a fine power and added to the Fleshfire compound . . .”

All the seemingly random events of the past several months began to make sense, the pieces starting to fit together in my mind.Moonstone.The key had been Moonstone all along.

Moonstone affected dragons by making them unable to access the innate magic in their blood. So anyone with a connection to that magic—like their riders—would be affected as well.

“. . . tested it on a nobody to make sure, an older rider that lived on the outskirts, someone no one would believe or take seriously if he started blabbing, and it worked like a charm. But I had to be sure, so I decided to use it on—”

“Ramin,” I said.

“Yes, Ramin,” Amir admitted with not a hint of remorse for the destruction he had caused, the lives he had taken, or the torment he had caused Ramin by using him and his dragon as a vessel. “Yes, I used him and his useless wife.” He gestured to where Sura was currently staring up at the stone ceiling with a dreamy look on her face. “But for some reason, it did not work on her, just as it hasn’t worked tonight. No doubt some natural immunity. After the attack, I discretely tested it on a few more riders until I was sure it worked, but I was out of Moonstone,” Amir continued to explain. “And it is notoriously rare and hard to find.” He grinned then. “But I knew where I could get more.”

“The mines,” I said with dawning realization. “It was you who broke in.”

“Correct.”

“But how did you know—”

“My brother is so arrogant. It never crossed his simple mind that our father had also entrusted me with the secret of what he planned to do with the Moonstone—to defeat Baldor for good and end the war. But then it was stolen. I had always suspected that it was Malik who had taken it, but I didn’t know for sureuntil I drugged Ramin and asked him about it. After that, it was easy enough to fly to the mines and take what I needed.”

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