Page 256 of Mother of Death and Dawn

“You sent Lightning Dust to your own people. You blew up your own country.”

“I didn’t—”

But then Nura’s gaze fell to Ara’s burning skyline behind us. Anger and grief warred across her face in erratic twitches.

“There is no room for dissidents in wartime,” she spat. “You were beside me when we learned those lessons in the Ryvenai War.”

“Stop pretending this is about the greater good. I fuckingseeyou, Nura. I know you better than any other living person does. And maybe you’re right. Maybe you do have every right to be angry at Ara. But—”

“I love this country,” Nura snapped.

“I’ve seen what you do to the things you claim you love.” He thrust his hand out, gesturing to Ara’s smoking shoreline. “We can’t survive your Ascended-damned love, Nura. And I think you know it, too. Don’t tell me you think this isright.”

For a split second, Nura looked hurt. The lines across her face were like cracks, revealing more of her emotion than she had ever let slip before.

“I watched Tisaanah burn Lady Zorokov alive,” she hissed. “What a terrible death. I was there in the rubble as I listened to her scream. What did you have to say about that?”

Movement stirred behind Nura, at the rail of her ship. Crazed eyes and messy white hair poked up from between the soldiers. Vardir drew in a gasp, then hurried down the ramp. He barely looked at Max and I—only gaped past us, at the Aran coastline.

“Get back on the ship, Vardir,” Nura barked, without looking at him.

Vardir did not appear to hear her. He lifted a shaking finger to Ara. “Look—lookat that!”

“Vardir—” Nura snapped.

“Look at that!” His round eyes snapped to Max, and then to me, landing there and holding my stare. “Do you feel this? Surely, with the connections you have to deep magics, you must.”

I realized what he was pointing to was not the wreckage, but the stream of red, shimmering smoke that rose from the ruins of the Tower—where the heart had been smashed in the explosion. Even after Max and I had gathered the shards, the strange tear of magic still yawned there.

The sheer intensity of Vardir’s alarm made me pause. He was mad—but he also knew more about deep magic than nearly anyone else in the world.

“You feel it?” he said. “The cracks?”

The noxious sensation. The sense of instability, like the earth a thousand layers down was shifting. I did feel it.

Vardir seemed to find this silence validating. “You can’t,” he said to Nura, all the words running together into a single panicked sentence. “It would be a mistake, I miscalculated, it will all collapse. We have been drawing too deep, far too deep, you can’t—”

“Get back on the boat.”

“But my—”

“Get back on the boat!” Swirls of murky shadows flared at her clenched fists, as if her magic momentarily escaped her grasp.

And despite the corpses, despite the Fey, despite the armada, it wasthismoment—Nura’s loss of control—that scared me more than anything.

“What is it, Vardir?” Max said, with a note of unease.

“It—” Vardir started, but Nura flung her hand up.

The burst of magic was unnatural, fitful. A flick of her fingers, and Vardir’s body was hurled like a rag doll backwards up the ramp, colliding with a wall of corpse soldiers and sending them staggering. They corrected themselves with uncanny precision, too-long limbs bending to balance their weight, faces blank.

When she whirled back to us, her eyes were a little wilder.

“We both want the same thing. The Fey are coming. I stole their greatest weapon, but they are still a force to be reckoned with. They won’t listen to reason.”

She outstretched her hand. Three fingers were now stumps. The ones that remained had blackened, pulsing blue and violet beneath the intensifying blood-red of the sky.

“I’ll ask you one last time to help me. The only way Ara survives this is if we do it together.” Her expression changed too fast, as if all her muscles rearranged in the span of a blink. Now she looked like a child, afraid and pleading. “We can still do this together, Max.”

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