Sky Breaker (Night Spinner Duology) by Addie Thorley (best beach reads .txt) 📗

Serik stops abruptly and laughs. “You’re telling me you didn’t have the power to stop her?”

“I’m getting stronger every day,” Ziva interjects.

I give her arm a threatening squeeze. “That isn’t the point—”

“The point is, we never should have trusted you,” Lalyne interrupts. “You lead us from one disaster to the next.”

It hasn’t all been a disaster. You’re alive, aren’t you?

But arguing will get us nowhere. I pull a deep, balmy breath into my nose and calmly say, “Ziva believes that Ghoa and the prince are telling the truth about Kartok.”

“And you believe her?” Iree demands.

Ziva’s fingers clench. The light in the room wavers, and I quickly jump in to steady the threads of darkness. “I believe her enough to hear her out,” I say. “She hasn’t given us any reason to doubt. She wouldn’t risk—”

“Ghoa and the prince don’t care about the Lady and Father. Or any of us,” Serik says, pacing even faster.

“I know it seems improbable, but you’ve been begging me to trust, to listen to our allies….”

“Not in place of using your head!” Bultum barks.

Serik shoots the shepherd a blistering look. “You will not speak to Enebish like that.”

It might just be the suffocating heat, but his rush to defend me makes me feel like I’m basking in the desert sun.

“This isn’t an attack against Ziva,” Serik continues with a nod in her direction. “It’s accepting the truth about our enemies. That’s the Zemyan heir down there. And Ghoa, who framed you for a massacre, En.”

“I have a profound idea.” Azamat lies back on the bearskin rug and props his head up with his hands. “Why don’t we let the girl speak and save the arguing for when we know what we’re actually arguing about?”

Most of the time I want to strangle the old man, but right now I could kiss his stubbled cheeks. “Thank you for the sound advice, Azamat.” I turn to Ziva, trying to convey with a single, searing look how serious this is. Do not make me regret putting my faith in you.

She rolls her shoulders back. “I will happily explain if I’m allowed to speak.” She glares at Iree, Bultum, and Lalyne in turn. “As you know, I spent a good deal of time hiding with my father in the Temple of the Kings at Sawtooth Mesa. It’s where every king of Verdenet is brought for their Awakening, before ascending to the throne. The temple is the size of an entire city, with rooms and halls branching out for leagues beneath the plateau. Before the Sky King invaded, it housed priestesses and scribes—”

“I’m sorry, but what does this have to do with Zemyan sorcerers infiltrating the land of the First Gods?” Iree interjects.

“Everything!” Ziva snaps back. “I wandered those halls for hours on end, day after day, studying the walls, which generations of scribes had painted with murals of Verdenese life and beliefs. They were beautiful, of course, but nothing groundbreaking. Stories I had heard a thousand times before. Except for one, though I didn’t realize it at the time.

“I had been on my knees for hours that day, praying to heal my father’s wounds and for deliverance from starvation and assassins, when the Lady put a distinct image into my mind of a mural I’d never seen before. For three days, I scoured the temple until I found it.

“The Lady of the Sky and Father Guzan were depicted high up in the sky, walking through what looked to be a floating garden, surrounded by high, jagged mountains. Their son, Ashkar, stood at the base of the mountains, where numerous people waited in line. One by one, they approached Ashkar and were turned away, until a group came forward, bearing a key. Ashkar inspected the key, counting the sigils of ice and snow and wind emblazoned on its head. Then he inserted the key into the mountainside, and when a tunnel appeared, he permitted the group to enter.”

“Were those people the Kalima?” Iree asks.

“I assumed they were the Goddess-touched—the select few who have proven themselves worthy to enter the realm of the Eternal Blue—and I was furious at the Lady and Father for leading me to something so unhelpful. But now I know what I am and what those symbols of the sky mean. The Lady of the Sky didn’t deliver us from Sawtooth Mesa then because She knew you would find me. She knew you would help me save my father and bring me to this point.” Ziva links her arm through mine, and an overwhelming flood of peace courses through me. A feeling I’ve only ever experienced while writing in my Book of Whisperings. Quiet confidence. Complete stillness. “The Lady gave me the key and the answers that would deliver us all—Herself included.”

Silence fills the room. There isn’t a word, not in Verdenese or Ashkarian, that’s weighty enough to describe the tightness in my throat or the lightness in my chest. The tremendous surge of gratitude and love I feel toward the Lady and Father. For guiding our feet and placing us exactly where we needed to be to find each other. To help each other.

“I believe you,” I say, a sob more than words.

Ziva’s laughter is full of tears. She looks up and wraps her arms around me. We bump into the wall, my trembling body suddenly unable to support our weight. We laugh harder as we regain our balance.

I don’t know what the shepherds believe about the First Gods. They weren’t in the habit of discussing anything with me, and to claim any god other than the Sky King was heresy. So I never mentioned the Lady and Father, and our quest wasn’t about Them anyway. But the expressions on each of the shepherds’ faces makes their stance perfectly clear: Azamat’s mouth lolls open so wide, I can see the gray, rotting tooth at the back; Lalyne lowers slowly to the floor, her hands clutched to her chest; Iree and Bultum,