Sky Breaker (Night Spinner Duology)

by Addie Thorley

  “Do you realize what you’re suggesting?” I ask Serik in a low, dangerous whisper. I can’t just mentor Ziva. Ghoa destroyed me. I want nothing to do with another relationship like that. And if I allow Ziva to help, I won’t have complete control of the night. I won’t be able to ensure everyone’s safety when she inevitably makes a mistake. Or purposely sabotages us.

  “Loosen your hold on the reins and stop being so suspicious,” Serik says. “We can do this, but only if you trust us. We need to use every advantage at our disposal, and Ziva’s offer is a good one.”

  Behind him, the shepherds nod. Ziva raises her chin, a challenge in her eyes.

  “What if my power flags?” I persist, even though I know it’s pointless.

  “What if my power flags?” Serik says solemnly. “Every day, I burn closer to the end of my wick, and when I reach it, we’ll all freeze to death.”

  “But—”

  “If you have a better plan, let’s hear it!” someone shouts.

  They know I don’t. Without proper treatment, King Minoak will die. And we can’t invade Lutaar City without him. We need the Namagaans to join our rebellion eventually anyway. I’d just hoped to recruit them later, when our numbers were more impressive.

  “I have a bad feeling about this, Serik,” I say, my heart buzzing in my chest like the wings of a dragonfly.

  Serik’s face softens. He twines his fingers through mine and tugs me closer, tucking my head beneath his stubbled chin. “I know it’s hard,” he whispers for my ears only, “but we’re your allies. If you can’t trust us, this rebellion is doomed before it’s truly begun.”

  I clutch his hand tighter. I know Serik’s right. I’m not being fair. I’m treating everyone as if they’re going to betray me—as if they already have. But how can I be anything but wary when Ghoa framed me for a massacre and Temujin tricked me and Kartok siphoned my power and stored it in his urns?

  “We can do this,” Serik murmurs into my hair. “Have faith.”

  There it is again. That word. Coming from Serik.

  He gives my shoulders a squeeze, then turns back to Ziva and the crowd of waiting shepherds. “Gather your belongings! We leave for Namaag at sundown.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  GHOA

  EVERYONE FEARS THE DARKNESS TO SOME DEGREE. IT MAKES the walls feel closer. Sounds seem louder. Every whisper of breath is sinister and every prickle on your skin is menacing.

  It renders even seasoned warriors like the Kalima useless.

  Their shouts fill the vault behind me and spill down the long treasury hall, low and high, shrill and warbling, as they realize what the darkness means.

  What Enebish has done.

  She isn’t acting in self-defense or rescuing the “weak.”

  She is attacking us.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” I roar into the blackness. We’ll never be able to stand against the advancing Zemyans if we’re locked in battle with one another. Maybe that’s the aim? Temujin has never been concerned with keeping Ashkar strong—always stealing our rations and cannons, luring our soldiers away and releasing prisoners. He probably wants Sagaan to fall. Wants to see the Sky King dethroned. Wants to end the Kalima.

  And Enebish supports him.

  Part of me wants to scream and flail like my comrades trapped in the blackened vault, but I refuse to give Enebish and Temujin that satisfaction. Plus I have an advantage the others do not: I’m accustomed to Enebish’s darkness. As accustomed as a person can be without the ability to spin the night, that is.

  Stretching out my arms, I feel my way across the glass-strewn atrium and back down the corridor, breaking into a run once my hand is flush against the wall.

  When Enebish’s power first presented, she stayed up all night fiddling with the ink-black threads, as she called them, drenching our entire room in impenetrable shadow. She never would have stopped practicing—she never would have even known the sun had risen—if I hadn’t woken up screaming most mornings.

  In time, I grew less terrified of the oppressive blackness. But I will never forget how my heart raced that first morning. How I felt like I was choking, suffocating. Falling down, down, down a never-ending well.

  Just as my honorless, double-crossing warriors are now.

  They continue to fight and thrash, desperate to escape the vault.

  When we first chose the space for our war room, the close walls and jutting shelves seemed like a good thing. An extra layer of protection. But in the dark, the obstacles might as well be prison bars. Not even the Sun Stokers can counteract Enebish’s darkness. They snap their fingers, but every spark is doused in an instant, leaving the most elite warriors in Ashkar to grapple helplessly for the door.

  I feel my way to the threshold and lean against the frame, listening to their weakness. Picturing their desperation. I ran back to them on instinct—to rally them to defend our king and city—but now I’m tempted to leave them here. It would be so easy to slip down the hall and out the door. Let them try to escape and orchestrate a counterattack without me.

  This is what happens when you “dismiss” your commander, I’d crow as I watched Enebish and Temujin overtake them.

  Or even better, I could seal the door with ice and fill the air with frost. Trap them in here until they’re too cold to move, too frozen to escape. A gift for the Shoniin.

  I reach for the door, my lips carved into a grin, when my mother’s warbling voice and my father’s stricken face appear through the blackness. They’re seated in the music room at our estate, as always, but instead of rushing to greet me, eager to hear of my victories, Mamá is sobbing over her embroidery and Papá is pacing the room, downing glass after glass of vorkhi.

  “How did you, alone, escape?” he asks.

  “Was there nothing you could have done to save them?” Mamá cries.

  “We’re so grateful you survived, but …”

  But, but, but!

  I could never face my family or the people of Ashkar without my warriors. No one will revere a commander who left her battalion to die—even if they deserved it—because the people will never know they conspired against me. No one will allow me to speak ill of the dead. Especially not if the Sky King is among them. In the eyes of Ashkar, I would be the traitor. The coward.

  No better than Temujin.

  I want to shout and rage at the injustice, but I let out a long breath, tighten my ponytail, and smooth my hands down my leathers. I will never forget their betrayal, and I will never forgive them, but if I must save my warriors to salvage my reputation and reclaim my position, so be it.

  “Stop moving!” I shout.

  They continue jostling and yelling, punching and scraping. Crawling over one another like feral dogs as pops of light from the Sun Stokers flare in and out.

  “Listen to me if you want to get out of here!”

  Again they ignore me. Or maybe they can’t hear me. Thankfully, I have ways to make them listen.

  Placing my palms on either side of the door frame, I press my cold outward, sliding it across the floors and along the walls like the giant blocks of ice we cut from the Amereti each winter. That’s how my Kalima power has always felt: like a crushing weight I must unload. Almost too heavy to move.

  I can’t see the blue and white fractals overtaking the walls, but I feel the power shoot through my fingertips. My body shivers with delight as the temperature plummets. Colder and colder until breath clouds my face and tickles my cheeks.

  “The commander is attacking us!” my warriors shout.

  “She’s defected to the enemy!”

  Of course that’s what they’d think.

  The loudest voice sounds like Bastian, and I make a mental note to annihilate him at our next training session.

  Assuming there is a next training session.

  “Unlike you, I haven’t betrayed anyone,” I retort. “I’m trying to help. But if you’d rather perish at the hands of Enebish and Temujin, by all means, keep fighting me.”<
br />
  To my astonishment, the jostling ceases. Probably out of habit or sheer desperation, but I’ll take it. “Reach out in front of you. If you can feel the table or chairs or anything at all, shove them together in the middle of the room. Then step back as far as you can. Press yourselves against the walls.”

  I give them exactly one minute to complete this task before I center myself in the doorway, raise my hands, and send a blast of ice hurtling at the furniture. It streaks through the blackness like a long, white spear, visible for a fleeting instant, before it hits the pile with a crack. It sounds like the entire room is shattering, and my warriors gasp. The Sky King cries out. Though, it’s completely unnecessary. My aim was true. I can feel my ice seeping into the wood, binding each piece together and freezing it to the vault floor.

  “Eshwar, lightning!” I command. After a brief hesitation, Eshwar hurls a snapping bolt of electricity at my makeshift firepit. As soon as the furniture bursts to flame, I shout at the Sun Stokers, “Fuel the blaze!”

  All five Sun Stokers dart forward, palms up, and direct their strength into the fire. The resulting wave of heat and light is so intense, I have to shield my face. Enebish’s darkness dives at the wood and snatches at the leaping flames, but unlike the Sun Stokers’ individual flares, this fire is too big, fueled by too much wood, to douse. And thanks to my base of ice, every obstacle in the room remains cemented to the floor. Which means, for a few blessed seconds, there is enough light and space to navigate to the door.

  “Move!” I shout.

  This time I don’t have to repeat myself.

  We spill into the hall, and the sudden wall of darkness feels like tumbling into a grave—one of the mass burial pits I’ve dug for fallen Zemyans. I always assumed they would repay the favor if I perished in battle. I never dreamed it would be my sister, along with defectors from our own army, who would put me in the ground.

  Another wave of outrage washes over me.

  How dare she? How dare she!

  “Form a line behind me,” I order, “hold on to the person in front of you, and do exactly as I say, when I say it.” I wave my arms and stumble forward until my left hand finds the wall. Then I take a deep breath and close my eyes. I feel safer in the blackness of my own mind than trapped beneath Enebish’s shroud. It also makes it easier to fall back through time, to my childhood, when I would skip down these corridors hand in hand with Papá.

  From the vaults, Papá’s office is seven doors down and up a flight of stairs. But going up will only trap us, so I guide the Kalima past two more doors and feel my way across the atrium to the perpendicular corridor, which will lead us to the rear entrance. Temujin will want to make a spectacle. He always does. Which means he’ll charge through the grand entrance so all of Sagaan can see his accomplishment. How he surprised and trapped the Kalima warriors. While he puts on a production, we’ll slip out the back. What we’ll do once we’re out in the open, completely exposed, is another question. But our odds will be better out there, where we have room to fight and unleash the power of the sky.

  I increase my pace to a jog. The king’s hands are like shackles around my wrist—sharp and bitter cold—but he doesn’t question my actions or make threats. Neither do the Kalima.

  They will never question me again.

  I plow ahead, counting the distance to the exit. Twenty paces. Ten. I remove my hand from the wall and extend my arms to shove through the double doors, but the sound of a high-pitched whistle makes me slam to a halt. The Sky King and several others crash into my back, their complaints peppering me like shrapnel, but I hiss at them to be silent. The whistle grows louder. Nearer. My stomach lurches. It’s a sound that preludes death. A sound I always equated with victory until Enebish turned on me at Temujin’s execution.

  “Get back!” I whip around and shove blindly at the Sky King. He falls into Varren, who stumbles into someone else, but if they complain, I don’t hear it. The boom of exploding marble drowns out every other sound.

  Debris pelts my face, and a wave of scorching heat throws us back down the hall. As if we’re no heavier than tumbleweeds. Which turns out to be a blessing, since the entire end of the corridor has been bitten off by a ball of starfire. It smolders red and gold as it rolls to a stop against the blackened wall. I stare at it. Bewildered. Then furious.

  They attacked from the rear entrance.

  Frustration snowballs inside me until my vision flares white. I was wrong. I don’t know Temujin as well as I thought I did, despite the fact that he’s been tormenting me like a vengeful ghost for months now, prodding invisible wounds he couldn’t have known existed.

  “Snow Conjurers!” I scream. The heat from the starfire feels even hotter than the blaze I started in the vault. Melting my icy core. Thankfully, the Snow Conjurers don’t need additional instruction. Flakes of the heaviest, wettest snow fall from the ceiling of the treasury and smother the flames. I urge them to continue, and the snow builds into a wall of solid white that seals off the burning hall. It won’t hold Temujin and Enebish for long, but hopefully long enough.

  “Freeze the floor!” I call as I charge back the way we came, relying on the faint glow of the dying starfire to guide us. The rest of the Kalima follow, the Ice Heralds at the rear, painting the tiles with sparkling strokes of ice.

  “We can’t use the grand entrance,” the Sky King says in a shrill voice that sounds nothing like the man I’ve served for half my life. He isn’t wrong. Those doors will either be obliterated like the rear entrance or the traitors will be lying in wait in the courtyard, ready to ambush us. “We’re trapped!”

  He is wrong about that. There’s another way—a way I imagined as a child, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows of Papá’s office while he finished his work.

  “What are those tiny bridges?” I’d asked, my face pressed against the glass, enthralled with the lacy wings extending from his second-story room to the building adjacent. They looked like a highway for birds. Only birds didn’t need a highway. They could fly.

  “Those are called buttresses, my dear,” Papá said. “They keep the building steady, help to hold it up. And they look rather nice, don’t you think?”

  If we can reach them, they will look better than nice.

  “Why are you leading us up?” Iska mutters when I bang through the seventh door on the left and pound up the steps. “We’ll be treed like snow leopards. We might as well surrender down here.”

  “If you want to surrender, stay. If you want to escape and return to fight another day, follow me,” I say as I slam into Papá’s office.

  The familiar scents of pipe smoke and his bergamot cologne hit me, both comforting and paralyzing. He and Mamá retreated to the safety of our estate after the attack on the Sky Palace, but if he were here, he wouldn’t doubt me for a second. Papá is proud and supportive to a fault—evidenced by the awards from every minor concert or competition I’ve ever participated in, plastered to the walls and dangling from the ceiling. The gauntlet of medals slap my cheeks, making the pressure even more overwhelming.

  I stumble through the pitch black and crash into Papá’s gigantic desk, toppling papers and making a mess of his carefully arranged quills. Once I’ve battered through the furniture, I lift my hands and ease forward until my palms meet the chilled windowpane. Then I spread my fingers and pump my bitter cold into the glass. I can feel it shudder and expand—like a bowstring drawn too tight.

  With a loud pop, tinkling glass falls across my boots and down the outer wall of the treasury, where it smashes against the cobblestones. I don’t know if it’s because my hearing is heightened in the dark, but the sound is louder than a cannon firing.

  If Enebish and Temujin didn’t know where we were before, they do now.

  “Go. Hurry!”

  “Go where, Ghoa?” Varren asks. “You can’t expect us to jump out a second-story window.”

  “Of course not. There are buttresses. Walk across to the adjacent building. Hopefully it hasn’t bee
n invaded.”

  “How?” someone shouts.

  “We can’t see!” another voice interjects.

  “Scoot or crawl,” I shoot back. “Do whatever you must. Just go. We cannot be captured. They’ll kill every one of us, then Ashkar will have no hope of recovery.”

  “Do as she says!” the Sky King bellows behind me, and despite everything, my racing heart flutters with satisfaction. Vindication.

  “We can try to provide some light,” Weroneka, one of the Sun Stokers, says. She and the others feel their way to the window and raise orbs of light as Lizbet ventures out onto the buttress. She’s the smallest and lightest of all of us and, as a Breeze Bringer, she can wield the drafts of wind to steady her balance. She’s the natural choice to make the first crossing. I keep sight of her brown braid until she’s halfway across. The Sun Stokers’ orbs grow smaller and dimmer every second, shrinking from the size of melon fruit to potatoes, but Enebish’s power is flagging too. Every time she snuffs the Sun Stokers’ light, the oppressive darkness lightens a shade. Ink to midnight. Raven to charcoal. It’s a battle of stamina, and she is out of practice.

  Vanesh, another Breeze Bringer, mounts the buttress next. He shuffles out a few steps, then turns and extends his hand to the Sky King. Varren helps the king navigate the jagged window and steadies his balance until he catches hold of Vanesh. Then the two of them creep forward slowly. Painfully slowly.

  “Faster!” I hiss. But the Sky King is too wobbly—encumbered and off balance in his heavy fox fur cloak and pointed slippers. “Lose the finery!” I order. Vanesh turns carefully, hands trembling as he fumbles with the buckle of the Sky King’s cloak. Which is stuck. Of course. Vanesh is still tearing at the clasp when the darkness ripples. The sky flares orange, and my ears ring with a deadly hum.

  “Turn back!” I shout.

  Too late.

  Several balls of starfire whiz past the window, demolishing the courtyard and east wing of the treasury. Varren leaps back into the room, but Vanesh and the Sky King are too far, nearly to the apex of the buttress, and moving slower than ever, thanks to the king’s hysterics. He’s shouting threats and gesticulating wildly instead of putting one foot in front of the other.