Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
Zanaya didn’t do linen or simple except when she was sparring or going into battle.
But she supposed it had been an emergency measure, the choice made by healers—who tended to be pragmatic by nature. She’d take care of it as soon as she rose and had access to her own resources. The thought made her wonder where she’d emerge this time around—she couldn’t predict it, not when she wasn’t the one who’d chosen the place of rest.
Alexander.
Her breath hurt in her lungs. She’d been trying not to think of him but to not think of her beloved general was an impossibility. She’d glimpsed him fighting his way toward her as Lijuan sucked her dry, but she didn’t know what had happened from that point on. Had he fallen victim to the monster, too? Was Alexander trapped in a mummified state?
Or even worse . . . had he borne damage akin to Antonicus?
Panic beat its wings inside her, her breath coming in short, sharp bursts. She could take anything but a world in which Alexander no longer existed.
Zanaya. You wake. The voice was beyond ancient, an echo of boundless time.
Zanaya went rigid, one hand on Firelight’s hilt. Who are you? An archangel’s imperious demand.
Laughter, the tone so very old that it made Zanaya’s bones ache. Her stomach dipped. Are you one of the Ancestors? The old ones who were rumored to Sleep below the Refuge, the very first of angelkind.
Perhaps, child. Perhaps I am. I do not believe so, but I cannot remember my childhood any longer. A sigh. I didn’t expect any of you to wake so soon, yet I have Slept with one ear open, listening. Waiting. Your brethren continue to Sleep, caught in-between.
Zanaya’s muscles began to unclench. She hated that she was in this unknown place, with this unknown voice, and yet . . . She felt no sense of threat. It was warmth and protection that she heard, that she felt. That witch bit me in battle.
The voice shifted, became songlike: Goddess of Nightmare. Wraith without a shadow. Rising into her Reign of Death.
Every tiny hair on Zanaya’s body shivered in a prickling wave. And some crumb of knowledge in the far recesses of her brain came to the fore, had her saying, Archangel Cassandra?
I was once her, came the answer. Now, I do not know who I have become. Qin, my Qin, he knew me. A world of sorrow. I dreamed of you, child. Long ago. I had forgotten.
Sky of silver.
Sky of night.
Wild tempests and a storm of gold.
Queen of the Nile.
Warrior beloved.
Battle born.
Death and resurrection.
Zanaya didn’t realize she was holding her breath until Cassandra came to a halt. “That’s it?” She threw up her hands, disrupting the liquid fire of her cocoon. “I know all that! I need to know what the future holds.”
Laughter in her mind, unused, rusty, and yet oddly infectious for all its weight. So many pathways I see for you, angel of tempests born. You could take any one of them. If I tell you the strongest thread I see, you will surely take the opposing one, so my sight is meaningless to you.
Zanaya wished the Ancient were wrong about Zanaya’s contrariness, but she wasn’t.
“It’s what makes me love you—and what infuriates me,” Alexander had said to her once, laughter in that silver-kissed gaze. “If I say the sky is blue, you’ll argue that it’s green for no reason at all.”
Sorry, she said to Cassandra. I don’t know why I’m like that.
Do you not? Eons in her voice, such a heaviness of age that it threatened to crush Zanaya’s ribs, compress her lungs. Your mother was a woman who would hear only one voice. Her own.
It had been a long, long time since Zanaya thought of Rzia, bitter and determinedly lonely, but now her stomach tensed. I’ve moved far beyond that. She was an archangel, a being of great power. I’m no child.
We are all our parents’ children, was Cassandra’s calm response. But you . . . you carry a piece of another now.
Ice in Zanaya’s blood, shards in her bones. “Lijuan.” She spat out the name like a curse. “She infected me with her viciousness?”
I have no answer to that, battle-born Zanaya. What I do know is that you’re not the same archangel who woke prior to the war. Do you wish to rise now? I’ve protected you in my fire, but it is no cage.
Zanaya stared at the rippling golds and reds of the flames, thought of Sleep . . . and came to a screeching halt. I can’t initiate Sleep. It was a gift that came centuries into adulthood and was a given; all angels past that age could choose to go into the state that suspended them between life and death.
Something is broken in me. Do you know what? Zanaya might be proud but she’d never been stupid; she was with Cassandra, Seer of Seers. To not ask the question would’ve been to waste a precious resource.