Sky Breaker (Night Spinner Duology), Addie Thorley [100 books to read in a lifetime txt] 📗

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,”