City of Spells (Into the Crooked Place #2) - Alexandra Christo Page 0,75

only thing I know is that people deserve a choice,Wesley said. We can’t decide their futures for them, based on a vision or anything else. You have to know that, kid. You have to understand that.

Only, she didn’t understand.

Zekia was supposed to be a Liege and Lieges had to make the hard choices and lead people. They had to decide what was best, even if nobody could see the wisdom of it. All Zekia wanted was for magic to be safe and not to destroy her brother’s legacy by letting the Crafters down.

But she’d done all of that anyway.

I can only protect you if you let me, Wesley said. But I can’t save you from yourself.

It wasn’t herself that she needed saving from, though. It was everyone else.

It was the visions that snuck into Zekia’s mind like a thief and stole everything that made sense and replaced it with fear and death.

She had been asleep ever since and she didn’t know how to wake up again.

She didn’t know if she even deserved to.

25

Karam

THE FOREST WAS DECIMATED.

The tree house that Saxony had kissed Karam good night in had fallen from its stoop and the tree that housed it—best at ferrying messages from one side of the camp to another—was burned to cinders.

There was barely anything left of the place Saxony and the Rishiyat Kin once called home. The Uncharted Forest was gutted and all that was left in its ashes were bodies. It looked like the Shores of the Dead that Karam and Arjun had left behind, desperate to find hope back in these woods.

“It’s all gone,” Arjun said. “The weapons and the magic. Do you think it was a raid? It must have been Ashwood and that bastard busker Nolan. They split us up so they could attack us when we were most vulnerable. Everyone is gone and we’re all that’s—”

“Check the bodies,” Karam said. “Check who they are.”

Check if they are anybody we care for, she thought.

She wouldn’t consider the worst until she’d seen it for herself.

So they thumbed through the dead and with each body Karam turned over, or those whose faces were bloody enough that she had to go by their clothing to see whether they were busker or Crafter, she prayed that she wouldn’t see anybody she loved.

There were some Rishiyat Crafters and a few of the buskers Karam recognized from their camp, but she couldn’t find Saxony, or Tavia, or anyone in Saxony’s family. She couldn’t see her friends and when Karam sat on a charred log that looked like it had been part of a building once, she let out a long exhale.

They were alive, somewhere out there.

She shouldn’t have wanted to smile, surrounded by so many bodies—so many of someone else’s loved ones who didn’t make it—but Karam had already lost so much that she thought she was owed this small spark of hope.

“What do we do now?” Arjun asked. “We came all this way and they’re gone.”

“Saxony wouldn’t have fled this place without me,” Karam said, certain. “She would have left a sign somewhere to hint at where they were going.”

“Signs can be read by anyone,” Arjun argued, unconvinced. “They wouldn’t have risked that.”

“Then it would have to be something only I know,” Karam said. “A thing only I would be able to follow.”

“Karam—”

“Stop it,” she said. “We’re not losing anyone else.”

Arjun pressed his lips together and nodded.

Asees was gone and six of Arjun’s friends had died with her. Karam and Arjun had been too late to save them, but they weren’t too late to save the others. Whatever had happened here, their army had survived, and that meant there was a chance of redemption for Karam.

She could still live up to the legacy of the Rekhi d’Rihsni her family had formed to save magic.

She could still help them win this war.

She could still save Tavia from that awful future she had seen.

Nobody else Karam loved was going to die.

“Think,” Karam said to Arjun. “What would only we see? What here would mean something to only us?”

Arjun picked up a piece of ashen wood. “Maybe they wanted to leave something and didn’t have the chance,” he said. “If they had to run from this attack, then they couldn’t have stayed around to leave signs and clues. There wasn’t time.”

“Saxony would have found a way,” Karam said.

If there was one thing in this world she still had faith in, then it was Saxony; it was the woman she loved and her inability to