The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,151

blinding light, a roaring in my ears …

And then nothing.

Confused, I open my eyes, my arms lifted to ward stone and mist alike away from my face. All around me is mist. Up close, it’s as beautiful as it is frightening—it gleams as if lit from within by every color at once, glistening like iridescent feathers. It roils around me, seething, angry—and yet I feel nothing, except a flare of heat against one hip. I lift a hand and see the mist swirl around my skin, which is unmarked and untwisted.

“North?”

I whirl around. Nimh is there, just behind me, gazing at me with round, tear-filled eyes. There’s no sign of Inshara.

It’s just Nimh and me, wrapped together in our own world of mist. She hovers a breath away from me, her gaze roving over my features, hungry, desperate. Her hand lifts, but halts just above my face, her fingers trembling with the desire to touch me.

“You have to stop this!” I gasp, not waiting to question my luck that, somehow, I’ve bought a few moments before the mist takes me. “You’re destroying everything that you love out there. She isn’t worth it.”

“There isn’t anything left that I love.” The tears in Nimh’s eyes spill over. “You’re dead.”

“I’m right here,” I insist, wishing I could reach out and grab hold of her. “I’m not some trick of the mist. Whoever told you I was dead was lying.”

“You can’t be,” Nimh cries. “The mist would destroy you. You have no protection.”

My hip throbs again, and with sudden realization, I dig my hand into my pocket until my fingers close around the small, round stone Nimh gave me on the cliff top. It’s so hot my instincts tell me to drop it, but I hold on, gritting my teeth.

“How are you here?” Nimh’s eyes drop to fix on her protection stone and then lift to meet my gaze, wondering.

“Magic,” I whisper.

“Oh, gods,” Nimh moans, her eyes focusing again on my face—focusing on the place that’s burning nearly as badly as my palm. Her hand lifts, but she halts the movement before she can touch me. Her fingers hover helplessly for a moment before a drop of blood from the gash on my cheek spatters against her skin. She stares at the crimson staining her fingertips. “You’re hurt.”

“But alive. Nimh—we can stop her. Take your crown back, and Inshara can’t go to the cloudlands. You don’t have to become this thing.”

Her eyes travel over my features as if memorizing them for the last time. “I am the destroyer,” she whispers. “I am the Lightbringer.”

“You can choose what that means!” I try to catch her wandering gaze, try to keep her eyes on mine. “You can choose, understand? This power is yours—you choose what to do with it.”

She opens her mouth, but whatever retort she had planned dies on her lips as she looks at me, an agony of indecision. Then I see her eyes widen, and the mist raging around us goes still.

For a moment, I want to throw my arms around her, hold her tight, relief that she’s chosen humanity over destruction making me giddy.

Then I see the hand curled around her ankle.

Touching her.

Inshara.

I’m paralyzed, the world crumbling around me. The mist falls away, the terrace and the city below it utterly silent save for the rasping of our breath. Inshara is alive—though when I see her face, my breath stops, for her manic smile stretches a fraction too wide, and her eyes flicker and glint with iridescence as if they’re windows to the mist-storm raging inside her soul.

She jerks at Nimh’s leg, pulling her down onto the ground where she crouches. Nimh cries out in horror and pain, and the sound goes through me like a knife.

Then, slowly, Nimh begins to glow. She’s like a sunrise come to life, gold suffusing her features. She’s utterly beautiful, her power on full display, and the thought of that power drained from her is unbearable. Her light catches the mist in the same way the dawn catches the clouds, growing brighter and stronger every second.

It’s Inshara who speaks, who breathes the word: “Yes.”

In that one syllable, all her mist-touched madness is there for the world to see.

Nimh is trying to pull away, struggling against the other woman’s iron grip—the grief in her face breaks my heart, for she knows what Inshara has done to her, that she’s witnessing the last moments of her own divinity.

The aura of gold swells and flares around the pair of