“I can hear you. You fear them. But they aren’t coming for you.”
Why are you doing this? You left. You made your sons, your subjects, all of Jeru believe you were dead.
“I jumped from the cliff, and I changed into a bird.”
Why?
“Meshara said I would become everything I feared—a monster—and I did. Meshara knew what I was becoming. I might have spared her, but she knew. So I had to kill her.”
He’d killed her because she knew. Boojohni was right. My mother had seen what was to come. It was not a curse but a prophecy. The realization swept through me with sudden clarity.
“I’d already begun to lose control. But after Meshara died, it became worse. I was changing without warning, entering the stables and shifting into a horse. Taking a bath and becoming a great, flopping fish. Turning everything I touched into something I didn’t want. Gold into rocks and rocks into water, bread into sand and my sword into straw. I woke up one morning and the sheet on my bed had become a boa constrictor.” He stared at me with pursed lips. “I was afraid of what would happen if my secret was discovered.”
You left Jeru because you were afraid. But you aren’t afraid anymore?
“I became everything I feared. Now I am fear. And no one can stop me.”
He stared down at Jeru City and flexed his huge wings.
“My son . . . he is a Changer too. An eagle. But he can’t control the change. Now he is gone, Jeru needs a king, and you are alone. I will let you live if you do as I say.”
And what of Lady Firi? She thinks she’s going to be queen.
He cackled. “She will make a good pet.”
For a moment all was quiet in the city below, the distance creating an illusion of serenity. Then flames begin to gyrate and lick the sky, and Jeru came alive. The stench of pitch and smoke rose in the wind, and screams and shouts began to swell and find me across the distance. Hide, the people said. Run, the women screamed. Volgar, the men shouted. The word mother pierced the air along with the others, and I covered my ears in horror, not wanting to hear, not able to prevent it. The birdmen are here. The Volgar are here. Run. Hide. Help me. The words trembled and burst, only to swell again like the blisters the Volgar Liege had raised on my skin.
Tiras, I cried, Tiras, your city. Your city is burning.
“Call him, Lark of Corvyn. Call your eagle king. Call my son, so he will know his father has returned. The birdmen will kill and feed, and when the people are begging for mercy, I will extend it. I will call them off. And I will take what’s mine.”
Fire burning Jeru’s streets,
Find the birdmen, make them flee.
Arrows in the archer’s bow,
Find the birdmen, e’er they go.
Zoltev laughed, incredulous. “The city burns, and you spin rhymes?”
Volgar birdmen, hear my cry,
Jeru’s burning, you will die.
Close your wings and bow your heads,
Every living birdman, dead.
“Do you really think they can hear you? That your words are so powerful across such a distance?” Zoltev mocked.
Rocks upon which Zoltev stands,
Tumble now beneath the man.
Open up and swallow him,
That Jeru will be safe again.
Zoltev bared his teeth and swung his arm, striking me across the face. For a heartbeat I was weightless, teetering between falling and flailing, my arms wide, searching for something to hold on to. Then I was part of the sky, a fluttering poppet in the wind, words rushing through my head.
I was falling.
It sounded like an eagle’s cry, piercing and long, vibrating in my head even as the wind tore at my hair and cloak, grasping hands that dragged me toward the earth. But I felt sound leave my throat, felt it stream behind me as I plummeted. Then the greedy hands of gravity became powerful arms, the roar of the wind morphed into the clapping of wings, and I was snatched from the air by the Volgar King.
My body bucked, and my cloak came loose, continuing the path of my descent, flapping like a crimson bird caught in a gale. For a moment we spun wildly, wings and arms and bodies colliding in mid-air, careening toward the ground, and I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see the end. Then the wings that carried me caught the wind and tamed it, pounding it into submission, and we rose again, climbing the sky, seeking the moonlight and the stars, leaving death behind.
I screamed again, the cry billowing from my throat and into the night, and the king pressed his lips to my ear and spoke my name.
“Shh, my queen. It is me.”
And I realized that the arms that wrapped around me were not scaled. The wings above me were not shot with green, and the man who’d plucked me from the air was not a beast.
Tiras.
Tiras?
I began to weep, locked in his impossible embrace, crying in horror and hope, disbelief and elation, watching the world stream below us, magical and hushed, a piece of a dream. I wanted to keep flying and never return, but the voices of Jeru rose from the ground.
Smoke and ash and billowing flames began to dot the landscape in every direction, and suddenly we were surrounded by a flock of Volgar beasts, screeching and diving in chaotic frenzy. They paid us no heed; Tiras was simply one of them, a birdman claiming his spoils, and I began to chant and cast my spells.
Spun from vultures, made to kill.
Volgar birdmen, stripped of will.
Born of fear and hate and shame,
Return to hell from whence ye came.
“It must end,” Tiras spoke into my ear. “Jeru burns, my father lives, and this all must end.”
The Volgar had to die. I couldn’t send them away, couldn’t urge them to fly. I had to destroy them, or it would continue.