Duna
Arrows came down like iron rain, sticking into the hides of the huge Chovathi around them and taking some Valurians with them as well. Kunas, a look of madness in his eyes, whirled around to face the Sharians, screaming, “What are they doing?” at the top of his lungs. He was practically frothing.
Duna didn’t have an answer, but she had a guess: her sister, Lena, probably thought that these Chovathi were the enemy; any rational person would. But if the Sharians kept trying to kill the Chovathi, while killing her army as collateral damage . . .
She had to get them to stop before this whole thing exploded.
“Kunas,” she said, “they think we’re being attacked. What can you do to stop them?”
“Destroy them,” he answered entirely too seriously.
“No! We need them.” She surveyed the land and thought about the possibilities. “Can you raise a wall? Maybe something to slow them down while I find Queen Lena.”
Kunas’s eyes bulged, and he looked like he was trying to contain his rage—or perhaps his power. “You would spare those who attack us?”
Another volley of arrows came down. A few dozen Chovathi shrieked in pain, and half that many more fell to the ground dead. Her men did not fare much better.
Kunas was staring death at the approaching Sharians.
“They think they’re helping,” Duna snapped. “Now give me that wall or I’ll find another Khyth who will.”
Kunas still did not make eye contact with her and seemed to be having his own internal struggle about how to stop the Sharians.
“Very well,” he finally conceded.
He held his arms out and raised his hands. The sleeves of his robe fell away from his arms, revealing the cracked skin that signified a Khyth of the Breaking.
Duna was never ready for the feeling she got when the Khyth used their Breaking: it was like having the warmth sucked out of a room; it never felt good.
Power, redirected. Refocused.
It chilled her, and she would never be comfortable with it.
The Master Khyth was bent slightly backward, and his arms were stretched out in a semicircle, as if he was holding up a great, invisible weight on his chest. He was drawing a great deal of power for this, Duna could tell. He clenched his fists . . . and the earth trembled.
There was a deafening crack as immeasurable tons of rocks were cleaved in two. From the center of the battlefield, between Duna’s army and the Sharians, the earth split, with the fissure quickly making its way across the entire length of the Sharian’s front line.
Kunas thrust his fists forward, and the earth groaned again. Where it had split, on the Sharian side, a wall of earth began to rise up.
Only Duna realized that it wasn’t actually rising up at all—it was being peeled back. Kunas wasn’t summoning a wall; he was paring back the surface of the earth to move one instead.
Very clever, Duna admired. By peeling back the earth, he was forcing the Sharians to retreat; if he had just raised a wall between them, they might simply have walked around it. This tactic forced them back, though, which gave her more time to get to their army and tell them to stand down.
For now, the volleys of arrows had ceased. Duna seized the opportunity.
“Eowen,” she called to her messenger, “come with me. They know you, and that should get us the ear of the queen.”
The blond messenger nodded and maneuvered his horse beside hers.
She looked at Kunas. “Good work,” she said flatly as she gave her horse a tap with her heels. “Listen for my signal to lower the wall.”
The Master Khyth did not answer her; he was still steeped in concentration, bending the earth to his will.
The wall continued to rise, slowly, as Duna and Eowen set off for its edge. They would have to be quick if they hoped to find the queen and convince her to back down—because the real enemy still waited beyond.
***
Duna couldn’t recall how many years it had been since she and her sister had been together—and, frankly, she didn’t care to. When they had last parted ways, it had not been on the best of terms. She wondered if Lena still thought about it.
She supposed she would find out soon.
“Follow my lead,” she said to Eowen. Pulling out a piece of white cloth from beneath her armor, she wrapped it around her hand and raised it above her head as they approached the edge of the wall. She wouldn’t risk being shot at, even though—or perhaps, because—her sister was the leader of the troops.
Eowen nodded and did the same.
Their horses rounded the edge of the wall, and the entirety of the Sharian army came into view. Duna grimaced. She hadn’t been this close to her sister in years, and she hadn’t thought about that day until recently. The sour taste still lingered in her mouth.
It had never mattered to Duna that the rule of Haidan Shar passed to the strongest instead of the firstborn. Duna had never seen physical strength as important; she relied on her wits to finish battles. Lena, on the other hand, preferred to do things the old-fashioned way: by rolling up her sleeves and taking a swing at whatever was in her way.
And the last time they were together, Duna had been in her way—at least, that’s how Lena had seen it. It was why Lena had her exiled.
“Ho there!” came a voice from up ahead. It was a man on horseback coming to greet them.
“You’re from the Dorokian army,” he said, pulling his horse to a stop. He was a dark-featured man—not dark enough to be G’henni, but perhaps one of his parents had been. “Eowen, isn’t it?” he asked as he recognized Duna’s messenger. “What brings you here?”
“Correct, Captain Jahaz,” Eowen replied with a slight bow from atop his saddle. “We’ve come with a message for the queen.”
“What message?”
Duna addressed the captain: “That your army is attacking the wrong enemy.”
Captain Jahaz looked at her for a long moment, studying her features. He looked at her hair and her eyes and her armor. “You must be the sister that she’s spoken of,” he finally answered.
“I am.”
The captain nodded. “Then follow me.”
***
When they got close, there was no mistaking her, despite the years that had passed in the interim.
“Duna,” her sister said. “You haven’t changed.”
The words had a bitter aftertaste as Duna swallowed them. Lena had changed—but, somehow, for the better. She still had the same flowing blonde hair that she’d had in her youth, and the sharp green eyes that Duna had always envied. While Duna’s own eyes seemed to be set too far apart, Lena’s were spaced flawlessly; where Duna’s forehead seemed just too large for her own head, Lena’s was perfect. In short, Lena was everything that Duna was not.
Including reckless.
“Neither have you,” she answered. “Still running headlong into battles that you have no reason to fight, I see.”
“No reason?” Lena echoed. “Your army was under attack from the Chovathi. You should be thanking me—just like you should thank me for sparing your life that day,” she added sharply. “I could have had you killed—should have had you killed—for murdering Allyn.”
Duna laughed. “Allyn?”
So, she did still think about it. She was too angry to do anything with the thought, though.
“Allyn,” Duna went on, “was going to get rid of you the second you became useless to him.” Her hand went to the sheath of the dagger that she’d held on to ever since that night. She wanted to throw the proof in Lena’s face right now. “You never were good at assessing a situation, were you? You’ve always just lowered your head and charged forward. Well, this time you got the wrong people killed.”
Her hand shook as she unclasped the sheath.
But before she could bring it out, her sister exploded at her.
“People?” Lena shouted. “We were killing Chovathi!”
Duna’s hand moved away from the dagger again. Now was not the time; she had to control this situation first.
“Just listen to me for once, Lena!” Duna snapped. She squared herself against her younger sister; they were at least equals on horseback. “That’s what we’re trying to tell you: we’re not under attack. We’re being helped.”
Now it was Lena’s turn to laugh. “Helped?” she asked incredulously. “Being helped by the Chovathi? I always knew that you were weak, but I never knew that you were crazy too.”
“Listen. We’ve brokered a deal with one of their clans who seek to consolidate power. In exchange for helping them, they will help us by killing off the other clans.”
The queen was silent for a moment. She eyed Duna, then the wall, and then her army.
“There seems to be no downside,” she said. With a look back at her sister, she went on: “And while I may not have your gift for strategy, I do know this: when a deal seems too good to be true, that’s because it is.”
Duna shrugged. “We’ll worry about that after we retake my city.”
Lena sighed and shook her head. “Fine. If there’s one thing I remember about you it’s that you won’t let go when you’ve got something in your grasp . . .” She tapped the crown on her head. “With one exception.”
The tone was soft, but the words were a dagger.
“Just tell me,” she added, adjusting herself in the saddle, “where to swing this sword.”
At those words, Duna gave a loud whistle . . .
. . . and the wall began to tremble. The colossal structure began its recession back to its original place in the ground, shedding boulders and dirt like a drawbridge made of the earth itself. It groaned to a stop, and the landscape was once again clear.
“Right there,” Duna said, pointing.
The two armies were once again face to face, but neither of them was focused on the other. Instead, when the dust had settled, their singular objective was where Duna’s finger pointed.
There, in the clutches of the waiting Chovathi, were the peaks of the captive city of Ghal Thurái.