Raise your hands, my daughter. Accept my boon.
In accepting the sky goddess’s boon, I allowed her magic to enter my body and gave her full control of my powers, unable to stop what happened next, even if I wanted to. Did you, really? a voice in my head taunts. Did you really want to stop?
“Hurry up,” Indu’s disembodied voice cuts through my thoughts. “We haven’t got all day.”
“I agree,” Kali says. “I don’t like the look of this place.”
I understand what she means. Even though there isn’t anyone around—the nearest settlement must be at least a day’s ride away—we’re too exposed here in the open, too easily seen. As for the horses—I don’t even know how the three of them successfully made it here without getting noticed.
Kali offers Gharib’s reins to Cavas and takes Ajib’s reins for herself. I force myself to focus on the task at hand—reaching Tavan—and climb onto Agni’s back. A keening erupts in the distance, followed by a series of howls. My skin crawls at the sound. Agni’s ears flatten.
“Dustwolves,” Kali says grimly. “Indu, where do we go?”
“This way,” Cavas says, watching the space somewhere behind Kali. Though he’s still pale, his brown eyes are alert now. We turn our horses around and begin following Cavas. By nightfall, we make it to the edge of the Desert of Dreams without incident, and we camp next to a nearly dried-out pond, the water browning with mud. Indu whistles the Rooh song again while the horses pause to drink and nibble on the clumps of wild desert grass growing nearby. Cavas leans against a dhulvriksh, its rootlike branches jutting into the sky.
“We’ll need to keep moving,” Kali tells me. “There’s no saying what might be happening at the palace now. Or who’s already on your tra—Queen’s curses!” She’s staring somewhere behind me.
I turn around to see a rising cloud of white dust, the sort that might be caused by a battalion of soldiers or—
“A dust storm,” I say out loud.
My mother often warned me about the Desert of Dreams—especially about the diamond-bright Dream Dust that swirls through its center like powder. “It glitters,” Ma said. “It stings your eyes and your face. It creeps into the crevices of your clothes and body. It does its worst when you accidentally catch a whiff of it.”
“Perhaps we better stay here,” Kali says, staring at the white cloud of dust. “Wait for the storm to subside.”
“Bad idea.” Indu’s voice, her cold breath so close to my ear that it makes me stumble.
“By the goddess! Will you stop that?” I shout.
“You’ll be jumping at more than my voice when the dustwolves get here.”
We hear howls again, as if summoned—only this time they’re louder, closer.
Dustwolves or a dust storm. I’m not sure which option is worse. Next to the dhulvriksh, I notice that Cavas is breaking off a long stick—likely to ward off the wolves. I find myself walking toward him, pausing less than an arm’s length away, a dagger in my hand.
“Do you want this instead?” I ask.
His eyes widen as he stares at the hilt of the seaglass blade, then narrow as he vehemently shakes his head. “I want nothing to do with all that.”
All that. As if it’s something repulsive. As if I am the same. I swallow back a retort. I know Cavas is grieving for his father. That he’s justified in his response after years of being ill-treated by magi like myself. Underneath the hurt, I feel something else: anger, simmering under my skin. I hold on to it, let it fuel my limbs into action by reaching out to climb onto Agni, who nudges Cavas with a sharp snort. His eyes soften infinitesimally, and after a pause, he heads to Gharib.
“Follow my voice,” Indu says. “Follow the sound of my voice and I’ll do my best to keep them off your scent.”
She begins whistling again—though this time, instead of getting annoyed by it, I clutch onto the sound like a lifeline. We gallop toward the column of rising dust in the distance, Agni lightly churning the sand under her hooves, putting up a veil between me and any possible predators.
Behind me, Cavas lets out a curse, followed by my name. That’s when I feel it—the brush of a paw, of something, on my bare foot—and then I hear a yelp as I kick out. A long howl claws up my spine. Agni spurs faster, the road growing bumpy the farther we go into the desert. I can’t see Kali, even though I hear her cry out somewhere to my left. A shadow rises amid the dust, nearly invisible, if not for the telltale eyes glowing red with hunger. This time, however, I’m ready, my dagger sending a beam of green light directly into the dustwolf’s eyes. The spell isn’t strong enough to kill it, but from the yowls I hear, there must have been enough damage to push it back.
I hear Cavas curse again. “I lost my stick! And there are more of them!”
I raise my dagger again and aim another spell—this one much weaker than the one before. I see the dustwolf outlined in the green light, bigger than the biggest dog I’ve ever seen, stubby horns growing out of its skull. It dodges the spell this time around and reaches out with a slash, catching Agni with its claws. The mare screams, nearly bucking me off in her efforts to dodge the wolf. The sky darkens in this part of the desert, the air around us turning a murky yellow.
“Aim for the rising dust!” Indu shouts. “And try not to inhale anything!”
“Kali? Cavas?” I shout. “Are you there? Did you hear Indu?”
“Here!” Kali appears ahead of me, heading right into the storm. “I heard her!”
But there’s no answer
