Sky Breaker (Night Spinner Duology) by Addie Thorley (best romance ebooks .txt) 📕

inside a cage originally intended for a dog, still attacking the wooden bars as if they’re the carcass of a rabbit.

I’ve visited her every day of our journey. Begging her to come back to me. Whispering happy memories of our years together. Reaching out to gently stroke her golden feathers. But her eyes continue to dart with a wild intensity I haven’t seen since the day she arrived at Ikh Zuree, just hours after being snatched from the tundra. Every time my fingers get close, she lunges to snap them off.

There has to be a way to reverse the binding. I will find a way to reverse the binding—or spend the rest of my life trying.

“So quick to forgive your eagle, but so quick to condemn me …” Temujin muses into the silence.

“Orbai is a bird,” I retort. “She doesn’t have agency or a conscience. She can’t be held accountable.”

“Do you think the binding magic cares if you’re bird or human? I’m doing my best within the parameters I’ve been given.” Temujin’s voice hitches, and it makes my gaze flit back. I watch him totter through the knee-deep snow, battered and bloodstained. The last time I saw Kartok in the Temple of Serenity, he tried to slit my throat in order to heal me with Loridium—to bind my will to his, as he’d done with Orbai.

And, supposedly, Temujin.

How much of the rebel’s treachery has been intentional and how much is Kartok’s pull? I wonder before I catch Temujin watching me with those mournful golden eyes. Willing these thoughts into existence.

Thankfully, I’m immune to his charms this time. In fact, I revel in his moans over the next two weeks as we trudge toward the Chotgori steppes, where the wind blows sideways and frost gnaws at your fingers and toes—even with the help of Serik’s heat.

“Please kill me and reap your revenge,” he begs me every day.

And every day I smile and say, “But this is so much more satisfying than killing you.”

We arrive in Arisilon City three weeks to the day from the time we left Namaag. Even though I knew we wouldn’t be greeted by a welcoming party and whisked away for hot baths and a feast, and even though Temujin claimed the Chotgori were living in squalor and forced to work in the mines, the sight of their ravaged capital still grinds my heart like the heel of a boot.

Just get to Chotgor, I’d chanted through every grueling league of our trek. As if making it this far north was the ultimate goal rather than the first rung on an incredibly high and rickety ladder.

It seems the shepherds had the same misguided hopes. Their eyes grow rounder than shields as we pass through the wreckage. Iree’s youngest daughter, who can’t be more than five, reaches for her father’s hand. “It’s worse than the grazing lands,” she whispers.

He nods solemnly and pulls her closer.

The riverside city is even bleaker than it was five years ago, directly following the Battle of a Hundred Nights, when Ashkar finally brought Chotgor into the Protected Territories. Unlike Namaag, I was present for this siege. I helped topple the quaint snow houses stippling the outskirts of the city. I aided Tuva, lending what I could of my novice Night Spinning, to help her drench the sky with a blackness so oppressive, all vestiges of everyday life ceased.

It was always under the assumption—nay, promise—that it would all be restored to even greater glory than before. That was the entire purpose of forming the Protected Territories—to offer these struggling people a better way of life. Yet here we are, half a decade later, and the charming little pubs and fisheries are still boarded up. Not a single ice barge floats in the frozen river, and the once great Castle of the Clans, which burst from the earth like fountains of cascading ice, lies in shattered ruin across the square. Above it all, a thick layer of charcoal smoke presses down like rain clouds.

It looks like chimney smoke, but every hearth in the city couldn’t produce billows so thick.

“Bleeding skies. I don’t have the strength for this,” Serik mutters as we pick our way through debris. “This is hardly better than the grasslands!” He waves at the ice-crusted buildings surrounding us and the leagues and leagues of windswept snow behind us. He’s spent every waking hour either clearing a pathway through the snow or hunkered beside a sputtering fire, collecting the wavering bands of heat and redistributing them over the caravan. His face is so gaunt and his skin so sallow, it takes on a greenish pallor against the starkness of his freckles.

“Where is everyone?” a shepherd boy asks, his voice echoing like a cannon down the empty street.

Not a single soul has peeked their head into the cold to investigate our passing. They wouldn’t be able to see us, of course, not through the cloak of darkness Ziva and I have stretched over the group, but surely a few people should be bustling down the road on errands.

“They’re mining the ice fields. Just as I told you,” Temujin says, shooting me a frigid look.

“Do you expect me to congratulate you for telling the truth this once?”

“It looks like a graveyard,” Lalyne says solemnly.

“That’s because it is a graveyard,” Temujin interjects again before I can respond. “The imperial troops blew through these streets like a snow squall, destroying everything in their path.”

He isn’t wrong, but at the time it felt justified. Provoked, even. The Sky King had attempted to treat with the leaders of each clan several times to draft an alliance agreement, but not only did the Chotgori spit on his offer, they organized against us, attacking our encampment on the steppes in the middle of the night, armed with fishing spears and clubs, looking for all the world like snarling bears in their grizzled furs. The Chotgori clanspeople were more ferocious warriors than the citizens of Namaag and Verdenet combined—that’s how