Dawn of Cobalt Shadows (Burning Empire Book 2) by Emma Hamm (best e ink reader for manga .txt) 📕

ignored him because of that. They wanted nothing to do with a noble who led a privileged life.

It had been a personal pleasure knowing that he’d changed their minds. The first time he’d offered to help, they had laughed at him. The second time, they had taken him up on the offer. They put him to work in the most grueling pace he’d ever seen set. But he’d taken it all in stride. If they wanted to test him, then so be it. He would perform better than they could ever imagine.

The other men around him straightened as well, their backs slick with sweat and their hair sticking up at odd angles. Did he look like them now? The sun had certainly burnished his skin even darker. A beard now scratched his chin, slowly softening in texture until he almost liked the new addition. It was different. And different was what he was looking for.

A woman strode toward them, back straight and the linen cloth blowing at her waist. Tahira was always the messenger for his mother. Likely, the old woman had another thing she wanted him to do. There was no shortage of need in this place.

Tahira paused near the half-built house, looking him up and down. “Seems they’ve put you to work.”

“Better than idle hands.”

She scoffed. “Somehow, it’s hard to imagine that’s what you really believe, Sultan.”

“If there’s one thing about me to learn, Tahira, it’s that I don’t lie.” Nadir wiped his hands across his chest and arched a brow. “I take it she’s interested in seeing me again?”

“She misses her son.”

He didn’t reply, knowing the tone of sarcasm in her voice. Tahira thought this was all an elaborate plan to get him to do what the Alqatara wanted. And maybe she was right. He wouldn’t put it past them to see the use in having a sultan in their pocket.

Yet, there was something more in Nahla’s gaze than the intent to use him as her pawn. The leader of the Alqatara was perhaps softening in her old age. She looked at him as though she hadn’t seen her son in many ages, looked at him with longing.

The truth was, she still thought of him as her son. She looked at him as the boy she didn’t have a chance to raise, but a man who could now still learn from her in the shadow of her great life.

He didn’t know what she was dying of. Something important, something likely that could have been fixed in the capital, but she didn’t want to be fixed. She’d already told him time and time again, life had a way of taking important things away at the very last second. He needed to learn to use that pain.

Nadir nodded and followed Tahira as she spun on her heel. He already knew where she was going to bring him. Nahla had taken the day in her private gardens, the only place she allowed herself outside the safety of her walls.

The gardens were beyond the mountain range that protected the Alqatara. To make the journey a little safer, they had blasted a hole through the mountain. The dark tunnel was lined with torches, casting the entire journey in a red light that flickered with their movements.

He strode through the darkened place, reminding himself that they didn’t want to kill him. There wasn’t a reason for him to be here so long only to have death find him. Nahla wanted something from him.

Tahira’s voice echoed in the tomb-like chamber. “You know, she’s only going to get what she wants in the end.”

“A son?”

“A sultan.” The woman in front of him shook her head slightly, the long black curtain of her hair shuddering with her movement. “Nahla is not some feeble old woman. She sees the future in ways other people couldn’t understand if they tried. Testing her will only end in your own madness.”

“I’m not testing her.”

“Then why are you still here?”

He thought about the question, wondering if there was a right answer to it. All he settled on was the truth. “I want to find out who I am, where I came from. I think that she can at least tell me part of that. Bymere is my kingdom, and Falldell is a part of that. If I cannot understand your people, then I cannot understand the empire which relies upon me to prosper.”

Tahira snorted. “I think you're falling back into your old ways, Sultan. This is just one more person to tell you what to do and how to live. Think for yourself, dragon, before someone else does it for you.”

The words stung like salt in an open wound. He winced. Was he falling back into the same habit he’d done his entire life?

Nadir didn’t want to entertain the thought at all. He didn’t want to think that something was so wrong with him that he couldn’t think for himself. What kind of man couldn’t do that? What kind of ruler would he be if he didn’t have the power to even think for himself?

They left the tunnel system and entered the garden beyond. An oasis had formed in the center. Stone wrapped around them on all sides, stretching up toward the sky in the mountain range beyond. No one would have been able to even find this oasis if they didn’t have wings.

It was, for all intents and purposes, a way to entrap men. Water bubbled from a death defying plummet high on the mountain peak. If they had traversed the desert and found this place, the only thing they could do was look at the lifesaving water so far from their reach.

Palm trees outlined the pool of water in the center. Their trunks were peeling great strips of vibrantly colored bark. Fronds bent from their tops, nearly touching the water in a few places.

The Alqatara weren’t usually a ritualistic folk. They believed in magic only as a last resort, and the Beastkin among them were only used in dire