Racing the Sun by J R Koop

Author:J R Koop
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780648524410
Published: 2019-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

The suns are too bright.

The hands at her shoulders are too tight in their grip. Pain shoots through her side and she yelps, protesting as her watering eyes creak open to the sky. The tears trail down her cheeks to her mouth, where they taste oddly sweet. Her hands shoot up, brushing away the grip at her shoulders as she stares Hazel in the face. ‘Hazel, what in Hadria’s Halls are you—’

Then it hits her.

‘Hazel?’ Rahat scrambles up onto her elbows, ignoring the hot tears at her cheeks. ‘But how are you here? How’d you find me? What happened?’ A shake of her head, clearing the fog from her thoughts. ‘This is impossible, you were taken back to the palace; I saw you—Qadira had you.’

Biting her lip, Hazel ignores the bombard of questions. ‘You’re behind on schedule,’ she says, as if that is obvious enough to explain her story. There’s an odd look in her eyes, old and haunting, that Rahat has never seen. Hazel wipes the dirt from her face and kneels beside the rajkumari. The Asthori rubs her sweating palms against her leather pants, but it’s no use. She only smears the wetness across her thighs. ‘I was hoping you’d’ve found Iliyah by now, but here I find you in the middle of the jungle, grossly closer to Ajrapur than the fields, looking like you’ve had a bout with the gods.’ She cocks a brow. ‘And why are you sleeping in the middle of the day?’ A hand goes to her cousin’s forehead without second thought. Small grazes and cuts cover Rahat’s face and neck; not taking into consideration the bruised welt where Qadira’s whip had caught her.

Hazel recoils when she finds the burnt and blistered skin of her wrists. She doesn’t want to imagine what other kinds of injuries might lay beneath her clothes. ‘Did something happen?’ she demands. ‘Did you run into hunters?’ The sounds of the jungle become so loud that they scramble her thoughts as she tries to understand, but comes up with nothing. ‘Rahat, none of this should have happened,’ she says.

But Rahat’s too stuck on that word. ‘Hunters?’ she echoes, still fighting to wake even as the sun forces her eyes closed. ‘What hunters?’

The girl hesitates, sitting back on her knees. ‘More knights than I can count are searching for Iliyah—and Zehran’s sent orders for Saadi to search around the God Mountains near Rahala. He…’ Hazel sucks in a deep breath, unsure of whether to tell Rahat this bit. It’s the look on her face that makes her say it. ‘He sent Qadira after you. When they caught me, I wasn’t sure they’d let me go.’

‘Why did they?’ The question’s out of her mouth before she can stop it.

A small quirk of her lips. ‘There’s a bounty of a thousand línare on your head. So Qadira let me go.’

‘She—what?’

Hazel’s lithe hands go to Rahat’s hair, matted with blood, smoke, and gods know what else. Without a word, she begins unravelling the rajkumari’s hair and re-braiding it.

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