Free Memories of Ash (The Sunbolt Chronicles Book 2) by Intisar Khanani

mages of the Eleven Kingdoms divided into factions, pitting themselves against each other in a bid for power and wealth. They worked enchantments that unleashed catastrophes over the land, draining whole regions of magic in order to rain fire upon their enemies, even forcing the ground to sink in upon itself, swallowing whole cities. The Great Burning ended with a conflagration of spells and the annihilation of two entire factions of mages.
    Not long thereafter, the High Council of Mages was founded to regulate magic and mages in the hopes of preventing such a war from ever happening again. The Burnt Lands are what remain of the great, abandoned regions where the magic was drained, making them barren and unlivable.
    The end of the hall opens to what must have once been a wide and fertile garden. The plot is terraced in long low steps with stone paths meandering over the exposed earth or leading down to the next terrace. But the earth itself is desolate. Deep cracks snake across the dirt, some nearly as wide across as my hand. No hint of trees, no brush or shrub. Not even a thorn bush.
    A boundary wall encloses both gardens and building. It rises three or four times my height and is as wide as my arm is long, but one section has crumbled to pieces. A wall like this one doesn’t crumble of its own accord; something must have knocked it down. Hopefully whatever it was is long gone, as dead as the people left behind here.
    The mage starts toward the broken section of wall. I follow, grateful for his silence. But as we reach the edge of the gardens and step down to traverse what might have once been a road, he asks, “Who’s your master?”
    “We have greater concerns right now,” I say. I have no intention of telling him anything about myself.
    “Yes, we do. After what you did, traveling between portals and bringing us here, you deserve to have your magic revoked.”
    His words make me shudder away from him. “That’s absurd,” I say roughly. “I put no one’s life in danger but my own.”
    “I would never have—”
    “There was no reason for you to come after me. The portal is never guarded, and you had no authorization from the Council to be there. You were there to cause trouble. Can you really fault me for wanting to avoid you?”
    His hand whips out, closing around my arm with viselike strength. “Don’t you dare lecture me, girl. You didn’t ask for passage. You’re lucky I didn’t kill you outright.”
    I stand stock-still, outrage flaming in my chest until my breath tastes of smoke. This man, this mage , is one of Blackflame’s associates. He was in Sonapur to keep the portal closed until his friends had raided Stormwind’s valley. He is not my ally. He will never be my ally.
    “We need to move.” My voice is cold and ugly and almost unrecognizable. “We can discuss the rest of this if we get out of here alive.” Before he can argue, I jerk my head at the break in the wall. “I see magefire.”
    He turns toward the wall, then drops my arm to stride forward. I follow, massaging my bicep, thankful to be walking behind him.
    He climbs up onto the tumbled wreckage of the wall, staring out.
    From here, the land drops away steeply. The late morning sunlight illuminates the roofs of a great city spread out below us — vast, multi-layered, and completely still. Just past the last of the buildings, a single orb hangs in the air emitting a flickering blue-green light.
    As I glance toward the mage, I catch sight of a dark spot moving far out in the distance: a bird. I can’t tell if it flies beyond the magefire or above the city, but I’m absurdly grateful to see some sign of life.
    The mage clambers over the remaining stones. Dread curls in my stomach as I watch him descend the barren slope toward the silent city. But there’s no other place to aim for, and I want to escape this land as fast as I can.
    I follow after him warily, the dead earth sliding beneath my feet.

We weave past buildings that rise