“Haven’t the faintest,” Rielle replied, swinging up into the saddle. Then she snapped the reins, and her mare bolted down the main road that led from the Pyre into the heart of the city, hooves clattering against the cobblestones. A tumbled array of apartments and temple buildings rose around them—gray stone walls engraved with scenes of the capital city’s creation, rounded roofs of burnished copper, slender columns wrapped in flowering ivy, white fountains crowned with likenesses of the seven saints in prayer. So many visitors had come from all over the world to me de la Terre for the Chase that the cool spring air now pressed thick and close. The city smelled of sweat and spices, hot horse and hot coin.
As Rielle tore down the road, the crowd parted in alarm on either side of her, shouting angry curses until they realized who she was and fell silent. She guided her mare through the twisting streets and made for the main city gates, her body pulled tight with nerves.
But she would not give in to her power today.
She would compete in the Boon Chase, as any citizen was free to do, and prove to her father that she could control herself, even when her life was in danger and the eyes of the entire city were upon her.
She would prove to him, and to Tal, that she deserved to live a normal life.
2
Eliana
“Eliana says that on the day the Empire took our city, you couldn’t breathe without choking on the taste of blood. She said I should be glad I was only a baby, but I wish I could remember it. Maybe then I would be stronger. I would be a warrior. Like her.”
—Journal of Remy Ferracora, citizen of Orline
February 3, Year 1018 of the Third Age
1,020 YEARS LATER
Eliana was on the hunt when she heard the first scream.
Screams weren’t so unusual in the city of Orline, especially in the Barrens, where slums sprawled across the river docks in a dark plain of misery.
This one, though, was high, piercing—a young girl’s scream—and fell silent so abruptly Eliana thought she might have been imagining things.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered to Harkan, who stood beside her with his back against the wall.
Harkan tensed. “Hear what?”
“That scream. A girl.”
“I heard no scream.”
Eliana glanced at the nearby darkened window, adjusted her new velvet mask, admired the lean lines of her body. “Well, we all know your hearing’s shit.”
“My hearing is not shit,” Harkan muttered.
“It’s not as good as mine.”
“We can’t all be as marvelous as the Dread of Orline.”
Eliana sighed. “Sad, but true.”
“I think even I, with my shit ears, would hear a scream. Maybe you imagined it.”
But Eliana didn’t think so.
In the city of Orline, girls and women had been disappearing of late—not shipped off to an Empire work camp nor taken to the Lord of Orline’s palace to be trained in the maidensfold. Those things left behind gossip, trails of evidence.
These recent girls were simply being taken. One moment they were there; the next they were gone.
At first, Eliana hadn’t let herself care. No one in her neighborhood had been taken, and she didn’t think the Empire would start abducting its own favored citizens. Her family was safe. It therefore wasn’t her problem.
But the more girls disappeared, the more stories she heard of vanished women, the harder it became for her to ignore the situation. So many sisters gone, and so many mothers—snatched from their loved ones, taken as they slept. Not criminals, not Red Crown rebels.
And then there were the rumors that persisted in some circles, despite their absurdity, of a hole in the sky on the other side of the world. Possibly in Celdaria. Possibly in the Sunderlands. Every rumor told a different tale. Some thought everything was connected—the hole in the sky, the vanished girls.
Eliana was not one of them. Hole in the sky? More like fear run amok. People were becoming hysterical enough to look to archaic legends for comfort and truth.
Eliana refused to join them.
Then she heard it again: a second scream. Closer.
A sour feeling drifted through her body, raking violent chills across her skin. The world tilted, froze, then righted itself. The sweet odor of the white gemma tree flowers overhead turned rancid.
Beside her, Harkan shifted. “Are you all right?”
“Don’t you feel that?”
“Feel what? What’s going on with you tonight?”
“I feel…” The edges of her vision shimmered like a heat mirage. “I don’t know what I feel. Like an adatrox is nearby, but worse.”