It would be a lie to insist that she wasn’t nervous. She didn’t know what lay in store for her in Nenavar or if she could even get in—or out, for that matter—in one piece. She knew only that she couldn’t let Sardovia down.
She had to keep moving. That was the only way to survive the Hurricane Wars.
Talasyn accelerated. Her wasp roared through the stillness as it sped toward the waiting horizon.
Chapter Five
Alaric knew that he would have to kill the girl eventually. The Shadow could only fall when there was no light to banish it. As long as the girl drew breath, she was a symbol for the Sardovians to rally around. As long as Sardovia stood, Kesath would never be safe. Would never be free to achieve the greatness that it was meant for.
All around us are enemies, Alaric’s father reminded him time and time again. And the Lightweaver was an enemy. From the moment Alaric first heard the hum of her magic, first saw her on the ice, bathed in moonlight, bringing a golden dagger down over his legionnaire’s broken form, he had known that there was no way that she could be allowed to live.
Which was all well and good, but he couldn’t exactly set about killing her if she was nowhere to be found. She seemed to have gone to ground after Frostplum, sitting out the rest of the battle for the Highlands.
Alaric redirected all his frustration into glowering at the Light Sever as it spilled over the side of the cliff, a waterfall of radiance that shone against the rough, dark granite.
It wasn’t a true Sever but, rather, the remnants of one. The cliff’s summit bore several collapsed archways and piles of rubble, which were all that was left of a Lightweaver shrine, situated in what had once been the border between Sunstead and the Hinterland, before the Night Empire conquered the two states. The legionnaires originally assigned to destroy this Light Sever hadn’t been thorough and, as a result, some of it had lingered deep beneath the bones of the earth, gradually rising to the surface.
It was a good thing, Alaric reflected, that Sardovia had withdrawn from this region long ago and a Kesathese patrol had spotted the stream of blazing magic before the Lightweaver got to it. The girl’s power was formidable enough without the assistance of a nexus point.
With a final outpouring of the Shadowgate from splayed, black-gauntleted fingers, a slim section of the struggling Lightweave vanished and Alaric rappelled further down the cliffside, his steps quick and steady on the granite ledges. There were three legionnaires below him, poring over a wider fracture, chipping away at it with inky masses of the Shadowgate that curled like smoke amidst the air and rock of this high altitude.
“Work faster,” he instructed once he had joined them. “The Night Emperor requires our presence at the Citadel.” They were planning a multipronged attack on several Sardovian cities; the Legion would join the first wave alongside Kesath’s conscripted regiments.
“Easier said than done, Your Highness,” Nisene replied, her throaty voice just the slightest bit petulant. “This one’s stubborn. For every inch we remove, a foot comes back, it feels like.”
“We should just blast this section,” opined Nisene’s twin sister, Ileis. She aimed a fitful kick at a nearby boulder to emphasize her point. “Expose the whole vein so we can dismantle it at the root. I’ve got some shells in my pack.”
Alaric shook his head. “That could trigger a landslide. It might even bring down the entire cliff—we don’t know how deep this Light Sever goes.”
“And so what if it brings down the entire cliff?” Nisene asked slowly.
“There’s a village at the base,” Alaric pointed out. “I do not consider it wise to destroy their homes for the sake of saving time.”
“Your father wouldn’t care about Sardovian villagers,” Ileis retorted. “If the decision were left to him.”
“They are no longer Sardovian. They are Kesathese, like us.” Alaric frowned behind his half-mask. “And I am not my father. The decision is mine to make, not his. I’m the one leading this mission.”
The twins turned to him in eerie unison, subjecting him to the weight of sly, searching gazes from two sets of brown eyes glimmering silver with magic, peering out from identical helms that crisscrossed over their bare faces in whorls of obsidian, sporting winglike projections along the sides. He gritted his teeth against what threatened to be a migraine. Ileis and Nisene could drive a man to drink, and not in the flattering way that such an adage was usually meant.
“Prince Alaric’s right, my ladies,” Sevraim called out from where he dangled a little further away on fixed ropes, pouring shadow into light. He’d removed his helm a while back and the sheer amount of concentration required to dismantle a Light Sever had caused beads of perspiration to dot his smooth brow even in the cold mountain air. “How many times do we have to tell you two that not everything can be solved with explosions?”
“Oh, fuck off,” Nisene said blithely.
Alaric’s lips pursed in disapproval at the coarse language. Sevraim merely grinned, lopsided and amused, teeth flashing white against mahogany skin. Ileis cocked her head with interest, and Alaric dearly wished, not for the first time, that he had subordinates who were capable of attending to the task at hand rather than their baser urges.
He was stuck with these three, though. He and Sevraim had grown up together, had trained together since childhood, and once they became legionnaires and met Ileis and Nisene, Sevraim had immediately roped the twins into those antics of his that Alaric bore on sufferance. There was a certain irreplaceable kind of trust that came with having spent most of their lives fighting a war side by side. Within the Legion, their combat formations were the most seamless, and Alaric supposed that he tolerated Sevraim, Ileis, and Nisene well enough during downtime.
A soft fluttering sound made the four Shadowforged look up. Alaric was expecting a skua, the standard messenger bird of the Kesathese army, or a raven, the messenger bird used exclusively by House Ossinast. To his consternation, however, what descended toward him in a swift glide was a mop of ashen feathers, binding a slender bill and beady orange eyes into a plump frame.
A pigeon.
It landed on Alaric’s shoulder with a gentle coo and extended a spindly leg to which had been tied a rolled-up scrap of vellum, waiting patiently while his legionnaires looked on in bewilderment.
“Is it lost?” Ileis demanded.
“Can’t be,” muttered Sevraim. “All messenger birds are aether-touched. They always fly true to the intended recipient.”
“Someone in the Sardovian regiments has finally grown a brain and decided to come on over to the winning side, then,” said Nisene. “Better late than never, I suppose.”
“The audacity,” breathed Ileis, “to directly contact the crown prince—”
Alaric thought that maybe he should add speaking only when spoken to to his mental list of desired qualities in subordinates. He slipped the missive loose from the knotted twine around the bird’s leg and unfurled it in his hands. The pigeon flapped its dusky wings and took to the air once more, soon vanishing behind the clouds.
It turned out to be two sheets of vellum, rolled together. Alaric scanned the message that had been hastily scrawled on one sheet, then folded up the other and tucked it into his pocket. “I have to go,” he announced. The Shadowgate poured forth from his fingertips, ripping the message apart until it was nothing but ashes that scattered in the breeze.