“Pick off the stragglers,” a masculine voice, greasy and guttural like an oil slick, instructed from not so far away. Talasyn bit back a curse. If the Legion was sweeping the lake, that meant there was no further need for them in the city and the Sardovian regiment had scattered. Frostplum was lost. The rest of the Highlands would follow, with its most strategically located settlement now in the clutches of the Night Empire.
Horror and panic tore through her in equal measure, and then ceded ground to a boiling rage. She hadn’t asked for this; the people of Frostplum hadn’t asked for this. No one in Sardovia had. A few hours ago her regiment had been celebrating Khaede and Sol’s future and now they were being mowed down like voles across pack ice. Snuffed out one by one. There was only herself, the night, the black water, and the lurking Shadowforged encircling her like a cage. She would not let it end like this.
With Talasyn’s rage came the spark of an ember in her core. She felt it burn the way it had earlier, but more intensely this time. Sharp, radiant, and demanding justice.
And it hurt. It felt as though her entire being was aflame. She had to let it out before it consumed her.
Don’t let anyone see, the Amirante had warned. You’re not ready yet. They can’t know.
You will be hunted.
Talasyn closed her eyes in an attempt to center herself, swallowing her emotions as if they were bile. No sooner had she succeeded in doing that than the ice shifted beneath her feet and she heard frost crystals crackling under heavy armor. Her nape prickled with the weight of a stare that must be surveying the Sardovian Allfold’s crest—a phoenix, the same one emblazoned on the regiments’ sails—stitched on the back of her coat.
“You lost, little bird?”
It was that oil-slick voice again. Measured steps drew near and the telltale growl of static could be heard as the Shadowgate was opened. The fire in Talasyn rose up as if a dam had finally given way.
There was nowhere left to run.
I’m not going to die. Not here. Not now.
Talasyn whirled around to meet her attacker head-on.
The legionnaire had to be at least seven feet in height, every inch of him covered in obsidian plate, and his gauntleted fists clutched an enormous greatsword crafted from pure darkness, shot through with streaks of silver aether. The edge of the blade crackled as he raised it above her head.
It was the same now as it had been the day Hornbill’s Head was destroyed. It was instinct. It was the body fighting tooth and nail to survive.
The magic spread through her like wings.
Talasyn met the Shadowforged sword with a wave of radiance. The tapestry of aether that bound the dimensions and held all elements appeared in her mind’s eye and she yanked at its strings, opening the way to the Lightweave. It shot out from her splayed fingertips, raw and shapeless and uncontrolled in her alarm, painting the immediate vicinity in hues of brilliant gold.
The last time this happened—when Kesathese troops crept through the ruins of Hornbill’s Head after the stormship had flattened it, searching for survivors to make an example out of—the soldier aiming his crossbow at Talasyn’s fifteen-year-old self had died instantly, flesh and bone devoured by the Lightweave. This giant legionnaire managed to block, his greatsword transmuting into a dark oblong shield with which the radiance collided in a fiery flash. However, Talasyn was desperate and he’d been taken by surprise, and he screeched as light consumed shadow and he was blasted to the ground in a heap of singed armor.
Sardovian forces had arrived too late to save Hornbill’s Head but in just enough time to rescue those who had withstood the stormship’s wrath. Coxswain Darius had been the one to witness her kill the Kesathese soldier and he’d ushered her away, taking her straight to the Amirante.
Tonight on the Highlands ice, though, no one was going to come for her. She was on her own until she made it back to her regiment in Frostplum.
And she wasn’t going to let anyone stand in her way.
Focus, the Amirante would say over and over during their training sessions. Words to meditate on. Aether is the prime element, the one that binds all the others together and connects each dimension to the next. Every once in a while, an aethermancer is brought into this world—someone who can traverse the aether’s path in specific ways. Rainsingers. Firedancers. Shadowforged. Windcallers. Thunderstruck. Enchanters. And you.
The Lightweave is the thread and you are the spinner. It will do as you command.
So, tell it what you want.
The giant legionnaire was flailing on the ice like a turtle on its back, his bulky armor cracked in several places, blood seeping through. Talasyn narrowed her eyes at him and stretched an arm out to the side, her spread fingers tugging back the veil between this world and others, opening the Lightweave once more. The weapon that appeared in her open palm, summoned from one of several realms of magical energy that existed within aetherspace, resembled the long, wide-bladed daggers that had saved many Sardovian infantrymen’s lives in melee, except that it was fashioned solely from golden light and silver aether. Its serrated edges blazed in the gloom like wisps of sun.
The Shadowforged’s panic was almost tangible, despite his mask. He scrambled backward on his elbows as Talasyn advanced. It looked as though his legs weren’t working, and perhaps, in the time before, a part of her would have quailed at the thought of killing someone so obviously incapacitated and defenseless. But he was one of the Legion and the Hurricane Wars had hardened her, loss after loss whittling away at the child she’d once been until there was nothing left but fury.
And sunlight.
Talasyn plunged the dagger into his chest—or she tried to. In that scant sliver of a second before the tip of the blade met the plate mail encasing his torso, something—
—someone—
—loomed up from out of the darkness—
—and her dagger slid against the crescent’s edge of a war scythe conjured from the Shadowgate.
With her concentration disrupted, the light-woven dagger fizzled out of existence and Talasyn was left clutching at empty air. It was instinct, too, the thing that made her leap back, narrowly avoiding her new assailant’s next sweeping strike.
The coin-bright rays of the seven moons sketched in mottled hues another legionnaire that, while not as statuesque as the giant that Talasyn had just felled, was tall and broad and imposing nonetheless. Over a long-sleeved chainmail tunic, he wore a belted cuirass of black and crimson leather, with spiked pauldrons and scaled crimson armguards connected to black gauntlets, their tips pointed like claws. The fur-trimmed hood of a winter cloak the color of midnight framed his pale face, the lower portion of which was shrouded by an obsidian half-mask embossed with a design of two rows of wickedly sharp, wolfish teeth, captured in an eternal snarl.
The effect was nightmarish. And, while Talasyn had never encountered this Shadowforged before, she knew who he was. She knew what the silver chimera on the brooch atop his collarbone meant. A lion’s roaring head affixed to the serpentine body of a brocaded eel, rearing up on the hooves of the spindlehorn antelope—Kesath’s imperial seal.