Fear stole the breath from her lungs, as razor-edged as the winter on this mountain.
People always said that Alaric of House Ossinast, Master of the Shadowforged Legion and Gaheris’s only son and heir, had the most piercing gray eyes. Those eyes shone a bright and chilling silver with the glow of his magic under the seven moons, looking directly into hers.
She’d been warned about him. She had known that she would one day have to face him.
That day had come too soon.
Then he was upon her with his flickering scythe of smoke and ink, and doubtless her terror was etched all over her face and across her trembling lips. Acting on pure instinct, she resummoned the Lightweave into the shape of two daggers, one in each of her shaking hands. The scythe clashed against the dagger on the right, sending vibrations all the way up her arm as she raised it overhead. She put all her strength into shoving him away, but he was quick to recover, coming at her again.
Oh, it was on.
Talasyn often sparred with the Sardovian regiments’ Blademaster as part of her training, but no blow from a metal sword could hold a candle to the sheer pulsating magic of the Shadowgate, and practicing with a mentor was a fair wind compared to someone actively trying to kill her. Especially when that someone was nearly twice her size and had reportedly been trained in the ways of the Shadowforged from the moment that he’d learned how to walk.
It was all Talasyn could do to dodge and to parry as Alaric drove her across the ice floes, his injured subordinate forgotten. Each dark barrier dissipated as they passed through it, as if he were banishing them—but to what end? Perhaps he took some sadistic joy in drawing this out, in playing with her as a cat would play with a mouse. She would never know and she wasn’t about to try to ask him.
Kesath’s crown prince was relentless; he moved like a thunderstorm, powerful and everywhere all at once. Shadow careened into light in a conflagration of aether sparks—once, twice, a million times. The flimsier patches in the sheets of ice cracked under the soles of her snow boots, spatters of lake water splashing at her woolen breeches, painfully cold wherever they landed. His blade easily dwarfed both of hers, and on more than one occasion she tried to shape her desperate will into a shield, tried to achieve what had eluded her ever since she began aethermancing, but she still couldn’t. More than once, she left herself wide open as she failed to conjure a shield, his scythe breaking through the flimsy weapon that she hastily cobbled together at the last minute, and she received sharp and shadow-spun cuts to her arms for all her trouble.
And then there came a moment when Talasyn teetered on the very edge of the ice floe and Alaric swung the war scythe from the side and there was no time for her to turn, to block, and she didn’t know how to make a shield—
She brought her hands together. The two daggers turned into a morningstar flail and she swept the shaft in his direction. The golden chain wound around the scythe’s blade and caught, and she hauled him toward her with all her might.
He shifted his weight and dug his boots into the ice, foiling her attempt to outbalance him. They stood mere inches from each other, both of them one ill-advised movement away from falling into the lake, their weapons tangled together at their sides. Alaric’s hood had slipped off at some point, revealing a tousled halo of wavy black hair. The eyes that Talasyn could see above the fanged snarl of his half-mask were sharp and unnervingly intent. He was tall enough that she had to lift her chin to meet his gaze.
She was breathing heavily from the exertion and he seemed a bit winded as well, his broad chest rising and falling in unsteady beats. But when he spoke, it was in smooth, low tones, so deep that it seemed as though the night grew darker around them.
“I was not aware that Sardovia had a new Lightweaver at their disposal.”
Talasyn’s jaw clenched.
Nineteen years ago, in what was now known as the Cataclysm, two neighboring states in the Sardovian Allfold had gone to war with each other—Sunstead, which had been home to every Lightweaver on the Continent, and the Shadow-ruled kingdom of Kesath. After Lightweavers slew Ozalus Ossinast, his son Gaheris ascended to the throne and led Kesath to victory, forcibly annexing Sunstead; in the same breath, Kesath tore away from the Sardovian Allfold and began styling itself the Night Empire. Gaheris had taken on the mantle of Night Emperor, and he and his Shadowforged Legion had killed all the Lightweavers and destroyed their shrines, leaving no trace of them on the Continent. Except . . .
“Your murderous tyrant of a father missed one,” Talasyn spat at Alaric, and she surged up on her toes and—
—slammed her forehead into his.
Splinters of white-hot pain exploded across her vision. Amidst them, she saw the Kesathese prince recoil, the inky scythe vanishing from his grasp, his gauntleted hand coming up to nurse what she dearly hoped was a crack in his skull.
But she didn’t stay to find out. She reshaped the morningstar flail back into a dagger and plunged it clean through his shoulder and he let out a grunt. She whirled around, the radiant blade disappearing, and she ran—through her splitting headache, over the ice floes, through the moonlight, toward the trees.
Not once did she look back, afraid of what she might find.
Chapter Three
The mournful wail of a horn rang throughout the mountain just as Talasyn plunged into a thicket of longleaf pine and bramble. It was the signal to retreat, and she changed course, heading not for the city proper but the docks. With a bruised and blood-streaked face and cuts on her arms, a padded coat soaked through with sweat, and ears ringing from echoes of adrenaline and injury, she broke past the treeline.
The evening sky was tinted arterial red by the smoldering inferno of Frostplum’s remains. The great wooden carracks of the Sardovian Allfold unfurled their sails in the smoke-ridden breeze before her, their bilges already several feet above the ground while long rope ladders spilled from the sides of the decks. Fleeing soldiers and cityfolk were swarming up them like ants. Talasyn quickened her pace in the direction of the largest of the carracks, the Summerwind, and she clambered up the first rope ladder that she came to, engulfed by a mixture of relief and foreboding.
Her comrades hadn’t left her behind yet, but they were leaving, effectively ceding more ground to the Night Empire. Ground that they couldn’t afford to lose.