I should have known that he allowed those visits only to have something he could hold over me when the time came. “I understand.”
“Good.” The warning tone changes, turning crisp. “I’m sending you on a trial mission, before you leave for Umbraxis.”
In my confusion, I almost break position. In all the years of planning, of preparation, of getting me ready, he’s never once mentioned another mission. There has only ever beenthemission. The one I was bred for, born for, trained for. “Sir?”
“At ease.” I turn, my muscles still stiff as my father walks across the barren room, past my small wooden bed and pallet to the opposite wall, away from the shuttered windows. He lifts his finger to the huge, stretched parchment that almost covers the entire wall of sandstone, pressing the pad against the inked illustration that spreads over the map, cutting it into two. “You will be accompanying a Lightbringer unit into the Veilspire before you travel on to Umbraxis. We’ve received intelligencethat suggests one of the villages has broken neutrality, and I’m sending a unit to investigate.”
Frowning, I step up beside him, my eyes tracing the inked mountains. The Veilspire – the mountainous territory that separates Solvandyr and Umbraxis – is inhospitable, dangerous, and unfailingly neutral. The few sporadic villages that eke out a living there, far from the passes both sides use to launch patrols and units, have no care for our war, only that they can survive through the next lightning storm. “What reason would they have?”
Choosing a side offers no benefit to them, not really. It only puts a target on their back.
“That’s what you’ll find out.” My father doesn’t look at me. “We don’t need the complication of a Darkwielder-allied territory within the Veilspire. Cindral will act as unit lieutenant and report back to me. You’ll answer to him.”
I’m careful not to let my feelings show. “I understand.”
All too well. This is a test.
I don’t intend to fail.
“Look at me.”
When I shift, his finger traces across my chin. I feel the faint burn of my skin knitting together as his magic closes the marks left from Reena’s nails. “We can’t have you scarring now.”
Not when he’s expended so much time and effort on making sure I remain unscarred. Pristine. Perfect.
His thumb rubs across my cheek when he’s done. I know not to make the mistake of thinking there’s any care behind his assessment. “What will you do?”
This routine is familiar enough, and a welcome signal that he intends to leave. I parrot the words back to him. “I’ll journey to Umbraxis.”
Through the Veilspire. Alone, or I will be once I leave Cindral and the unit behind.
He surveys me with golden eyes. “Go on.”
I breathe in. “I will find an opportunity to present myself to the Duskbane prince and plead for sanctuary, offering whatever I can in exchange for his help.”
I will be pitiful, pretty and soft, and beg for shelter from Kaelen Duskbane with wide, flame-filled eyes. The heir to the Darkwielder throne is, by all accounts, a brute. In all of my studies of the information our spies and scouts have managed to gather, he offers no mercy and fights with the fury of a hundred men. Wields enough magic for more still.
Kaelen Duskbane is the last protection the Darkwielders have, and the biggest, if not the only, threat to my father’s power.
End the heir, end the war. Without his power, the flailing territory will buckle and finally collapse. It will be over.
And I have been carefully crafted to appeal to him. A Lightbringer, fragile and unbroken. Not a soldier, but a victim. Someone for him to take out his anger on. To lose control with.
My training was not the usual. Whilst the Lightbringers train to build muscle, tofight, I was crafted differently. Trained in warfare, in strategy, in fighting with grace and fluidity. Enough not to raise suspicion with the Darkwielders who know our ways, yet not enough to be able to offer any useful information in the event that I’m discovered. But also in seduction, etiquette, and any discipline which might assist me in catching the eye of a shadow-wielder, in case my looks weren’t enough to carry me.
I was built to entice. And I was broken toendure.
To endure whatever Kaelen Duskbane wants with me. A small flicker of fear curls in my stomach, but I push it down.
This is the reason for my existence. The reason I wasborn, at the sole behest of our priestess who read the sun movements and commanded it.
Nobody truly knows how the war started.
But I know how it will end.
All I need is a single moment of vulnerability. The turn of a back. The lift of a chin. The distraction, a stretched neck as a door knocks.
“I will find an opportunity.” Breathing in, I test the magic coiled beneath my skin, drinking in the heat as my daggers slide into existence from the pocket of air above my palms. Fire and light and death, wrapped in the familiar heat that prickles my skin. “I will end him.”
