Ezer,he thought.
They’d learned of her past.
She was a forbidden baby, born to a Sacred servant. A nobody named Styerra, with no magic to her name.
She was just a servant girl, helpless and scared and alone.
She’d fallen in love with a Sacred Realmist, a fool of a young man who’ddiedafter paying an eternal penance for falling in love with someone who wasn’t his Matched. For placing a forbidden baby inside her womb.
A baby...who had becomeEzer.
It explained why there was no sword in the snow for her father.
Because when someone paidthatmuch penance, they weren’t meant to be remembered. They were wiped from the Citadel’s records, removed from the history of the Sacred as if they were a traitor to the gods...almost as bad as a defector.
They were lucky if they were to be allowed into the Ehver at all, after their death, for it was left to the gods to decide their eternal fate.
And Ezer?
She should have been killed for who she was.Whatshe was. The child of an Unmatched pairing, half Sacred Realmist and half servant.
It was possible shedidhave magic in her blood, unpillared...
As wild as his own, for the gods did not choose to place her in Styerra’s womb.
It was forbiddenlovethat did. And choices that had terrible consequences.
“Shall we report our findings to the War Table, Sir?” the Ehvermage asked, as they reached the door that led out. From black stone to white, darkness to light.
Kinlear’s heart thumped unevenly in his chest.
The Citadel, their laws, theirrules...
What if his father decided to make her pay the penance in her mother’s place? The penance that this servant Styerrashouldhave paid...were she not already dead.
“You saw nothing,” he told the Ehvermage. “You saw only that the Ravenminder is the child of two servants who fled, and if you are to say otherwise...”
He’d never given a threat so big.
He wasn’t even certain he had the guts to do it.
But the vision ofher,the feeling of flight together...of the shadowstorm opening to let them in...
It made him brave, as he turned to the Ehvermage. And with all the royal flair he could manage, he said, “...the penance her father paid will becomeyours, too.”
He slept.
He dreamt of her all over again, and on the third day of her runic sleep, Kinlear Laroux went to the War Table and argued for the Ravenminder until he was blue in the face.
She would mind the raphon. She would tame it before Realmbreak, before the Long Day arrived. And when she was ready...she would complete the Descent and be tested for the right toflyit across the Expanse.
He, as the leader of the Black Wing Battalion, as the spare prince with no future to his name, would be the one to ensure it all played out.
They would slay the Acolyte together.
Or they would not return.
The War Table debated heavily, for hours on end. Sometimes shouting, sometimes so painfully silent, the sound of Kinlear’s cough was the only thing to be heard in the room.
