“And yet you always make bets with me.”
“I can start ignoring you outright if you prefer. It would certainly makemylife easier.”
Faron waved away the comment with a lazy hand. It didn’t matter how many times she lied or cheated. The people’s memories for her heroic actions during the war were long, but those same memories were short when it came to any of her less-than-heroic actions since. Even Jordan was repeating the same things he’d said during their last footrace, and it hadn’t stopped him from challenging her to this one. At this point, there didn’t seem to be anything that Faron could do that would have real consequences.
Or maybe the problem was that she already lived thoseconsequences. Enemies and admirers were the closest that Faron had gotten to having friends since she’d come home alive but haunted, reeking of smoke and ash. She spoke to the gods more than she spoke to people her own age. She had her sister, Elara, but Elara also had Reeve and her sixth-form friends. Faron hated school enough that she already knew she would fail the exam for sixth form, if she didn’t fail this year entirely, and school was the only chance she had to mix with her peers.
Maybethatwas the real price she paid for being the patron saint of lies. There was no Faron Vincent. Only the Childe Empyrean.
“Give me my rayes and take the lesson,” said Faron, forcing those thoughts away, too. “If you keep trying to use your track talent against me, expect me to use my powers against you.”
Jordan’s scowl deepened, but he dug through the pockets of his khaki trousers for the money. Faron shifted on the uncomfortable rounded tip of the egg as she waited, surveying the sprawling view she had of the town. Behind the businesses were rows of houses with thatched roofs, yards separated from one another by fences or cacti. Chicken coops pockmarked the grounds, and goats grazed in the open fields. She couldn’t see her own house from here, but she knew which direction it was in; if she squinted, she might be able to spot the splashes of forest greens and cypress browns that made up her father’s garden.
There was none of that right now, though. In fact, the farther she looked, the more the edges of Deadegg seemed to be smudged by fog.
Fog that seemed to bemoving.
Within the cloudy puffs, she could see a shape—no,shapes. Shapes that were dark and large and worryingly familiar.Horses.And not just horses, but an entire horse-drawn coach. It was an unusual sight, both because mules and donkeys were more common in rural Deadegg and because she didn’t know anyone in town who could afford a coach of any kind. The longer she stared, the more she was able to make out the ocean blue of the carriage, the grass green of the drawn curtains, the golden detailing catching the sunlight. Her heart stopped, and in that long, silent space between beats, she noticed a flag in all three colors waving from the rooftop. The Iryan flag was the last confirmation she needed.
For the first time all day, Faron felt true fear.
The queen was here.
CHAPTER TWO
ELARA
ELARAVINCENT HAD BEEN A SURVIVOR LONG BEFORE SHE’D GONEto war.
It was a mandatory trait for an eldest daughter, the experimental first child whose personality was a diamond formed under the extreme pressure of her parents’ expectations. Growing up, it had manifested in fervent peacekeeping and anxious respectfulness, especially after her sister was born. Faron, in all her glorious chaos, teased Elara endlessly for being docile. Nonconfrontational. Prewar Elara didn’t believe in going to bed angry or being needlessly impolite—even to old Miss Johnson from down the street, who took the briefest pause as an invitation to tell you how each of her nine kids were doing.
But being gentle on a battlefield was a good way to get killed, and Elara hadn’t survived the war against Langley at thirteen to shed the lessons that had kept her alive.
The first and most important one was simple: It was her or them.
Now eighteen years old, Elara sized up her ex-girlfriend Cherry McKay for a weakness to exploit, confident before they even began that she would win this fight in three moves.
Two, if Cherry made the same mistake.
The gods had blessed Iryans with the ability to summon ancestral spirits, and that gift was wielded in three general ways. For most, it was commonplace, taught in schools and mainly used for communication. For some, it was a religious calling, a talent to be dedicated to the gods at one of the temples across the island. For the rest, it was a weapon to be wielded in service of the nation, a means of protecting the Iryan people from their enemies.
Combat summoning was so heavily associated with the Iryan Military Forces that most civilians didn’t bother learning it, but Elara was not most civilians. Before the war, she’d practiced her forms and tested her limits. During and after the war, she’d built on those skills and perfected them. Combat summoning required discipline: the knowledge of how to call an astral, contain an astral, and safeguard your own strength. The longer she channeled an ancestral spirit, the more her own soul eroded until her body shut down to save what was left—and that was a hard thing to remember with enemies raining down their own magic upon her.
But there had been no margin for error then, and there was no margin for error now. By the end of this week, she might be a soldier.Officially, this time. She just had to defeat Cherry first.
“And,” Aisha Harlow shouted, “summon your astrals!”
Only Elara could see the ancestral spirits who answered her call. They wereherrelatives, after all, summoned by her to support her in this fight. For most, the astrals who came to them were the spirits of family recently deceased, though she’d heard stories of summoners who could call any dead relative to whom they’d had the strongest emotional connection. Luckily, for Elara, those ancestors were one and the same.
The astrals of her maternal aunts, each one killed during the war, surrounded her now: Vittoria Durand, the youngest, with her hair up in twists and a mischievous smile on her face; Mahalet Durand, the oldest, thick with muscle carved from years of swimming and running track; and Gabourey Durand, the middle sister and the most violent, whose love for the bottle was only equal to her love for the fight. Elara reached for Aunt Vittoria, her skin warming as the extra soul settled beneath it.
On a hot day like today, it felt like torture to summon. But Elara already felt stronger, powerful, more dangerous.
Across the grass, Cherry smirked at her. Elara smirked back.
“Ready?” Aisha’s burgundy braids fluttered as she dived out of the way. “FIGHT!”
Lightning crackled across the field. Cherry’s fingertips sparked white-hot, wielding the electricity her astral helped her conjure like a whip. Elara met her with a simple shield—first move—that swallowed the bolt, enhancing her own magic. The shield shrank to a ball of energy that hovered between her palms. Lightning shot across the surface of it, making it glow almost as bright as the sun.
