But before I could say another word, the room exploded with the peal of the breach bells. Thefullbreach bells, which meant that not just the squadron on duty would be deployed;allof us would be. The walls shook suddenly, as if a huge fist had slammed into the priory; my tray toppled off the bedside table, and the stew splashed across the floor.
“Shock wave,” I muttered, bolting out of the bed. Since the collapse of Mhorghast and the death of Ankaret, the Middlemist had grown more unstable every day. By now we knew quite well what it felt like when part of the Mist fell. The impact resonated for hundreds of miles.
“Godsdamn the godsdamned Mist and everything it touches,” Brigid grumbled mutinously.
From outside in the corridor came the sounds of running feet and barked orders as Roses ran to their stations. Ripples of magic spilled through the air; they were transforming, and so were we. Already I could feel my body elongating and the sharp pinpricks of pain that marked the bloom of feathers along my spine.
Brigid strode toward the door, downy gray feathers cascading across her skin. “What’s happened?” she shouted.
“Mistfall,” came the answer—Danesh, one of my fellow squadron captains. Her changing voice split in two. “Sector Three is down!”
“Allof it?” Brigid asked, incredulous.
I bolted to the door, Cira just behind me. Sector Three housed two small settlements and an Order outpost.
Sleep would have to wait.
It was time for battle.
Chapter 3
When the greenway spit us out into Sector Three, a nasty storm greeted us—typical for an area affected by Mistfall. Pelting rain, constant lightning. The second we emerged from the greenway, gusting winds slammed into each of us, blowing us off course.
I turned into the wind, beating my wings furiously to stay upright, and spent a few seconds up above the chaos, assessing it all. Freyda raced past me, along with the other avian familiars who had accompanied their Roses. They would catalog the damage, give us a picture of the Mistfall’s true scope. The terrestrial familiars followed them from the ground—foxes, ermines, lynxes—leaping across chasms and between huge crags of earth that had been thrust up through the ground like a new range of mountains. A range ofmovingmountains, shifting atop a burning underground sea.
And across this chaos poured the Mist—a roiling silver ocean, no longer contained by the gods’ ancient magical boundaries. In its wake, the ground split open with great yawning groans.
Cira hovered to my left, her slender face crowned with speckled brown feathers, her eyes huge and golden. “Earthquakes and thunderstorms!” she shouted. “Lovely. My favorite combination!”
Brigid, to my right, flung out one of her massive gray wings to gesture toward the watchtower in the distance. “Graystone burns!”
Graystone: an Order outpost now submerged in Mist. Only the burning watchtower was visible. I glanced quickly in the direction of the nearby settlements—the tiny, stubborn towns of Two Bluffs and Oakvale that we planned to forcibly evacuate next week. Even through the rain and wind and Mist, I could see that they teemed with darkness and hear their villagers’ distant screams.
Invaders. Each of my heightened senses prickled. What would it be this time? Shifters? A titan?
Kilraith?
There was no time to wonder. I whirled about in the air to face the waiting squadrons.
“Red Team, secure Oakvale; Blue Team, Two Bluffs,” I roared as the rain lashed my face. “Green Team, follow the familiars and eliminate any hostiles in the open Mist. Gold Team, you’re with me. We’ll secure Graystone.”
In an instant, they obeyed—four squadrons, sixty Roses. I watched them tear off like arrows through the storm. Black and gray and brown, beautiful and deadly efficient. Red and Blue Teams, led by Danesh and an older Rose named Wenna, sped toward the villages; Green Team dove into the Mist in unison, their wings matching each other beat for beat. Every formation was precise, every captain belting out clear commands.
I spun around and followed the rest of Gold Team toward Graystone. A quick, dark thought came flying at me: How many of us would die on this mission? How many of us would return home?
Such thoughts were not new to me. But the Warden’s words tickled the back of my mind, stoking unfamiliar flames of fear:It saddens me that you don’t trust me with the secrets you carry.The image of her tired black eyes, the silent strength of her sword arm. The head of Nerys rolling across bloodstained stone.
I pushed hard against the memories, refusing to let them take hold of me no matter how clever their grasping fingers. I was a soldier; I could not afford distractions.
As we approached Graystone, we dove beneath the Mist’s canopy to get a better view. Cold raked across our feathers like a thousand icy fingers as we slipped through the silver. Confused whispers snaked into our ears, urging us to stay, to sleep, to run, to hide. The Mist had many things to say these days, much of it nonsense that contradicted itself. It was as if the knowledge of its own destruction was slowly driving it insane. But we knew these tricks and flew on.
“Hold!” I ordered, switching from the common tongue to one of the coded languages we used in the Order.
My team pulled up around me, our wings beating hard to remain stationary in the howling wind. I scanned Graystone for signs of hostiles and saw nothing; there were no Roses either. Were it not for the blood-curdling screams rising up to greet us, I would have thought the place abandoned.
Then I realized with horror that the screams were coming from inside the outpost’s burning buildings.
“Fire nymphs?” Cira shouted from my left.
