Gen made quick progress through the mountains, sturdier and nimbler on his legs than a Kemeiran mountain goat. Linn had thought herself fast, but she found herself admiring the Temple Master’s steps, the way he never misplaced a single toe. He would stop and squat on the ground, swiping fingers across mud, patches of grass, and leaves, and bringing them to his nose. Sometimes, he licked them and muttered to himself.
On the third night, they happened upon another abandoned village. Charred black. Linn’s throat knotted as she passed the crumbling houses, knowing full well what had happened. Knowing full well what lay within those walls.
Gen stopped to inspect certain buildings. The Temple Master kept his eyes closed, his hands clasped in meditation before him. Searching, Linn realized, for any living victims of the destruction the Cyrilians had wreaked upon this village.
Gen grunted. “We draw close to the invaders.”
They stopped by a house that had completely burned. He bent to the ground and picked something up. A tome, miraculously unscathed amid all the destruction.
Gently, the old Temple Master dusted it off. The pages fluttered silver in the moonlit night. “They came to our bookhouse first, too. They took our Temple Masters.” His eyes narrowed. “It is clear they seek information that Kemeira stands to protect.”
Linn thought of the Temple Masters that Gen said the Cyrilians had kidnapped from his village. “Then we had better hurry.”
The night wore on. Gen walked silently, his hand held before his chest in the same meditation pose as earlier. Every now and then, he glanced up at the stars, holding his hands before his eyes in a measurement of direction.
They came upon the camp suddenly. One moment, Linn was focusing on placing her feet over an extremely slippery patch of mud; the next moment, she felt stirrings in her wind ahead. She froze in place, tuning in to the vibrations like a spider on a web.
Ahead, Gen, too, had stopped. The Temple Master’s eyes were closed, his hands clasped before him.
Linn’s hands went to her daggers. She sensed figures cutting through the air, moving in the vicinity ahead. She counted. “Twenty-six people,” she breathed. “About thirty paces ahead.”
Gen cracked open an eye. His lips arced in cunning; he shook a finger at her. “Twenty-nine, Daughter. You are losing your touch.”
Heat crept up Linn’s neck. She was rusty, her training having been cut off at a young age. Her wind-wielding skills were nothing like they should be.
“Can you tell,” the Temple Master continued, “how many soldiers?”
Linn closed her eyes, blocking out all other senses. Focusing, as her Wind Masters had taught her, solely on the movement of air. The currents. The breezes. How some of them curved against the figures, delineating sharp edges and hard armor, others soft cloth rippling gently in the night. “Four Masters,” she said at last. “Twenty-five soldiers.”
When she opened her eyes again, Gen was grinning at her. “Good,” he said. “Now, follow.”
They stopped when they were near the edge of what appeared to be a clearing in the forest. A small glow came from between the trees. Linn recognized it: the light of globefires—an invention unique to Cyrilia. She crouched, watching the shadows flicker, listening to the voices that drifted to her.
From their vantage point, they could make out a circle of soldiers dressed in the ubiquitous livery of the Cyrilian Imperial Patrols: glittering gray armor with tomb-white cloaks. Their backs blocked Linn’s view, and it was only when one of them shifted that Linn realized what they stood around.
In the center of the circle were four Kemeiran elders: two women and two men. They were dressed in plain cotton robes, adorned with a black silk belt at the waist. Blackstone collars gleamed around their necks.
Temple Masters.
A Whitecloak stepped forward and prodded one of the women with a foot. Anger stirred in the pit of Linn’s belly. “Are you going to talk, or are we going to have to make you?” he growled.
Ana had always spoken the Cyrilian tongue with an air of grace, the lilting and rounded vowels falling like song from her lips. When this Whitecloak spoke, however, the language sounded oily, covered with slime in a way that made Linn’s stomach twist.He leered down at the Temple Master, a small woman who might have been Linn’s mother’s age. Tufts of her long gray hair had escaped her braid, and a blue bruise was blooming on her left cheek.
“The yellow dogs don’t speak our language, Myroslav.” A woman spoke; her hair glimmered gold in the globefire light, her armor silver. “Let the translator handle it. It’s why the bastard’s here.”
Linn’s fingers wrapped tightly around her knives.
Gen shi’sen watched her. “This Daughter speaks their language?”
Linn nodded. “They speak of an interrogation.” She paused to listen. In the clearing, a Kemeiran man had stepped from the ranks of the Cyrilians. And as he began to speak in Kemeiran, she realized exactly what he was: a trafficking victim, brought back here to serve as their translator.
It was like looking into a mirror, watching the young man’s Kemeiran features remain stone-dead as he murmured to the Temple Masters, then turned to the Whitecloaks. He switched seamlessly into Cyrilian, but she could hear it: the smallest edge of an accent that the Northern Empire hadn’t managed to wipe away.
Just like hers.
She frowned. The words barely made any sense to her. “They ask about…relics…of the Deities—the gods. The center…no, the core…of the gods, I believe.” Her Kemeiran was rusty; she stumbled over the big words. “The Temple Masters do not yield.”
Gen’s face shifted as quickly as melting water. “The Heart of the Gods?”
