Ruu’ma turned. “Rii shi’sen, will you summon the others?”
The shi’sen with the sunbeams inclined their head, hair sweeping like a ripple of silk. “As you wish,” they said, and when the sunbeam disappeared, so, too, did they.
So this was the true power of the greatest Temple Masters in the land. The ability to weave darkness and light like gods, to effortlessly appear and vanish as though stepping through space and time.
Linn looked to the Temple Master before her—Ruu’ma shi’sen, as the shadow wielder had addressed her. Throughout their entire exchange, the woman had never lost her serene smile. “Ko Linnet, you must forgive me,” the shi’sen said. “I must warn our Imperial Palace, and I have some divination to attend to. It seems the dream I feared most is on the precipice of becoming reality.” The smallest crease appeared on her forehead. “And if so…the harmony of our world hangs in question.”
“Wait,” Linn began, but the woman had already turned and was gliding down the hallway. Between one breath and the next, she became a shadow, then nothing at all, as quickly as she had appeared.
Linn was alone.
She reached for her daggers, feeling utterly lost. This wasn’t the way she’d imagined her meeting with the Temple Masters to go. Gen shi’sen haddiedto get this message to them, yet they had given her no more than two minutes of their time before turning away. And from what Ruu’ma shi’sen said, she seemed to have anticipated something like this happening. If so, why not galvanize the entirety of the Temple of the Skies to fight? Why not send word to the Emperor immediately, to warn him? She’d heard of the oft-indecipherable decisions of the Temple of the Skies, shrouded in secrecy and steeped in Kemeira’s principles of harmony, peace, and balance. There was never counteraction without action.
But that is stupid,Linn found herself thinking. Did it take aninvasion for the Temple Masters to act? She stood in the lowlight, the hallway stretching long and empty to either side of her, the carvings of gods and monsters watching her from shadowy corners with gleaming gold eyes. The chill of Ruu’ma shi’sen’s words twisted dread through her.The harmony of our world hangs in question.
Gen had died battling the Imperial Patrols, protecting the knowledge of the Heart of the Gods—whatever it was—from them. If there was one thing Linn prided herself on, it was her blades.
She would fight, even if she stood alone against an entire army of Cyrilian Imperial Patrols. She would fight, to her last breath.
Linn touched her hand to her heart and drew her daggers. The wooden token pressed against her collarbone, as though urging her, the smooth strokes of its characters etched into her mind, reminding her of the promise she had made Gen Fusann.
She knew what she needed to protect.
Bei’kin Shiu’gon.
The Bei’kin Bookhouse.
As Ana and the Redcloaks drew close to Salskoff, the amicable chatter and light atmosphere turned to silence. The gravity of their mission rested heavy on their shoulders. Yuri took to reminding them of the plan: Once they arrived at Salskoff, a little before dawn, they would lie in wait at the city borders and undercut Sorsha before she could even reach the Palace walls.
Ana noticed people grasping for their Affinities, hands twitching for snow or the soil beneath. Some had found ways to incorporate the elements of their Affinities into their outfits: A sand Affinite had padded his chest and back with bags of silt, while a copper Affinite had fashioned an entire suit of armor out of his element, allowing him to break off quantities of it to use as weapons.
In turn, Ana was acutely aware of the dull ache in her own bones, the hollowness in the pit of her belly where she had once felt full and whole with her power. Where she might have ridden confidently into battle with her blood Affinity before, she now only felt a sense of unease. The winter nights in Cyrilia were unbearably long, and somehow, in the span of the past two moons, the Syvern Taiga seemed to have changed, too. The air held anunnatural stillness that rendered every crack of a tree branch, every sound they made, too sharp and too unnatural. There was a feeling of malice to the way the wind shrieked, its distant echoes resembling wails in the night. Ana noticed Yuri raising his hand higher, the flame in his palm burning brighter.
The colors around them began to shift, the pitch-blackness lifting into a murky gray, and at last, a pale silver in the spaces between the trees to herald impending dawn. And when the hills began to slope downward, Ana knew, with a certainty in her gut, that they were close to home. The trees began to thin, trunks and branches giving way to slices of sky and ground, and then there it was, materializing before her eyes like a dream.
In the distance, between the rolling tundra and snow-covered pines, stretched an expanse of red-tiled roofs, gleaming wet beneath a blanket of morning mist. Rising above it all was the Salskoff Palace, white steeples plunging into the predawn sky, a palace of stone and snow come to life. Her ancestors had built this on the eve of unifying what was now known as the Cyrilian Empire, and there it had stood for centuries, unflinching and unyielding over the tides of time. Her empire’s history was etched into the lines of its ancient marble walls.
Ana gripped her reins tighter, the sight stirring an unquiet thought in her mind.
What kind of a legacy would she, Anastacya Mikhailov, leave within those hallways?
She heard Yuri draw a sharp breath. They paused over the outcrop of cliffs, the weight of the moment hanging thick as smoke in the air between them. She knew from the look on his face that he remembered just as she did: the stolen mornings begun with hot tea and ptychy’moloko, evenings by the hearthwith the warmth of his company. Days of sunlight, witnessed through her window with her hand pressed against cool glass; days of storm, her blood running in rivulets down her arm, her fear and fury lashing like wind and rain.
The edges around his eyes softened, and for a moment, Yuri looked as though he were about to reach out to her, put a hand over her shoulder as he had during her bad days, and tell herit’ll soon be all right.
But then there rose a shout from up ahead.
The moment splintered. Yuri’s eyes narrowed and he spurred his valkryf in the direction of the call.
Ana’s valkryf followed.
And came to a sharp stop.
Skewered against a tree, like an ugly scar across the portrait of Salskoff, was a body, mangled beyond recognition. Blood dripped into the snow beneath it, steaming gently in the cold.
Yuri leapt off his valkryf, drew his sword, and hacked through the branches impaling the body. It fell to the ground, and only then did Ana notice its cloak, which was dark on the outside and a vibrant, cardinal color on the inside.
A Redcloak. One of their scouts.
