The fog was thick, but Linn had dreamt of a night like this for years.
She sat on deck, listening to the sound of silence as their ship sluiced through the midnight waters. Each slosh of a wave against the hull, eachwhoompfof the sails against a cool breeze, felt like a small sign of magic.
For tonight, Linn was on her way home.
She’d left here eight years ago, alone and afraid yet determined, in pursuit of a brother stolen by Cyrilian traffickers. She’d endured horrors many would never see during their entire lives, and she’d survived the brutality of a broken system.
Now, she returned as Ambassador of Cyrilia to the Kemeiran Empire to recruit forces in the Aseatic Isles on behalf of the Red Tigress, Anastacya Mikhailov. Preparing for a war that would end the system she’d been subjugated to.
For as much as this was Ana’s war, this was alsoLinn’sfight.
King Darias had commissioned this brig for her, replacing the Bregonian navy-blue sails, painting over the symbols of stallions, eagles, and fish, and hand-picking a crew for it from the Blue Fort. Now, the colors they flew were gray, the shades of cloudsand wind and everything in between, punctured by the sigil ofa Bregonian seadragon entwined with a red roaring tiger. It was asigil significantly different from that of the Cyrilian Empire—with which the Kemeiran Empire was formally in a state of war—and yet it was one honest and true to Linn’s cause: to make peace between Cyrilia and her homeland, and to convince the Kemeiran government to support the Red Tigress in her fight against the current monarch.
From far off, the ship was no more than a slip of a shadow in this weather. A phantom, just the way she liked it.
Her favorite gift, though, was the translucent fabric that she kept draped over her shoulders. It stretched down to her hands, roped gently around her wrists.
Her chi, which meantwingin the Kemeiran tongue, was something she kept on her at all times. She slept with it, and during the days at sea, she’d leap off the crow’s nest and fly, soaring over clouds and dipping over the waves to the song of ghostwhales. Her arm, which Alaric Kerlan had shattered during the Battle of Godhallem, was healing nicely; with every passing day, she found that she could move it a little more, use it to adjust her balance a little better. With a cast for support, she was able to fly for longer and longer periods of time, working the muscles that had atrophied during her injury.
It had been over a fortnight since she’d set out for Kemeira, and they were close. Linn closed her eyes against the cool ocean air, the evening breeze wrapping around her. She could practicallysmellit, the subtle shifts in the air currents, the crisp, wintry coolness different from both Cyrilia and Bregon, stirring memories buried deep in her heart. She’d watched silently earlier as the sun set across the seam between sky and sea, glowing deeporange like the tangerines of her childhood that had burst sweet and tangy over her tongue. A knot had formed in her throat, and she found that even if she’d wanted to speak, she had no words to describe this feeling.
The feeling of coming home.
The fog continued to roll across the waves, silent and gray, stretching infinitely in all directions until it was swallowed by night.
Linn frowned, leaning on the railing. The weather had taken a turn for the worse in the past hour; visibility was now so poor, she could barely make out the end of her ship. Not to mention, there was something different about this fog. It felt too thick, too heavy.
“I thought I would find you here.”
Linn turned. She could just make out a silhouette between the ghostly tendrils of mist—the steady slope of his shoulders, the cords of muscles.
Kaïs came to stand by her side, his footsteps light as a cat’s despite his heavy build. He’d ditched Cyrilian and Bregonian armor for a simple black tunic and dark cloak, drifting lightly over him as he shifted. It suited him.
“We are close,” Linn said. “The captain said we would alight at midnight.”
He was silent for a few moments, their breaths mingling comfortably in the cold ocean air. “Do you feel nostalgic?”
There was a wistfulness to the deep, steady bass of his voice. Like her, Kaïs had been stolen from his mother and brought over the border to Cyrilia at a young age, where he was enlisted in the Imperial Patrols due to his special ability to sense and controlother Affinites. His kind was called yaegers, orhuntersin Old Cyrilic, used to keep regular Affinites under the Empire’s control.
Kerlan had kidnapped Kaïs’s mother and used that as a threat to control him during the Battle of Godhallem. Yet Kaïs’s last-minute change of heart had helped Ana and Linn win the battle—but potentially cost him the opportunity to ever see his mother again.
If I return now, Morganya will know what I did, the traitor that I am,he’d told Linn.The only way to protect my mother is for them to believe that I am dead.
I must become a ghost.
Standing before her, weaving in and out of sight between the ever-shifting clouds, he seemed to have become that. His eyes were silvered by the moonlight, and in them, Linn thought she could see land and sea, mirrored yet never meeting.
Over the course of the fortnight, she’d mulled over their plan in Kemeira. The ache of wanting to return to her village and see her mother was almost physical—yet her home village lay in the opposite direction of their destination, Bei’kin. There, the Emperor of Kemeira resided in his Imperial Palace built atop the highest fortified mountain of the city. And in the city center was the revered Temple of the Skies, housing the greatest Temple Masters in all of Kemeira.
If the Emperor was the head of Kemeira, then the Temple Masters were its heart, serving as invaluable counselors to the Emperor and implementing governing policies through the network of Temple Masters that stretched across all provinces and regions like the veins of the country.
It was the approval of those two governing bodies Linnsought. It was they who could launch Kemeira’s forces, the deadliest and most well-trained wielders—the Kemeiran term for Affinites—in the world.
No matter what, she knew what her Wind Masters would have told her.
“Duty first,” she said. “We must make for the Northern Capital, Bei’kin, to appeal for the Emperor’s and the Temple Masters’ help. After that…”
She’d given a lot of thought to the seemingly impossible task before her. The Kemeiran Empire had been in a state of war with Cyrilia for longer than she’d been alive, over their disagreements on how Affinites were treated in the Cyrilian Empire as well as the clandestine trafficking of Kemeiran wielders to the Great Northern Empire, which Cyrilia had admitted no involvement in yet had taken no measures to prevent.
