Chapter One
The knife at my throat needs sharpening.
Its jagged edge bites into my skin as a man closes in behind me. This is the desperate blade of a man who owns no better weapon. This is the blade of a man who has no better option.
This is the blade of a man who will kill me.
Footsteps crunch on dry dirt as other attackers approach my sister and our Guardian. They’re arguing about what broke the carriage wheel. They don’t hear them coming.
I don’t cry out to warn them. I don’t need to.
The man reeks of blood and sweat and death. This isn’t his first ambush. This may not even be his first ambush today.
But it will be his last.
“Scream, and I’ll kill you,” he whispers, his voice as harsh as the desert that surrounds us. He kicks at the bend behind my knees, intending me to walk forward but nearly knocking me off my balance. My throat stings as the knife, dull though it may be, draws blood.
The man is forcing me into the shadow of our carriage, and I suppose I ought to be afraid of what he intends to do to me there. Nothing good happens in the shadows. Not for most people.
I, however, am not most people.
The second I leave the light, I draw on the power within me and deepen the shadow to the black of a moonless night. The sun is strong overhead in this blighted land, but it holds no power in the impenetrable darkness I’ve created.
The man lowers his knife in confusion.
I spin back towards the carriage, putting distance between us. I can see him clearly, even in the darkness. It’s the gift of the shadow-born, those whose magic settled into the lowest elemental school. We’re reviled by some and feared by most, all because we know what lurks in the dark while others can only wonder.
What lurks in the dark is always men, men like this one.
He’s tall and bone thin, so thin that I can barely see his eyes in their deep hollows even with my gift. But it’s the state of his arms that draws my attention. They’re covered in twisted scars, jagged lines that reach to the knife in his hand.
I know those scars. This man is an ash-harvester. All of them end up with scars like this eventually.
This man is one of our people.
These lands were once ours as well. The Machair Wastes were once the Machair Plains, a flat and fertile land east of the mountains House Verran calls home. They were the pride of old Nithyria. I remember watching waves of wind travel through fields of grain from up on the hilltop of Avaris as a child, an ocean of gold.
Five years ago, those same fields ran red with blood. And then, just before the war was over, God-King Aurelian destroyed them. Stripped them and scoured them with magic, tainted them with poison. They say it will take one hundred years for the rain to wash it from the soil. But it won’t matter even if it does. With the fields laid bare, the dunes of the great Serath Desert blew in on the wind, and the land was lost forever.
Even the vultures don’t come here.
The road we’re on was built on a dry riverbed. It’s the shortest path through the Wastes, and the only one that’s even remotely safe. It’s patrolled in the north by our people and in the south by the Selarans, but with the Great Festival of the Gods on the horizon, God-King Ronan’s patrols must have been too preoccupied to clear out the few people desperate or depraved enough to remain here.
My sister Adria will have some choice words about that, no doubt, once she finishes barbecuing our other attackers. Judging by the smell of smoke and burning flesh, they’re already medium well.
Silently, I draw my sword. My blade is deadly sharp, of course, and nearly as long as I am tall. It’s not a sword for the battlefield. It’s the sword of a lady, a sword meant for dueling in the defense of honor.
It’s more than my honor that I’m defending.
“Where are you, bitch?” the man spits at me. He’s close, and I really ought to end this. It won’t take much, just a quick thrust of my blade. There are several places on his body that would do. Larus made me drill on the dummies in the castle courtyard until my blisters had blisters. Heart. Kidney. Lung. And yes, throat. An especially good spot to strike an armored opponent.
This man wears no armor, and I’d be better served to thrust at his abdomen, but there’s a kind of poetry in stabbing him in the throat after he scratched mine.
I should do it. Just lean forward a little and pierce an artery. He’ll be dead in seconds.
He’s literally right here. I’m so close, I barely need to lean.
Here’s the thing though: I’ve never killed someone.
