He finally turns to me. “He thinks the gods are going to hide, doesn’t he?”
“I think so.”
Darian growls and shakes his head. “Fucking cowards. Lee hasn’t heard from Adelyth ever since Echo died. She’d started getting worried about her, seeing as how they’d easily communicated all these years. But it makes sense. Things started changing when she changed her name from Adelynne to Adelyth.”
He shakes his head again. “I’m so tired of being a piece on a game board that’s far too big for me to see.”
I look down and see his hands shaking. “It’s going to be okay. If everyone on Nyth has been having this war all these years to prepare for this invasion, then we must be prepared, right?”
He shrugs. “How should I know? We know nothing. Maybe Azric’s right. Maybe this whole war needs to end so that we can start trying to work together. Maybe that will help. I don’t know, Fi. It all just seems so pointless. We don’t know enough. We don’t have leadership that knows any more than we do. Sometimes, I wonder if the gods even give a rat’s ass if Nyth survives as long asthey keep living. Maybe we should all just pack up and leave Nyth and the gods to their destruction.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that’s any better a plan than staying and fighting,” I say.
“I know. It’s just… It’s infuriating, you know?”
I nod my head. “I can see why you’d be frustrated. I don’t really understand it since I’ve only been hearing about it for a few weeks.”
He takes a deep breath, and then he smiles. His hands stop shaking, and he turns toward me. “So, you’re just going to pretend like you didn’t find out about what your… what Rhaskar did?”
I nod to him. “That’s all I can do at this point. Anything more, and I’m liable to burn a bridge I still need from time to time. There will come a time when he and I will have a very long, very violent discussion, but that time is not now.”
Chapter 32
Every Godforged needs human life for something. The Corpsebinders use their bodies as material to create Abominations and their life force to animate them. The Chained use their blood and life force to forge their armor and weapons. Every human life lost fuels our enemies.
~Rhaskar Thorne, Book Four of the Priests
Fiona
I swing onto the ledge where Rhaskar Thorne stands, an entire bag of what I expect to be my Infusions sitting at his feet. He doesn’t even turn to me, his eyes still peering at the bridge. Inni and Vyran fly in complicated patterns over it. Between them, a much smaller figure zips around them. Azric. He’s the only person they’d allow to be that close.
“You brought the Infusions?” I ask.
He nods to me. “Ainslee said that you needed a significant amount of them, so I did my best to make sure you wouldn’t runout. I put in extras of even the rare ones because she seemed to think you were using them faster than expected.”
Anger tries to work its way out of me, pushing to confront the man who killed my parents. I don’t let it. This is about more than just the two of us.
“I’m sparring every day, multiple times a day, against the best of the best. I have to use Infusions or there wouldn’t be any way for me to survive even our practices.”
He nods. “Good. You’ll have to show us all you’ve learned while you’ve been here when you get home.”
If I go backhome.
“Have you ever heard of the Hunters?” I ask, changing the conversation.
He cocks his head. “Where did you hear about the Hunters? That’s not a topic that’s spoken about regularly.”
“Darian said they’re why this whole war began.” I may have decided not to confront Rhaskar about my parents, but that doesn’t mean I trust him with the full truth of what I’m learning.
He sits down on the ledge that rings our hiding place and says, “He’s right. He was there when Maeve Arden forced Calyr to wake the gods. The dragon explained to the gods that the Hunters would come for them soon, and they forced Nyth to train for the war that would happen when the Hunters arrived. That’s the point of these eighty years of fighting.”
“Yes, he told me all that, but what do you know aboutthe Hunters? Their motivations, their abilities, their numbers?”
Rhaskar sighs. “That’s not a simple answer. There was a book called A History of Magic and Dragons written by Erevyn Morvyn, the first Conduit of Shadows, which had some information on them. Then there is The Future of Magic and Dragons by Maeve Arden, which has collected some other tidbits of lore. But all of it has come from two sources: the dragons that are still on Nyth and a being that lurks just outside of Nyth within the Void called the Darkness.”
He rubs his cheek and continues, “Remember that all this information could be completely wrong, as the dragons spent far more time running than fighting, and the Darkness’s information is secondhand. The Hunters’ numbers areendlessaccording to these sources. They are extremely powerful and could destroy hundreds of dragons while taking no losses. The only dragon who ever successfully fought them was Sidon, and he did it alone.
“What we’ve assumed is that they kill by pulling the magic from a creature. I doubt they’d have any problems wielding a sword or spear, but their true danger is how easily they can drain a magical being’s power. For dragons, this would be deadly. For nearly anything else, it would be nearly as deadly, with the sole exception being humans. Sidon’s powers are unique in that he doesn’t really have any. He didn’t depend on his magic to win him fights, so he had experience fighting with tooth and claw rather than powers.”
