PROLOGUE
On the nighther daughter turned six months old, Melea Waters woke in the darkness to a sound from the bassinet under the window.
Monsters.
It was always her first thought when she woke at night.
She opened her eyes and lifted her head and found the shutters blown open by wind and the full moon’s light pouring over her daughter’s face. No monsters, just Eurydice.
She didn’t recall opening the shutters, but the nighttime winds sometimes blew hard between storms. And Melea was a terrible sleeper.
Since the birth, nights had felt long, dangerous. Often now Melea woke at the smallest sound, her eyes wide in the darkness. In the southern district of the Kingdom of Storms, few thought beyond the next day’s rains. But Melea Waters thought only of the long nights.
It had been six months, and from the moment her daughter had emerged from her body, the sun was no longer the brightest spot in her world. She had borne an infant with straw-gold hair and velvet-soft skin. A light amongst the storm clouds.
Her baby wasn’t chubby. She wasn’t large, and she never cried. But Melea loved Eurydice with leonine fierceness.
In the quiet, she remembered a childhood memory; she once saw a horse-pulled wagon roll in through the gates of the southern district late at night. Two guards sat on the bench with lit torches, and a tarp lay over the wagon’s bed.
From the street corner where she stood, twelve-year-old Melea perceived a creature’s hand peeking from under the tarp’s edge. It was an image she had never forgotten: the hand, veined with black blood. That was when she had known the stories her mother had told her were true.
Monsters were real. They always had been.
She rose from the bed and crossed to the bassinet, where Eurydice lay awake. This was uncommon; her daughter had mostly slept for six months, and rarely woke in the night. Melea made to swipe flour from her hands—a bread-baker’s tic—before touching her baby’s cheek.
She gazed down at her infant and she was startled by the blueness of her child’s eyes. In the moonlight, they were the color of well water and wide open.
For the first time, Eurydice seemed to see her mother. The new glint in her eyes was unmistakable. She let out a noise, sudden and lively, and reached for her mother’s hand. Her fingers closed around her mother’s, her grip tight.
Tears blurred Melea’s vision.
Eurydice was a strong baby. She would survive the southern district, the acid rains, this hardscrabble world.
Her chest wrenched with something like happiness, though not quite. She was not a woman who thought long or hard about what her body told her. She lived each day, and she baked bread, and now she was a mother.
The feeling in her chest was like lightning.
CHAPTER ONE
On the battlements,you kept your eyes open or you paid in blood. Monsters roamed beyond our kingdom’s high walls, or so the stories said.
I tightened my grip on the stone edge, willing the night to remain as still and placid as a blank canvas. But the wind, devious little bastard, had other ideas. Up here above the plains, the wind toyed with you; first it hit you like a hundred frigid needles, then it slapped your braid in your face.
But that wasn’t what kept me standing.
Beyond the stone walls, across barren plains stripped raw by acid, the sun was a thin red blade against the distant evergreens. Those trees, straight as spears, were the only thing stubborn enough to survive here.
Still here. Still hanging on.
The sun passed the tree line fast at this hour, racing toward night. From the moment it touched the treetops, I could almost hold my breath long enough to see it gone.
“Waters,” a deep voice called from the tower, set higher atop the high wall we stood along.
I turned fully toward the tower, though I couldn’t see the faceinside. The wind whipped my braid into my face with a flail’s sting.Remember your training.But it didn’t come naturally on my first night. “Yes, Regiment Commander?”
Those were the right words, though stiff and pitchy. I had spent so many secret nights up here as a child, trespassing where I should not, that the top of this high wall felt like it was mine. Mine to climb, mine to claim. Back then, I was beholden to no one as I watched the sun set.
“Eyes on the plain,” the regiment commander said.
