The spirits who had drawn close weren’t fast enough to evade him—he’d switched so suddenly from stillness to motion that they were caught off-guard. His blade slid through them. He felt them die.
Swing right.
Drop down.
Kick and jab. Elbow back. Palm upward, slamming into the face of a spirit, and then he stabbed, felt it slide in, heard the cry, pulled back, and twisted to slice at the whisper of wind behind him. An ice spirit shrieked as his sword bit into it. He drew back then struck again, a whirl of motion.
And the untamed spirits retreated, as if unused to anyone fighting back. He heard them rustling, and he opened his eyes to see he stood in a clearing of gray stone. Pale-blue sky was visible overhead, and the whiteness had retreated.
At the edge of the haze, he saw a flash of color: Naelin.
He ran toward her with his sword ready. Around him, in the mist, he saw light flash—lightning strikes within the clouds. Beneath his feet, the earth shifted. He didn’t let any of it distract him and ran across moving ground, his feet landing lightly, knees bent deep, never depending on the earth to hold him as he sprang across the clearing.
Midair, he swung his sword, and he felt it impact. A spirit reared back in pain, and as he landed, he saw it tower above him: an earth spirit with a stone face and a body of brambles. It clawed at him, and he dodged in a roll, blade protected against him.
And then he was at Naelin’s side.
Her eyes were closed, and her arms were spread wide, fingers splayed. Positioning himself at her back, he fended away spirits that dove for her.
The ground rumbled beneath them, and he felt it rising up higher and higher. He crouched for balance, but Naelin stood straight and tall. The earth rose up and up until they towered above the swarm of whiteness.
Lowering her arms, Naelin looked back at him. “The spirits of the untamed lands don’t want us here.”
“Yeah, noticed that. Where areyourspirits?”
“Coming,” she said, and then hundreds of spirits circled them, on the ground around them and in the air above them, driving back the whiteness.
Naelin felt the vastness: hundreds of thousands of spirits, stretching out toward the horizon—if there even was a horizon in this place. It felt endless. She drew her own spirits closer, in a tight circle around her and Ven. They felt pitifully few.
I never thought I’d come to the point where I felt saferwithspirits.
But these wereherspirits. And even though they had come from the untamed lands originally, they were bonded to her now, and that made them instantly different from the unleashed spirits who roamed this land. Her spirits knew what it was like to have a queen, to be controlled and have control, to be able to create and destroy but with restraint. Unlike the ones here...
How can Erian and Llor be here? How can theysurvivehere? And how can I find them either way?She felt like a single leaf in an overwhelmingly massive forest. She’d thought she was strong, but this place... From their vantage point on top of the rock, she surveyed the untamed lands in all directions.
The forests of Aratay were no longer visible, though she could feel the border to the east, a sharp cutoff to the sense of wall-to-wall spirits.
They’re not wall-to-wall,Naelin told herself. It only seemed that way because there were so many, and they flitted so quickly that many were almost indistinguishable from the gauzy fog. She felt the attention of the spirits shift away now that she and Ven were motionless.They have the attention span of children.
“Which way?” Ven asked.
She studied the sea of mist. It all looked the same—except no, it didn’t. Squinting, she saw a flash of blue in the distance, far to the southwest. It widened, and the mist shifted away from it. A river? A lake? Perhaps an ocean.
Ven pointed north. “Mountains.”
She saw gray peaks above the clouds. She could have sworn they hadn’t been there before, but they must have been hidden by the mist. Even unleashed spirits couldn’t form mountains that quickly. Smoke curled from the peak of one of the mountains, and it was ringed with blackness. She thought she saw a streak of red, like a bloody tear on the side of the peak.
“Northwest,” she decided, between the sea and the volcano.
He nodded. “It’s the clearest path. A sensible choice.”
Nothing about this place feels “sensible.”
It felt as foggy as a dream. Summoning a spirit with leathery bat wings and a cat body, Naelin climbed on its back, with Ven behind her. He kept his sword unsheathed and held her waist with only one arm. The spirit kicked off the rock and flew westward.
As they flew farther in, the mist became more wisplike, and she saw it wasn’t all blankness like it seemed from outside. There were colors here.
Red. Fire that danced across stone.
