The man stared furiously at Rielle for a moment, blood trickling down his forehead and nose—and then, as Rielle watched, his face softened and his eyes dimmed. His expression shifted into something sly and familiar.

One of the women pinning him to the floor cried out and scrambled away from him.

Rielle’s skin prickled.

The man opened his mouth to speak, but Rielle did not recognize the words. It was a harsh tongue, yet somehow lyrical, and though Rielle did not know the language, she caught the meaning well enough.

It was a taunt. A tease.

An invitation.

And underneath the man’s voice hummed another, familiar one that Rielle had not heard for weeks.

She stiffened. Corien?

The man grinned, and then, abruptly, his eyes cleared. His body stiffened, jerked, then fell still.

Rielle rose to her feet and backed slowly away from him, the wild drum of her heart drowning out the sounds of onlookers shoving closer to get a better look, shouting questions at Tal, at Audric, at each other.

The Sun Guard swarmed, forming a tight circle around Rielle and ushering her quickly out of the temple, Audric’s guard following close behind.

Ludivine’s voice came urgently. We need to leave. Now.

Rielle murmured a protest, shaking herself free from her shock as they moved outside. Atheria was prancing nervously in the garden just outside the temple, wings out, ready to fly.

Rielle turned, found Ludivine leading Audric toward her. The crowd pressed close, barely held back by the circle of guards.

“We have to stay,” Rielle protested, looking round. A man shoved forward his small child, who reached for Rielle’s skirt, sobbing. “They’re frightened!”

No.

Climb.

Ludivine’s voice cut like a blade. Rielle stumbled forward, catching herself on Atheria’s chest. The godsbeast knelt at her feet. In a daze, Rielle mounted her. She heard Audric and Ludivine climb up behind her, felt Audric’s arms wrap around her waist.

“Make her fly,” came Ludivine’s tight voice. “We’re leaving.”

He won’t touch you. In Rielle’s mind, Ludivine’s voice was low and tremulous, like the roll of nearing thunder. Never again will he touch you.

Distantly, Rielle realized she was not in control of her mind. Ludivine was there, in her thoughts, stifling her, calming her, even though she did not want to be calm.

And yet, she gathered Atheria’s mane in her hands and croaked, “Fly, Atheria.”

The godsbeast obeyed.

2

   Eliana

“The Emperor favors dreams most of all. Here, you are at your most vulnerable, and therein lies the appeal. Before sleep, clear your mind. Say your prayers. Recite to yourself the following: I am myself. My mind is my own. And I am not afraid.”

—The Word of the Prophet

At first, the dream was familiar.

Eliana searched through the smoking ruins of the Empire outpost where she had dined with Lord Morbrae. Prisoners still trapped in the rubble screamed her name, an agonized chorus.

Eliana.

Their voices overlapped, shattered, surged. She ran with her hands clamped over her ears, but the screams pierced her palms and burrowed inside her like animals scrambling for shelter.

Eliana.

Quivering flakes spun down from the sky, a gossamer gray curtain of ashfall. Soon she was inhaling more smoke than air. She stumbled over a pale-brown arm jutting up from a black drift.

She wanted to shout a protest, but her voice had vanished.

She wanted to run, but her body did not obey. Her body was not her own.

She grasped the cold hand, stiff with death, and pulled, dislodging her mother’s body. It was monstrous, deformed, frozen in a state of convulsion—not Rozen Ferracora, but the bestial crawler into which the Empire had made her.

“Eliana.”

This voice was near, and singular. A cool breath puffed against her shoulder. A faint, perfumed scent—spice and incense.

She whirled.

She was no longer in the field of ash.

She stood at the end of an eternal corridor, its carpet red as a raw mouth.

Galvanized lights, affixed to the walls with wrought-iron brackets, buzzed quietly between closed doors. The walls were wood-paneled, polished to a gleam. As Eliana walked, her blurred reflection accompanied her.

She tried the first door she came to. Tall and narrow, its arched frame formed a point that reminded her of knives.

She reached for her belt, but found she was without her weapons. She wore a simple dark nightgown; her bare feet were wet.

She glanced down at the plush red carpet, testing her feet. As her weight shifted, so too did the carpet’s color.

Red bubbled between her toes.

Her stomach tightened, and the sudden high whine in her ears told her to run, but, as before, when she tried to move, she stayed right where she was. Her feet were pinned to the soaked carpet. When she tried to cry out for help, only silence emerged.

Then, with a great slam, as if from the drop of some unseen mammoth blow, the door nearest her shuddered in its frame.

Eliana stared, her skin an icy shell of sweat.

The sound came again, and again—faster, louder, until it was a pounding heartbeat, and then the rhythm degraded, and it was a hailstorm of two frantic fists, then a dozen, then two dozen, all beating against the locked door.

Eliana pulled at her legs, desperate to dislodge them from the floor. Silent screams lodged in her throat like food too sharp and hot to swallow. And still the door shook, rattling in its frame. A scream began. Distant, deep, and rising, it joined the cacophony of fists until it drowned them out entirely, and the door was shaking then, not from the weight of hands but from the sheer anguish of the wild, furious howl now bearing down upon it.

Eliana stared, her vision watery, her legs stinging from the scratches of her own fingernails. Not long ago, she had summoned a storm from the skies and used it to sink a fleet of Empire warships. On that frosted beach in Astavar, in the cold shallows of Karajak Bay, her blazing fingers had crafted angry wind and furious waves, and every muscle in her body had bloomed with pain as a strange new power ricocheted up the ladder of her bones.

But here, in this corridor, the world remained unremarkable and closed to her eyes. Her hands shook and her knees trembled, and she couldn’t gather her thoughts well enough to reproduce that terrible moment on the beach, her mother dead at her feet, when her scream of grief had torn the world apart.

The door would fly open at any moment, and when it did, whatever was on the other side would find her, sweating and barefoot and defenseless and alone—