“Artem, Artem, my dear.” She cupped her guard’s square-jawed face, wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “You’re here. You’re safe.”

Then, without warning, violence exploded through Ludivine’s mind, accompanied by a furious succession of images—pines weighed down by piles of snow, a half-buried village. Tossed flames. Burning flesh.

“He’s here,” she whispered, no longer entirely in Obritsa’s apartments. Part of her was in the mountains, her mind racing to find the source of these terrible images. “He’s there. He’s hurting them. Oh, God.”

“Who?” Obritsa stood. “Tell me at once.”

“His name is Corien. The most powerful of my kind.” Ludivine searched the far reaches of her thoughts and saw the truth. “He is in the mountains, at a small village. Polestal. He is forcing the elementals there to hurt each other. They are burning.”

And suddenly she understood what was happening. It was a trap; it was bait. He had grown impatient, so he would try every method he could think of until Rielle relented.

But she wouldn’t relent. Ludivine wouldn’t allow her to, even if she had to sit stubbornly in Rielle’s mind for the rest of her life, controlling her every movement. A sentinel doomed to endless duty.

“You must take me to Polestal now,” Ludivine ordered, clutching her aching arm. The blightblade scar was throbbing as if freshly made.

Obritsa’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Because he is doing this to force Rielle’s hand,” she replied, fighting the slow spread of her terror, “and if he succeeds, we’re all dead.”

28

   Eliana

“I have heard tell of beasts that run wild in the night. Horrors from children’s stories, thrust suddenly into the waking world. It does not surprise me, that now we must add monsters to the list of terrors wreaking havoc upon our world. I’m convinced we did something terrible, long ago, something ancient and unforgivable, and that these interminable years of war are punishment for it.”

—Collection of stories written by refugees in occupied Ventera, curated by Hob Cavaserra

In the city of Karlaine, Eliana could not sleep.

She lay on the hard, cold ground, under a pale dawn sky slashed with black pines. They had made camp in a small cluster of vacant buildings on the outskirts of Karlaine, slipping into the city in small groups of two or three, so as not to attract undue attention. The atmosphere in Karlaine was already tense and watchful. The smoke from Caebris stained the horizon, and the explosions had surely been audible to those living in the city.

Eliana closed her eyes. Once, she had been good at sleeping, no matter the time of day or her state of mind. Those days were long gone, and as she lay there, her spine wedged against a tree root, legs and arms tightly crossed, her mind filled with the sounds of battle.

Explosions, possibly of her own making.

Wood shattering, watchtowers collapsing with a groan.

The crackle of flames, the clash of swords, the snick of a blade catching against flesh, the cries of bullets hitting bodies and bodies falling to the ground.

The opening and shutting of doors down an endless hallway—faster, harder, closer. Relentless.

Corien’s voice in the dark: There you are.

And Jessamyn, watching her curiously: Nothing’s finished.

Eliana turned onto her side, tucking her thrumming hands close against her chest. Her castings had not quieted since the raid of Caebris, and she still couldn’t be sure if they had caused those initial explosions, or if Patrik had abruptly decided to use more bombardiers than just the one, or if, perhaps, Eliana had been imagining the number of explosions she had counted. If she could trust her own mind.

She clenched her fists, ignoring the pain of her healing burns, and closed her eyes. It was an odd, unsettling feeling, to love and hate a thing so passionately and in such equal measure. These castings she had made with her own hands.

These weapons she did not trust, imprisoning her.

She tried to remind herself of a few simple, glad truths.

In total, they had saved nine prisoners from the Fidelia laboratory.

Of the refugees who had traveled aboard the Streganna, more than three-quarters of them had survived the battle, and those who hadn’t yet left for the city now rested peacefully in this copse of trees and in the little buildings nearby—a stable, a feed shed, two tired cottages, one of which was inhabited by an old man and his husband, who had soap and potatoes and had at once set to work gathering well water and starting a fire.

Jessamyn was alive, and Patrik too.

Harkan slept beside her, curled up on his side and lightly snoring.

But still, Eliana could not sleep. She sat up, rubbing the back of her neck. She could feel the faint echo of Corien’s fingers there, groping and grabbing. His hand in her hair, his voice unraveling against her nape.

Her stomach churned; her throat tasted terrible, like dirt and blood and old food. She pushed herself to her feet and wandered camp until she found Patrik, on watch at a low stone wall, facing west. It formed one side of a broad paddock that had long gone untended—scattered with rocks, overgrown and empty.

“We’ll have to leave by noon,” he said quietly as she came up beside him. “They’ll come for us soon enough.”

“We killed all of them,” she said, remembering. Once the prisoners were away, she and Jessamyn had returned through the auxiliary door and cut down every physician they could find, every dead-eyed adatrox blundering through the rubble.

“Perhaps,” Patrik conceded, “perhaps not. We did well, that’s true. You and Jessamyn were quite a team. But the world crawls with the soldiers of the Empire. And I don’t trust these woods, these fields.” He waved an arm across the horizon. “I keep waiting to see one of the cruciata jump out from the shadows as the one that attacked me did, years ago.”

“From what you’ve told me,” Eliana said dully, “that seems unlikely.”

“Angels creating monsters of women and armies of monsters,” Patrik muttered. “I don’t understand them. Why do they hate us so completely?”

“A long story.”

He shot her a sharp glance, watching for a long moment. “I suppose you won’t tell me?”

“Once I’ve had a bath and some food, I’ll tell you the whole sordid tale.”

“I look forward to that. Meantime, we’ll leave the refugees with their families. They’ll blend in well enough, even after having been gone for months. But the prisoners we’ll have to take with us when we leave in the morning. Their presence wouldn’t go unnoticed here.”