Viger Maul is sitting on an outcropping of the island’s onyx stone, his gaze set on her, and Tierney is too stirred up to be intimidated by the Death Fae’s sustained attention.
Go ahead, Tierney thinks at him as she holds Viger’s stare. Read my fear. Read all of it.
She turns back to implacable Fyordin, fully aware of Viger’s sustained focus on her as she and Fyordin consider each other, Fae to Fae, neither side ceding any ground.
What would it be like, Tierney wonders as her frustration mounts, to spend time with Viger Maul? To face every last fear, no longer hiding from any of it?
Every dark thing exposed.
Like a relief, Tierney can’t help but consider. A cursed relief.
And, possibly, an essential preparation for Vogel’s advance on the Eastern Realm.
“You don’t fully understand what’s coming,” Tierney says to Fyordin, dread rising. “If you did, you wouldn’t be wasting your time fighting our allies, imperfect though they may be.” She moves closer to him, adamant, holding his equally fierce stare. “We need to fight this thing together. Every last one of us. Or Vogel’s nightmare is going to devour us all.”
Their mutual storms of emotion rise, their power lashing against each other’s with unbridled force.
Tierney wrenches her gaze from Fyordin’s, suddenly needing to be away from him. Needing to be away from Viger Maul. Needing to be away from everything but the river.
Fyordin remains silent as she grabs hold of the terrace’s railing, hoists her body up until she’s balanced on top of it, then raises her arms and dives straight into the Vo.
As her body hits the cool water, she doesn’t angle up to skim along the underside of its surface like she did last night as the waves of the river frolicked over her, welcoming her home.
No.
She swims straight down like an arrow, into the deepest black. Until she touches down on the river’s great bed, the weight of the Vo a soothing pressure as her Asrai body strengthens against it.
She lies back and splays her arms on the riverbed’s soft ground.
Erthia.
Tierney breathes in the clean river water, pulling it deep into her lungs as she’s filled with the glorious sense of all the life thriving there—life independent of the Wyvernguard, the Noi lands. The river flows into her with every breath, connected to her now like some mammoth network of veins feeding into her own. And for the brief sliver of a moment, as her body morphs into water and unravels into beautiful chaos, Tierney considers staying there for good.
But then she feels it.
A disturbance at the outer reaches of the water that feeds into the Vo. One small point of contact reverberating out, almost imperceptible.
A faraway tendril of shadow, seeping into the water.
Slow and curling.
Life draws away from that point of contagion, plants flexing back, insects scuttling for land, fish darting for cleaner waters.
Every sense sharpening, Tierney draws herself back into corporeal form in a single snap of power.
She stills and listens to the water.
An image of a dead tree shivers to life in the back of her mind as she remembers, all too vividly, what Elloren told her of Vogel’s shadowy tree and his heightened, unnatural power.
The dead forest.
She remembers, in another unsettling flash, where she encountered this Shadow power before—the night Alfsigr Marfoir assassin creatures came for Wynter.
Tierney recalls the Marfoir’s rune markings, wrought from Shadow magic with the same unnatural, polluting feel as the Shadow that’s begun to invade the Vo.
For a long moment, Tierney remains completely still at the bottom of the vast waters, the Vo flowing rippling images over her, piece by piece.
And then, the Vo grows quiet, focusing in on one thing and one thing alone—that touch of Shadow, making first contact with its single, slender tributary.
The threat to the river coalesces inside Tierney’s mind, and everything inside her rears up to meet it, courage welling to overtake all fear.
I’ll fight for you, Tierney vows to the river all around her, fists clenching. I’ll defend you against this Shadow power. I’ll protect you from Vogel and the Gardnerians and the Alfsigr.
Her power whirlpools inside her as love for the river gains ground.
I won’t let them poison your waters.
Shot through with fierce resolve, Tierney pushes off from the bed of the Vo and makes for the surface.
CHAPTER SIX
REBELLION
THIERREN STONE
Sixth Month
Valgard, Gardneria
Thierren stands before Lukas Grey in the command room of the Valgard military outpost as an almost irrepressible rebellion lashes through him.
Because he’s no longer on the side of the Gardnerians.
Get hold of yourself, Thierren cautions as he holds himself military stiff. You need to hide the fact that you’ve turned against the Magedom. Lukas Grey is dangerous. He’ll sniff out your true feelings if you’re not careful.
Amber light gutters over the room, blazing from Verpacian Elm torches set into iron holsters that are bolted into the command room’s dark Ironwood walls. Sanded Ironwood trees emerge from the walls to branch out over the ceiling, giving the room the typical Gardnerian illusion of a deep forest.
Lukas Grey is a formidable presence, Thierren considers. Lukas’s aura of power mixed with his keen intellect is nothing short of intimidating. But Thierren isn’t cowed. Not after witnessing the Gardnerian massacre of the Dryads. Not after meeting Sparrow.
Brave, determined Sparrow.
The young woman who is the sole reason that Thierren hasn’t self-destructed, drawn his wand, and hurled an ice bolt straight through Lukas Grey and every other Gardnerian soldier on this evil base.
She brought him back from the brink of the abyss and challenged him to reformulate how he viewed a world turned on its head, everything he believed about his own people and himself wrong. Cruelly, disastrously, and heart-destroyingly wrong.
Now he’s alive for one sole purpose—to atone for ever being part of this, and to fight against it.
And to help Sparrow and Effrey get to the Eastern Realm.
* * *
Thierren spent the past few days obtaining fraudulent work papers for Sparrow and Effrey, emptying much of his savings to do so. Both he and Sparrow have stayed up late every night for weeks now, huddled in secrecy and talking almost until dawn in the deserted stables as they’ve fallen into an uneasy and dauntingly complicated alliance.
It’s a bond they’re loath to acknowledge, and Thierren was increasingly clear on why.
“The Mages preyed on us constantly,” Sparrow told him a few days back, the weighted look in her eyes speaking volumes.
They held each other’s gazes for a protracted moment.
And then Thierren reached down and silently handed Sparrow his wand, giving her a look blazing with contrition, disarming himself while she remained armed with her blade. The action was a flimsy gesture, he knew, but it was all he could think of to acknowledge that he was listening to what she said as well as to what she left unsaid.
Giving her the power of being the only one armed didn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what she’s up against, the power imbalance the world has thrust them into a poison that can’t be surmounted. Because the power of the entire oppressive system lies on the side of the Mages.
On Thierren’s side.
At first, Sparrow simply looked at the wand in Thierren’s outstretched palm then back up at him in a blaze of incredulity. But then her amethyst eyes lit with a more open, searching look as she accepted the wand and sheathed it alongside the blade at her hip.
And so they began every covert encounter from there on with Thierren silently offering
up his wand and Sparrow silently taking it. A symbol, more than anything, that Thierren was ready to listen. Really listen. It did nothing to shift the oppressive dynamic between their cultures, but it was a start, fueling the fragile spark of friendship that had unexpectedly lit. A friendship that they’re both careful to edge back from, Thierren, out of respect for Sparrow’s traumatic situation, Sparrow for blaringly obvious reasons.
But still, Thierren’s heart twisted with surprising force when he brought both Sparrow and Effrey, camouflaged as state-sanctioned Urisk workers, to the Indentured Labor Guild Office, their small dragon, Raz’zor, hidden with Thierren while his wing healed. As Thierren held Sparrow’s gaze, he was surprised to find that she seemed loath to part from him as well, her normally guarded expression briefly igniting with fierce emotion as they bid each other a terse goodbye. As he watched them go, Thierren fought the ferocious desire to draw his wand, cut down every Mage in the room, and flee East with Sparrow and Effrey.
But he couldn’t protect them, not with a Mage Guard runic brand on his neck—a brand that made it possible for the Mage Guard to kill him in an instant, even from a distance.
Instead, he kept his power in check as Sparrow and Effrey were whisked away, both of them quickly lost in a sea of Urisk being processed for labor assignments by pinch-faced Mages. Thierren stared after them for a long moment, his heart constricting in his chest, his wind and water magery whipping up into a tempest inside him as a ferocious resolve gained ground.
Yes, he’d endure whatever punishments Lukas Grey doled out and play the faithful soldier until he could get the vile mark stripped off his flesh.
Then he’d help Sparrow and Effrey get East safely. And then, he would come back West.
To fight the Mages.
* * *
Lukas Grey brusquely dismisses his Level Five Mage Guards, leaving the two of them alone in the imposing chamber. Then Lukas levels his deep-green gaze on Thierren, raptor-hard.
“I’m assigning you to a position as my personal envoy,” Lukas states, his green eyes trained on Thierren, as if gauging his reaction.
Thierren gives a hard, inward start, his mind cast into confusion.
Where is the punishment for trying to stop the killing of the Dryads? For turning his wand on Sylus Bane?
He’s been told again and again not to expect any mercy from Mage Lukas Grey.
A heavy silence hangs in the room.
“What are your aims, Mage Stone?” Lukas finally asks, lethally calm.
To fight you, Thierren inwardly snarls. To fight every soldier in the Guard if I have to, to get Sparrow and Effrey and their small dragon out of this nightmare land.
“I’d like to earn my way to freedom,” Thierren says cautiously as he holds Lukas’s penetrating gaze.
Lukas rises, strides around to the front of his desk, and unsheathes his wand.
Thierren braces himself and pulls in a strained breath, ready for whatever torture this Mage will inflict. He swallows as Lukas takes firm hold of his upper arm, presses the tip of his wand right onto the rune mark on Thierren’s neck, and murmurs a series of spells.
A prickling sensation rises along the lines of the circular tracking rune, the sting quickly dissipating to nothing as Lukas removes the wand from Thierren’s skin and takes a casual seat against the front edge of his broad Ironwood desk.
Thierren reaches up to rub his neck, the constant, almost imperceptible burn of the rune completely gone. A whoosh of bewilderment almost pulls him off balance. “What did you do?” he asks.
“Freed you,” Lukas says, challenge in his eyes.
It’s a trick. It has to be a trick. Thierren glares at him, cast further into cornered astonishment. “Why would you do that?” he demands, not able to keep the defensive anger from breaking through his tone.
Lukas’s eyes tighten with a sly expression that reads, Ah, good, there it is. The real Thierren.
“Do you know why I’ve assigned you to be my personal envoy, Mage Stone?” Lukas asks, almost congenially.
The insubordinate words burst out of Thierren before he can rein them in. “I don’t really care, Mage Grey.” It’s clear that Lukas has somehow found him out.
Lukas gives a short laugh, seeming impressed, as he throws Thierren a look of approval. “I assigned you to be my personal envoy because I hear that you’re an unrepentant traitor to the Gardnerian cause.”
Astonishment rocks through Thierren.
This has to be a trick.
He knows all about Commander Lukas Grey. He’s as conniving as he is dangerous.
So, what cruel game is he playing here?
“Your magic complements mine,” Lukas goes on conversationally. “Water and air, is it? My two weakest affinities.” He lifts an appraising black brow and tilts his head, as if in invitation. “Together, we’d be quite the formidable weapon.”
“To do what?” Thierren asks sharply.
Lukas’s stare darkens, his smile now gone, his words low and unforgiving when they come. “To take down the Mage Council and kill Marcus Vogel.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
RUNIC EYE
YVAN GURYEV
Sixth Month
Oonlon Military Base
Noilaan, Eastern Realm
Yvan Guryev stares over the great Oonlon plain, the vast, dry carpet of russet shrubland giving way to the distant peaks of the Icelandic Mountains that top the entire continent.
His fire gives a heated flare of longing as his thoughts turn to Elloren, the remembrance of how she conjured an inferno with just a small branch filling his mind.
Their separation is too much to bear at times, often keeping him up tossing late into the night, his skin feverish as his fire lashes out, searching and searching for Elloren’s fire to no avail, desperate to find his Wyvernfire-bonded love.
But wherever she is, she’s too far away for his fire power to contact and sometimes it makes him feel like both his Wyvernfire and his heart have come untethered.
Where are you, Elloren? Did the Vu Trin bring you somewhere isolated, as well? When will I see you again?
Forcing away the urge to take wing and find her somehow, somewhere, Yvan looks behind him at the knot of Vu Trin soldiers massed inside the northern edge of the Spikelands, the natural rock formations that look as if thousands of great stony knives have been upthrust through Erthia and toward the sky, the stone gleaming obsidian even in the pewter light of this gloom-ridden day.
Vu Trin High Commander Vang Troi meets his gaze with her piercing black eyes and nods once.
Yvan turns and sets his sights once more on the icy mountains as wind scuffs across the tundra before him and whips his fire-red hair against his temples, ruffling the hem of his black Vu Trin uniform and the feathers of his outstretched wings.
He closes his hands into fists, draws in a deep breath of the cold air, and focuses in on the tight ball of Wyvernfire that dwells in his very center—a ball of flame that he’s been strengthening for days.
He can feel himself transforming into a powerful weapon for the Resistance forces, his own desire to be a warrior for them rising along with his dragon powers.
It has been almost too much to bear, filling his center with so much fire while resisting the urge to access it. Resisting the almost irresistible desire to feel the fire’s release as it burns through him. Instead, he has let the fire power build and build.
Now it’s time to see just how powerful a weapon he’s become.
Yvan drops his control, loosens the golden-hot inferno in his center, and opens himself up to it in one shuddering intake of breath.
His whole body tenses with something approaching ecstasy as fire floods him, eliminating the tundra’s icy cold. His head cranes back, his mouth opening from the sheer pleasure of the burn as his vision tints gold and the whole world lights up.
And then the dragon in him breaks loose.
Fists clenching tighter, Yvan lowers his gaze toward the mountains as he exerts control over the fire and coils it into roping spirals, layer upon molten layer, through his hands, his arms, his shoulders, his whole body.
Tighter and tighter and tighter.
He snaps his wings out to their full breadth as flame crackles inside his vision, lightning hot, and Wyvern horns push up from his hair with a tight, satisfying sting. His teeth sharpen, and he bites them together with a mounting ferocity as the conflagration inside him rises, everything in him yearning for release.
A feral snarl builds in his throat as he throws his arms up and back, then violently forward, splaying his palms open.
His snarl breaks loose as fire explodes from his palms like water from a breached dam, avalanching over the tundra, filling the plains.
The horns on Yvan’s head solidify, his nails lengthening to claws as he grits his sharpened teeth and loses himself to the feel of his own hot, violent power, rushing forward from his palms and over the plain with unstoppable force.
And then he’s releasing the last bright tail of flame, sending it over plains that are now a lake of dancing fire, every particle of brush and grass alight. Alive with flame.
For a split second he’s stunned by the extent of his own power.
Is it like this for you, Elloren? he wonders, aching from that familiar longing to be with his Wyvern mate. His love. His whole heart. When you fill the world in front of you with fire?
Spent, Yvan lowers his hands and blinks in awe at the inferno he’s wrought, the flame-tint of his vision tamping down, the tension dropping from his wings and body as his horns recede and he begins to turn toward the Spikelands at his back, toward the contingent of Vu Trin behind him.
The air changes, the acrid tang of a threat suddenly on it.
Yvan freezes, midturn, nostrils flaring.
His eyes snag on something dark perched atop one of the towering obsidian formations, and every muscle instinctively tenses once more.
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