Marina studies Rafe, her brow tensing. She sniffs hard. “He is not a shifter.” She turns to Diana, appearing deeply perplexed. “Is he as strong as you?”
Diana huffs out an indulgent sound. “Oh, please. I could snap him like a twig.”
Trystan coughs out a laugh and turns to Rafe, amused. “Are you intimidated by your girlfriend yet, my brother?”
Rafe’s mouth twitches up. “Not at all, my brother.” He grins at Trystan and throws him a mischievous look. “I happen to enjoy the company of strong women.”
Marina turns and focuses in on Yvan. “You were there. The day Elloren freed me.”
Yvan regards Marina with the dragon’s same even, unblinking stare. “I was.”
Marina’s nostrils suddenly flare and she stiffens, drawing back. “What are you?”
Yvan’s whole demeanor instantly shifts from languid ease to a darkly shielded rigidity.
“You are other,” Marina whispers, hunching down as if faced with a potential threat.
“He’s a man of mystery,” Rafe puts in with a smirk.
“Another Evil One,” Trystan idly states as he forms a rotating ball of lightning over his wand’s tip. “We’re all Evil Ones here.”
“Evil Ones?” Marina cautiously asks, uncomprehending.
I glower at Trystan. “My brothers have a strange sense of humor.”
“Well, it’s true,” Trystan says as he transforms the lightning ball into a roiling orb of deep blue fire. “According to the glorious and most holy Book of the Ancients, we’re all Evil Ones. Except, maybe, for Ren here.”
I bristle at Trystan’s singling me out, but Andras’s broad chest rocks with a deep laugh. He gives my brother a wry look. “Yes, you Gardnerians cast a wide net with your Evil Ones.”
Trystan eyes Andras sidelong. “That we do. It’s our special talent.” He casts the fiery blue ball into the bonfire, the flames momentarily burning with a stunning variety of vivid blues.
Gareth, Marina and Tierney fall into low conversation with my brothers and Andras. Wynter pairs off with Ariel, the two of them gathering the splinting supplies and disappearing into the cave.
My attention is inexorably drawn to Yvan, as it always is when he’s near. He’s leaning toward Naga, no longer at ease. Their eyes are set on each other with intense focus, as if they’re immersed in a silent, tension-fraught conversation, and Yvan nods stiffly every so often.
Without warning, a malicious wave of unease flows in from the trees like a dark tide, and a vision of phantom branches curling around my throat invades my mind. Ire rises within me, and I survey the blackness of the forest, my fire lines instinctively kindling faster than they ever have before. I close my eyes and mentally stoke them higher, surprised when my inner fire ratchets up to an invisible, steady blaze, then a hot stream of flame. Exhilarated by this new sense of control over my lines, I tense my whole body and exhale sharply, blasting my invisible affinity fire out on all sides of me and toward the forest in a powerful wave.
The trees fall back, their blistering hatred forced down as if hit by a concussive power. I pull in a deep breath, heat pulsing through me with delicious tension.
When I open my eyes, I find Yvan staring at me with a stunned expression, his eyes edged gold with fire.
I feel instantly exposed, as if I had thrown off my clothes in front of him. Fear slashes through me—fear that he’s sensed the full extent of my grandmother’s magic in my lines.
And that he’ll be repulsed by it.
But his gaze is the opposite of repulsed. He looks...enraptured.
An invisible tendril of his fire power reaches out for me and twines through my fire lines, heightening the blaze. I pull in a shuddering breath, my affinity lines giving a hard flare in response to his fire, an intoxicating warmth sliding through me.
Yvan’s gaze remains fixed on me, discreet and darkly private. As if he’s giving in to something forbidden. Emboldened by his attraction to my power and equally tempted to disregard our carefully drawn boundaries, I coax more fire into my lines and let it flow brazenly out toward him.
The smile he sends me in return is subtle, but the flame in his eyes intensifies.
I look away, wildly flustered, only to find Jarod and Naga watching Yvan and me intently. Naga’s probing gaze snags mine, and I can tell by her shrewd look that she senses my fire. Jarod averts his eyes, as if he’s just intruded on something intimate, and I imagine that, like Naga, he’s picked up on some semblance of what just transpired between Yvan and me.
Flushing with embarrassment, I draw my fire sharply in, struggling to avoid contact with Yvan’s power, and I can sense him doing the same.
“At some point, when you feel ready,” Rafe is saying to Marina, leaning forward and distracting me from my combustible haze, “can you tell us everything that’s happened to you? Everything you remember? We want to get your sister and the other Selkies to safety, but we’ll need your help.”
Marina seems to be actively fighting off her unease over Rafe’s distinctly male smell. She swallows and pulls her gills in. “I will try.”
“We have a pretty good idea of where they might be, but anything you can tell us would be helpful,” Rafe says.
Marina nods. She opens her mouth slightly, as if about to say more, then stops, her gills ruffling. She shakes her head, her expression devolving into one of anguish.
Tierney says something to her, too quietly for me to hear, but it seems to calm Marina. She looks at Tierney gratefully, and then her expression sharpens suddenly, her eyes lighting with recognition. She leans in to sniff Tierney’s neck, inhaling deeply as Tierney stiffens at the unexpected contact.
“You smell good,” Marina marvels, pulling back to meet Tierney’s eyes. “Like water. Like rain.”
Tierney spits out a facetious laugh. “Really, do I?” she says, but the repartee catches in her throat, and her eyes gloss over with sudden tears. She leans forward and hides her face in her hands, her whole body going rigid.
Andras goes to Tierney and lowers himself on one knee before her, his hand coming to rest on her skinny arm. “Tierney,” he prods, his deep voice kind, “look at me.”
Tierney shakes her head stiffly, but Andras quietly waits. Eventually, she looks up at him, her face slick with tears. “You will not be in this glamour forever,” Andras assures her.
“You’re wrong,” Tierney counters, her voice rough. “I’ll never be free of it.”
“Magic that can be set can also be undone,” Trystan puts in. “Always.”
“My mother told me that the Amaz are working on breaking Fae glamours, so the Fae refugees can take their true forms once again,” Andras says to her, his hand still gentle on her arm, and I’m heartened to hear that he and his mother are on speaking terms again.
Tierney emphatically shakes her head. “They combined multiple glamours to make this one. It’s fused to me with Asrai magic as strong as steel.”
“The Amaz combine runic systems,” Andras replies. “It makes their rune-sorcery very powerful. They’ll find a way.”
“I don’t want to be in this cage anymore,” Tierney says to Andras, impassioned. “I could merge with water if I could regain my true form. I could breathe in it. I want to be who I really am...” She stops, her mouth trembling as Andras pulls her into a warm embrace. Marina looks on with an expression of quiet devastation.
Overcome, I chance a look back at Yvan. His eyes have cooled to their usual green, but they’re still fervidly on me. Perhaps sensing my troubled emotions, he sends out a small tendril of his fire and sets it shimmering straight through my lines.
The white wand pulses against my leg, as if in response to the sudden rush of heat, and I reflexively reach down to touch it through my boot. I can sense my earth and fire lines twining toward the wand, intimately joining with it, and suddenly, I feel a rush of wi
nd racing through me, followed by a slim, flowing trace of water.
Earth.
Fire.
Air.
Water.
Four affinities now quickening inside me, spiraling tightly around the wand.
PART TWO
THE REAPING TIMES
Gwynnifer Croft’s eyes are full of excitement as she looks out over the sea of Gardnerian Mages filling Valgard Cathedral’s central plaza. Everyone’s skin shimmers a spellbinding emerald in the darkness of the evening—a mark bestowed upon the Mages by the Ancient One’s own hand as undeniable proof of the Gardnerians’ blessed status.
Gwynn glances down at the glowing, verdant beauty of her own slender hand, an elated rapture filling her. Like most of the other young women here, looping black fastlines swirl over Gwynn’s luminous skin, creating a lovely stained-glass effect on her hands and wrists. The women all wear dark fitted tunics over long skirts, like Gwynn’s own, and their sacred uniformity fills Gwynn with a heady, comforting sense of belonging to something good and powerful and pure.
The wintry night should be freezing, but Gwynn doesn’t even have her cloak on. She doesn’t need it. There are huge blessing stars suspended in the air around the plaza’s periphery, bigger than waterwheels and crafted from golden flame. Gwynn marvels at their incandescent beauty and how they suffuse the entire plaza with their lambent glow and enveloping warmth.
Soldiers stream into the plaza and fill the cathedral’s broad staircase, row by row. The entire Third Division is here, their tunics’ shoulders marked with the division’s Ironflower insignia. Giddy anticipation swells in Gwynn as she strains to get a glimpse of her young fastmate, Geoffrey.
Wonderful, handsome Geoffrey.
She peers over the black-clad shoulder of the young woman in front of her, then breaks into an enamored smile as she catches sight of her tall, slender fastmate. Geoffrey’s close to the top of the sweeping staircase, all of the soldiers around him standing at rigid attention and facing the gigantic crowd.
Gwynn can’t help but smile as Geoffrey meets her gaze. His eyes spark and the edges of his mouth lift as he beams back at her in adoration. Geoffrey quickly schools his face back into military solemnity, but he glances back at Gwynn repeatedly, and her heart flutters each time his eyes meet hers.
There’s a white bird embroidered on the chest of Geoffrey’s black military tunic instead of the traditional silver Erthia orb, marking him as a member of the Styvian sect, the most devout adherents to the teachings laid out in The Book of the Ancients.
The most blessed of all the Mages.
Geoffrey’s tunic is a reflection of the new Gardnerian flag hanging from the cathedral’s front—a design proposed by High Mage Marcus Vogel that replaces the heathen Erthia sphere with the Ancient One’s white bird on black.
A sweeping cheer rises up from the crowd as Marcus Vogel himself steps out onto a large platform at the staircase’s broad pinnacle. Gwynn is swept up in the excitement of her people, a bolt of tingling fervor flashing through her as the crowd goes wild.
Vogel is all lithe grace and power, the sharp, elegant planes of his face shining with an emerald glow that eclipses that of every other Gardnerian, his priestly tunic emblazoned with the Ancient One’s white bird.
Vogel draws up behind the Ironwood podium at the center of the platform and looks out over the crowd as if they belong to him.
Gwynn trembles as she basks in his presence. The most righteous and blessed amongst us.
A line of Level Five Mages stands in an arc behind Vogel, along with several priests and Mage Council members. Four young Mage Council envoys bracket him, two on each side. Their faces fill with pride as Vogel raises both arms in a gesture for silence.
The crowd abruptly quiets, excitement thrumming on the air.
The Council’s elderly Light Mage steps onto the dais. He flicks his wand and three rotating, glowing deep green runes appear in the air, hovering just below Vogel’s head like small planets.
“Mages,” Vogel says in a booming, sonorous voice, amplified by the runes. “Too long have the Evil Ones been allowed to run rampant over Erthia.” His eyes sweep across the rapt crowd, and Gwynn’s heart strains toward him, like the tide yearning for the moon. “Too long have the heathens and Fae-blooded been allowed to procreate like wild beasts on Mage land and in the cursed wilds.”
Vogel grows momentarily silent, and Gwynn feels her whole-self falling into that silence.
Everyone waits, the crowd of thousands hanging suspended as if by a slender thread.
Vogel’s penetrating gaze fills with zealous fire. “They thought they could destroy us. The Kelts. The Urisk. The Fae. They enslaved us. Abused us. Mocked us. They tried to crush us under their heels.” His eyes flick over the crowd like black lightning. “But we have quietly filled ourselves with the will of the Ancient One. And now the Magedom is set to roll over Erthia like a mighty river of power.”
The crowd breaks like a storm, cheering and yelling and crying out as one torrential force.
The beautiful Magedom. Holy and strong and true.
Caught up in the fervor, Gwynn sends up an impassioned cheer, tears sheening her eyes, her smile so wide she feels like joy will burst right out of her to flow over all the other Mages.
The crowd eventually quiets, and Vogel opens The Book of the Ancients that’s set on the podium before him.
The entire crowd listens, rapt, as he begins to read the ancient story of the prophetess Galliana. His voice swells when he describes how she rescued the blessed Magedom from an army of demons, wielding both the White Wand and the sacred, demon-slaying Ironflowers.
Gwynn frowns as she scans the crowd, her gaze lingering on the less strict women of the non-Styvian sect. Their tunics are close-fitting and edged with forbidden Fae colors—purple, gold, saffron, rose. Gwynn looks down at her own chaste, pure black tunic with pride. When Vogel’s impending heathen purge of Gardneria was announced, some of these non-Styvian Mages actually cried and protested the idea of surrendering their Urisk workers and servants. These Mages are objects of suspicion now—unholy staen’en traitors, forming ties with the heathens who seek to smite Mages.
A shudder of relief passes through Gwynn, followed by deep gratitude for her strict Styvian upbringing, her family above reproach and doing business only with other Styvian Gardnerians, avoiding all heathens and their polluting ways.
Geoffrey catches Gwynn’s eye and sends her a playful half smile. Sparks tingle down her spine as she remembers how he wrapped himself around her all night, and love swells in her heart.
We’ll have pure, blessed Mage children, Geoffrey and me. And they’ll grow up in a world free of Evil Ones.
Vogel finishes his reading and grows silent, pulling Gwynn’s attention from her blissful thoughts.
“The time of the Prophecy is upon us, Mages,” he says with searing import. “The heathens have their Icaral demon, but he is still a small baby, filled with depravity and easily slain.”
As Vogel details how the Fifth Division Mages are tracking the babe down, guilt rises and twists inside Gwynn. Guilt she can’t share with anyone.
She knows the mother of the Icaral demon.
Sage Gaffney was once her friend. They met when they were young girls of thirteen, brimming with excitement during their fasting day and caught up in Gwynn’s fanciful, wildly adventurous story about the White Wand.
What was I thinking? Gwynn agonizes. How could I have stolen that wand from Father’s armory? And how could I have given it to Sage?
And now, Sage has been twisted by the Evil Ones. She’s run off with a Kelt and broken her sacred fasting. And she’s given birth to an abomination of a child.
The Icaral of Prophecy.
Pain and deep regret stab through Gwynn. And warning—that horrific danger waits for any Mage who strays from the Ancient
One’s strict path.
“Hold fast to your faith, Mages,” Vogel’s strident voice charges. “Just as one point of the Prophecy rises—” he pauses, eyes blazing “—so shall another.”
There’s a ripple of movement behind him as a young female Mage is brought forward, carefully supported by two young soldiers. Gwynn recognizes the young woman immediately, the crowd murmuring in dismay all around her.
Fallon Bane.
Gwynn’s heart falls like a stone as she takes in the young woman’s weakened state. Fallon Bane was supposed to be the shining point of the Prophecy. A new Black Witch—defender of Gardneria and destroyer of Icaral demons.
But she’s been struck down by the Evil Ones.
Fallon stands now at the front of the platform, propped up by the Mages beside her. With great effort, she pulls her wand from its sheath and thrusts it into the air.
Suddenly, a spinning cloud bursts up from Fallon’s upturned wand, and Gwynn gasps along with the entire crowd, her eyes widening with surprise. The cyclone rapidly gains size and speed, sending an icy wind through the plaza that abruptly extinguishes the flaming blessing stars.
Cold roars in.
Gwynn wraps her arms around her uncloaked body, the sudden chill biting and severe.
Fallon raises her wand higher, and the cyclone gives way to a dazzling spiral of crystalline ice. The crystals break free of the spiral and fountain high into the night sky, long as spears, fanning out over the plaza like a scattering flock of birds.
Gwynn’s teeth begin to chatter, the cold air needling her lungs as she watches the countless ice spears start their descent, whistling as they fall. The whole crowd murmurs in growing confusion, then cries out, arms raised high in a futile attempt to protect themselves from the incoming spears. Gwynn’s heart pounds against her ribs like a hammer, but she grits her teeth and faces the jagged ice shards boldly.
The Ancient One’s will be done. The Ancient One’s will be done.
Gwynn pulls in a hard breath as the spear that’s hurtling toward her stops a hand span from her face, quivering in the air just before her forehead. Before she can exhale, the spear explodes, along with all the others, into a puff of ice that rains down on her skin.
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