“When did Sigvar start gaining followers?” the queen asked.
“A bit more than a winter ago, if memory serves,” the woman said. “He came into town with claims of restoring the old Mecklen farm on the hill. Which I suppose he’s done.”
“And why haven’t you been drawn in by his magic, if it’s powerful enough to destroy the economy of an entire region?” the queen asked.
The jeweler smirked a little. “Men have never interested me.”
A little hum of recognition went through me. I’d never known what attraction was—what love was—until I’d met Mare.
“I’m not without an Affinity,” the woman added. She wrapped her palm around the pinecone-shaped charm necklace she wore, and when she removed it, the pinecone had transformed into an ornate flower.
“An earth user, then,” the queen said. “A lot of you seem to come from this region.”
The jeweler nodded. “The Mecklen farm is on a site that is reputed to have once been an earth temple in the days before your reign, Your Majesty.”
My curiosity was piqued. They’d had temples here? Zumorda hadn’t always been a godless place? Zumordans often made summer pilgrimages to the High Adytum in my homeland, but they did that because the Adytum was an ideal place to cast powerful enchantments, not because they worshipped our gods. I thought they journeyed to Havemont because they’d never had temples of their own. Apparently, that wasn’t true.
“So what you’re saying is that he’s built a shrine on top of what used to be an earth temple, and anyone with an attraction to men is susceptible to his gifts?” I asked.
“Mostly,” the jeweler said. “My resistance certainly isn’t due to my earth magic—plenty of the others up there are earth users. How else do you think they have that garden looking so nice on the edge of winter? But most men are susceptible, too. If you’re attracted to him or you want to be like him, might as well sign away your soul before you look into his eyes.”
“So as one of the few exempt from his powers, why haven’t you tried to stop him?” Karina asked.
“I paid my tithe to the crown,” the jeweler said, pointing to a piece of wood by the door with notches carved into it. “My success or failure does not depend on him, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some young buck come in here and uproot me from the town I’ve lived in all fifty-three winters of my life.”
“Then I suppose we’d best uproot him instead,” the queen said, the predatory expression back on her face.
We bade the jeweler farewell and exited her cabin to climb the hill to the Mecklen farm.
“That was indeed useful information,” the queen said. “Wise choice to inquire there, Lia.”
Ikrie scowled, and the other trainees regarded me suspiciously, making me want to shrink away from everyone. I hadn’t meant to attract attention or gain any special treatment. Karina shared what we’d learned with the other trainees as we ascended the hill. A few of the Swifts flew overhead, swooping from tree to tree ahead of us to scout out the place. They were quieter than ordinary birds, and something about the silence of the woods alongside the trail unnerved me.
As we drew closer to the barn on the hill, men and women paused in their chores to wave to us in friendly greeting. Only when I got close did I notice the similarities among them. Although their eyes were bold shades of brown and green and blue, even in the weak light of the winter sun their pupils were hardly larger than pinpoints. The people seemed to look through us, unseeing, their expressions empty. It made my skin crawl.
We found the man who had to be Sigvar at the farm’s well, hauling buckets of water up to pass to men carrying them into the barn. His rolled-up sleeves revealed muscular forearms marked with inked symbols I didn’t recognize. Our party drew to a halt, the Swifts moving into a protective semicircle around us. When Sigvar turned to face us, Karina’s stern expression morphed into an unfamiliar smile, and then she proceeded toward him at a slower pace. My heart lurched into my throat. Karina was supposed to be the most powerful of all the Nightswifts. If he could effectively disarm our best fighter in a few heartbeats, there was no hope for anyone else. Every instinct screamed at me to run.
Sigvar’s warm brown eyes invited all of us to come closer, his grin genuine and framed by a neatly groomed beard. His fitted shirt, partly unbuttoned at the top like an unwelcome invitation, clung to his strong physique. The other trainees stared, their eyes glazing over. Even the guards we’d brought with us lost focus, their limbs going slack. A few even dropped their weapons. I braced myself, waiting for something, for whatever magic it was, to affect me. But I felt nothing.
“Welcome!” He gestured to the farm. “Have you come to join us here? We accept those from all walks of life to serve the earth god by tending to the land and its animals and people.”
“I’ve come to find out why Tilium was unable to pay its tithe this year,” the queen said. There was a tightness in her jaw that betrayed her use of magic—she was protecting herself from his influence, but it was taking its toll.
“My queen!” Sigvar said. He fell to one knee but kept his gaze fixed on her. “What an honor to have you in our humble town.”
“Your gift does not burn brightly in my Sight,” the queen observed, staring him down. “But I can See pieces of it in everyone here. How exactly did you manage that?”
“An initiation spell, my queen. It binds us all together, allows us to share a consciousness and a community,” Sigvar said.
I looked around, realizing that the other people had closed in around us, all of them staring at us blankly. Above us, the flying Swifts soared to land on the ground, their forms elongating, feathers and talons and beaks dissolving into human skin, clothing, mouths. I recognized one of them—the sandy-haired man who’d slept in my sled. As they took human form, their pupils shrank and their expressions grew slack.
Fear made a small surge of magic flow through my arms, and for once I was grateful for its presence.
Sigvar beckoned with one finger, and I watched with growing horror as Karina stepped toward him. Tension warped the queen’s face, but she was frozen in place by Sigvar’s magic, the blue in her eyes slowly swallowing the dark centers.
My panic rose. Was Sigvar going to kill Karina? The queen?
The queen lifted a hand, holding it palm up, and a flame sparked to life in it. But her hand trembled and the fire guttered and went out. A small gasp escaped her lips. Beneath my feet, a strange rumbling welled up from the ground, as if the earth itself were joining the fight. I frantically looked around, trying to find the earth user responsible, but only Sigvar seemed to be wielding magic.
“I think you should come with me,” Sigvar said. “I can show you all that we’ve built.” He gestured, and Karina moved easily to the side as he took a step toward the queen. All around us, the rumbling intensified, and small pebbles rose off the ground.
“No!” The shout came from in front of me, from one of the queen’s guards. The sandy-haired Swift lunged at Sigvar, clumsily attempting to draw his sword. Sigvar stepped back in surprise, the friendly expression on his face dropping like a discarded mask. But before the Swift could get close, a female Swift swept the sandy-haired Swift’s legs out from under him. He fell to the ground, and the woman drew her sword.
I lunged forward without thinking, slamming myself into the attacking guard’s side. The beginnings of flames sparked in my hands, and I grabbed her arm.
The woman yelped when I touched her, but she shoved me away easily, and I tumbled to the ground. The guard stood over me, sword drawn, her eyes widening, her pupils growing, confusion on her face. She hesitated just long enough for the sandy-haired Swift to scramble off the ground and punch her in the side of her face. She crumpled.
My legs shook, and I rolled backward toward the queen, scraping my palm on a sharp rock and lurching to my feet just in time to see the queen launch a fireball at Sigvar.
His shriek echoed through the hills as flames engulfed one of his a
rms. It was enough to break his hold on the queen’s guards and the other trainees. His people surged toward us, but Karina, alert again, swept them aside with a powerful gust of wind that knocked them flat.
“Take his breath!” the queen shouted.
Ikrie stepped up to join Karina, and they both lifted their arms to jerk the air out of Sigvar’s lungs. He fell to his knees, clutching his neck, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and he hit the ground. As soon as he lost consciousness, his followers collapsed around him.
“For traitors, there is no mercy.” The queen knelt beside him and rested her hand on his chest, which rose and fell with breath once more. She closed her eyes, and her jaw tightened with concentration that slowly turned to euphoria. Smoke rose and his skin blistered, but that wasn’t the only damage she was doing. His body convulsed as though he was being burned from the inside out, and his veins pulsed black everywhere they showed through his skin.
A collective scream went up from his followers like some kind of unholy chorus, a sound that made goose bumps rise all over my body.
When the queen removed her hand from Sigvar’s chest, he lay very still, his breathing so slight it took me several long moments to be sure he was still alive. The queen’s cheeks glowed with a healthy flush that made her look many years younger. In her palm, a silvery flame lingered, and she closed her fingers around it before feeding it into a vial she pulled out of her cloak pocket.
“His form,” the queen said, turning to the dazed Swift behind her. He rushed to follow her order, kneeling beside Sigvar and blowing a breath of air into the man’s face. Sigvar’s body rippled and shifted until instead of a man, a buck lay on the ground before us, his head crowned with arching antlers.
I watched in horror as the queen beckoned another Swift forward. The guard removed a hammer from his belt and struck the antlers until they snapped free of Sigvar’s skull, leaving bloody holes behind. But she didn’t stop there—she pulled a knife from her pocket and held it in her hand until it blazed red hot, then seared the wounds with the blade. Two blackened pits were all that remained when she was done.
Behind her, Evie clutched her stomach like she was about to vomit, while Tristan watched with detached curiosity.
All around us, Sigvar’s people had begun to rise, stumbling toward the queen. They were weak but clear-eyed, their faces full of confusion. Among them was a boy with a familiar face—the same blond boy I’d seen taken by the Sonnenbornes in Duvey after his father was killed. How in the Hells had he ended up here? I got to my feet.
“His hold on them is gone,” the queen said, satisfied.
“What did you do to him?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.
“I burned away his gift.” A savage smile cut through her face.
I shuddered. Having my gift torn away was the most violating thing I could imagine, even if it would have made my life easier in countless ways. A little flicker of anger burned in my breast as I looked at Sigvar and wondered if his fate was what Mare would want for me. She’d said as much.
The queen turned to her guards and gestured to Sigvar’s crumpled manifest form. “Take him prisoner,” she said. Two Swifts moved forward, lifting the buck roughly off the ground and carrying him down the path.
“Will he change back?” I asked Tristan.
“Eventually,” he said, his tone grim. “It involves more than taking someone’s gift to part them from their manifest.”
As the Swifts took names from the cult members and organized everyone to go back down to town, I approached the boy from Duvey.
“Hello,” I said.
He looked up from under his unruly mop of blond hair, confusion still evident in his eyes. “Who are you?”
“I’m Lia,” I said. “I saw you in Duvey. How did you get here?”
The boy looked around as if searching for a familiar face and finding none. “I don’t remember. I want to go home.”
My heart went out to him. I knew how he felt. “Do you remember leaving Duvey?”
He shook his head. “There was a battle, and then I woke up here. Sigvar kept us safe.”
“The Swifts will help you get back to Duvey,” I reassured him, but I was troubled. Somehow he’d gotten from Sonnenborne hands into Sigvar’s, which made no sense at all. We were far northeast of where he’d been taken, and the Sonnenbornes surely would not have ridden this far north just to drop a boy off with a random cult. None of it made any sense, and I had a bad feeling that the only way to untangle it would be to talk to Sigvar himself, who was unconscious and a prisoner of the queen. Even though the trainees had been expected to help with this mission, it would raise a lot of suspicion for me to ask to speak with him. I’d have to tell the queen and hope she’d look into it.
When we made camp that night, I kept to the shadows, hiding between two of the barges to eat my meal of fresh bread, farm cheese, and apple preserves from the last town we’d passed through. Evie and Tristan had both mysteriously vanished; the servants looked at me askance if I got too near; I would rather have walked into a pit of angry vipers than go anywhere near Ikrie, Aela, and Eryk; and I didn’t dare try to approach the queen or her cohort without an invitation. I did my best to blend into the background and listened to the conversations going on around me. Much of it was typical—talk of family and children, crops, past adventures. The off-duty Swifts often broke into song, laughing and teasing one another until someone’s feelings got hurt and that person fled the gathering in bird form.
As I finished up the last of my meal, someone approached—the sandy-haired Swift from my sled. His face was covered in scrapes, and his left cheek bore a large bruise, made all the more spectacular in the jumping shadows cast by the nearest campfire.
“Hey,” he said, “you’re Lia, right?”
“Yes,” I said, remembering just in time not to curtsy.
He smiled and stuck out his hand. I took it, shaking it cautiously. “My name is Aster. And I want to thank you. I think you saved my life today.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I just did what made sense.”
“You have good instincts. With a little training, you could put up a formidable defense.”
I suppressed a laugh, surprised that I even felt like laughing at all. “That’s kind of you to say.” And it was funny, too, given that the top of my head put me barely at eye level with his chest. Physical skills hadn’t been part of my education as a princess.
“I mean it.” He grinned again. “If you ever want a lesson, all you have to do is ask. Everyone should know how to throw a punch.”
I was about to tell him no, but then I thought better of it. There was no one here to defend me now, and my magic was notoriously unreliable. It couldn’t hurt to learn.
“Can you show me now?” I asked.
“Of course!” He seemed delighted and, a few minutes later, had me making a proper fist with my thumb on the outside.
“Like this?” I said, holding up my hand for inspection.
“Yes, but keep your hand aligned with your wrist.” He corrected the angle between my hand and wrist. “Now, hold up your fists in front of your face. When you punch, do it from your shoulder.”
I swung wildly, and he laughed.
“Here, like this.” He showed me in slow motion how to rotate my arm into a straight line as I punched, making impact with my first two knuckles.
“Where do I punch?” I asked.
“Well, that depends on where you can reach, short stuff.”
“Hey!” I laughed.
“The face is a bad idea—you’re likely to hurt your hand. Try for the neck or the sternum to knock the wind out of someone. And remember, the point is to hurt someone enough to get away. The longer you engage in a fight, the better your chances are of losing.”
He ran me through the punches a few more times, showing me how to follow through.
“I’d best get back to the others,” he said, once he was confident that I had the basics down.
&nbs
p; “Thanks,” I said, feeling a little surge of gratitude.
He nodded and headed off, joining a few other Swifts at the edge of the campfire. For the first time since I’d left Mare behind, a little bit of hope glimmered on the horizon. At least someone besides Karina and the queen had shown me some kindness.
And now I knew how to punch someone in the throat.
THIRTEEN
Amaranthine
MUFFLED SHOUTS FROM OUTSIDE WOKE ME TO A ROOM that was too cold without Denna pressed against me. My guilt grew heavier as I searched for her. She wasn’t in the chaise or the washroom, and I assumed she’d gotten up early, perhaps to run errands, or perhaps to avoid me. I shouldn’t have fought with her about her magic or what to do. It was her choice, and her choice alone, and I knew that. My fear didn’t give me the right to dictate what she did with her life.
I threw on my cloak over my nightclothes and peered out the window. The courtyard bustled with activity as the queen’s caravan departed for Corovja. A great barge was the first out of the gate. It hovered above the ground, eerily steady in spite of the cold breeze that sent leaves swirling across the flagstones. Four smaller floating sleds filed out behind it.
I sat down in front of the mirror with a sigh, but as I lifted a brush to my hair, I saw a letter sitting on the vanity. Denna’s unmistakably tidy penmanship decorated the front. My breath caught as I unfolded it and began to read.
“No,” I whispered, crumpling it in my hand.
I dropped the letter on the floor and bolted from the room. It felt as though my heart was being ripped out of my chest. I flew down the stairs out into the courtyard, shoving my way through the remnants of the crowds that had gathered to see off the queen’s caravan. Angry curses followed me, but I didn’t care. By the time I got a clear line of sight to the barges, the last one had already left the courtyard.
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