I WOKE WITH DENNA pressed against me, her back warm along my chest, my arm still draped across her ribs. The fire had burned itself to nothing and above us the stars had shifted in their slow wheel.
Lying still, I tried to figure out what had woken me. The pond was quiet, its surface smooth beneath the fading moon. A thin stream fed it from the east, barely more than a trickle over stones. Beyond that, silence. The deep kind that presses against your ears and makes you imagine what kind of monster is lurking beneath.
I almost let sleep pull me back. Denna’s breathing was slow against my arm, and for a moment I let the warmth of her hold me where I was. My thoughts drifted somewhere half-formed and pleasant. What might life look like when this was all over? Perhaps we would journey to Ralien in the Caeld, or to distant Junpui at the edge of the Small Kingdoms. I pictured us in a place where no one knew my name, somewhere without Chandrian or Amyr casting shadows over our days.
Then I heard it. Faint, carried across the water. The clink of metal on metal. I eased myself up on one elbow, careful not to wake Denna, and listened harder. At first there was only the stream and the soft wind through the grass. Then I caught the pattern beneath it. Hoofbeats. Dozens of them. No, more. Coming fast from the north.
“Denna.” I touched her shoulder. “Denna, wake up.”
She groaned softly, turning toward me. But I didn’t have time to be gentle. “Denna! Get up! Someone’s coming.”
Her eyes shot open, confusion sharpening into alarm. “What?”
“No time,” I said as I sprang to my feet. “We need to move.”
We threw things into the nearest packs, leaving behind anything that might slow us. I left my pot by the dead fire and shoved the bag of dried leaves into my saddlebag and cinched the straps, but my fingers were clumsy with it, fumbling at buckles that should have taken seconds. Denna’s horse was already pawing at the earth, and within moments we were in the saddle and riding hard into the night.
Hoofbeats pounded behind us, growing louder by the stride. My own mount had seen better days in its youth, and now it labored to keep pace while Denna’s mare fought the reins, wild-eyed.
I gripped the reins tighter and felt my hands refuse to obey, the tremor now running from my fingers up through my wrists. Riding made it worse. Every jolt of the horse’s stride sent a fresh jag through my arms, and my concentration split between keeping my seat and keeping my grip and holding my mind together.
Denna pulled ahead without meaning to. “This way!” she called, cutting left through a stand of birch where the ground rose and the roots made a natural barrier. She read the terrain the way I read music, by instinct, finding the pattern before she could name it.
I followed, falling farther behind, clinging to the saddle with my knees as much as my hands. The reins slipped through my fingers and I caught them against the pommel, pressing them flat with my palm because my grip couldn’t hold them.
“Are they just patrols?” I called out over pounding hooves, my mind too fogged to think it through.
“No,” she called back. “They’re tracking us too closely.”
We angled off course, then tried a dry streambed, then doubled back through a gap in a stone wall. But they kept coming. Their hoofbeats had found a rhythm behind us, matching our every change like a melody that refuses to resolve. Moments later, the first shouts reached us, jeers carried on the wind. I looked back. Pale faces flickered through the trees, and torchlight glinted off drawn swords.
“Faster!” I urged, though I knew it was futile. My horse was flagging, and the ground had grown treacherous.
We burst out of the trees into open air. A lake lay before us, still and enormous, its surface holding the moon like a coin at the bottom of a well. Our horses slowed on their own, hooves splashing in the shallows as they balked at the water’s edge.
Denna reined in her mare and turned in her saddle, measuring the distance behind us and the water ahead and finding no answer in either.
I saw that she had drawn a thin steel blade. Her hands trembled, her eyes wide. Something in my chest went tight. “Denna. When I say go, swim for the shore and don’t stop. Head south. Don’t look back.”
She looked at my hands on the reins. At the water. Back at me. “And you?”
I didn’t answer.
“I’m not leaving you,” she said.
I held her eyes. There was nothing I could say that she hadn’t already worked out for herself.
The riders emerged along the lakeshore, their silhouettes solidifying into men on horseback. At least a dozen of them fanned out along the bank. At their center was a man in leather armor, his thick black beard woven into braids. He sat his horse the way a man sits when violence is a profession and not a passion. His weight was settled low, his hand easy on the pommel, and he watched us the way I’d seen Dagon watch a room.
Denna looked at me one more time, regret etched into every line, before turning her mare toward the far shore. Three riders peeled away and spurred their horses after her.
The bearded man raised a torch and lifted it high. “Come out o’ the water and I promise to make it quick.” He paused, then grinned. “Cross me, and I’ll give my men more than one turn with your lady.”
I slid from my saddle in surrender, dropping into the shallows. The water came up to my shins, cold against my boots. My hands were shaking freely now. I let them, the way a musician lets silence into a song. Every ounce of concentration I’d spent keeping them still on those reins was flooding back to me, and with it came something deeper. My sleeping mind, rising through the cracks the way water rises through broken stone.
The Name of the water was everywhere around me. It had been there all along. I had slept beside it, listened to it feed the pond in the dark, felt it on my skin when I washed my face at the stream. I had been learning it all night without knowing.
I spoke its Name.
The lake answered. The sound of it was enormous, a swell surging outward, rising taller than a man before crashing down upon them. Their horses screamed and tried to flee. The wave took them, dragging riders and mounts down into its depths.
I fought and cursed my way back into the saddle. It took two tries. The animal was spent, foaming at the bit, but it obeyed when I dug my heels in, clinging to the horse’s mane with one hand and letting the animal do the work, because my hands were no good for reins anymore.
Around the far side of the lake, my horse labored beneath me, chest heaving and hooves pounding against the hard earth. It ran harder than it should have, as if my fear had poured down through its veins. Ahead of me were the three riders and Denna. When I finally caught up, they had already cornered her near a stand of boulders. Her mare was rearing and striking as the men tried to close in.
Then the Name of the wind was in my mouth.
The blast hit them all, flinging them apart. The men tumbled from their saddles. The horses shrieked and scattered. Denna hit the ground and rolled, and I saw her crawl behind the nearest boulder. Her mare tried to rise, stumbled, and went down on one foreleg with a sound I will not soon forget.
By the time I reached them, the three men were picking themselves up from the dirt. Dazed. Angry. But alive.
I half-fell from the saddle and hit the ground with both feet, my knees nearly buckling. My hand found Saicere’s hilt and the sword slid free of its scabbard. I wrapped both hands around the grip because one was not enough and I could feel the blade shivering.
The first man was still finding his feet. He raised his sword, but the motion was loose and unsteady. I swung with both arms, all my weight behind it, an arc that had more desperation than technique. Saicere bit into his neck and didn’t stop, even as he crumpled to the ground.
The second rushed at me with a furious growl, a torch blazing in one hand and a notched sword in the other. I caught his first strike on Saicere’s edge and the impact jarred up through both arms and into my teeth. I tried to riposte and my hands betrayed me. My blade dipped wide and his sword came down hard on Saicere’s flat and the shock jolted through my wrists and my fingers opened and the blade was gone, ringing against the stones.
For a single breath, my hand held nothing but empty air. He pressed in, raising his sword for the killing stroke.
A word rose inside me, unbidden. Sharp on my tongue, it leapt from my lips before I even realized.
“Fire.”
The torchbearer burst into flames. Tongues of fire melted his eyes and poured from his mouth. He let out a high, choked scream and collapsed into a blazing heap before he struck the ground.
The third man froze. His sword hung limp in his broken arm and his lips moved in a frantic prayer. “Merciful Tehlu, save me,” he whimpered.
“I am not Tehlu,” I said.
The words had barely left my lips when I felt the Name of the wind gather in my chest and leave me like a long-held breath. The man staggered back, clawing at his throat. Then he fell. The sound he made when he hit the ground was final.
I found her huddled at the base of the boulder, her back pressed hard against the stone. Her face had gone the color of ash, streaked with dirt. Her lips trembled. Her eyes were fixed on me.
Somewhere her mare whinnied softly in pain.
“Denna!” I called, dropping to my knees beside her. I reached out, but she flinched away as if my touch would burn her.
I tried again. “Denna,” I whispered, reaching toward her once more. Her small knife slipped from her fingers and fell to the dirt with a soft clink. She shuddered, then she broke. Tears carved new streaks down her cheeks as her body buckled with sobs.
I caught her before she hit the ground, pulling her into my arms. “It’s over,” I whispered. “You’re safe now.” And I held her until our shaking stopped.
For all we’d endured, our wounds were merciful ones. Denna had hit the ground hard when the wind struck. She brushed it off, but the streak of dried blood in her hair said otherwise.
I carried no visible scars, only the sort you carry home. My hands shook faintly at my sides, their trembling unbidden.
The mare hadn’t been so lucky. Her leg had twisted beneath her when she fell, and there were no kind roads left for her to walk. I ended it swiftly, murmuring soft nonsense as if I could quiet the breaking of her breath. That was the worst part, the way it lingered even after she was gone. Afterward, I pulled the Lackless box and what I could carry from the saddlebags. The rest I left where it lay.
Denna said little. She moved to keep a cautious distance between us, and I did not close it.
I didn’t blame her. I needed distance from myself too. So, to distract myself, I turned to a quieter kind of magic. From the bottle I’d scavenged, I poured a ribbon of water into my hands and reached out with a word. The Water answered, cold and clean, then curled into a ring that spun between my fingers. It joined the others on my hand. Wind. Stone. Iron. Each one a Name I’d earned the hard way. The rest I’d earned in other ways.
“That’s a pretty thing you’ve made there,” Denna said as the water stilled, her voice catching me between surprise and shame. She’d been watching me longer than I realized. Her words were careful, measured, the way you speak to someone when you haven’t decided how close you want to stand.
“Comes in handy,” I said lightly, and offered her the water bottle.
She hesitated, then pulled away. “No, thank you,” she said simply, her eyes settling on the horizon instead.
At dawn, we set out once more. Denna rode my horse, looking small in the saddle with her arms wrapped around herself like armor, the Lackless box bundled in the cloth beside her. I walked alongside, leading the horse by the reins. The road was slick with mud and pocked with ruts.
For a while, we walked in silence. The only sounds were the creak of the saddle and the wet squelch of mud beneath my boots.
“How do you think they found us?” Denna asked at last.
I turned the thought over. “Campfire,” I answered, too quickly for it to sound honest. “Most likely they saw our fire and thought we’d be easy pickings. Bandits move fast when desperation bites.”
She kept her eyes on the road ahead and said nothing. Neither of us believed it was quite that simple.
I wondered if I should tell her what I already suspected. The bandits had moved too cleanly, with too sharp a purpose. Someone had set them on us. Someone who knew exactly what they wanted. But I swallowed the words.
The crags forced us to slow to a crawl. Jagged stones bit at my boots, and Denna’s cloak caught in the wind. The sun gave light but no warmth, and my feet ached with every step on the uneven ground. At last we reached an old pass high in the hills. From the narrow path, we could see far into the valley below.
I almost missed it at first. A flicker of movement in the canyon, too straight to be natural. I stopped and scanned the hollow below. Then I saw it. Rows of tents stood in neat formation, campfires burning low, and men moving among them in organized purpose.
I dropped into a crouch, motioning to Denna to kneel beside me. “There must be at least five hundred soldiers down there,” I murmured. The men moved in clusters, and the number kept growing.
“Do you recognize the uniforms?” she asked softly.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. But something else drew my attention. A pale banner snapped in the wind above a large white pavilion at the center of the camp. I froze. It was trimmed in silver and emblazoned with a coiled serpent. “Jakis,” I said. “That many troops this close to Renere means he must be working with Fascino.” I stood abruptly. “We’ve lost too much time already. We need to get back to Renere.”
Denna nodded, but her gaze remained fixed on the camp below, her eyes sharp with thought. The wind stirred, snapping the banner once more. The serpent on it seemed to coil even tighter.
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