She Who Rides the Storm (The Gods-Touched Duology)

Anwei’s stomach roiled at the nothing smell welling around her friend like a bloody wound. The bond between them flamed to life in her head now that there weren’t shapeshifted walls between them, but it was stuck through with needles and pins, as if there were something else inside him violently trying to sever their connection.

“What is wrong with him?” Lia shouted as Knox barreled toward them. “Knox, it’s me. What in Calsta’s name…”

Knox’s eyes seemed black in the mirrorlight, the sword swinging in a perfect arc toward Anwei’s throat. The world slowed around Anwei, her gloved hand full of calistet.

Lia burst into Anwei’s line of vision, deflecting the sword with her knife. Everything sped back up, only faster. Lia spun before her, dodging another swipe from Knox’s sword, to lash with the knife’s heavy hilt. He slid away like water, his eyes burning coals, ever on Anwei.

“Climb up to the burial chamber! It’s open. Run!” Lia roared.

“Get the sword away from him. It’s the sword doing this!” Only it wasn’t the sword. It was the thing Anwei could feel in their bond, grown strong. The sword only made it stronger.

His sister, the ghost.

Anwei clutched the calistet, reaching out to Knox inside her head. She could feel him underneath this alien mask, a panicked warmth trapped inside a cage made of sharp thorns and a void.

Knox slammed the sword down toward Lia’s shoulder, the Devoted barely able to turn him back with her little knife, and yet she stood firm between Anwei and Knox. Every strike brought Knox closer to Anwei, his eyes nailed to her as he fought. Anwei took a step back, then another, then she was climbing, the sound of that first cry inside her head echoing over and over.

Anwei! he’d screamed. She hadn’t gone quickly enough, and whatever it was inside him had taken over.

Anwei pulled herself up over the ledge where the burial chamber door had broken in, a plume of dust billowing from inside. There was a raised dais, a coffin, bones, and a boy on the ground, shaking, shaking, shaking.…

“Anwei!” Lia screamed, like an echo to Knox’s voice in Anwei’s head.

Scrabbling on the rock below her set Anwei’s feet running, Knox’s monstrous presence in her head flared with victory and hunger. Anwei tore open the calistet packet and spun around, the cloud of powder erupting from her fist before she could even think, jetting toward the opening just as Knox burst through it.

No! She didn’t want to kill Knox. She didn’t want him to kill her, either.

The flaring cinnamon red of calistet was in the air, Anwei feeling every speck of it as Knox ran toward her with his sword raised. She could feel the shape of the poison cloud in her mind, each granule in the air.

Stop. She screamed it inside her head, her mind wrapping around each particle. And… they did.

Knox charged toward her, but something inside him changed the moment his foot crossed the broken door. He stumbled, falling to his knees, one hand grasping at his chest. The sword clattered to the ground next to him, shining in the dead lantern light.

Lia charged in after him, her eyes wild and the knife clutched in her hand like an extra limb. She skidded around Knox and almost fell into the cloud of poison Anwei was holding in place.

“Back! Get back, Lia,” Anwei cried, not sure if she was warning Lia away from Knox or the calistet.

Knox gasped, and then again, as if he couldn’t get any air. For a moment Anwei worried she hadn’t stopped all of the calistet, but the bond between them seemed to stretch thin, the coldness inside him growing thick. All Anwei could smell was the burning fire of calistet warring with the wave of nothing that gushed from Knox.

“Mateo!” Lia kicked the sword away from Knox and ran to the dais behind Anwei, where the boy lay shaking by the coffin. “Calsta above, this is bad. Where is your sky-cursed father, Mateo?”

Anwei couldn’t rip her eyes from the haze of red in the air and Knox beyond it. A tear burned down her cheek as she tried to hold the cloud in place, the little bits twitching here and there. The calistet wanted to move. It wanted to be breathed. She was locked in place just as it was, unable to shift an inch without it breaking free. “Knox,” she whispered. “Move out of the way.”

Knox’s eyes were shut, one hand reaching for the sword, the other at his throat as he tried to suck down air through his blocked airway. The nothing around him seemed to deepen and bleed off him in patches, moving like a wave to attach to the dais behind Anwei, then to come back again.

Not the dais. The boy. The collapsed boy. He and Knox were swapping energy and nothingness back and forth, and somehow it was killing them both.

Anwei tried to look at the boy, the shape of him familiar. All of a sudden she could smell the something she’d detected up in the tomb, the scent that had confused her, made her stop and wonder how she knew it. Under the weight of all the nothing, she finally realized what it was, a smell she hadn’t detected since her days as a girl back in Beilda. A memory flashed across her mind of a boy’s fingers tying one of her braids into knots.…

The boy jerked up from the ground. His hair was cut short like a servant’s, but his clothes stopped any possible misconception about where he fit into society. The colors of him, the shape of his face, even his long fingers, were exactly as Anwei remembered.

When he opened his eyes, something inside Anwei broke.

It was impossible. She’d seen those long, thin fingers lopped off like extra bits of hair, lying in pools of blood under his bed. So much blood that no one could have survived.

A new void opened up inside Anwei, bloodier, deeper than the scars her parents had left on her skin, more terrible than the nothing so thick in the air around her. He didn’t smell like nothing.

He smelled like home.

Like the boy she’d been searching for since she was twelve.

Like someone who was alive and shouldn’t have been.

Like someone she’d spent her life trying to avenge, only he wasn’t dead.

Like someone stealing energy first from Lia. Now from Knox.

Like a shapeshifter.

The calistet muscled through the air. Anwei tore her eyes away from Arun, Knox kneeling only a few inches from the cloud. Tears streamed down his cheeks—

And a dark shape appeared behind Knox in the stone opening, blocking silvered mirrorlight that was creeping in from above. The shadow cast long and wide, much too large for the man standing in the doorway.

“Lia?” the snake-tooth man said. Anwei’s skin trilled with memories of blood soaking into the hem of her dress. He’d laughed as he’d escaped through the window, leaving nothing but blood in her brother’s room.

Anwei couldn’t move, couldn’t even breathe, or the calistet would envelop Knox.

“What have you done to Mateo?” The snake-tooth man’s eyes flicked over Anwei and the cloud of calistet, over Knox, and then to the pockmarked sword. He hardly blinked, scooping up the sword and walking past Knox and Anwei as if they didn’t matter to where Arun lay.

Mateo. That’s what he’d called her brother. Lia had called him that too.

The snake-tooth man’s face was different from the one in her memories. Pleasant. Bearded. It was the aukincer Anwei had met in the apothecary, not a single whiff of nothing to him. How had his voice sounded that day? Anwei couldn’t remember.

Her eyes crumpled shut even as she concentrated on the calistet, willing it to drop to the floor. A cry escaped her lips when the granules twisted in the air instead, wafting toward Knox’s face. Knox’s mouth contorted, both hands wrapped around his throat. Tears streamed down his cheeks in pained rivulets. A bright spark shone in her head, deep inside the frozen pit their bond had become, as if he were trying to fight his way out of the darkness.

“You have to help him. Is it another attack? I don’t think he’s breathing.” Lia was saying it from behind her. “And Knox. He’s my friend, and something’s happening to him, too. Is it the tomb? Something in the air? Tual—wait, where are you going?”

The man reappeared in Anwei’s line of sight, Knox’s pockmarked sword clutched in his fists. “I know this sword.” He held it up toward Anwei. “And you.” He smiled. “Who did you kill to hide your aura, little Beildan?”

Anwei’s stomach clenched. I didn’t kill anyone to hide my aura. Knox and I hid each other. Our bond hid us. Did that mean whatever it was that hid shapeshifters required killing instead of… whatever it was between her and Knox?

Love?

Anwei’s mouth was full of blood. Her mind full of calistet. And the air full of a seven-year-old murder she had meant to avenge and found contorted into a new shape instead.

Her brother. Her twin. He’d been alive all these years she’d been searching for his murderer. Not only alive, but he’d become a shapeshifter.

Had he looked for her? With all of a shapeshifter’s power, it seemed as if it wouldn’t have been hard to find his sister, starving, hiding, stealing, and poisoning to fix the wrong that had been done.

The distilled gamtooth serum was spent on the floor, shards of glass in the dig director’s arm. No weapon. No herbs. No breath to breathe. Anwei had nothing. “Help me, Lia,” she croaked.

Lia’s voice: “You think Anwei killed someone to hide…? Because of the relief outside?” Her voice slowed. “Knox’s aura was hidden. And shapeshifters kill someone as part of their oath. They steal another person’s aura. Does that mean the two auras cancel each other out?”

“Knox and I didn’t kill anyone,” Anwei croaked. “We worked together and it hid both of us.”

“Keep Mateo still, Lia.” The shapeshifter was walking toward Knox now.

“He’s the one who’s been doing all of this, Lia.” The words choked out of Anwei’s mouth. “He sucked your mother’s life away. She’s dead.” The calistet swirled and burned. Glossy, poisonous, deadly red. Anwei’s brain began to crumble at the edges, exploding in little spurts at the effort of holding it away from Knox. “He’s a—” A shapeshifter. He and Arun both were.

Before the word came out, the snake-tooth man bolted forward and kicked Knox over. Knox fell backward, his head hitting the floor.

Then the man raised the pockmarked sword and stabbed Knox through the stomach.

Agony exploded through their bond, and a wordless scream filled Anwei’s head. But it wasn’t Knox’s scream: this one belonged to something else. The ghost, prickly and rotted and foul. Dead already and somehow dying again.

Anwei’s mind blanked with the pain, and suddenly the calistet cloud was flying at the snake-tooth man where he stood over Knox. The shapeshifter stumbled to the side, eyes on the poison spiraling toward his face. But then, in a flash, it was gone. Reduced to ashes as a jolt of unnatural energy thrummed through the air, telling the poison to unmake itself.

A hiss of nothing oozed out of Anwei, coming from a tiny void newly opened inside her. A piece of her stolen to destroy the calistet, smelling like death in the air.

Knox’s whole body curled around the hard metal stabbing him through. One moment he’d been standing in the yard with Gulya, and now—

And now—

His whole mind was frozen with Willow’s unholy scream. There was a cave, and hard rock underneath him, and a sword, that horrible sword, and Anwei kneeling on the ground, and Calsta’s voice raging like a bonfire, trying to melt the winter of his sister’s ghost. All of it was fading at the edges. Narrowing. Darkening.

NOW, Knox! Reach for her now!

His eyes caught on Anwei. The spark of her in his mind blazed. Like the last night they’d been in this tomb, the two of them stronger together.

He reached.

Anwei surged to her feet, her hands clawing toward the snake-tooth man. He’d taken her brother. Her parents. Her village. Her home.

Now Knox? She tried to charge him, but her feet stumbled, her energy sapped.

“So strong. I should have taken both of you.” The snake-tooth man’s grin was casual, his hands still holding the bloody sword jammed in Knox’s stomach. “I did try, but I couldn’t make your mind stick.”

Anwei couldn’t speak, remembering watching her mother’s blank face, her mind stuck on something that wasn’t reality. He’d made everyone else’s minds stick.

“I’m surprised you survived. You were so much more timid than he was back then.” He smiled, a full-mouthed, genial sort of happiness gushing out from him even as Knox twitched at his feet. “You can come now, if you want. Now that your brother is fixed, we’ll be able to disappear.”

“Fixed?” Anwei’s hands clenched, Knox limp at her feet.

“Those purging rituals that almost killed you and your brother came from somewhere. I’m cutting away the bad magic.”

“Tual!” Lia’s scream filled the chamber. “What are you doing? Is that why I can’t see your auras? Because… you killed someone to become…” Lia ran forward, knife in her hand. “How could he be a shapeshifter too? Mateo’s dying. He said you told him the two of us together would stabilize him. Like Patenga and his partner.”

“I’m afraid that when I changed Mateo, I had less information than I do now. He was very badly injured, and the only thing that would have kept him alive was… this.”

Badly injured. Anwei couldn’t stop seeing the blood. Arun’s scattered fingers.

“But it didn’t work the way it was supposed to.” Tual eyed the pockmarked sword where it stuck up from Knox’s stomach. “When I turned myself, the weapon I used disintegrated. When I changed Mateo, the same thing happened, or so I thought. And yet, here it is. All these years I wondered if blending her with Mateo hadn’t worked because she had survived.” He looked down at the sword. “Not exactly the case. It seems as if her soul survived—and latched on to this sword.”

“Tual, the caprenum, all of this was to—”

“Save Mateo. I’m afraid I don’t know much about caprenum other than the fact that it can change someone from gods-touched to shapeshifter. There’s so much to learn.”

Anwei couldn’t follow the conversation. Who did you kill to hide your aura? The snake-tooth man didn’t know about bonds. Only about killing.

“I’d guess this boy found the girl’s body soon after she died, and the sword… came back somehow because she latched on to it. And that linked him to my Mateo. She’s been draining both of them ever since. Mateo was a shapeshifter with no way to access power because she took it all. And this boy… I guess he was a Devoted who managed to take enough power from Calsta to stay alive.”

Knox wanted to kill me every time he picked up the sword. Because the thing inside him needed more power? Because she knew that if he killed me, it would… complete her, maybe? A Basist and a Devoted. One taking the life of the other.

The snake-tooth man looked to Lia behind Anwei. “Luckily, the sword will kill… Knox, you said? He was dead the moment he picked up the sword, so this is a mercy, Lia. It’ll end this parasite that’s been latched on to him for so many years, and Mateo will finally be complete.”

“You said you needed me.” Lia was breathless, her chest heaving as she held up the knife. “You said he had to love me. Just like Patenga loved the man he sacrificed. And you… you must have loved the person you killed.”

“This drama is unnecessary, Lia.” The shapeshifter smiled so very kindly, as if it were not yet another shape he wore. “Help Mateo up, and let’s go.”

“Help him? Tual, get away from…” Lia’s voice was like an arrow behind Anwei. Far away, farther than the sky, farther even than the moons up above, flying slowly, oh so slowly…

Knox’s hands quivered, jerking up to touch the sword where it protruded from his stomach. The spark in Anwei’s head flickered. Dimmed.

Screaming filled the cave, and she didn’t know where it was coming from: Lia, or Arun, or maybe it was from her own mouth. Knox’s head twitched in Anwei’s direction, one hand reaching toward her.

The snake-tooth man pulled the sword out in one violent jerk, then pointed it at Anwei, though the blade seemed to be collapsing, dripping in steaming rivulets to the ground as the thing inside Knox bled away. Knox looked at her, his eyes suddenly fierce and hot and wholly his own.

Anwei took one step toward the shapeshifter. Then she was running, Knox a surge of power inside her to replace the energy the snake-tooth man had stolen from her. The world around Anwei focused as if she were seeing twice, with Knox’s Devoted eyes alongside her own. Lia was a flare of gold behind her, knife out and running toward the snake-tooth man. Arun still lay struggling to breathe, he and the shapeshifter both haloed in a white that seemed a little too perfectly plain. Anwei could see the rock all around them, bonded together at angles that screamed in the pain of magic that shouldn’t have existed. And she could feel life in the dirt above, so many seeds and plants and trees. Just like the day of the storm, the day that had left her whole village dead and her half-drowned at sea.

Instead of wrapping her hands around the snake-tooth man’s neck, Anwei slid to her knees at Knox’s side. His breaths were coming in gurgling spurts that spoke of blood and ruptured humors and ends. The air around Anwei came alive. She could smell every bit of Knox, the spots where his bones were dry and broken, the wet russet smell of blood, the slashes in his skin, his humors as they mixed. Only it was more than that, more than she’d ever seen before because Knox’s power was inside her too.

The energy pulsing from her sent shock waves out, power reaching into the soil for miles, as if Anwei were some kind of goddess, trying to draw life from the sky, the stars, the sun itself, to put it back inside her friend.

“I can fix this.” Anwei hissed it at Knox, even though she knew she couldn’t. Bodies didn’t grow back together any more than plants would if you chopped them off at the stem. But what about the plants that had pulled the bricks apart in the wall at the governor’s house? The poison she’d drawn out of Knox that night that should have killed him. The explosive powder she’d created that should have been impossible, the tang of calistet holding still in the air. I am not doing this for myself. Nameless god, whoever you are, Calsta, may your sky throne forever be covered in wet paint, this boy believes in you. If you exist, then DO SOMETHING.

Her hands on Knox’s ribs were on fire, her whole mind was on fire, full of Knox’s power, her power, their power, and voices and vines and plants, and there was too much, too much.

But he had to grow. She wasn’t letting him leave her, not like this. Knox had to stay. He had to grow back together.

Lia flailed back as the ground between her and Tual began to buck and roil. Over on the dais, Mateo’s eyes burst open, air wheezing from his lungs. “Lia,” he gasped. “Lia help me, I can’t breathe.”

But Tual was holding a bloody sword, and chunks of rock were raining down from the ceiling, and roots were bursting through the ground and growing along the walls like snakes. Tual dropped the sword and ran to his son, gathering Mateo up from the ground. “Help me, Lia. I know this looks terrible to you, but you don’t understand all of it. Mateo needs to get out of here now, or he’ll die. We need you, Lia. If you care for my son at all—”

“You killed my friend. My brother.” Lia couldn’t even hear herself speak over the rumble of rock. The knife in her hand felt slick, but for the first time in her life, she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with it. “You… she said you killed my mother.”

“You’re going to believe a Basist? A shapeshifter who enthralled your friend? He was dead long before he walked into this tomb.” Tual hoisted Mateo up off the ground, dragging him toward the coffin. “Help me carry Patenga’s sword.…”

Lia stumbled up the steps onto the dais and peered into the coffin. There, between the slumped skeleton’s ribs, was the sword this shapeshifter had fallen on. He’d dealt his own killing blow. With a sword made of caprenum.

“Take the sword, Lia.” Tual’s voice hummed. He was already trudging down the stairs. “And come. Quickly!”

Lia stared at the sword. The ceiling groaned, the stone cracking in explosive bursts. A healing substance that would save Mateo. A bond between a Devoted and a Basist. Who did you kill to hide your aura, little Beildan?

And the depiction on the wall of Patenga shoving a sword through the man who meant the most to him in the world.

Shapeshifters weren’t Basists. There was a bond between Basists and Devoted formed through love. And if one of them destroyed the person they loved to gain their power—that was the abominable sacrifice that created a shapeshifter. That was what distorted them into something no longer human.

Lia picked up the sword and swung it to touch Tual’s throat, pointing the knife in her other hand at his face. Her arm shook as she tried to hold it up, her whole body crying as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. “This sword? The one you want Mateo to murder me with, Tual?”

Tual backed away, holding Mateo close.

“Lia!” Mateo gasped, his eyes fluttering shut.

“They say shapeshifters can do more than any Devoted or Basists on their own, and they steal people’s souls to do it. Like… like Mateo did when he opened the wall.” Lia’s stomach dropped, her voice curdling. “Using energy he stole from me. That’s why I can hardly lift this sword.”

It wavered in front of her, fragments of rock raining down from the ceiling all around her. Anwei was by Knox with her hands clenched, a power wafting off her like waves crashing into the shore.

“Mateo isn’t going to be better because you killed off the thing draining him. The first sacrifice didn’t take, so you need a replacement. You need me.” She whispered it, but Tual could still hear her. She could see it in his eyes, the way they bulged when the tip of her sword touched his Adam’s apple. “Or he’ll die?”

Tual’s eyes went hard, the pupils seeming to thin into slits. “All three of us are going to die if you don’t let me take Mateo out through the tunnel, Lia. Is that what you want?”

“Does he know?” she asked. “Does he know what you are? What he is?”

“Who are you to judge, Lia?” The words slicked out of Tual’s mouth like a snake’s long tongue and his face seeming to elongate, his nostrils flaring. “How many innocent Basists have you killed in the name of a goddess who doesn’t even speak to you?”

Mateo lay limp, his eyelids fluttering as if he were trying to stay awake.

“Help us, Lia. There is much I can explain, and much you don’t understand—” Tual dove to the side, a boulder-sized chunk of the ceiling crashing down where he’d stood. It shattered, tiny pieces zipping through air, peppering Lia’s arms and legs with burning lines of pain. She stumbled back, raising her arms to shield her face.

The sword yanked from her hand, and suddenly Tual was standing over her, Mateo still in his arms. “We aren’t the villains history wrote for us. Come with us, Lia. Come now!”

Lia’s body shook, the knife still clasped in her hand.

“Remember my promise when we discussed what would happen if you tried to go against me?”

Tual’s nostrils folded back against his cheeks, his nose flattening, jaw opening to spill a mouthful of jagged teeth. In one sinuous movement, his neck stretched up, his arms coiling too long around his son. The sword arced toward Lia’s leg as if he meant to wound her, then drag her along after him, but Lia lurched toward him, too close for the sword to reach, and stabbed Tual’s ankle with the knife. He hissed, skittering back.

The ceiling caved, chunks of rock cascading down between her and Tual. Stone pummeled the ground, and Lia curled into a ball, the whole world falling around her.

It took years, an entire lifetime, for the noise to stop. For the rocks to stand still and the ground to stop heaving. Lia coughed, rock dust grainy in her mouth and down her throat when she finally raised her head. Sunlight pierced the tomb—vines, roots, and flowers choking the opening. The coffin on the dais had tipped over sideways, the floor strewn with bones.

Still shaking, Lia forced herself to stand. Where were Tual and Mateo? Buried in the rubble?

There was a perfectly empty ring in the mess of fallen stone, Anwei and Knox at the center. The Beildan’s chest was heaving, tears making muddy trails in the dust on her cheeks. Streams of blood ran from both of Anwei’s nostrils, and her tears were tinged red. Knox was still lying in a pool of his own blood. There was no sign of Mateo or his father.

Lia could hardly breathe as she stumbled toward Knox and Anwei, trying to understand the space around them, the rocks on the ground, the vines twisting down from the ceiling. She collapsed onto her knees next to Knox’s body, nothing making sense. There was a long, bloodstained tear in his tunic where the sword had stabbed him, Anwei’s hand fisted around the bloody material. But underneath it, instead of a gaping wound opening Knox’s stomach, there was a nasty, bulging scar.

Pitching forward, Lia checked his breathing, his pulse. Anwei didn’t move, her eyes shut as if she couldn’t bear to look at the world ever again. “He’s breathing,” Lia gulped. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know,” Anwei gasped, tears streaming in earnest down her face. Her fistful of Knox’s tunic didn’t move, as if she were firmly holding him in this world. His hand circled her wrist, the two of them breathing together.

Lia thought of the painting from the cave that Mateo had copied, Calsta and the nameless god reaching for each other. All the ones they’d touched, working together. Bonded, like Mateo had said.

And Patenga bonded to a Basist, then destroying that love and bond for power. She closed her eyes, thinking of all the shields in the tomb, the painting of Patenga crying despite his crown. He’d regretted it. Designed and built this tomb. Killed himself instead of extending his own life and power like most other shapeshifters.

Killed himself…

Lia stared down at the sword Tual had stabbed into Knox, the end now half-melted and dull. There had been a sword through the shapeshifter king’s ribs. A sword Tual had taken with him, wherever he’d dragged Mateo, made of that stuff Mateo had said they needed to heal him. Caprenum.

Patenga had been made by that caprenum sword and then had died by it.

She moved to pick up Knox’s half-melted sword, but Anwei’s eyes sprang open. “Don’t touch it,” she rasped. “She’s still in there. She’s still in Knox. If she goes, he will too. While he stays…”

Lia swallowed, pulling her hand back. “The… ghost. His sister?” She’d grown up with Knox. Played with him. Fought with him. And never once had she seen the sword. How could she not have known Knox had another person living inside him, feeding off him like a tick? He’d said Calsta had spoken to him, gotten him to a seclusion, where she could feed him power. And then when that hadn’t been enough anymore, she’d brought him to Anwei.

The thought made her clench her eyes shut. Calsta had brought Knox to Anwei. A Basist. Because a bond between them would balance him. Just like Mateo had said.

“If Knox is still alive and his sister hasn’t… gone, that means Mateo is going to get worse,” Lia whispered, opening her eyes. “Which means Tual is probably already on his way back here for me.”

Anwei’s eyes burst open, the whites of them spidered over in red. “He doesn’t have to come back for us because we’re going to go to him. My entire life has been wasted on finding that piece of silenbahk dung.”

“Tual?”

“I thought he killed my brother. It destroyed me. My family. My whole village. So I was going to destroy him. All for a murder he didn’t commit. Arun’s calling himself Mateo now?” Lia’s skin pebbled at the razor edge to Anwei’s words. “All my life fixated on avenging my twin, and he never gave a second thought to me.” Her fingers were still clenched in Knox’s shirt. “He turned into a shapeshifter himself.”

“Mateo isn’t…” Lia stopped. She’d known Mateo for only a week, and most of it had involved him spouting off insults, tearing things up, and hiding his head while she fought for her life. But he couldn’t help what Tual had done to him, could he? He’d been kind and funny and just ridiculous enough to make her forget what was hanging over her for whole minutes at a time.

Of course, so had Tual.

Lia took a shaky breath and looked down at Knox, finally asking the question she’d been too afraid to voice. “Is he going to be all right?”

Anwei’s eyes drifted shut again. “I don’t know.”

“We have to move. The Warlord was supposed to come.”

“She’s already here.”

Anwei’s whisper scraped through Lia. She frantically sent her aurasight up to the circle of light above them where there once had been floors of statues, artifacts, and reliefs, and where now there was nothing but a jagged hole clear to the sky. Lia’s heart jittered in her chest, and she fancied she could already hear auroshe cries, the brash sound of Ewan’s cocksure laugh. “Can we move Knox?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

Lia shoved the bloody knife into her pocket. Tual and Mateo had run in the same direction as the man who had been wearing a shapeshifter costume. She didn’t want to follow them to whatever was waiting at the end of that tunnel.

Instead Lia went to the cascade of vines and roots that had ruptured the ceiling, growing in sticky swirls all the way to the floor in thick bands. A bridge to the surface.

Once she’d climbed out of the tomb, Lia stared at what was left of the compound, feeling as if she had fallen asleep in one place and woken up in a new one. The structures, the walls, the baskets, the pavilions—they were all gone. A gargantuan tree had grown up in the center of it all, spilling into the hole Anwei had made of the tomb. Crackles of fire caught in Lia’s ears, hidden in the lush new growth. She couldn’t feel any auras nearby, but she was too afraid to push far enough for it to matter. The Warlord could be within shouting distance, waiting to snap up anything that came creeping out of the ruins.

Lia and Anwei couldn’t carry Knox a long way and couldn’t walk back to Chaol hoping no one saw them on the road, so they needed a horse. Lia picked her way toward where Mateo had tied Bella.

Mateo. Lia didn’t like the way her thoughts stuck on him. He’d probably stolen pieces of her every moment they’d been together. Even when he’d stood between her and Ewan. When he’d ridden to her father’s house, the Warlord bearing down on him. When he’d sat with her in his father’s study, saying “maybe later when everything has calmed down…”

He’d been so embarrassed and earnest, so apologetic when he realized what a stupid thing it was to say to her.

But there was no over. Not when Mateo’s very existence depended on draining the life from people around him. He’d reached into her and plucked something straight from her center, from her soul, leaving her exhausted and grasping at the stone walls just to hold herself straight.

It was different from what Ewan had done, but it still left her feeling dirty, violated, wishing she could wash away the feeling of foreign hands clutching at whatever it was that made her Lia.

When she got in sight of the gates—where the gates had been, anyway—Lia stumbled, stubbing her toes on a discarded shovel hidden in the knee-high grass. Where the horse tie-ups had been there was nothing, no roof, no hitching post, and no Bella. She closed her eyes, pulling on her aurasight once again, then letting it go in a panicked flurry when auras popped into existence at the very edges of her mind. Golden ones.

One was coming toward her, the gold flecks so diminished she could hardly see them.

Ewan.

A reptilian scream split the air, the familiar call filling her chest until Lia thought she would burst. He was still riding Vivi, as if he owned the both of them. She pulled the knife from her pocket, wondering why Ewan was coming when the others hung back. Could he see her despite his diminished aura?

Did Calsta accept sacrifices from a would-be rapist?

Vivi’s familiar form tore through the sugarcane, ripping holes in the earth with his claws and screaming as Ewan manhandled the reins. He leapt the last timber, the Devoted throwing himself from the auroshe’s back, rolling out of it to come toward Lia at a run. He was all steel sword, oiled leather, and white teeth in one ugly blur.

Lia had frozen the last time she’d seen him. She’d frozen and let a sky-cursed shapeshifter with no more muscle than a little child stand up for her. She couldn’t freeze this time. She groped in the grass for the shovel she’d tripped over. Knife in one hand and shovel in the other, Lia fled back into the ruins of the dig.

Ewan’s aura blistered in Lia’s head as she tried to keep track of it behind her. Ewan had greater strength, a longer reach. A sword instead of a shovel. Lia was faster, but her legs were already shaking, her insides hollowed out. The gold-splattered aura chased after her, weaving through the newly grown trees, the broken remains of buildings, and the piles of dirt now hidden by flowers. Lia’s heart hiccuped in her chest as she looped back toward the spot Ewan had left Vivi rearing, praying to Calsta he was following the trail of broken grass she’d left in her wake, not her aurasparks. She was so tired, all her energy sucked out of her.

She slid to a stop behind a tree, Ewan’s aura darting around the other way as if he couldn’t see her. So it wasn’t aurasight. He’d heard the noise, heard her voice, or perhaps he’d just hoped all this destruction had belonged to her and had come running.

Lia broke from her cover toward where she could still hear Vivi’s cackling calls, only to hear Ewan’s dry laugh behind her. Muscles screaming, head screaming, all of her screaming, Lia ran.

“Lia,” his voice came in an unhinged yell, all too close. “The Warlord already saw your aura. She sent me to collect you.”

Vivi’s long, choking scream echoed across the compound, as if he could smell blood. It chilled her, wondering if he’d still recognize her now that Ewan had forced him to receive a new master.

Planting her feet, Lia twisted around, swinging the shovel toward his head. The blow barely glanced off the side of Ewan’s skull, and when she swiped at him a second time, he blocked it with his sword, then wrenched the shovel from her numb fingers.

“Look at you with your pretty red hair.” Ewan was still laughing, his grin so full of bile that she didn’t need to see his thoughts to know what was inside him. His sword hung loose in his hand, and he circled her, herding Lia toward the edge of the compound. Lia kept the space between them, darting in a few times to jab at him with the knife, but he knocked each blow aside with a lazy swipe from the sword, the last catching her hand with the flat of the blade in a painful slap.

“To think you thought you could take me in the training yards. Everyone said what a good little Devoted you were. Powerful. Special.” He swiped at her with a sneer, forcing her to stumble back. “Now look at you. Cowering. You can start pleading any time now, I’ll listen.” Ewan grinned when she stumbled again, then changed the angle of his sword so Lia had to retreat toward the broken wall. Toward the Warlord. Toward the end of her life, where there would be no escape. Roots and grass pulled at Lia’s ankles as she tried to remember where the breaks in the wall had been. If only she could get to Vivi.

She could hear him keening, though perhaps not for her now that Ewan had tamed him. Going to Vivi could end this fight with her guts on the ground.

“I’ve taken your auroshe. Your shovel. The knife will go next.” Ewan spat on the ground at her feet. “And then once the Warlord gives you back to me—”

Stabbing pain shot through Lia’s ankle as a rock skidded out from under her foot, and suddenly she was on the ground and Ewan was on top of her, grinding her into the hard dirt, pinning her knife hand.

“I’m so disappointed, Lia,” he breathed into her ear. “I know you can fight better than this.”

Lia’s whole body writhed at his breath on her face. She tried to roll to the side, jabbing at his eyes with her bare fingers, but he only laughed, shifting his weight to hold her other arm down.

“Maybe you played this easy. Hoped I’d find you,” he whispered. “It’s okay. I understand.”

The knife felt damp, hard, too heavy in Lia’s hand. But Ewan’s shift to hold her down had left that arm barely pinned. She tried to inch it out from under his weight, but it wouldn’t budge, the blade pressing against her own ribs.

“Maybe I don’t even need to wait for the Warlord. She’s too scared to come back here. It’s just you and me—”

Something whistled through the air, slicing into the back of his neck. In his split second of pain and confusion, Lia tore her arm free and stabbed the knife into the slit between leather plates in his armor under his arm. Ewan’s eyes bulged, his breath all coming out in a pained wheeze.

Just in time for Vivi’s horn to spear him through the side.

Ewan’s mouth gaped open, his hands flailing to find the twisted horn piercing him through. One hand flopped toward Lia’s knife, but Vivi was too fast, shaking Ewan loose of his horn, then darting toward him with a gaping mouth, jagged teeth finding Ewan’s neck.

Lia rolled away, pinching her eyes closed at the awful sounds, her arms creeping up to cover her head. She didn’t move until Vivi—still her Vivi—had gone back to nickering, coming to nudge her head with his inky-red muzzle.

Arms and legs shaking, she stood, hugging Vivi’s face to her chest. “I missed you,” she whispered. “I needed you. This whole time.”

The auroshe nipped at her, smears of blood marking her dress where he lipped the fabric.

Ewan’s aura blazed brighter than the sun behind Lia, then drained away into the sky until there was nothing left.

Lia didn’t look at his body on the ground. Holding tight to Vivi’s neck, she stumbled away a step, her foot catching on something stuck in the grass. Lia bent to pick it up.

It was a wooden hair stick, the end decorated with a pretty flower. The two prongs were sharpened to wicked points, each of them marked with blood.

Something had hit Ewan before Lia had stabbed him. Before Vivi had come. Lia looked around the jumbled mess of plants and found an aura hovering behind a thick tree that had grown so fast, it had split its own bark.

The aura was white, not a trace of Devotion inside. Vivi squealed, starting for the tree, but Lia grabbed his reins, holding him back. “Hello?” she called.

A girl peeked out from behind the tree, soot marking her nose and cheeks, knots that looked as if they belonged on a high khonin snarled in her hair. “Aren’t you going to run?” she whispered, her eyes on Lia’s blood-soaked front. “That thing—”

“He won’t hurt me.” Lia’s voice shook, but she put up her hands to stop the girl when she retreated a step. “Or you. I’m not with the Warlord. You… you helped me just now.” She couldn’t bring herself even to gesture to the pile of flesh that was Ewan. “Thank you.”

“What monster wouldn’t? Are you all right?” The girl edged backward, her eyes on Vivi’s bloody teeth. “I know a healer who might be able to…” She looked around, the dirt streaks on her cheeks marked with tears “I mean… I did know a healer. I don’t know if she…”

“You came with Anwei?”

The girl’s eyes widened. She nodded but still hung back.

“Come on. We need to get out of here before any other Devoted come.” Lia turned toward the tomb, hugging Vivi’s neck as she walked. He let her, and an awful laugh that might have been a sob burst up through Lia’s throat when he began nosing her pockets, looking for treats. No other golden sparks flickered across Lia’s aurasight as they picked their way across the compound. Perhaps the threat of a risen shapeshifter king was enough to shake the Warlord herself.

Every inch of Lia felt bruised, dirtied, touched. But Lia was still breathing. Lia had Vivi back. And Lia wasn’t done.

Something shifted in the darkness behind Anwei. She closed her eyes, her mind swollen and protruding. Knox’s chest moved up and down, the blood soaking his shirt wet against her cheek.

The sound came again, rhythmic. Footsteps. Anwei jerked up, grabbing a rock. Images of the aukincer’s snakelike face drummed through her head, but when a shadow emerged from the gloom, it wasn’t the snake-tooth man. Altahn stumbled out of the rubble, his long tail of hair disheveled. His eyes found Knox’s sword where the shapeshifter had thrown it on the ground, the melted end black with blood. He bent to pick it up. “All this over a sword…”

Altahn’s whisper barely reached Anwei. She gripped the rock, her fingers rubbery and useless. “That’s not Patenga’s sword.” She couldn’t sense a change in Altahn despite the fact that the sword was in his hands. He still smelled of horse and leather and salpowder.

But she could still smell the sword on Knox. The ghost who was eating him. The shapeshifter had said Knox had been dead from the moment Willow latched on to him. But Knox had said Calsta could fix it somehow. That he and Anwei could fix it together.

Altahn looked down the length of the melted sword, then set it back on the ground. He stepped over it and extended his hand to her instead. “I didn’t know there was a shapeshifter here, or I wouldn’t have gotten my father involved.”

“You know now?” It was hard to bring up words to answer such a declaration when Anwei’s world was already punctured.

“He came out our tunnel. The shaking, all of… this…” He kicked at one of the roots that had swollen up from the ground. “My father…” He swallowed. “He’s dead.”

Anwei blinked, the plants that had come at her call finally registering in her mind. Something had unfolded inside her when Knox’s power swirled through her. She’d reached farther, felt more, done more than she ever had before. The magic in her wasn’t broken.

“Here.” Altahn stepped up to Knox and pulled his legs straight. Anwei flinched, ready to swat him away, but the Trib put his hands up. “The Warlord is up there. I can help carry him out.”

“You want to help me?” Anwei hurt everywhere, her other hand refusing to come unclenched from Knox’s tunic. He still held her wrist, his fingers leaving lines on her skin. “You don’t want to, say, hand me over to the magistrate in exchange for a magic sword?”

“I’m sorry that we lied to you. I had no choice. That sword was stolen from us. Used to murder the very man who’d forged it, then buried with the murderer. It’s powerful, and we need power right now.” Altahn shook his head. “And Van needed a scapegoat.”

“You could have warned me.”

“It wasn’t the most honorable thing I’ve ever done. But you drugged me and left me underground for two days, so I suppose none of us are blameless.” Altahn flexed his hand once, then held it out to her. “You were in this because of the snake. He’s killed my father and taken the sword.” He raised an eyebrow when she hesitated. “Why don’t we go find him together?”

Anwei let the rock in her hand fall to the ground, then wrapped her fingers around Knox’s wrist. His heart was still beating, his space in her head warm. Less separate than it had been before. He hadn’t stirred, though she couldn’t smell anything wrong with him.

She untangled her fingers from his tunic long enough to feel for the pulse steadily beating in his neck. His body seemed fine, but that didn’t mean his mind was still inside.

She looked up at Altahn. “Why did you come down here for me?”

Altahn glanced up at the vines that had broken through the rock, before letting his hand fall back down to his side. “Because I think I’m going to need help, and I’ve seen what the two of you can do.”

Knox’s eyelids flickered. Anwei sat forward, watching. Not wanting to think of everything Altahn must have overheard in the apothecary.

“We can’t afford to be caught down here.” Shadows twisted in the darkness behind Altahn, resolving into a man and a woman with Trib leathers and ponytails. “So it’s come now or wish you had.”

A light tap, tap of split hooves echoed down from above. Bile rose in Anwei’s throat. It was too late, the Devoted were already here. An auroshe peered over the edge of the hole in the ceiling, its single twisted horn jutting toward them like a sword. Blood dripped down its muzzle.

Gathering everything she had left, Anwei forced herself up from the ground, her mind a gaping hole of fear as she dragged Knox back from the light and the thing’s line of sight. Altahn was there next to her, groping for the nothing sword.

“Wait! It’s me!” Lia’s voice filtered down. The creature’s black eyes followed Anwei hungrily as Lia’s face appeared alongside its neck. “I have a present for you out here. She may have helped save my life just now. The Warlord is hanging back, but I don’t know how long it will last. Can you get Knox to Gretis?”

Anwei’s mouth was dry, nothing more than a croak coming from her throat. But she glanced at Altahn, who nodded. “Where are you going?” Anwei asked, craning her neck to peer up at Lia.

“I have to get my family. I’ll meet you after nightfall.”

“Lia, go to the apothecary for me. Tell Gulya…” Thoughts of the old woman who had taken Anwei in felt stale and tired in her head. The old apothecarist had liked the customers Anwei’s braids had brought in. She’d cared about Anwei, too, though. “Tell her I’m sorry. And get everything she’ll let you take. Herbs. Money. Anything.”

Lia nodded. “I’ll do what I can.” Then the auroshe snorted and withdrew its head, Lia disappearing with it.

Another head stuck out over the gap, blocking the sun. “Sky Painter protect you, Anwei!”

A spark of something bright erupted in Anwei at the sight of Noa waving at her from above, though she was too far away from herself to know what it was. Relief? Joy? “May she send her storms far away from us,” Anwei mumbled, not loud enough for anyone to hear.

Noa grinned. “Was that a big enough fire?”