Arkyn moves past with a fine-tipped crown hanging from his hand. He pauses before the barred gate, his frayed cloak billowing in the hot, sulfuric exhaust wafting off the arena, making his hood flutter. Pushing it off, exposing the back of his head—not unlike Pah’s was when I hacked it from his shoulders. Patched with swatches of dark, stringy hair, the rest a gnarled swirl of flesh unmistakably scarred by the touch of flames.
Solid proof that Pah’s Sabersythe chased him across the plains and charred him from the outside in.
Silence weighs between us as Arkyn watches the final fae square off against a small razah that’s pawing the ground …
“Mah told me stories of these beasts when I was young,” he mutters, so quiet I imagine he’s mostly speaking to himself. “Said they’re the rabid spirits of perished fae, minds mutilated by their bloodlust, bodies cast in fire. Reforged by Ignos in a manner nobody truly understands. They never tire of the battle. If they’re slaughtered, the embers swallow them, only to spit them out whole again. Or they feast. Grow.”
The razah lunges, manages to swipe the young fae to the ground, andrips out his trachea in a blur of motion—all to the crescendo of howls from the bloodthirsty crowd. Screams and hoots that echo well after the final beast has dug back into the molten boil that spawned it.
“This horde has grown bigger and much stronger since my Fire Lark fled me.”
I want to rip the name from his mouth; carve it into a weapon and flay him with it. Tear him apart, limb by limb, for what he’s done to my family.
I yank at my shackles, stilling as a grate on the far side of the arena begins to grind upward in jerking increments. Slowly, it reveals the shapely form of someone shrouded in the darkness beyond.
My heart lurches. Breath halts.
Up and up the gate grinds until it resembles a wide-open jaw.
Shesteps through the billows of smoke and steam that taunt me with only glimpses. First, her feet—strapped in leather footwear that lends itself to movement. Certainly notprotectionfrom the rugged terrain of near-molten rock blazing in the arena.
Another churn of smoke reveals almost everything from her neck down, clad in battered plates of silver armor that cover only bits of her body—her shoulders, breasts, and the curve of her hips. Frayed white material hangs beneath it like a skirt that’s been ripped short, her hands clenched around twin daggers, all distorted by the ripples of heat and brume rising from the volcanic arena.
“Marvelous, isn’t she?”
I ignore Arkyn as I’m gifted with a view of her face, mostly covered by the streaks and swirls of an ornate silver helmet that cages all but her eyes, jaw, and lips. Her pale skin is unblemished, bearing none of the burns that ate her to the bone in places, no doubt mended in the smear of time since she was carried from that table with a stare so blank I’m sure she’d tucked somewhere deep. But I know it’s Raeve. Even though her movements are more animal than fae, a litheness befitting some elegant beast.
Even though her eyes are black.
I grind my teeth into my gag, desperate to scream her name and feel her gaze on me. For her to know that I’m here.
That I’mwith her.
As she stalks toward the heart of the arena, the volcanic stone awakens, throbbing with luminous heat beneath her steps to the gasps and cries of a murmuring crowd. My pulse pounds when flames stream up to gather between her shoulder blades, going from red to yellow to stark, flaming white—like tattered Moonplume wings streaming in her wake.
She steps over smoggy mounds of red and gray stone with the poise of an apex predator as the crowd falls into a heaving chant. For her.
“Fire Lark!”
“Fire Lark!”
“Fire Lark!”
“I always wondered why Ignos chose to honor her here,” Arkyn fawns, leering with obsessive intrigue, appearing enraptured by her presence in a way that makes me sick to my soul. “I guess I can begin to make sense of it now that I understand her heritage.”
I want to roar. Grind him into the ground and tell him he doesn’t understand.
He’llneverunderstand.
“I can see how much you love her. I, too, know how it feels to have something you love taken. But look at her,” he preens, watching Raeve stop on a knoll of smoldering rock, chin falling to her chest as those blazing wings envelop her like a wispy cocoon. “She’s far too much for a soft-hearted fool like you.”
The words gouge. Much deeper than I’ll ever let him know.
“Fire Lark!”
“Fire Lark!”
“Fire Lark!”
