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Someone stood there in the dark.

Xerxes’s brows came together, and he lifted to his elbows, his bedsheet sliding down his bare chest as he studied the dark silhouette eclipsing the firelight outside. “Who are you?” he demanded. Reza was broad shouldered, but this person was slender. A long cloak skated around in the breeze, but the figure otherwise remained dead-still.

He sat all the way up. “I asked you—” A sword sailed down toward Xerxes’s bed, and he rolled off into the sand, spraying grains against the tent wall. His heart thrashed as the sword came down again so fast he barely scooted back in time to avoid losing his arm. He reached over to Reza’s empty cot, yanking the General’s sword from its sheath and blocking a third strike. The figure pressed the sword toward Xerxes’s throat with his weight, the blade inching closer, closer, and Xerxes gritted his teeth, his arm muscles flexing. His gaze fired up to a pair of near-black eyes and pure white flesh shadowed by a long hood that sent warmth dropping through his stomach. He shoved with his last bit of strength, sending the figure’s blade sailing back, and he sprang to his feet, his lungs screaming for mercy and cursing the dark night for playing tricks on his eyes.

The figure went still.

Xerxes did too, staring, wondering what this thing was waiting for.

A crushing weight fell on Xerxes’s chest like a boulder. His gasp filled the tent as he staggered back, his hand slapping over his heart even though there was nothing there, nothing touching him, yet… the thick heaviness kept him from taking a full breath. A screech-like ringing filled his ears, sharpening like iron against iron, and he stumbled into his cot, clutching the side of his head as dread slipped in.

He’d felt this before.

“Who are you?!” Xerxes growled, screamed. He glanced out the slivered tent opening but no soldiers were nearby. Wind rushed against the walls in a roar, flapping everything hard enough to rip a peg out of the ground.

“We are legion.”

The tent flaps flew open and a current of sand channeled in, driving Xerxes into the back of the tent and filling his mouth. His hand flashed up aimlessly, searching for anything to grab through the grainy river.

Silver flashed in the current, and Xerxes raised the General’s sword, blocking the figure’s blade by a miracle of the Divinities seconds before Xerxes’s handle tore out of his grip. The figure stabbed again, and this time Xerxes braced for it, but the figure’s body lurched, the tip of his long sword grazing down Xerxes’s chest as he fell, the river of sand collapsing with him. Xerxes coughed out sand and blood as he leapt to his feet, grabbing the water jug from Reza’s beside table and raising it to strike.

The figure’s snow-white fingers came around an arrow protruding from his shoulder as he glanced out the tent opening where it must have come from. Xerxes brought the water jug down with a vengeance, and the figure swerved, barely escaping as he pulled a coin-sized ball from his fluttering coat. He threw it at Xerxes.

The ball burst against the side of Xerxes’s neck, liquid splattering up his jaw just as Reza stepped into the tent with another arrow loaded. The figure’s hand raised with bent fingers, and sand erupted at Reza’s feet. Reza tumbled, his bow snapping beneath him as he fell, and the figure fled into the dark night.

Xerxes dropped the water jug and grabbed Reza’s sword. He kicked cool sand as he burst from the tent, spinning once, predatory eyes taking in torchlight, black sky, and abandoned bonfires. “Division One, assemble!” he shouted down the path. “There’s a spy in our camp! Search the tents!” His hand flew to his wet throat.

Per-Siana soldiers scrambled from their beds, grabbing weapons, dragging on their boots. Cold raced over Xerxes’s skin as he inhaled, exhaled, searching the shadowy corners to try and locate the man who’d just tried to kill the King.

Intelligentsia.

He fought a shudder as he shook his head and blinked. Why was he thinking of them now?

The Intelligentsia’s magic could be heavy and suffocating like that. But only now, being out here, free of the palace halls and court pressures, did Xerxes realize the effect such magic had on him. Maybe it had always affected him, and he’d just gotten used to it.

Xerxes scrubbed the thoughts from his head. There were no Intelligentsia out here. That had been something else. And whatever it was…

It had tried to stab him clean through the heart. He placed a hand over his chest where the blade had almost entered his body.

Wetness glittered over his neck and shoulder from whatever liquid had erupted from the animal skin ball. Xerxes rubbed the moisture between his fingers and sniffed it. It wasn’t blood. It wasn’t water. In the moonlight, he could vaguely see a light hue that was starting to glow.

It took him several moments of staring at it to realize it was ink.

Ink that covered his neck, his jaw, his hands. Ink that provided an easy way to identify a king among a crowd of soldiers. He dropped his hand to his side in disbelief as it sank in.

He’d been marked.

Before setting up a temporary camp, Division One had travelled an orange mountain pass through a dry forest of leafless trees into the vast expanse of deserts beyond. Too many soldiers were injured from the ambush to move at full speed, and Division One had been forced to stop and rest, never making it to the oasis, never finding fresh water to bathe in or relieve the horses.

After the attack on their King, the entire division had searched for the man until sunrise, overturning the whole camp they’d spent so much time arranging. Crisp morning sunlight revealed the ink on Xerxes’s body to be violet; not a dark, subtle violet, but a bright, fluorescent colour that made him glow during the day. A beacon among his men in dark navy; a flag of his kingship easy to spot across desert sands.

He’d heard of this war tactic before, had even read about it in strategy books in the palace library as a teenager when he was supposed to be studying the sacred Celestial religion. At the time, he never thought he’d be the subject of a marking.

Xerxes looked out from the medicine tent, eyeing the desert beyond. He saw nothing—no movement at all. No trace of a white-fleshed enemy in a long coat with a draping hood sneaking away. The one who’d tried to assassinate the King of Per-Siana. The one who called himself ‘Legion.’

The lookouts were questioned, first by the Division One leaders, then by Xerxes himself. No one guarding the camp had seen an enemy sneaking in; not a single soldier was aware an assassin had entered the tent village. How could someone cross so much ground completely undetected? It was like the figure had moved in the wind, passing by everyone as a vapour instead of a body.

Reza stood at Xerxes’s side in the medicine tent with his arms folded. Every few seconds, the General shuddered.