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She should have known he was too good to be true, but she’d let her feelings cloud her judgement. He’d made her believe he’dlovedher, and for what? To get close to an heir of Delmira? To collect her secrets and report back to the enemy? She’d been a fool.
‘I’m going to get the horses.’ Without waiting for a reply, she trudged to the village gates where they’d tethered their mares.
The unrelenting sadness came in those quieter moments, with the scent of leather in the wind, with the sight of Hawthorne’s tin of peppermint tea sticking out of her saddlebag. Cursing colourfully, she untied the horses. All the midrealms were in uproar over his betrayal, even twelve months later, and though she wore the same mask of anger day in, day out, the sorrow beneath that surface grew taut. Sorrow for what she had lost, including the flicker of hope she’d had for the future. Sorrow for Malik, who had lost his brother to the very things that had taken his livelihood from him —
‘If you want to go, let’s go, Thea!’ Kipp called loudly, jumping from foot to foot. ‘I’m freezing my fucking balls off. Why is it always so damncoldhere?’
‘Frost giants,’ Thea replied, before remembering who’d told her that.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ she muttered, tugging the horses along, ignoring the whip of wind that swept across the lake behind her, the thick layer of ice creaking and groaning. The frigid air bit at her cheeks and nose as she reached her friends, and she felt a twinge of regret that they wouldn’t be lounging before a roaring firecome evening. But there would be time enough for that once the traitor was in chains.
At the thought, Thea gave her pack a quick pull, hearing the metal clink within, feeling instantly reassured. Though she hadn’t seen her sister since she’d left Tver, Wren had stayed in touch through a series of letters: updates on the assassin’s teapot she’d invented and on Sam and Ida’s latest shenanigans, the recipe for Thea’s contraceptive tonic, which she still took religiously, and then later, a package that had found Thea and her friends in Kilgrave, Hawthorne’s hometown. A set of iron manacles, treated with alchemy that made them unbreakable to a Warsword… Manacles Thea would clamp around Hawthorne’s wrists before she dragged him to the rulers of the midrealms to face trial for his crimes.
Thea removed them from her pack now, clipping them to her belt. She’d need them soon enough.
‘Who’s going to stop you?’Hawthorne’s words echoed in her mind like a distant song.
‘No one,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Least of all you.’
CHAPTER TWO
THEA
Beneath their horses’ hooves, snow crunched like broken glass, the only sound to permeate the eerie silence of the forest. The outskirts of the capital, Vios, should have been teeming with wintry woodland life… and yet they were desolate, a graveyard of trees closing in. The centuries-old evergreen pines were dead, and above Thea and her companions, the canopy was barren, naked branches reaching up into the sky like skeletal fingers, more evidence of a cursed and dying world. Cold seeped through every layer of clothing, causing an irrepressible shiver to take hold of Thea.
Early morning light filtered through the treetops, casting a pale blue hue over the frosted landscape before them. The air was so crisp that Thea could taste the ice on her tongue. Frozen streams and icicles hanging from rocks greeted them, and for a moment the midrealms were suspended in time, the stillness of the woods almost hypnotic. But time could not freeze. Thea knew that better than anyone.
Her fate stone warmed against her skin as she rode. She’d cast the fucking thing into the seas, only to have it find her againhours later. No one could escape fate, or time. She was living proof of that as her name day dawned around them: another year closer to twenty-seven, the age where she’d be wiped from the world.
‘Do you know any Warswords who were granted immortality during the Great Rite?’she had askedhimonce.
‘Tell me that’s not why you’re doing all this? Tell me it’s not why you want to become a Warsword? Because you want to live forever?’
‘I want to live longer than two and a half more fucking years.’
Thea could have laughed.Make that one year, she thought darkly. Hawthorne had told her he’d take her to one of the rare immortal Warswords if she mastered her magic. They’d both failed in that regard. He’d broken his vows, and she’d lost her magic entirely.
In the aftermath of the battle of Notos in Tver, it had ebbed away, despite Wren having removed the suppressant alchemy from her fate stone. For whatever reason, her connection to the storms had severed. Once she had felt them like beacons in the long, dark night, but now… now, there was nothing. Though she hadn’t admitted it to the others, she missed the magic sorely, like a piece of herself had vanished and she wasn’t entirely whole. She still found herself reaching for it, expecting to feel its spark within, only to remember how empty she was. Even now, thunder rumbled in the distance, and yet she felt nothing.
The Great Rite seemed further away than ever, along with any chance she might have of skirting her fate of death at twenty-seven.
‘You’re ready, you know.’
‘Ready?’
‘For the Great Rite. When you feel its call, you go. Drop everything and go. You will emerge a Warsword. The very best of us.’
The words had been spoken on the blood-soaked battlefield in Notos, where she’d truly earned the nameShadow of Death, so sure she was on the cusp of feeling the Furies’ call. For so long she had imagined wielding a Naarvian steel blade of her own and riding a Tverrian stallion across the midrealms. She had pictured accepting the gifts from the rulers of the kingdoms with her head held high: the vial of springwater from Aveum’s Pools of Purity, the mysterious vial of poison from Harenth… And though the armoury of Delmira stood no longer, she had the designs for Warsword armour stashed safely in her pack and had sworn to find a master armourer worthy of the task.
Cal and Kipp’s voices wrenched her from her thoughts. They were debating something behind her, getting louder and more insistent with each passing moment.
‘For Furies’ sake,’ she muttered, twisting in her saddle. ‘What is it now?’
‘Nothing,’ Cal replied quickly.
‘It’s not nothing,’ Kipp countered with a disbelieving shake of his head. ‘That storm ahead got us thinking. We were just talking about your magic.’
