Imogen wasn’t sure this was the right strategy, but Matrin had wanted to test himself. It was part of the reason that Imogen had come. If anything went awry, she was here.

  Matrin tipped his blade toward the nearest swordsman.

  And then he darted forward.

  The swordsmen were of reasonable skill. Imogen had seen that in the times that she had been dealing with them, and she recognized that while they were capable, that was all there was to it. It was easy enough to take these men on and even easier to recognize the flaws in their flow. The traditional patterns gave answers to how to attack and fight and to what needed to be done to counter anything they might try to throw at them.

  As Imogen expected, Matrin danced with them a little longer than he probably needed to, though this was likely his first foray into real danger. He was skilled. His blade was fluid. Precise. And she suspected that with enough time, and practice, he could challenge for progression to First.

  It would probably take several more years, but he had more promise than most. There were a handful of others like Matrin in the city whom Imogen trained. All of them had a measure of natural ability that Imogen had been working with, hoping to hone it into something more. So far, she had managed to shape them into competent swordsmen.

  He drove the hilt of his sword into the forehead of one man, swept his leg into the knee of the other, and then he danced around, kicking the man, getting past him and darting toward the sorcerer.

  And then he froze.

  Imogen waited a moment. If Matrin had been focusing on what he’d learned, he shouldn’t be frozen for too long, but she sensed more than just a hesitation here.

  She sensed sorcery. There was a buildup of power, and she could feel it working along the street, wrapping around Matrin as it did. As that power began to contain him, there would not be much that he would be able to do to break free of this sorcery.

  She gave him a moment, and then another.

  “Are you just going to leave him?” Vortel asked, sliding down next to her. His hand had gone to the hilt of his sword, though Imogen knew that it would not do much good.

  “I do not want to intervene any sooner than needed.”

  “Even if the sorcerer kills him?”

  “The sorcerer will not kill him.”

  “You are quite confident in that.”

  “The sorcerer wants me.”

  That was the gamble that Imogen had been counting on. She had anticipated that the sorcerer would not put down her swordsman, because they would want to find a way to get back to Imogen. She wasn’t sure if that would be their plan or not, but it seemed like a reasonable assessment. She waited again, and again she counted to ten, but still Matrin did not break free.

  Imogen launched herself off the rooftop and landed next to the other swordsman, driving the hilt of her blade into his nose and hearing a satisfying crunch before she spun. When sorcery began to build, Imogen darted through a series of her traditional patterns. Sixty-one. Twenty-two. Eighteen. They carved through the spell that the sorcerer was starting to summon, and as they did, she could feel her patterns, and the power within them, interrupting the sorcery.

  Matrin staggered, lurching forward.

  Too late to let him handle this. Imogen had presented herself.

  The sorcerer spread his hands to either side, his fingers already starting to move.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, and she darted toward him.

  He tossed something. She jumped, and it was just in time. An explosion caught her, sending her off-kilter and slamming her into a nearby building. Matrin was caught up in that explosion as well, and he was thrown off to the side. He pushed away from the wall and stepped toward the sorcerer, his blade upraised. He started to swing it down, and Imogen knew that he would strike—and it would be a killing blow.

  That was not what they had agreed to. Test themselves, but little more.

  If they were to cut down sorcerers, then they would create enemies that they did not need—at least, enemies they did not need yet. They needed to take time to work through this first.

  She darted toward Matrin, caught his blade, then spun her wrist to disarm him and then spun back, turning to the sorcerer. She was almost too late, as the sorcerer had begun another spell, and it wrapped around her ankles. Imogen reacted, slicing her blade down in a series of three quick traditional patterns, and she freed herself. Then she took a step forward. The sorcerer continued moving, but now she had a sense from the sorcerer that he was more on edge than he had been before.

  “The Society should retreat from Loruv,” Imogen said.

  The sorcerer looked up, holding her gaze for a moment. “You do not dictate what the Society does.”

  The man’s words were clipped and accented, and there was a measure of anger within them. Imogen understood. She had felt that anger. She still felt that anger. It came from her perspective on sorcerers, and it came from how she felt about everything that she had been dealing with.

  He lunged forward. When the power began to build at her, she reacted. She had been expecting it. If there was one advantage to her time in the city, it was that she had begun to anticipate sorcery in ways that she never had learned when she’d been in the Leier homeland. There, sorcery was more than existential threat, and though the Koral were said to use similar power, she had never fought with the Koral the same way that the general had.

  Imogen now knew what it would take for her to disarm the others. She sliced through the sorcery, and when the sorcerer reached for something in his pocket, Imogen was there, her blade carving through the fabric of his cloak, spilling the contents of his pocket down onto the ground.

  And then something exploded near her.

  It was a strange, shadowy shape.

  She backed away, regarding the sorcerer for a moment as she tried to make sense of what had happened and what she might be able to do with this. It had to be what they called an enchantment, but it was the kind of enchantment that Imogen wasn’t quite certain how to disarm. She didn’t have enough experience with an enchantment to know what that would take, only that she could tell that there was power here.

  “Imogen!”

  She jerked her head toward Matrin, and she saw him pointing.

  There was another shadowy figure making its way toward her.

  Not a sorcerer, but something surprising. Something dangerous.

  She looked back at the sorcerer, but he was gone.

  Two of these shadowy forms slithered toward her.

  She positioned herself in such a way that she could block Matrin, as she felt that was going to be the most important thing.

  “Get moving,” she commanded.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Get moving,” she said again.

  Matrin scrambled to his feet, and behind her, she heard Vortel shout, calling down to Matrin and summoning him to join Vortel up on the roofline.

  The shadowy figures slipped toward Imogen.

  She darted toward one, her blade slicing into it. It felt like she was carving through something physical, but the way this shadow moved was different. It was as if it slithered on the wind, as if it was not a physical manifestation of power.

  She slipped her blade around, carving as she cut through a series of the patterns, her blade a blur. She managed to bring down one, and then she spun, facing another of the shadowy figures.

  This one moved just as quickly as the other, and as she focused on it, Imogen started to question whether she would be fast enough. It slipped past her blade any time that she thrust at it. She had never felt that way about her swordwork here. When facing swordsmen, Imogen had little difficulty. When facing sorcerers, she had little difficulty. The only time that she’d been challenged was when they had used a measure of sorcery to wrap her and hold her. Even that had proven less effective the longer that Imogen had been dealing with the sorcerers, as she had started to understand how to escape it.

  But this was something else.

  She wasn’t sure what it was, only that she had the distinct sense that there was something quite dangerous about it.

  And as she slipped toward the attacker, she drove her blade toward the creature’s chest and went straight through it. She staggered to the side, righted herself, and then slipped her blade up, driving it toward what she imagined was the creature’s face. Her blade slipped into an open mouth, and the creature shrieked.

  It was a strangely horrifying sound, and it echoed among the buildings on either side of her. Then the shadowy form faded, drifting down into nothingness.

  She stood for a moment. Trembling.

  Imogen didn’t know what that was, but it was a dangerous magic.

  And with certainty, she knew that was the reason that she was here. Master Liu had known that there was a dangerous magic and had sent her on her bond quest so that she could deal with it. But had he known just how dangerous it was?

  He was Master Liu. Of course he would have known.

  She stood for a moment, and then she began to search around her, looking for answers. There had to be some answer as to what she was dealing with, though Imogen did not know what it was. She found a few broken fragments on the ground. It looked like pieces of stone, and she collected them, looking along the street and making sure that there were no others coming. When she was satisfied that she had all the fragments gathered together, she straightened, stuffing those pieces into her pocket.

  An enchantment. It had to be.

  The problem for Imogen was that she had never seen any enchantment quite like that. When she had dealt with enchantments before, and there had been several times when she had dealt with some, she had not known the sorcerers to break the enchantments. That seemed counterproductive. A waste. In this case, though, it seemed as if the sorcerer had used the enchantment like that because he had needed to free something.

  And it was that which worried her.

  She checked on the two fallen soldiers. They were both still living. Beaten and bruised, and one man had a cut on his forehead, while the other had blood drying beneath his nose where Imogen had driven her hilt into it, but they would live.

  As she thought about the attack, and what she had experienced, she wondered if perhaps this had been a mistake. Maybe she should not have allowed the sorcerer to live this time.

  And worse, she started to wonder if perhaps she had finally found the reason for her bond quest.

  If she had, then it was time to stop working with these others. That was not her quest. It was time for her to hunt down the sorcerers, and this dark magic, to eradicate them.

  Chapter Seven

  Thunder rumbled overhead. Imogen had grown accustomed to the thunder, though she didn’t much care for it. It was the threat of storms off in the distance that taunted her, though she supposed that she should welcome the wind and the rain, as it was better than the cold and the snow, and occasionally even the ice that she had been dealing with in the upper aspects of the mountains. Still, her people were exposed, and she didn’t much care for the idea that they would be left out in the middle of a dangerous thunderstorm.

  She paused at a small ravine, looking at the ground as it sloped down from her, before turning and glancing back at Jorend, who trailed behind her. He was surveying everything around them much like Imogen was, to the point where she was left wondering what he had seen. He had his own way of viewing the world, and it was one that she appreciated. Perhaps he had uncovered something she had missed. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “Do you see anything?” she asked him.

  He tore his gaze away from whatever it was that he was looking at, and turned back to her. His hand hovered near the hilt of his sword, at the ready, as he often was. “Nothing. I keep thinking that we will come across more of these enchantments, but there has not been anything, has there?”

  Imogen smiled tightly. “Not yet.”

  And it was that not yet which had them all on edge. She wasn’t the only one to fear that there was bound to be something more, and bound to be something that they would have to deal with, but she had remained on edge for all of them.

  “We aren’t that far from my village,” Jorend said. He looked over at her. He scratched his scruffy beard and frowned. “Though it has been a long time since I’ve visited.”

  “I haven’t returned to my village,” Imogen said. “I’m not even sure if I can anymore.”

  “Now that you’re the general, you can travel wherever you want.”

  Imogen smiled tightly. “When I left on my bond quest, I felt like all I needed to do was complete the journey, and then I could return to the sacred temple and my people. Once I finished it, I felt like I should return.”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.”

  She shook her head. She thought back to those days occasionally, though not as often any longer. “To be honest, I’m not so sure what I’m trying to tell you, either. Maybe I should have come back.”

  “Would you have learned what you needed to learn if you had?”

  The answer came to her easily. Imogen knew that she would not have uncovered what she had needed to learn had she returned to her people immediately. Had she not stayed with Gaspar, headed into Yoran, learned the truth of magic—at least, what truth she could learn—Imogen wasn’t sure what might have become of her. She would have returned to the sacred temple, and she probably would have presented herself to Master Liu sooner, but would that have been right? Had she done so, she would never have become the sacred sword master. It had taken staying out of her homeland, away from her people, for her to become what she was meant to be.

  “I don’t know that you ever told me about your village.”

  Jorend turned, looking toward the mountains. “We don’t talk about home when we’re in the sacred temple, do we?”

  “We don’t talk about what was left behind.”

  “It was a village much like others. Perhaps a little larger. Probably five thousand people in all.”

  “That is large,” Imogen said. “Mine was barely a thousand.”

  “Which explains how you were able to rise up so quickly.” He said it with a hint of a smile.

  “Perhaps if you had been in a village like mine, you wouldn’t have taken so long to progress to First.”

  “I was the youngest in a generation,” he told her.

  She didn’t need to remind him that she had been as well. All the swordsmen who had gone to the sacred temples—or at least, attempted to go to the sacred temples—had been the best of the best. That was how it had always been.

  And as she thought about what Master Liu had told her, and what she had learned about the purpose behind the sacred temples, and whatever connection they might have to the Porapeth, Imogen found herself wondering if perhaps there was something to that which she should have known about all that time ago.

  “We could stop through,” she suggested.

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “If we are close, I think we need to.” She turned to him. She wasn’t sure how he would react to what she needed to say next. He might call her the general, and there were times when Imogen really felt like she was that person, but what she wanted to tell him now was beyond what most who had grown up within the Leier homeland would ever agree with. “I intend to unite the Leier and the Koral.”

  “Sword and shield,” Jorend said softly.

  She tipped her head in a slight nod. “Exactly.”

  He was quiet for a few moments. The thunder rumbled, and there was a flash of lightning, reminding her of one of the sacred patterns. Perhaps that was why they were named as they were, as out here on a mountainside of the Leier homeland, she could practically feel those sacred patterns as they circled around her. It was as if there was a power that was meant to be here. She could feel that energy, even if she could not trace it to its source.

  When he finally spoke, Jorend met her gaze. There was a dark intensity in his eyes. “Do you fear how I might react?”

  “It’s not you that I fear,” she said.

  “I’ll admit that I wasn’t certain. For a long time, Imogen.” It was better that he call her by her first name rather than First, as he and many others had taken to doing. It was a marker of respect, she knew, but she needed to connect to Jorend more personally. Especially with what she intended. “I was trained and taught to hate them, as so many of our people were. But you have shown us something different.” He paused, and in a moment, little more than a heartbeat, he was standing before her in Tree Stands in the Forest, the sacred pattern taking hold and power flowing from him. “When I left the tiger temple, I knew the sacred patterns, but I didn’t know them. I feel like many have the same experience.”

  “I would argue that most have that experience,” Imogen said.

  “Exactly. Which is why we owe you a debt of gratitude. We have begun to learn that there is so much more to what we can be. Without that knowledge…” Jorend released his hold over Tree Stands in the Forest, relaxing and sweeping his gaze out around him. “Our people have been divided for too long. You have shown us that as well. I can see that now. Much like I, along with others, can see that the division did not serve us. I don’t know what it served, but certainly not our people.”

  Imogen looked toward where the Leier and the others gathered. It was late, and they had not dealt with any fighting in a while, so they were gathering and had settled for the night. There was a quiet to the camping, and a certain sense of comfort.

  “Do you ever intend to return to your home?”

  She looked over at Jorend. “Maybe one day.”

  “I would like to accompany you, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  She smiled. “You are one of the Leier. You are my second-in-command. Of course you may accompany me.”

  A look of disappointment swept across his face. Then he looked up. “Have you made it official, then?”

  “I’m afraid you need to clarify what you are asking.”