Quil burst into the clearing, blades out, tearing through a Kegari woman coming at him, knocking away the arrows flying from the pilots who’d fled toward the woods. It was easy, infuriatingly easy. These were the great warriors who’d brought the Empire to its knees? Quil wished he could tell his aunt right now that without their Sails and bombs and their damned liquid metal, the Kegari were nothing.

  Sirsha cried out in warning. “Quil!”

  A heavy body slammed into his back, knocking the air out of him. He almost laughed, for he was eight when Elias had trained him to roll away from a blow, to move while he caught his breath. Quil was on his feet moments later, his fist flying into the face of the man who’d attacked him, knocking him to his knees. A moment later, Sirsha had buried a blade in the attacker’s back.

  The clearing was quieter now, the only sounds Sirsha’s and Quil’s heavy breaths, the pop of the fire, and the moans of the Kegari who lay on the ground dying.

  A scream echoed from the woods—and was abruptly cut off.

  R’zwana emerged a few seconds later, dragging a limp Kegari man by his hair, frowning in disgust. J’yan appeared from where he’d hidden with Quil, looking dispassionately at the bodies scattered around him.

  “This one will talk.” R’zwana tied up her prisoner. “J’yan, wake him up.”

  “That’s it?” Quil said, and looked over R’zwana’s shoulder, hoping he’d counted wrong. “You were supposed to grab two.”

  “If you wanted them alive,” R’zwana snarled, “you shouldn’t have killed so many, Martial.”

  J’yan knelt beside the man but shook his head. “I can’t wake him. I’d need a Khind to heal him first,” he said. “We’ll have to wait for him to wake up on his own.”

  R’zwana took out a pair of brass beaters from the pack slung across her chest. “Stand aside.”

  “No.” Quil turned his body so she couldn’t get at the Kegari man. If they didn’t get answers out of this pilot about the war camp and the Tel Ilessi, this entire operation would have been for nothing. Quil didn’t have time to argue with her about interrogation methods.

  His magic, quiet for so many weeks, stirred. It’s the only way, it seemed to whisper.

  “I need you to leave.” He looked at the three of them. “All of you. Burn the Sails.”

  “You don’t tell me what to do out here, Martial—”

  “Go,” Sirsha snapped at her sister. “Or I’m going on without you. You can’t track. You won’t be able to find us.”

  R’zwana looked at Sirsha with revulsion, but something else, too. Fear, perhaps. She took a branch from the fire and stalked off, J’yan and Sirsha following.

  Quil settled himself in front of the unconscious pilot, considering. He could ponder every consequence of what he was about to do. Or he could just do it.

  He lifted his hand to the man’s forehead and let a trickle of magic flow through him, hoping Sirsha was too distracted to sense it. Show me the camp.

  Quil had never made a request like this of his magic. But all Sirsha’s talk of emotion and element had made him wonder in the past few weeks if he’d been asking the magic for memories without even realizing it.

  Please, he added.

  His magic flared, and images filled his head. The man walking out to a flat expanse of earth, the ocean crashing in the distance. Getting into the seat of a large Sail as crewmen loaded the weapons chutes.

  The man pushed his arms through two sleeves, the fingers of his right hand dipping into a bowl with a hunk of hard white metal at its center.

  As soon as he touched it, it turned to liquid, shooting along the pilot’s skin and through the hollow reeds of the Sail, bringing it to life. The liquid seemed to bond with the man, becoming not just part of the Sail’s structure but part of the pilot’s.

  An engine hummed, and the pilot was aloft, spiraling up, the ground dropping away. Quil caught a glance of coastline, a large inlet with a huge arch formation beyond the beach, and an estuary splayed to the south of it.

  Now, Quil thought, the Tel Ilessi.

  Abruptly, he was shoved out of the man’s mind. He found himself back in the ravine, his blade loose in his hand. The Kegari man’s eyes were open, bloodshot.

  “Rue la ba Tel Ilessi!” The man thrust out his jaw, as if even the name of his leader gave him strength. “Kill me if you must, Martial,” he growled in Ankanese. “Kill us all. But we will not betray our Tel Ilessi.”

  The pilot lunged forward. R’zwana had failed to tie him up properly, and Quil had been too enamored with his magic to check. He snatched the dagger at Quil’s belt and plunged it into his own throat. Quil pressed his hands against the wound to stanch the bleeding. But it was useless. The man was dead—along with any chance of learning more about the Tel Ilessi.

  35

  Sirsha

  From a rise in the prairie where the grasses hid them, Sirsha and the others looked down at the Kegari war camp, a sprawling mess of tents and fires, clotheslines and supply wagons. The sky-pigs had erected it in a shallow bowl of prairie about a half mile from the Thafwan coast. The top of the bowl was littered with boulders and scrub and rocks—which meant plenty of places to scout from with no one the wiser.

  The only part of the camp that wasn’t haphazard was the airfield on a swath of cleared land north of the camp, where hundreds of Sails lay in neat pools of canvas and reed, awaiting riders, and, Sirsha suspected, the liquid metal that gave them life.

  It looked like any other military camp. Not a hint of anything supernatural.

  But Sirsha felt the killer in the nausea that plagued her, the vaguely unpleasant stench in the air. The murderer lurked like a family secret somewhere in that muddy labyrinth, along with the Tel Ilessi. If Sirsha wanted to find her mark, she’d have to get closer.

  Sirsha glanced at Quil crouched beside her, the fading light silhouetting him in gold. He said he’d persuaded the Kegari to tell him where the encampment was. But Sirsha suspected otherwise. She’d felt a twinge of—something—from Quil’s direction during the interrogation. When she dug for it again, it was gone. And when she’d asked the elements for help, they’d shown her the monster’s path instead, fixated on her mission.

  “The moment you kill the Tel Ilessi, get out,” she told Quil now. “Get to the horses and we’ll meet you.” She looked to J’yan and R’zwana, whispering to each other a few yards away. “J’yan should be able to keep us hidden all the way in.”

  “How long will the binding take?”

  Sirsha shook her head. “I’m not going to bind her, Quil. I’m going to kill her. For Loli.”

  She’d decided it days ago, after yet another night when she dreamt of her friend, crawling like a wounded animal along the spongy ground of the Thafwan jungle, a cavity in her chest as she looked desperately for hearts to revive her own.

  But it wasn’t just Loli’s death that made Sirsha want to finish this creature. It was the dead she’d seen in Navium, Jibaut, the Thafwan countryside. It was the way the creature targeted the young and strong. The way she seemed to relish the act of murder.

  The wind blew Sirsha’s hair into her face, and she shoved it back impatiently. She’d lost her hairpins at the cabin and had been tempted to cut off her hair a dozen times since.

  “Perimeter guard is rubbish,” Quil observed. The camp was gray in the near-dark, lamps and fires slowly flickering to life. “Too many entrances to count and only half of them are being watched.”

  “Are you complaining about our enemy’s lax fortifications?”

  Quil frowned. “It’s odd that they were able to take the Empire when they don’t know the basics of entrenching an army.”

  “They’ve conquered this land.” Sirsha thought of the cratered Thafwan villages and scattered bodies they’d seen as they traversed the countryside. “They don’t have a strict watch because they don’t think they need one. Besides”—she nodded to a Sail spinning up into the clouds—“that’s their perimeter watch.”

  “Either they really are the worst-run army in history, or this is a trap,” Quil said, with such calm certainty that Sirsha almost looked behind her, expecting Kegari to be closing in.

  “Does it change our plan?”

  “We need more than one path out.”

  “Speak for yourself, prince. I’ve mapped out four. And”—she gave him an appraising look—“I’d wager half my money that you’ve mapped out double that. What has you so nervous?”

  Quil’s jaw was set as he surveyed the camp again before fixing his cat eyes on Sirsha. “I know you have to kill or capture that monster down there to satisfy the oath to Elias,” he said. “But J’yan told me if someone else kills her, your blood oath dissolves. It’s the payment you don’t get.”

  Sirsha regarded him askance. “I need the payment, prince.”

  “You think you can do this alone,” Quil said, and Sirsha didn’t bother contradicting him because he’d give her sad eyes for lying. “Let R’zwana and J’yan help you.”

  “J’yan will get me in, and R’z—”

  “I’m talking about the killing, Sirsh,” Quil said. “Don’t go in there alone because of the money. If Elias doesn’t fulfill your payment, I will. I’ll give you double. Triple. Whatever you want. Just—don’t face her alone.”

  “Must be nice to have so much money that you can—”

  He lifted a hand to her face with such tenderness that she fell silent. Her eyes stung because that was not at all how someone should look at you if your relationship was meaningless, and now their oath coin was burning, damn him—

  “Please, Sirsha.” Skies, she loved how he said her name. “Care about yourself as much as you care about those you love. As much as—as we care about you.”

  Behind them, R’zwana chuffed like a horse. “Are we going down there?” she asked. “Or shall we say goodbye for three hours?”

  Quil shot her a glare and rose. Sirsha grabbed his hand, driven by a sudden fear that she wouldn’t see him again. You’ll have to part eventually, she reminded herself. He’s not for you. Nor you for him. Her skin went cold at the thought.

  She stopped herself from saying something she would regret. “Don’t die, prince.” Her voice sounded harsher than she’d meant it to.

  His dimple flashed as he brought her wrist to his lips in a swift kiss that she wished didn’t light her every nerve ending on fire. Then he was gone, disappearing through the grasses and into the maw of the enemy.

  Sirsha turned to her sister, irritated that Quil had figured out her intention: to give R’z the slip and kill the monster alone.

  But now, because she was a fool with a soft spot for broad-shouldered Martials with talented lips, Sirsha had to rethink her plan.

  “Where is the killer?” R’zwana asked. “You haven’t said, and I’m starting to suspect you don’t want me to know.”

  “You’re losing your magic,” Sirsha said, because she needed something to hold over her sister. R’z turned on J’yan, practically frothing at the mouth.

  “Don’t growl at him,” Sirsha said. “I figured it out on my own.”

  “Listen to her, R’z, for once in your life,” J’yan said. “She’s not the enemy.”

  “Ma doesn’t know, or you wouldn’t still be Raan-Ruku.” Sirsha ignored the twinge of guilt she felt at the helplessness washing over R’z’s face. “So, here’s how it works from now on. I’ll tell you what to do. You’ll do it. And after we kill this murderer, sister, you’ll never hunt me again. Understood?”

  R’zwana gnashed her teeth, a deeply unpleasant sound. But then, thankfully, she nodded. J’yan sighed quietly, as relieved as Sirsha.

  “I know you can’t track,” Sirsha said. “Can you bind?”

  “It’s only the tracking magic that’s faded,” R’zwana muttered. “I’m not— I’m still not as strong a binder as you.”

  “You’re stronger together,” J’yan said. “You always have been, much as that might annoy you.” He turned to Sirsha. “What’s the plan?”

  * * *

  They waited until full night to approach the camp from the west. As of yet, no alarm sounded—Quil hadn’t reached the Tel Ilessi.

  The narrow lanes were poorly lit, which made infiltration easier. But not easy, by any stretch. Soldiers patrolled, ate, cooked, trained, chatted, argued. They were everywhere, with scores of wind-wielding pilots among them. While Sirsha didn’t doubt she could bind them easily, the camp was crowded enough that they’d have been discovered a dozen times over without J’yan hiding their passing.

  As they penetrated deeper, Sirsha felt the killer. But her presence was subdued. Quiet. Sirsha saw a distortion in the earth ahead of her. She awaits you, the earth spoke. Beware. Sirsha kept moving east, the disparate strands of the trail coalescing, thick and viscous like an ooze in her mind, leading to the far side of the camp.

  Behind her, R’zwana gasped.

  Ahead, in the shadows of a low hill and past a row of supply wagons, a lone canvas tent hunched. No bigger than the rest. Yet it was set apart. Sirsha crouched amid a stack of crates, watching. There were no guards. No one entering or leaving. The Kegari passing the tent avoided even looking at it, giving it a wide berth.

  Death. Pain. Unnatural. It churns, it eats, it is never satisfied. The earth whispered the words, as if frightened. A spike of terror lanced through Sirsha’s body at the way the earth was damaged here, twisted. The natural magic that lay like a thin web over all things sagged brokenly, as if shredded by a rabid animal.

  R’zwana stared at the tent like it was poison. “I can feel it.”

  “It’s a trap,” J’yan warned, and even he was affected, the freckles standing out starkly on his pale skin. “Remember that, and we can figure our way out of it.”

  Sirsha nodded. “Wait for my signal.”

  As she flitted through the camp, mud squelching beneath her boots, she touched Elias’s oath coin and spoke to the elements. Be with me. They hummed back in response, a tremor only her bones could feel. Before her instinct told her to run as far and fast as possible from the tent, she walked through its flaps.

  Within, it was bright and cheery, weirdly at odds with the oppressive feel of the place. There was a thin bedroll on a raised wooden cot. A finely carved Thafwan chair and table in one corner, and thick rugs on the floor instead of cold dirt. The brazier in the center of the tent crackled, the coals within blasting heat into the space. There was even a mirror in one corner.

  For all its comforts, the tent was empty. Yet Sirsha could feel something oily and slick. Something watchful.

  The tinkle of coins alerted her to the killer’s presence, but Sirsha didn’t turn, only looked up into the mirror to see her lurking. Sirsha’s skin broke out in goose bumps. The creature had again taken the form of her mother, proud-faced and strong, fully coined. Every inch the Raani. Except for that hungry, too-wide gaze that did not belong on the face of any human.

  Sirsha felt repulsed, like she needed to crawl out of her own skin. She wanted to murder the monster at that moment. Wrap magic around her so tight that she choked on it and died, as Loli Temba had died.

  “S’rsha Inashi-fa.” The killer bowed low. “I longed to look upon you again.”

  Hearing her full name in her mother’s voice almost made Sirsha forget why she was here.

  Bind her. She is a horror.

  The elements brought her back to herself, and Sirsha turned to face the killer, not bothering to hide her disgust. “You knew I’d be coming and you didn’t make me any tea? You’ve clearly never met my mother.”

  She plopped down on one of the seats and gestured to the other. “Join me?”

  The monster cocked her head—something Sirsha’s mother had never done in her life, and Sirsha wondered where she had learned that trick. From another human perhaps.

  “Tell me your name,” Sirsha said. “I’m sick of calling you that infernal murderer. It’s tedious.”

  “You may call me Mother Div, Holy Cleric and Vessel of the Fount.”

  “I see that we have philosophical differences about the meaning of the word holy, so I’ll call you Div. Or maybe Detestable Div, if I’m annoyed. Why are you stuck in here, then?” Sirsha leaned back, drawing on years of practiced nonchalance, even as she tried to get a read on the creature, to figure out how she would bind her. “I mean, it could be worse. I’ve been sleeping on rocks and twigs for the past two months because of you. But a creature of your…range should have better accommodations, no?”

  “My range has been limited these past two weeks.”

  Skies, what a trick. Div really did sound exactly like the Raani. Gently, so gently that the creature couldn’t possibly notice, Sirsha probed the earth.

  The earth shriveled away. Bind, it said. Bind her, child, or run.

  Sirsha swallowed, throat suddenly dry. “That must be unpleasant for a being such as yourself. Used to roaming the countryside, murdering whatever poor sap you happen across.”

  As Sirsha spoke, she reached for the binding magic she’d ignored for eight years. Emotion exerted on an element. In this case, the element was magic itself. She drew on it, casting it out like a lasso until it was a snug, glowing chain around Div’s neck. Then, with a surge of satisfaction, Sirsha yanked. She allowed herself to smile, for she knew the strength of her own magic. It was firm and unyielding—a yoke Div couldn’t break. Sirsha wouldn’t need J’yan and R’zwana after all.

  Div looked down, bemused.

  “Tell me, child. Did you truly believe you could chain me?”

  An odd sound, a popping in Sirsha’s mind, as if she’d fallen from a great height. Sirsha’s power stretched taut before streaming away from her. Something was yanking it free, devouring it.