Author: David Estes
Date: 2022-10-25 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Fiction
Description: Tarkosi Terelta is a nobody. A nobody who will save his world from demons and the hellfire they bring. The third-born of a shamed family, Tarkosi's lot in life is to spend his days as a worker, feeding temperamental lancewings under a harsh master. His days in the bloodwood city of Shal Gara are full of drudgery, tedium, and pain, his own ambitions cast aside in the name of order. That is until demons from a broken world invade the forest realm of The Swathe, and an accident born of violence and dark magic intertwines Tarkosi’s fate with the greatest among them. Forced onto the frontlines of a
Publisher: Wraithmarked Creative, LLC

Demon’s

Reign

The Bloodwood Saga

Book One

Ben Galley & David Estes

DEMON’S REIGN

Book One of The Bloodwood Saga

Copyright © 2022 by Ben Galley & David Estes. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product
of the author’s imagination or used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locals,
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this
publication can be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
without expressed permission from the author.

Editor: Taya Latham

Cover Illustration: Mansik Yang

Cover Design and Interior Layout: STK•Kreations

Art Direction: Bryce O'Connor

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-955252-33-1

Worldwide Rights

1st Edition

Published by Wraithmarked Creative, LLC
www.wraithmarked.com

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Epilogue

Part One

1

Kindling

The first-born shall be the heir.

The second-born the warrior.

The third-born blessed as workers.

The fourth-born owed to the scholars.

The fifth-born to become a healer.

The sixth-born will forever wander.

Those with the gods’ gift for the sorcers.

These shall be the seven tribes of the Swathe.

THE BLOODLAWS, FIRST WRITTEN IN 1236

There was no good day to be executed.

“The sky ain’t right,” Juraxi said as he struggled against the rope bonds tied tight and rough around his wrists.

No answer came from any of his captors. Big Thatch shook out the black-dyed mosscloth sack before him. Easier to scoop up his decapitated head afterwards without messing up their gloves, Juraxi supposed. He shuffled nervously in his white prisoner’s tunic.

It was likely a way of making the most of his neck in its last moments, but Juraxi furiously bobbed his head to the midday sky once more, bruised purple and yellow at its mountain-clawed edges. The sun was at its highest, and although it roasted his skin, there seemed a faint gauze across it.

“See? Looks like an ill omen to me. Maybe we should choose another day,” Juraxi urged, blinking sweat from his eye.

Superstition got the better of Swik, the greenest, skinny wretch of the three. He was a sapling with a mop of rare and unruly flaxen hair. Juraxi had a bet placed in his mind that the boy would hurl before the sword came down.

“He ain’t wrong, Igran. Look at it,” Swik muttered. “Since when ’ave you ever seen the sky like that?”

The third and oldest of the executioners stabbed his huge, obsidian sword into the loam. The black, half-moon blade had been freshly sharpened. He took some time adjusting his polished warder’s uniform of leafleather scales. The man never let even a speck of dust alight on his colours if he could help it.

“He dies today. Just like the higher ranks ordered,” Igran said. His bushy brows were the only hair his face held on to. They were furrowed as he examined the sky. “Besides, which of the Three Gods would bother to complain at the death of this murdering sack of cowardice?” Igran chuckled, exposing amber teeth.

If the sky bothered the lump of fat and muscle they called Big Thatch, the man didn’t show it. He came at Juraxi with the opening of the sack stretched wide like toothless jaws.

“Last words before the sack, Thatch. Bleeding trees. How many times must I tell you?” Igran cursed him.

The oaf took back his eager steps and scratched at the fringes of his shorn, greying hair. If he had a tail, it would be wagging profusely, as if he were a barkwolf pup perched at a wrangler’s elbow, waiting for scraps.

Juraxi sniffed the air. Brushwood and ash. He looked up and down the edges of the immense forest looming behind them. It was no smell of Firstwatch. There must have been travellers on the Scorchroad, camping downwind and late to breaking their fasts.

The Scorch had never failed to enthral him. It was a view worth making his last. As black and featureless as the Swathe was emerald green and bursting with life, the burned wasteland stretched as far east as the eye could see and mountains allowed. Ridges of red-rusted iron zigzagged across the dead earth until they culminated in a sharp and vertical protrusion of obsidian a hundred feet high. Kī Raxa’s Blade was no bigger than a thumb at this distance.

Juraxi had always thought the rocks resembled the shattered stump of a tree rather than a blade. Others saw claws or even a crown. The children of Firstwatch and the surrounding towns dared each other to touch its broken fragments spread across the plain. Juraxi had played such games and had never managed the nerve to lay hands on the Blade. Nobody from the Swathe but the metal and stone miners dared venture further than the spur of obsidian, for beyond was the domain of the Scorchfolk. Bandits, marauders, and warlords, all.

The thin barrier they called the Loamsedge was the only separation that stood against the Scorch: a mile-wide scrubland prone to scavengers and the chosen workplace of Firstwatch’s executioners. It hugged the forest’s edge, running along the meandering, endless wall of foliage and trees like a frayed hem of a coat.

“Go on then, out with it,” Igran intruded on Juraxi’s thoughts. “Have your last words. Pray, if you wish.”

As Juraxi drank in the view one final time, he pondered what poignant words would define his unremarkable life. When he found none, he blew his sweaty locks from his face and decided to try one last time to save his worthless skin. “I’m innocent, and I swear it on the Three and all their spirits. You know the curse of killing an innocent man, right? You could simply let me go, you know. I’ll walk the Loamsedge. I’ll even head east into the Scorch, if that’s what it takes. I promise you’ll never see me again,” Juraxi said.

Igran wrinkled his nose. “You fancy letting him go, Thatch? Bleeding trees. You can’t even remember when you last shat, can you? And you, Swik?”

The mention of curses had got the skinny lad flapping his jaw. His eyes had to be dragged from the strange sky. “Er…”

“No, is the answer, Juraxi,” snapped Igran. “If we don’t come back with your head for the matriarch, it’ll be us out here on the Loamsedge kneeling before the sword. You think we’re fools, you filth?”

Juraxi’s pleading turned to begging. “You could say I ran. Escaped you somehow!”

Igran looked bored of his whining, far more interested in a seed stuck between his teeth. Juraxi could see the offending pip, black amid the pipe-smoke yellow.

“Any better last words?” asked Igran.

Juraxi tensed against his ropes once more. “I didn’t kill her. It was that accursed husband of hers, I tell you. He tried to slice my throat just the same, but I fought him off. It was too late for… I didn’t kill her,” he hissed. He didn’t favour the way his voice cracked.

The black sack shut out the daylight and conveniently hid his sob. Thatch shoved Juraxi’s head down and roughly exposed the skin of his nape. He was indifferent enough to thump Juraxi on the back and belch as he thumped away. The mocking from an oaf of his degree was vinegar to a wound.

Igran’s voice came close for a moment. “I don’t rightly care who you killed and why. You betrayed your marks, your tribe, and your bloodwood by taking innocent lives.”

Juraxi’s panic wanted to protest, but he bit his tongue between his teeth and chose different words. “See they treat my mother and father well,” he told Igran. “Don’t punish them for my sins.”

By the sound of it, the old man finally spat the seed from his blistered lips and gave a kick to the leather-clad wretch beside him. “Read him the rites, Swik.”

Swik commenced reading aloud in his pipe-reed of a voice. The ancient words counted the precious and fleeting final moments of Juraxi’s life.

“May the Three Gods of sun and soil and rain have mercy on your soul…”

Dry grass crunched as Igran widened his stance. A shake took up residence in Juraxi’s limbs. No matter how he tensed, he couldn’t deny it. Every grisly tale he had heard of the executioner’s blade taking a dozen swings rushed through his mind.

“…may your body feed the forest that fed you…”

Juraxi heard the grunt of the heavy blade being lifted. Thatch’s meaty and unbearably warm hands pushed against his back to keep him still. Every muscle in Juraxi’s body seized up in expectation of the blade at any moment.

“…and we consecrate you to the spirits of sap and nectra, of the loam, the bark, the root, in honour of the—”

A deep voice cut Swik off.

“What in the Six Hells is that?” It was always shocking to hear Thatch speak. No more so than now.

Juraxi almost fell backwards as Thatch gave up the pressure on his spine. Relief drowned him. “What’s going on?” he shouted through the sweltering sack.

Nobody answered him. All Juraxi heard was Igran whispering in what sounded like horror. The sword thumped to the earth near his knee.

“No, no, no. That ain’t right. That ain’t right at all!” he croaked, the old man’s half-toothless mouth audibly dry. “Get your unwashed arses on the path back to Firstwatch! Now!”

“W—what’s happening?” Swik stammered.

“Now, Swik!”

By the sound of boots scattering on scrubland, it seemed Igran was already running. Thatch too. Swik wasted no time dashing after them. The idiot had the gall to mumble an apology to Juraxi before sprinting away.

“You can’t just leave me here!” hollered Juraxi.

A deep, earth-trembling boom shattered the silence.

“Bleeding trees!” he cursed.

Spitting and seething, Juraxi felt for Igran’s heavy blade behind him. Cutting his hands and wrists more than once, he slipped the rope under the hook of the obsidian sword and began to slice. It took far too long and a dozen more injuries before he was able to free himself and drag the sack from his head. Smearing blood and sweat across his face, he rubbed his eyes to ensure they were indeed working.

To a rending rumble, the Kī Raxa’s Blade was starting to collapse at its base. Shards of obsidian likely twice Juraxi’s height exploded into the air as it tilted, teetered, and then crumbled. It took a few moments for the thunder of its fall to reach him, and with it came a foul stench. It washed over the Loamsedge, and all Juraxi could taste on his tongue was bitter ash. The cold breeze that normally seeped timidly from the Scorch became a forceful, hot wind. Behind him, the smaller trees at the very edge of the Swathe recoiled. Clouds of scattered leaves arose with scores of birds taking flight.

It was then Juraxi saw it: the disk of the sun bore a wound on one side. To his panic and confusion, darkness had begun to carve away its light. It was indeed an omen, and a fell one at that. The sun goddess herself was beset by darkness.

Juraxi frantically wiped blood across his white jerkin before he saw the ropes around his legs. Arms windmilling, legs wobbling yet urgent, Juraxi sprinted for the safety of the Swathe.

“Father! Mother!” he yelled in dread.

The path to Firstwatch was a tunnel carved through tangled foliage and shored up by the walls the workers liked to weave out of ironpith and narin saplings. Filled with gloom between the patches of candlevines, the path was wide enough for three wagons abreast and bored straight for the bloodwood.

Juraxi pelted along the bark-chip path like a man with jaws gnashing at his heels. Even when he passed Swik, who rocked back and forth nursing a sideways ankle, he did not stop. Crime and punishment be damned, he told himself. He was no murderer in the first place.

A journey that had taken an hour shambling in rope shackles was a blur to Juraxi’s panicked mind. Though the bark and scattered rocks cut his bare feet, he persevered until he spied the scarlet colour of Firstwatch’s leaves dominating the rest of the forest. Like all bloodwoods, it was a giant amongst ordinary trees. Firstwatch was a sapling by all rights, barely grown at a thousand feet from root to crown, and yet already it stretched triple the height of the Loamsedge canopy. The more ancient bloodwoods of the west, deeper into the Swathe, were said to rival mountains in height.

The town that called it home was one giant watchtower. The timber buildings of Firstwatch spiralled around the bloodwood’s colossal bronze trunk and sprouted onto boughs broad enough to support a web of streets and leafroads. Those roads were already abuzz with runners sprinting between hand-carts and citizens. The drums of the high towers were already pounding at the sight of the fading sun.

Thatch and Igran were ahead, dragging their heels with exhaustion and yelling to the warders and warriors perched in basket-like platforms hanging from Firstwatch’s branches.

“Summon all the warriors! All the sorcers!” Igran was yelling, doused with fear-sweat.

“Sound the alarm!” Thatch barked breathlessly.

The confused shouts rang down. “What news!”

“Is it marauders?”

“Fetch everyone! There’s an ill omen in the skies! The Blade has fallen!” Igran yelled as he pointed madly at the sun between the branches. Juraxi felt his knees weaken as he stared. He barely needed to shield his face. A dark maw had already swallowed half of the sun and was swiftly devouring the rest. An early evening was setting over Firstwatch.

The uproar spread like a potent stench. Warriors scrambled up rope ladders or sprinted across the loam to Firstwatch’s spiral tower. Citizens either cowered in terror or staggered about, bewildered and fearful.

Juraxi caught the glint of a lancewing and its rider. The bird sped through the treetops in stomach-churning manoeuvres until it disappeared beyond the canopy. Its iridescent wings sent leaves spinning to the forest floor.

“Oi!” came a holler from Thatch. He had a finger levelled at Juraxi and he was gaining speed.

“Leave off, you fool!” Juraxi howled back at him. The man was a barrel-shaped lump, but a disconcertingly fast lump.

Juraxi was not headed for the bloodwood but for the small ring-shaped village gathered around the giant trunk. Thatch cottages and huts blistered the tree’s foundations, squatting under or perching atop the root arches that spread far and wide. Smoke from cooking pits and crafters gave the tree a hazy halo. Candlevines, thinking it was dusk, were already blossoming across rooftops and up the spiral tower.

The early gloom had drawn dozens from their doors. Curious heads poked from every window. The fear was spreading quickly. One woman as grey as endseason clutched at her chest and threw herself down upon the loam, shrieking as if she knew what the omen meant.

Thatch had somehow overturned a wagon and was currently entangled with a shocked and injured merchant. Juraxi ran only harder, dodging a gang of carpenters hauling planks and tools. He had spied his father’s hut. Lungs aflame, he hurtled towards it, too close to halt now.

Those around him had different ideas. The shout pierced his soul.

“It’s the murderer! Juraxi!”

Less than twenty paces from his father’s door, a pole swung from nowhere and hammered into his gut. Juraxi flipped over it to land in a heap in the dirt. The pole prodded at him, trying to keep him from getting up. Bystanders descended on him, yelling as they sought to restrain him.

“The matriarch sentenced him to death!”

“He must have escaped! Three Gods, look at the blood on his hands and cloth!”

Juraxi’s head was spinning but he fought like a madman to be free. Rough fingers had laid claim to his leg. “Get off me, you idiots! Have you not seen the sky?”

“Juraxi!”

The utterance of his name in his mother’s shrill voice cut through the tumult like a blade through cloth. Between the tangle of flailing limbs, Juraxi saw her standing in a doorway with Father clinging to her arm, his clouded eyes wide and searching. His mother’s tear-crimson gaze was already too much to bear. She stared only at the bloody hands and cuts the sword had given him.

“What have you done now, Juraxi?” she cried out.

Juraxi had been pinned by three men. His face was in the dirt and limbs spreadeagled. All he could do was scream out, gaze locked on his mother. “No, Mother! I… Look at the sky! Something’s happening in the Scorch, like the stories you once told me!”

The only warning was a fleeting spark, sputtering in mid-air amongst the crowds. The shockwave that followed moments later ripped the air from Juraxi’s lungs.

The pressure crushed him into the earth. Juraxi swore he heard his skull crack. A scorching heat seared the side of his face not shoved to the dirt. In the blur of his one useful eye, he saw his captors severed just below their shoulders by an invisible blade of force that missed Juraxi by inches. Boiling blood rained.

The shockwave spread outwards in a flat disk of fire, halving or blasting apart anything it came into contact with. Flames burst into life wherever the destruction spread. Houses were reduced to splinters. Juraxi saw his mother and father disappear in a hail of debris, their screams cut viciously short.

The disk was on the verge of reaching Firstwatch’s roots before it abruptly held fast. Howling with pain, Juraxi crawled as fast as he could to safety. The air above his head shook as it grew even hotter. Juraxi’s jerkin and trews were aflame; he could feel it. Black smoke swirled around him as he slithered from beneath the fire.

Somebody seized him by the shoulders and dragged him across the loam. Though it tortured his seared skin, Juraxi had no strength to fight. Choking, he stared aghast at what he had barely escaped: a roiling plane of air barely inches thick but now more than fifty yards wide. Golden fire ringed its edges. An obsidian darkness lay at its centre. Smoke billowed from it, already filling the cavernous space beneath the boughs of Firstwatch. Within the depths of its black swirls, a magma glow began to rise.

“What in bleeding trees is happening?!” bellowed the plump lad dragging at Juraxi’s arms.

“I don’t know!” Juraxi screeched to the stranger, but the answer came without hesitation.

Something deep and mighty groaned as the air crackled once more. There, in the belching darkness, a huge hand forged of charcoal, brandishing brimstone claws, reached from the pit of shadow and ash.

In the soulless eyes that followed, Juraxi saw death stretching for him.

Several hours earlier

(Longsun, 2310th Season)

2

A Black Sun

Only an idiot treads the loam alone. Or at night. Or at all, for that matter. There’s a reason the ancestors left it behind for the safety of the bloodwoods.

FROM A STOLEN SCROLL FOUND IN A SHAL GARA MARKET

Nothing ate quite like a lancewing.

I had worked the nests of the high branches for a month now, and still the birds’ appetites awed me. No sooner had I filled their troughs with sapwater than one of the bastards swooped in to guzzle it down. Their table manners, however, were far from awe-inspiring. They were nothing short of enraging. If it wasn’t the draught from the birds’ violent and rapid wings, or their shrill chirps that tested my ears, it was their spear-like beaks and tongues that knocked the wooden buckets flying.

With a deafening roar, another lancewing skimmed the thatched rooftops of the nests. I reached to shield my face and cursed as sapwater slopped onto my blue worker’s tabard. The bird slid through the air sideways as it turned, its emerald wings a blur that defied the eyes. It hovered momentarily as it surveyed the long network of perches and nests that lined the bloodwood branch. As though the lancewing heard my muttered threats, it chose me, landing swiftly on a perch that sat in my section. It uttered an impatient and piercing trill at finding its trough empty yet again.

I sighed deeply.

Framed in the shafts of light that pierced the gaps of the bloodwood’s high canopy, the lancewing’s plumage shone as though coated in gems. The tight-knit feathers were as green as the carpet of canopy leaves below. A sapphire stripe ran from its ridged crest to its broad, oar-shaped tail. The leafleather saddle upon its back was, for now, empty of rider.

I recognised this lancewing: it was a ravenous bully of a bird. Its great black eyes watched me as I hesitantly approached, poised and pensive. A black tongue darted from its beak, as long and as thin as a whip.

“Don’t you dare. Not again. Not this time,” I told it. “You just wait until I empty it into the trough, you hear?”

As I laid the bucket down to get a better grip on the sugar-encrusted bucket, the lancewing darted for its sapwater and near skewered my arm in the process. Insult to injury, the bastard beat its wings for balance, driving me sliding across the deck. The thin serpent of a tongue made depressingly short work of a bucket it took far too long to fill and carry. It was no wonder the nests had to remain abuzz with nesthands all hours of the sun, from firstglow to lastlight.

The bucket thumped on the wooden deck as the lancewing jostled it. I saw the events unfolding before me. It was barely noon and I had already lost three buckets. I didn’t dare think about my weekly total. I refused to let another one fall because of these winged pests. I could not fail again. Another lost bucket, Headman Karonak had said, and I would be headed to the louse-mines. There were few positions of work more ignoble, more detestable, and lower on the social ladder of Shal Gara than louse-mining. And I should know: I had already tumbled down half the ladder, bouncing from calling to calling as I fell.

Just as I expected, the lancewing reared up, and the bucket caught on the sharp tip of its beak. Failing to grab it, the bucket began to clatter and roll towards the edge of the nest’s platform, where the bloodwood branch ended. Desperate to save it, I sprang into a mad dive, sliding on my backside across the sap-and-shit-smeared deck to seize the bucket before it tumbled into oblivion.

“Bleeding trees!” I yelled as my momentum overtook the bucket. I snagged its handle, but not before my mosscloth shoes skidded into empty space. I felt the firm planks disappear from beneath me.

Sensing my spare hand grate against the nest’s edge, I seized the lip of the deck and held on for all my worth. So it was that I found myself dangling more than half a mile above the loam and lesser canopies, a bucket in one hand and my eyes bulging.

“Bastard birds,” I muttered to myself as I stared inexorably down at the teeming leafroads and branches of the city of Shal Gara below me. They stretched almost to the ground and the hideous loam, hidden by lesser trees and canopies, and I dangled above them like a ripe fruit. Terrifying, of course, but there lay the excitement.

With a snarl of effort, I hurled the bucket above me, got two hands on the deck, and slowly hauled myself back onto solid footing. Rolling to my back, I stared up at the false sky of the scarlet bloodwood leaves and let my lungs heave.

“You all right, Tarko?” one of the nearby nesthands called my name. Boon sounded genuinely concerned. The others smirked behind hands or shook their heads in disappointment, but she stomped forwards and effortlessly shooed the lancewing from its perch.

“As I’ll ever be,” I said, squinting in the rush of air. “Three Gods, that was close.” I nursed the ache in my one arm and cursed the lancewing that still hovered above us, looking innocent as a chick despite the mischief that hid behind those black eyes.

A woman whose arms were thicker than my waist, Boon hauled my light frame upright with ease. She smacked me on the back with such force that all the precious air was driven from my lungs.

“You tit,” she said, talking far too loudly for how closely she stood, as always. “Why didn’t you just let it fall?”

“You heard Headman Karonak earlier, right? He’ll have my skin for a waistcoat if I lose one more bucket,” I replied.

“So you’d rather plummet to your death?”

I wrinkled my nose as I wiped the white shit from my uniform of the blue tabard and mosscloth trews. “It would be better than giving him the satisfaction.” I grinned. Impetuousness was a quick path to trouble, so my sister loved to lecture me, and Boon seemed to agree as she bared her yellow teeth in grimace.

As well as outranking my lowly position as hand, Overseer Boon was my elder. Thirty seasons, or so she had told me, and already her mouth was rotten. She wasn’t the only nesthand who snuck palmfuls of the sapwater. The stuff was highly addictive, or so they whispered. I found the stuff unbearably sweet to the point where I had almost vomited my first try. Boon was always proud to remind me it took some getting used to. I had merely added it to my growing mental list of things I was apparently useless at.

I smeared sweat across my forehead with the back of my hand. “In all honesty, it’s because I can’t bear to fail again. Karonak’s got the louse-mines in mind for me, I tell you. And it’s not just that prospect; I can’t get banned from yet another calling. Sixteen jobs in four seasons is a sure sign of a useless worker, and at this rate, I’ll end up begging for scraps or banished to the loam. That’s if my mother and sister don’t strangle me first.”

Boon grumbled incoherently as she guided me back to the nests: tall, skinny triangles of buildings made from woven leafleather and thatch. Their awnings cast a deeper shade of cool than the canopy above. They remained almost completely empty throughout the day. When the shadows grew long and the sun faded behind the leaves, the nests were promptly stuffed with the feathered nuisances until firstglow arose once more.

“I guess…,” Boon offered with a sigh. “Just be less terrible at this?”

“It’s those bloody birds, Boon. They don’t like me. Either that or it’s these confounded buckets,” I said, knocking my bucket against a railing. “Why don’t we get some pipes or gutters and pour the sapwater in from afar?”

“Deck’s got to stay clear for the lancewings, see. That’s why we’ve got no ropes or skyriser platforms here. Perches, buckets, and troughs is the way hands have always done it. I told you: the lancewings need a while to trust a new hand. They got good eyes for faces and an even better sense for what’s in your skull. Takes their lancers seasons to build a bond strong enough to ride them.”

I nodded while I absently watched two lancewings duel overhead between the bloodwood leaves. The birds spiralled around each other while simultaneously careening between lesser branches. It was stomach-clenching to watch. How the lancer riders even stayed affixed to their saddles, never mind expertly wielding long wooden glaives, was baffling. The staccato crack of their blades was audible over the drone of wings and of Shal Gara around us. Within moments, they had disappeared into the daylight beyond the leaves.

“Is that what makes the lancers such arrogant bastards?” I narrowed my eyes.

“Told you before, Tarko: you sound jealous when you talk like that. Especially to the other nesthands who don’t know you like I’ve come to.”

Boon did not know me. A bitter handful of weeks was not time enough to know somebody, but Boon was constantly boasting how easily she saw to the heart of others. And as much as it had come to irritate me, she was most often right.

“Maybe I am jealous,” I admitted, squinting my eyes. “That’s because it could have been me. Should have been.”

“Psh.”

“Not a lancer, but I could have been a sorcer. That’s obvious to see.” I prodded at the tattoo across my left brow, eyelid, and cheek. It was the indelible mark of a mistake made when I was but five seasons old: the ornate black dagger blade symbol of the sorcer tribe. It was crossed out at its tip by another tattoo barely three days older. The line broke the blade at an angle, running along the ridge of my cheekbone. “I could have been a sorcer.”

“A sorcer?”

I nodded fiercely. “I bet I would have wielded magic with the best of them.”

Boon’s laugh was cruel. After she set her bucket down beneath the nearby vat of sapwater and punished its handle, she pointed a chubby finger at my tattoo and almost blinded me in the process.

“Yeah, but you ain’t, Tarko. They explicitly marked you as one without the gods’ magic, Tarko. In your next life, maybe, but for now you’re a third-born son just like I’m a third-born daughter. Just like every one of these nesthands is a third-born. We don’t drink nectra and cast magic. We don’t ride lancewings. We’re not scholars or bone-fixers. We’re workers, and we toil for the better of our bloodwood. That’s all the Bloodlaws demand of us, or do I need to remind you yet again, Hand?”

“No, Overseer,” I said, using her formal rank as she had mine, and bit my tongue to keep from saying more. The subject was ever-present, and its ability to cut me after all my seasons was astounding – and deeply annoying.

Boon raised her fists. Not in anger, but to show off the tattoos on the backs of her hands: the simple design of three crossed nails. Each of the Swathe’s seven tribes had their own tattoo. It had been that way for almost ten centuries, ever since some matriarch saw fit to write the Bloodlaws. First-born heirs were marked with a tree on their necks. Sorcers kept to their dagger. The warriors had a sword on their forearms. Third-born workers wore three crossed nails, and I bore the very same tattoos on my hands.

On our right cheekbones were the brands of our ranks within our tribe: simple, straight lines scorched at an angle beneath our eyes. I wore none as a greenhand. Boon wore two. It was simple, yet cunning of the noble-blooded. Any soul in the Swathe could be measured and sorted into hierarchy with a single glance. There was no escaping your place in your tree or tribe.

“Get your mind out of the canopy and stop dreaming. Head down and work on,” Boon said. “That’s our calling.”

I ran a sweaty hand into my locks, dark as obsidian blades, and frowned.

“Better fill your bucket up swift-like. Your wild antics have not gone unnoticed,” Boon advised quietly, nodding down the branch to where something was amiss. Headman Karonak could be spotted – and heard – yelling a path through the crowds of workers. I positioned the bucket under the vat’s tap and grimaced. His presence had the wonderful ability to set any crowd of blue-tabard workers into a frenzy of activity. Not a foot or finger stayed still while Karonak was in view.

The headman came bustling through a herd of nesthands who spared a fleeting moment to smirk in my direction. The tapping of Karonak’s walking cane was an angry drumbeat, and his gaze was set solely on one pair of nesthands in particular. To me, the man had the appearance of a frog stuffed into a wig of grey hair.

“Loitering! Loudmouthing, and no doubt lollygagging!” Karonak barked at Boon and me. “How I detest it!”

I flung my shoulders back and urged the tap to dribble faster.

Boon tried her hardest to stand up for me. “Terelta almost fell, sir. He’s just catching his breath.”

“I witnessed it with my own powers of perception, thank you, Overseer Boon, and that is precisely what has perturbed me!”

Karonak had a way – no, an unfortunate obsession – with long words. I’d become certain it was in effort to hide the old man’s severe lack of importance in the city, like flowers sprinkled upon a lancewing turd. Karonak used his extruded words like weapons, most often combining them with generous amounts of spittle. He wasn’t the only bully in the high ranks of the worker tribe, but he was exceptional at it. A bastard of a man in frog form.

I flinched as a fleck of the man’s saliva struck me square in the forehead. “I was doing all I could to save the bucket, just as you asked me to—”

A thump of Karonak’s cane against the deck silenced me.

“That is not what I requested of you! Should one of my nesthands descend at a rapid pace from this branch and be so unfortunate as to land within the cargo of a merchant or artisan – or gods forbid, the transportation of a noble – whose detestable responsibility do you believe it is to make restitution when you’re inconveniently deceased?”

It took me a moment to translate the man’s tirade. “Er, yours?” I guessed.

“Assuredly! I am responsible for this entire branch, young hand. Five hundred more workers toil here alongside you, and each upholds the veneration I deservedly demand. But not Tarkosi Terelta. No!” Karonak used my full name as if it were an insult. Several other nesthands, busy filling buckets from their identical vats, watched on with broad grins.

“I suspected the other headmen were saddling me with a useless burden when they dispatched you to my nests, and I am vindicated!” Karonak was yelling.

“But you said not to lose any more buckets, sir—” I tried again.

“Not at the expenditure of my pocket, you poltroon! One further blunder, Terelta, and I shall dispose of you so rapidly, you will wish you had fallen.”

Shutting off the tap with a vicious clank, I clutched my bucket and bowed my head. I had worked for more than a dozen headmen and headwomen, and every one of them was the same: they delighted in rolling their shit down the steep hill of superiority. I’d often wondered if it was the same in all seven tribes. Surely the sorcers didn’t have to deal with rotten little men with inferiority issues.

I did what I always did: I pasted a polite smile upon my face and recited the words I had learned to say. I stared at the three lines of a headman’s rank on Karonak’s cheek as I spoke. “Thank you for the lesson, sir.”

Once Karonak was done glowering and had found another nesthand to eloquently howl at, I stared at the false scarlet sky to calm me down.

“Tell me, Boon. In all your seasons—”

“You mind your tongue.”

“—have you ever found a calling where you’re not cursed if you do and cursed if you don’t? Because I sure haven’t.”

“Never had that problem, Tarko!” Boon remarked cheerily. “Been here almost fifteen seasons now. You? You walk too tall, and you don’t take enough care. Just like the rest of us, before we learned our place in the way of things. Sooner you learn yours, sooner you’ll feel happier with your lot. You’ll be part of the foliage like the rest of us. You’ll understand eventually.”

And there they were: the four words I had come to loathe. You will understand eventually. It was a promise idly and freely offered and yet broken by every job I’d held. I did not want to understand. The notion sounded hideous to me, no matter how many times I heard third-born daughters and sons bray about the grand call to fit within society. To follow the Bloodlaws for the glory of order. It made me feel like a dull rock amongst gems, out of place. I grumbled under my breath as I eyed the two lancewings that had just alighted on the perches.

“You’re up, Terelta! Try not to die this time,” yelled a grinning nesthand on the neighbouring stretch of deck. Boon and I hustled forwards. Sugary sap slopped down my arms. Boon didn’t wet the deck with a single drop.

“I’ll say it again,” she lectured, “you’ve got to be quick on your feet. Assertive! Don’t be afraid of the lancewings. They’re skittish, so plan for that as well as use it. Fill the trough and move away, and don’t bloody let go of the bucket.”

I stared at my lancewing, failing to admire its dazzling colours. It was the hungry look in its eye that I watched carefully. “No. There’s a better way,” I said with a shake of my head.

“Get those lancewings fed and back in the air!” hollered another overseer.

“What are you doing now, Tarko? By the Six Hells!”

I shut my ears to the shouts and walked determinedly for a knot of rope lying useless on a railing.

“Do your job, greenhand!”

I snatched the rope and lashed it around both my arm and tight around the bucket handle. Dangling one half over my forearm, I marched to the trough. As expected, the lancewing darted for the bucket instead. I held on to it firmly, but the force of the beak dislodged it from my hands. Before the whole bucket of sap could be wasted, I hauled it back to myself, much to the lancewing’s apparent surprise and indignation. The bird thrummed its wings, knocking me back a few steps, but still with my bucket in my arms.

“Fixed it!” I cried.

“Impressive, but you’re still wasting time,” hissed Boon.

“Noble incoming!” came a cry, urging every nesthand in earshot into a rush of activity.

High in the canopies of Shal Gara’s bloodwood, the employ of a nesthand might have seemed glamorous to many, but it was gruelling. Not just in my mind, but in every nesthand’s proud admission. It was a crowded position with little advancement. Any way to be favoured, be noticed, or get above your fellow hands was executed swiftly and without mercy. That was why a not-so-subtle battle raged over who got to tend the finest lancewings when they called at the nests.

I was pushed to the deck by an overseer younger than I was in the rush to tend this most prized specimen of lancewings. Its shadow flitted over me, not to mention a gust of air that made me shield my face. The bird’s golden wings had a deeper, growling tone, not to mention that it was accompanied by four other birds in arrow formation. Much larger than its kin, the noble’s lancewing was a fiery amber in colour. It had a throat of blue so iridescent I felt as though I stared into a pool of water.

“I swear all I’ve done these past weeks is pick you up off the deck,” complained Boon. “Come on! Make yourself useful.”

Whether it was her muscle, her ample size, or the dark threats she uttered to her fellow nesthands, somehow Boon cut through the crowds. She made enough room that I could sneakily follow in her wake. Others noticed all the same.

“Him, Boon?” they asked.

“He’ll embarrass us all!”

“Watch out, he might just end up knocking the noble from the nests!”

The ability to ignore people had become somewhat of a power of mine. I was more interested in watching the birds land in one neat arrowhead around their leader. Judging by their beaked masks, the riders were warriors of lancer rank, but the noble in charge was of much higher standing. Around his neck hung a large eagle’s feather, the symbol of an eagleborn of the warrior tribe. It was the highest position a second-born could ever hope to attain without worming into the matriarch’s court as one of her seven sages.

This eagleborn was clad in fine silver and hardened leafleather armour from his boots to his feather-plumed helmet, yellow as the sun goddess. A red-painted mask of ironpith wood covered his face, carved like an eagle’s beak mid-snarl. The man’s glaive was as long as he was tall and studded with jagged razors of obsidian.

I peered, not in fascination or admiration, but in scrutiny. I could not yet see the family glyph of his breastplate, but the noble seemed worryingly familiar.

The man removed his mask and helmet in one fluid motion, and in that moment my suspicions were confirmed. I found the heat rising in my face. My jaw clicked as my teeth clenched in unease. The telltale cascade of bloodwood-red hair was known throughout the city.

“Wine!” yelled Haidak Baran as he swaggered across the wooden deck. The swarming hands shrank back in respect and awe. His scarlet eyes of noble blood scanned the ranks of nesthands. The brands of his warrior rank were stark on his right cheek. Six for an eagleborn. Only the second-born and sorcer tribes had six ranks. The rest of us lowly tribes had to be content with three.

Haidak was barely five seasons older than I was, and already he was a hero amongst the warrior tribe, a frequent cause of racing hearts, and the son of a sage. Though he was a second-born, a malady had taken his older sister to the Six Heavens seasons ago, and Haidak had been given the role of first-born and heir to the illustrious Baran family. He wore the tattoos of both tribes. The curling branches of a black tree could be glimpsed on his throat. Such were the perks of having a father who sat on the matriarch’s court.

The nesthands worked in their separate crews, several workers to each of the lancewings. Sapwater spilled in their eagerness. Not only did they keep the troughs topped up, but once all the riders had dismounted, they readjusted their saddles and preened the birds’ metallic feathers with moss brushes. Platters of small insects were brought forth and proffered as if in prayer. The sun goddess’ form was a lancewing, after all. The birds attacked the platters with their whip tongues.

“By the loam, bring me wine!” Haidak snapped.

It was Karonak himself who escorted the painted clay bottle of wine across the branch to the shining Haidak. His grovelling was loud and clear.

“Haidak Baran! It is always the most splendid of days when you select to honour our nests with your presence.”

I watched Haidak brush his infernal hair from his face while staring flatly at the headman. He swiped the clay bottle from Karonak’s hand, threw his head back, and poured wine liberally into his mouth. Leaving the blue liquid to dribble down his neck and beneath his armour, Haidak held out the flask to one of his lancers. The man reached, but not before the eagleborn dropped it to the deck. The clay smashed and wine spattered several nesthands as Haidak laughed.

Pride was a poison, or so I believed. It turned a mind against the shared pleasures of one’s fellow man. A man like Haidak only found pleasure in the mockery and downfall of others. I didn’t need to have Boon’s knack for insight to see that. And not to forget: he was the perfect copy of his father, the first-born Sage Kol Baran. Two men could be held responsible for the downfall of the Terelta family. One of them was Kol Baran. The other man had been my own father.

Haidak perused the crowds of nesthands, every one of which was agog at either his armour or the huge lancewing behind him. Which, as it happened, had already drained its trough.

“More sap!” came the cry, and buckets came running through the crowd. Boon raised her hand and whistled, and before I knew it, I had one thrust into my arms.

“Go, greenhand!” Boon elbowed me forwards.

“Let another,” I tried to protest, but a shove from the line slopped sapwater over the deck. “Bleeding trees,” I muttered as I accidentally caught Haidak’s eye. I ran alongside Boon, trying to use her for cover. These lancewings were thankfully calmer than the others. This time, I had no trouble emptying the bucket into the trough.

“See?” Boon said. “Confidence.”

My slumped shoulders reflected no such accomplishment. I had turned to see the eagleborn barring our way. Haidak’s glaive teetered back and forth in his hand.

“If it isn’t Tarkosi Terelta!” Haidak brayed with amusement.

Mistaken jealousy turned the heads of the crowd to me. I briefly contemplated whether dashing over the edge of the branch might have been preferable. I found myself hating tradition instead. A higher rank had spoken to me directly, and that meant I was now forced to bow my head.

“What a displeasure to find you here,” continued Haidak. “Last I saw of you, you were trying to be a weaver, or was it a cook? Or armourer? Farmer? Bah, I forget. Now I see they have sent you up here to serve sapwater to my lancewings. My my, what kind of worker are you that you aren’t good enough for a single calling?”

Snickers and whispers of gossip spread through the nesthands.

And I wonder why that is, Eagleborn Baran. I wanted desperately to say the words, but my lips were sealed too tight.

Haidak clicked his gloved fingers. “Headman Karonak! I shan’t have my lancewings tended by such useless filth as this.” He pointed straight at me.

Karonak was quick to remedy the situation. “Return to your nest this instant, Terelta!”

I did so with fire in my face and jaw bunched. I didn’t blame Boon for trailing several yards behind. I wouldn’t have wanted to be seen with me, either.

“Filth, he called you. What did you do to him?” asked Boon.

“Me?” I glared. “I didn’t do a thing except get born into the wrong family. And that’s a long story for another day.”

“Sap!” yelled another overseer.

“Looks like you’re up, Boon,” I said.

“I…”

“Terelta!” Karonak had not wasted any time coming to find me. There was no audience around us this time, just Boon and a couple of elderly hands taking breaks in the nests. Karonak tapped his cane at the ground before my feet. “I have no curiosity for how exactly you affronted one of the finest families in Shal Gara, but I will not have your transgressions tarnishing the proud performance of my nests!”

I knew where this conversation was headed. I felt the frustration blooming in my chest. This situation had happened so many times it was now a rehearsal. The only comfort I could grasp in these moments was the fact that I could blame my father. My father had seen to it that his stench followed my family long after his death. It never made my continuing fall from grace any easier, but at least I could blame him instead of my own impetuousness.

Knowing what was coming next, I was reaching to remove my nesthand’s tabard when a piercing note struck the nests quiet. It stole the words poised on Karonak’s tongue. He and Boon turned sharply to look down the branch. Another lancewing emitted a similar shriek. Every bird had their beaks angled to the canopy, heads waving back and forth as if studying danger.

A shadow descended across the colossal bloodwood canopy. The shafts of sunlight that fell across the city dimmed. It was barely noticeable at first, but the longer I watched, the more obvious the change became. At first I thought it was a mere cloud-shadow, but the sky I could see was a clear longsun blue. A cold spread as the darkness washed through the whole forest below us. It was barely midday, and yet somehow evening was already falling.

With bellowed orders and a roar of wings, Haidak Baran and his ranks of lancers tore up into the leaves to investigate the strange shadow. Shredded fragments of leaves, errant feathers, and dust snowed in their wake as every nesthand craned their head to the canopy.

“What is it, Boon?” I whispered, somehow afraid to break the tension of the moment.

“I… I don’t know. Headman!” she called to Karonak. “What’s going on?”

Karonak’s lips were moving but nothing was coming out. I watched the slow and wary shake of his head. His eyes, normally shrouded in wrinkles from squinting angrily at anything and everything, were fixed wide. His jowls hung loose.

Around us, the other branches had fallen silent also. The bustle of Shal Gara had turned cautious and muted. Beasts pulling carts and wagons lowed fearfully. Smaller frogs and lizards that called the bloodwood and canopies home shrieked and whistled as the darkness gradually deepened. Bats took flight alongside bewitching flocks of minuscule waif birds. A chill wind stirred the forests. The giant leaves above us shifted solemnly, showing cracks of sky between their red. The sun goddess was at her apex, and like every other soul in the high branches, I stared upwards.

For an infuriating moment I had no idea what the fearful shouts and cries were for, and then I saw it: a creeping black edge eating into the very sun goddess herself. It was fleeting, half-glimpsed between the leaves, yet the icy prickles still ran across the backs of my arms.

Sonorous drums sounded across Shal Gara, prompting further worry. I had only heard those drums once, on the first day of my ninth season. That day, the horns had escorted a new sage to Shal Gara’s ruling court, the Crimson Crown high above us. It had been Haidak’s father, as it happened, and that was nine seasons past.

“Vacate the nests!” Karonak had recovered himself and pounded his cane against the deck. “All of you back to your homes and abodes! Crews of overseers only!”

“What’s happening?” I yelled at the headman. Karonak thoroughly ignored me and began chastising the other gawking nesthands instead.

“Begone, all of you!” he ordered. “Return at firstglow tomorrow!”

The frustration and anger were still cinders in my gut, and so without another thought, I began to push through my fellow workers. Not in panic, not in obedience, but in abject curiosity. I didn’t have a lancewing to fly me upwards, but I knew I needed to see the sun.

“Where are you going, lad?” Boon yelled after me, noticing my head pointed upwards instead of back to my hovel further down the bloodwood.

“I need to see this!”

To the drone of lancewings taking frantic flight from their perches, I muscled through chattering throngs and along the wooden decks towards the trunk of Shal Gara. There, the branch of the bloodwood widened to several hundred feet. Lines of wagons queued to supply the nests with their sapwater. Pandemonium was breaking out as several wagons tried to turn around on the already crowded branch. The hairy orokan harnessed to each wagon yowled and scraped the deck with their long, dull claws. Ignoring the yells and insults, I weaved through them on quick feet.

At the end of the branch, the bloodwood’s trunk soared above me, immovable as a cliff. The daylight was always dimmer below the canopy, but that afternoon the bloodwood shone with the light of blooming candlevines and fireworm lanterns. They too must have thought evening was coming.

The nests sat in the top third of the bloodwood, below where the trunk split into its very topmost branches. The city of Shal Gara spread upwards along every available scrap of wood. This was the high canopy. Here, white-wood mansions hung from the branches like hives, sweeping, tiered fields of maize and vegetables soaked up as much light as they could, and great towers thrust above the leaves. In their midst, clutched between two curling branches, was the Crimson Crown. This was the matriarch’s court, and a building I had long insisted looked like a fattened and upside-down pear. Its scarlet walls were dappled by the broken light.

The spiralling walkways that wrapped around the trunk in great sweeping arcs bustled with comers and goers. To go left took me down the trunk to my own branch. Right took me aloft past a gate of warders and into the highest reaches of the bloodwood, branches where a worker like me was seldom seen. My mosscloth trews, tabard, and tattoos were unmistakeable. Never mind the sporadic and guilty smears of lancewing shit and sapwater across my threads.

Fortunately for me, I couldn’t have hoped for a finer distraction than the darkness swallowing the sun.

I turned right and set foot to the stairs less-worn. With legs long-used to treading stairs and ladders, living life in vertical rather than on the disgusting flat loam of the forest floor, I climbed at a rapid pace. A single glance over my shoulder showed me Boon trying to follow me and failing.

An inexplicable panic was slowly spreading through every branch of Shal Gara. Even the nobles, women and men in fine wormsilk threads, gawped upwards or pelted back to their homes as if they were aflame. Normally they would be staring at the mop-haired worker in their midst, curling their lips and asking the warders to remove me.

Climbing until the trunk started to narrow, I took a junction to a branch that formed one of the pillars of the canopy’s sky. It reached up at a violent angle that was barely walkable. It was a thin branch, only thirty feet wide. Homes of white plaster and polished wood clung to every spare inch of deck.

Rarely had I had the chance to climb so high. I did not look down, or even out from the branch; I walked on with my head fixed forwards. Upwards, to the strange sky. The growing wind shifted the leaves but gave me glimpses only. I had to press on.

On the highest branches, the watchtowers and mansions that reached above the canopy had built their roots. Warders in leafleather scale and bearing obsidian swords guarded their doorways, silently daring me to outstay my welcome while they kept one eye on the sky. The drums were still beating. The sound of raised voices was becoming a constant thunder.

I kept moving until the branch reached its end. There, a leafroad suspended by ropes stretched to another loftier branch. It was already filled with onlookers, and a stout gate guarded by several warders blocked our way and held back a crowd. Tall and lithe as I was, twisting through the packed bodies took nothing but time and some sharp elbows.

I spotted a chance and took it: pushing through the throng to an unguarded spiral of stairs that led up the outside of a mishmash of spherical buildings.

“Get down, worker scum!” The shout followed me. Somebody was giving chase. I could hear the stream of threats, but I was already too far up the spiral to turn back now.

When the stairs became nothing but a rickety ladder to a rooftop, I climbed as fast as I dared. Wooden slats shifted under my scrambling cloth shoes. The canopy became tangible, and for the second time in my life, I touched the false sky I had been born beneath. And what was more enticing was that the rooftop, now growing steeper by the yard, ascended above it. Fingers biting into any gap I could find, I broke out into an uninterrupted daylight I had never felt on my skin before.

Below me, endless green Swathe soared in all directions. Crowns and peaks of rusted scarlet betrayed where the bloodwoods grew amongst the lesser forest. The closest was still unfathomable miles to the north. Clouds hid the distant east, but not a blemish besides soaring ravens and vultures spoiled the pure sky. Nothing but air lay before me and the sun.

My breathless awe was short-lived. The cold wind needled my spine as I looked up and witnessed calamity.

The sun goddess had been partially swallowed by a dark void. Like the crescent of the waning moon, a black maw cut into her burning fire and continued to spread. Unnatural shadow lay across the emerald land. I felt my mouth hanging loose, and whatever heat pounded in my face drained. It was instinct that made my heart stutter, not understanding.

A door burst open and footsteps clattered behind me. I turned to see two armoured warders stumble onto the rooftop. Their chase ended abruptly as they froze, staring at the sun as I did.

“Bleeding trees…,” one stammered in whisper.

I had seen all I needed to. I hadn’t a clue what I’d seen, but if there was one thing I trusted in Shal Gara, it was my gut, and it filled me with a sweaty trepidation, like feeling the eyes of a predator on my back.

To the squawking cries of waif birds and parrots rising from the canopy, I swung a foot over the lip of the wooden railing and threw myself to the whims of roof tiles and gravity.

3

Bloodwood Burning

Every child, whether of low or noble birth, shall be tested on the first day of their fifth season for their aptitude in the gods’ gift of magic. Should they be able to withstand the effects of a single drop of nectra, they shall be marked as a sorcer and trained by their elders in the three orders of magic. So stands this law forevermore.

THE SORCER’S EDICT, WRITTEN 1089

The warders had given up on chasing me after half a branch, the fat lumps. Peace was Shal Gara’s greatest treasure, and with little to do but shoo away drunkards, homeless – or the occasional curious worker – warders’ armour was well-known for growing tight with fat bellies.

I glanced back and saw the two men with hands on knees and full of hot breath and insults. I was too preoccupied to laugh at them, and I skipped away between the milling crowds and hopped over railings. My mother would have slapped me blue for such behaviour. Those who called the Swathe home were sure-footed and strong, but still painfully wingless, as I had been resoundingly reminded earlier that morning. This, however, was urgent.

For a branch or two, it felt as though I was going the wrong way. More and more people climbed higher to see the darkness that was trying to swallow the sun. I saw wild eyes turn my way and scrutinise me as if I fled away from something dire.

The unknown coloured minds different hues. As always, those minds of poor constitution or panic were painted with fear. Here and there, I heard claims of doom that rattled my heart. Others seemed sleepily confused, or morbidly curious, or quick to scoff and blame the clouds while they swore at others to get out of their way. I belonged to the quietly terrified.

The daylight was still fading, and the middle branches were easily plunged into murk. The bloodwood was a jealous sort, hoarding all the sunlight for itself even on the brightest days. Deeper into Shal Gara, the city had learned to flourish in gloom. Candlevines grew along every walkway, leafroad, and sweeping stairwell. These, too, had come awake early. Their chrysalis bulbs opened to burn with a soft, yellow glow. Even when picked, their light held on to life for several hours. As I scuttled breathlessly down Shal Gara, I slapped their coarse leaves to make them shut once more.

I raced the darkness and the spreading of dire news. The drums alone had brought almost every citizen to a halt to stare skywards. I’d hoped the shared confusion would calm me, but it only deepened my worry and accelerated my feet. My sister and mother had to be warned. Of what, exactly, I had no idea.

Shal Gara was both the name of the bloodwood and the city that flowed along every crimson bough and every inch of its trunk. Buildings and homes hugged the branches. Leafroads spiralled around the trunk of the tree to connect the sprawl. Where the carpenters allowed, roads and thoroughfares tunnelled into the thick bark of the bloodwood trunk.

Below the high branches and crown of Shal Gara lay the broad midsection of the bloodwood: the Midern. It sat half a mile above the loam, still high above the green canopy of lesser trees. The tangle of city only grew thicker here. Where light could still reach, suspended highfields grew one above the other in thin tiers and tall stacks. Ladders crisscrossed them like stitching on an old coat. Great beards of moss hung from the thickest boughs. Some of it so thick that snail-shell cottages hung from it. Complicated structures suspended from ropes and vines spread around the burls of the mighty tree. Noise poured from these intersections, where bustling markets resided. Rumour had it the merchants would keep selling their wares even if the bloodwood was falling.

I dashed past spoke-like leafroads suspended from almost every branch. They stretched out from Shal Gara into the forest of the Swathe, using treetops for support until they disappeared into the foliage. Those roads forged safe paths to other bloodwoods, like Dorla Sel, the oldest city in the Swathe, or Firstwatch, standing on the Loamsedge. And if you followed them far enough south and north, you would reach the bloodwoods of Stormbeaten and Rasqax, the river-straddling giant. They were far enough away to be myths as far as I was concerned, and normally I stood at the railings, hungering to tread the roads and be free of the Bloodlaws’ shackles. That day, my heart was too busy climbing my throat for me to pay any attention.

My urgency sent me staggering over a handcart that jutted into my path.

“Watch it, whelp!” a fellow worker yelled at me as he tried to catch lizard skins escaping from the cart. I scarpered on.

Shops and food stalls were stacked on every spiralling step of the Midern. Others burrowed into the bark like louse-holes. Some brave and highly intrepid vendors plied their carts up and down the flights all day long to match the flow of workers, warriors, and heirs about their business. Their spoked wheels of wax and rubber feet ticktocked rhythmically on the steps. Today they stood still, their owners craning their necks to the sound of the drums.

I found myself on the north side of Shal Gara’s trunk and winding through a broad road that ringed the tree like a halo. Markets and warehouses occupied the edges, where skyriser platforms on ropes and pulleys went down to the deepest leafroads, tantalisingly close to the loam. With great ease, I ignored the hounding yells of merchants attempting to coax me to their stalls, as if it were any normal day.

“Boy! Boy! Gift for your sweetheart? Or family? Be a dutiful son, now.”

“Crow wings stewed in bakarak!”

“Waif egg for the waif! Boiled and salted. Spiced or jellied!”

“Ticabo berry pie!”

The clueless fools.

A collective gasp accompanied a burst of steam from a kitchen stall. The waft of spiced and boiled insects taunted my stomach and bothered me with a hunger I hadn’t noticed.

The scents attempted to stall me. Upon the counters and tables, the Swathe’s endless bounties were displayed in great rows and piled high. Frog haunches and briskets boiled in sap and their own juices. Gnarled squashes and purple carrots and maize from the highfields. Black and pungent mushrooms from the gloomfarms far below. Meaty orokan tails, loamtoad, and sezal lizard feet roasted on coals, served with the traditional trio of scorching and mouth-tingling venoms. Mosses of rainbow colours, soaked in wines or fried in cakes. Tharantos hatchlings, big as my head. Even slabs of musktooth fish from far territories where deep pools resided between bloodwoods. Between the kitchens, alehouses sat rubbing shoulders with shabby-dressed seedwitches selling tinctures and charms and lucky carvings. I snarled at the distractions and ignored my rumbling belly.

I flew past a broad tunnel and glimpsed a moment of its depths, where lanterns lit a sorry-looking crowd shuffling in both directions, confused by the early evening. The glyphs of the ubiquitous and vital signposts pointed deeper, proclaiming this one of many mines that ran deep into the bloodwood bark. It was a louse-mine, and it made me shudder to see the workers lugging about fat, wriggling insects.

Like many other abodes in the Midern, my home perched on struts above the main thoroughfare. And also like many other buildings, it was more accurately a hovel of wooden panels topped with leaf thatch. A ladder reached from the street to a small hatch in the cottage’s underside. I ducked out of the flow of the crowds and grabbed the worn rungs.

“Home already? Don’t tell me you lost yet another job?” rasped a voice.

My glare shot to where a beggar sat slumped against the armoured bark. Two clouded eyes peered back at me from beneath rags of snakeskin, piled upon his head in a flat turban. A smile wrinkled his scarred face and he showed off teeth as blue as the true sky. Urka seed blue. The intoxicating drug left a permanent stain on lips, tongue, and your teeth if you abused it long enough.

The rest of his shabby attire was littered with shavings and dust. Beyond his crossed legs was arranged a menagerie of creatures carved from the thick hides of clubfoot mushroom. It was tough as timber unless one bothered to boil it for two days straight, as Blind Pel repeatedly liked to tell me.

What always fixed my attention was the matching tattoo Pel and I shared: the crossed-out dagger across our left eyes. Pel had known seasons in the sorcer tribe before succumbing to his love of urka seeds and being cast out. The scars on his cheeks hid whatever rank he’d once held, and no matter how many times I asked, he never spoke of his earlier life. Pel must have been close to seventy seasons old by now, but nobody knew for sure, not even my mother.

“No. There was something… Else,” I said through short breaths.

“What’s all the rush, Tarko?” Blind Pel pointed upwards. “Anything to do with all this commotion I’m hearing above? Those drums don’t speak for no reason.”

I rubbed at the cold sweat on my neck. “You should see it, Pel. It’s the sun,” I stammered. I’d expected confusion just like all the others, but Pel sat upright with a start. “Like a—”

“A dark shape moves across it? Eating at it?” Pel whispered.

I stared at him in bewilderment. For a blind man, he often saw clearer than anyone. “How did you know?”

“It’s in an old song, boy,” he muttered. The slightly manic smile that always hung on his face like a lopsided painting had vanished, replaced by something I suspected was fear. “The oldest, perhaps, far too forgotten. Far too lost.”

The old beggar must have recently taken an urka seed, for his rambling made no sense. He began to search in his rags, and though I dallied to see what he was looking for, he just kept digging, growing ever more agitated. Half his carvings were knocked aside. One was trampled by a passerby. I gathered them as best as I could, but Pel didn’t seem notice. He resorted to rubbing at his temples and cursing frantically. I had never seen him this upset, and I didn’t need any more oddness to my day. I backed away and put feet to the ladder.

I thrust the hatch open with such accidental force that Tesq whirled on me.

“Bleeding trees, Tarko!” my sister snapped.

The stench that struck me in the nostrils must have been the beginnings of supper. I almost fell back down the ladder. In all other duties of being first-born, Tesq excelled. In the culinary arts, she was so dreadful as to be almost deadly.

“What’s with your rush and all this huffing and puffing?” she demanded in her usual harsh tone.

“Something’s happened, Tesq!” I blurted. “Can’t you hear the drums?”

My sister blew the curtain of black and tangled hair from her face and pointed a spoon at me as if it were a weapon. It slopped something worryingly purple onto the floor. Tesq’s face was a red hue in the glow of gathered candlevines and her brow shone with sweat. Above the collar of her shirt, the mark of the first-born and heirs was tattooed. The branches of her tree reached across her throat and up to her ears. Unlike the rest of the seven tribes, first-born had no ranks, and therefore wore no brands on their right cheeks.

“What have you done now?’ she demanded. “Don’t tell me you’ve been let go from yet another calling? If you’ve ruined another chance for this family to make some gems at last, I swear to the Three—”

I jabbed a finger at my nesthand’s tabard. “No, I haven’t done anything! And you sound so much like Mother sometimes it’s painful.”

“Rightly so!” Tesq clanged some utensils around for good measure as she went back to the coals of the stove. “Mother won’t be able to take it, I say. Never mind the extra mending I’ll have to take on for the gems to keep us eating. I can’t keep up as—”

“Will you listen to me, curse it?” I snapped. “Something’s happening in the sky. I don’t know what’s going on, Tesq, but the whole city’s astir. Can’t you hear that?” I moved to the hatch, where the concerned voices buzzed. The distant drums were a soft booming.

Tesq was ignoring me. “I don’t have time for your games or tricks. This frog refuses to cook, not to mention—”

I was in the middle of slamming the hatch shut when my mother burst through it. To the creak of her leafleather warder armour, she climbed wearily into the kitchen. Her breath was as ragged as mine. Sweat beaded her forehead. She must have caught the reflection of the dark sun in my eyes.

“You’ve seen it, haven’t you?” she asked of me. I saw Tesq’s gaze darting back and forth between us.

I nodded. “From above the canopy and with my own eyes. The nests were cleared until firstglow tomorrow and I took my chance.”

Mother ignored what was a blatant confession of climbing the high branches and skewered me with a stare. “They’re saying a shadow is consuming the sun goddess. Is it true?”

“What?” Tesq breathed. “What are you two talking about?”

“A darkness is covering the sun. The whole of the Swathe is in shadow. There’s smoke over the east.” I was hungry for answers. Old Pel’s reaction had unnerved me. “What is it? What does it mean?”

Mother sought a space on the mud-plaster wall to lean against. Axera Terelta had the look of a woman who hadn’t slept in two seasons. Deep wrinkles gathered around her stern lips. Dark shadow hung beneath her eyes, and yet not in all my seasons had the glint in those amber orbs ever dared to dim. Grime was smeared across her face.

Mother was a second-born, and as punishment for our father’s downfall, she had been kept at the lowest rank of warder for more than a decade. She was not one of the plump warders I had escaped less than an hour ago, but one of the tough bastards given watches in the Neathering: the lowest and darkest part of Shal Gara. It was a dishevelled skirt of buildings that sprawled upon the canopy of the lesser trees of the Swathe. At its deepest point was the Rootfort, a circular and ancient castle that protected Shal Gara and the lowest leafroads from the dangers of the loam.

The forest floor was a realm of nightmares. It was a place where woefang spiders could snatch unwary citizens screaming into the dark, and where gloomsprites – lost and jilted souls – were said to search for skins to wear so that they might rejoin the living. I could have told of a dozen more dangers. That was Mother’s calling, and it made my own problems as a third-born worker sound laughable.

And yet, today my mother looked as rattled as I’d ever seen her. She blew a strand of rebellious hair from her face and puffed out her cheeks in a sigh.

“By the loam, Tarko, this can’t mean anything good. I overheard a bunch of godseers calling it an omen,” she replied. “But of what, I have no idea.”

“Pel seems all in a fuss about it,” I replied. “Disturbed, even. Never seen him behave like that.”

“That old beggar has gone,” Mother added. “He’s not in his spot.”

“He hasn’t moved in two seasons,” I said. The shadow of our hovel was practically Pel’s permanent shelter.

Tesq clutched her spoon so tightly she snapped it.

Mother sighed. “Let’s not lose our heads, now. The rest of the city’s already far too nervous as it is.”

“What do you mean?” asked Tesq.

“The matriarch has called for every tribe but the second-born to return to their homes until firstglow, probably in case somebody foolish starts a needless panic. Lancewings have been sent to Firstwatch for information. Every warder’s watch has already been doubled. And me? I’ve been given patrol all night.”

With another sigh, Mother swiped a mouthful from the pot that Tesq had forgotten to stir. She winced so much her lips almost disappeared. “By the loam, Tesq! That’s fouler than usual. How is it you only seem to get worse with practice?

While Tesq mumbled something into the bubbling pot, I caught my mother’s arm before she could put a foot to the ladder.

“Haidak Baran was in the nests today,” I whispered, and I heard her growl at the name. “Headman Karonak would have fired me had it not been for the sun. First Haidak had me cast out of the armourers, then the highfields. The nests was a good chance for me and he’s ruined it once again.”

Mother nodded slowly, thinking with a hooded brow. “Keep your gaze loamwards, Tarko. Endure. That’s all we Tereltas can do with what your dead father left us,” Mother muttered, reciting a mantra long-overused and always spoken with a bitter tone. “Don’t shake the branches. Do as you’re told for once and stay home instead like the matriarch’s ordered. I’m trusting you to watch him, Tesq.”

My sister sighed dramatically. “If I must.”

“Why is it always me who needs to be watched?” I asked.

“You want a list of reasons, Tarko? How about the time you ran almost burned the cottage down? Or nearly shot your sister dead with my bow? Or the time you coaxed a flock of waifs into your hollow, thinking you could string them together and fly west?”

She had a point.

Mother snickered as she disappeared down onto the street. She always made sure to flash a smile, no matter how tired or dejected she seemed.

“She’ll be fine, don’t you worry about her,” Tesq said, feeling as though she needed to advise me.

“I’m not worried,” I shot back at her. “I feel bad for anyone who decides to tangle with her when she’s in this mood.”

“Supper’ll be another few hours.”

I snorted with laughter. “I’m not eating that. It smells like a rotten foot.”

“Then you’ll go hungry for the rest of the day and night. It’s all we have in the larder!” Tesq yelled at me as I climbed the ladder to the small chamber squeezed into the roof. It was my hollow: the only place in that city I could call my own, especially once the cloth mat covered the hatch and ladder. Between the sloped roofs of stiff leafleather, even though I could barely stretch out in any direction, I could be alone. Avoiding the stench of Tesq’s more hideous concoctions was an added bonus.

No sooner had I sat down was I immediately pounced upon by a brown and furry creature the size of my fist. I seized the shrewbat in one hand and held him aloft. The creature looked more like a bundle of mosscloth rags than a living thing. He yawned as he stretched his skinny wings back and forth. One pair spread from his forelegs to his midriff, the other from his back legs to the tip of his mouse-like tail.

“You need to learn some manners, Misfit,” I told the pest.

Misfit squeaked in disagreement. I turned him upside down so his little claws could grab a vein of the slanted roof and tickled the beast’s ribs. Misfit chirruped, more muted than usual.

“You feel it as well, don't you? The cold in the air?” I asked him.

Pressing against the leafleather roof, I opened up my makeshift window so I could feel the breeze and hear the tumult of the city.

Climbing out of the window and onto the cottage’s thatch roof, I scrambled to a space pinched between the struts of other hovels and a crisscross of leafroads. It was dark and it was noisy with feet overhead, but I could lounge on the ridge of the roof. I even had a perfect square patch of city view above me. From there, through the tangle, I could stare upwards at Shal Gara’s sprawl. And, if I am to be utterly honest, my hiding place was also the perfect spot for my daily target practice.

Every headman and overseer I had ever met delighted in informing me I was useless. Perhaps I had no knack for farming, or weaving, that much was true, but I was far from without use. There was one skill I had that nobody could take from me; a skill I had honed over seasons.

I reached for my trusty sling, hidden in a nook in the bark. The worn leafleather was already well-used to my hand. I picked a round stone from a pile in the hollow and pressed it into the flat, leather cradle. My eyes instinctively shifted to the balconies of larger houses further along Kī Raxa Branch. One in particular boasted an array of clay pots balanced precariously on railings. They were impossible to ignore, especially on a day like today, when I craved normalcy and distraction. Crouching on one knee, I grasped the other end of the sling’s cord, spun it into a frenzy, took aim, and loosed with a grunt of effort.

The stone was a blur amidst the Midern’s tangle. I knew I’d hit my target when a pot holding some dead flowers exploded into shards and dirt.

As always, I pressed myself into the shadows of the bark. My satisfied smile only widened as I heard the usual whine of rage echoing across the branch. A pudgy man appeared on the balcony, shaking a small shovel, his face glowing with rage.

“You bloody bastard! This has gone on two seasons now, curse you! Enough! I’ll find you. You hear me? I’ll find you one of these days, and I’ll drop you to the loam myself!”

My victim’s yells sputtered out as he caught a glimpse of the canopy above and its unusual gloom. As did my snickering. I cleared my throat, stowed my prized possession in the nook, and shuffled back into my hollow to stare at my scrap of sky.

That afternoon, to the sounds of a muted city I did not recognise, I pondered nothing but the sun, watched every flicker of the blood-red canopy, every shift of its leaves, and every glimpse of the wounded sun beyond. I fidgeted and worried until I my eyes grew too heavy to hold open. Sleep took me.

��

Rain.

For all its vastness and jealous clutching at the sun’s rays, Shal Gara’s canopy made a terrible roof. Rainwater funnelled into waterfalls that clattered and splashed their way down the city’s tiles and gutters. One would think the Midern would be spared being so far down, but you would be sorely wrong. With the bloodwood stretched so high, half of the rain-heavy clouds never reached the canopy.

The first gob of cold rainwater smacked me in the forehead. It was the portion of the season we of the Swathe called the longsun. Rain was unexpected in those hot days, especially when I was lost in a deep slumber.

I came awake with a cry and promptly slammed my head into the leathery roof. I found the blue tabard I had fallen asleep in drenched. I shrugged, counting it as somewhat of a free bath, and blinked at the city, finding it gloomy and wreathed in cloud layer, but undoubtedly firstglow.

Firstglow.

Both Karonak and Mother’s voice chimed in my head.

“Bleeding trees!” I tore at the mat and practically fell down the ladder.

Tesq was abed with whichever fleeting romance she was currently pursuing, judging by the tangle of twice too many feet poking through the curtain of her room.

To the growl of my ravenous stomach, I hopped down the ladder to the empty road beneath. The matriarch’s curfew kept the branches clear, but faces still peered from windows and balconies, trying to spy the sun between leaf and cloud. There was nothing of the sun to be seen. More light came from the Neathering. The combined glow of its candlevines and luminous mushrooms was like a fire at the foot of the bloodwood. Smoke from the smiths, crafters, and kitchens hung around the tree like a misplaced cloud.

Blind Pel was still gone. A smattering of his carvings remained discarded. I didn’t have time to worry; I was dangerously close to being late. Workers started their days at the crack of firstglow and no later. The nests started earlier than most. Lancewings were highly particular about breaking their fast.

Puddles splashed and early-rising merchants cried out as I sprinted headlong for the high branches. Miniature rivers were vaulted. A dozen waterfalls soaked me. Sodden moss hung low and slapped me in the face.

I felt the minutes clank by, clockwork and irreversible. The clattering of my feet did nothing to slow or halt them. Branch by branch, I ascended until I was pelting along the road, overtaking sapwater carts and those who’d earned the right to dawdle.

I saw the hillock of Boon standing halfway down the nests, where a large crowd of hands stood waiting and staring at the canopy. Ducking and weaving like the very lancewings that swooped overhead, I pelted towards them. Just as the crash of a gong sounded the firstglow hour, I skidded across the wet deck on my arse and seized Boon’s sleeve. Only she and a few others seemed to notice. I could have cheered.

“You lucky rascal. Just in time. Don’t make it easy on yourself, do you?” she hissed, looking surprisingly relieved.

“Apparently not. What’s happening? Any news of the sun?” I asked, between hard breaths and wiping some of the muck from my backside. Karonak could be heard somewhere beyond the forest of heads. There was a copse of spears ahead, a sign of highwarders – the guards of the matriarch herself. They were gathered around a ring of drenched flags of stiff silver leaf emblazoned with a red sun. A sign of royalty in Shal Gara, and of the Crimson Crown above.

“By the Three Gods, is that—?”

Boon nodded. “The bloody envoy of the matriarch, Tarko.”

I understood the whisper Boon spoke in. I strained to see but pointed umbrellas kept anyone important out of sight. “This must be serious for her to leave the Crown.”

“Especially in this weather. The rain came in the night with strange airs. The lancewing scouts that went east rode the storms back. They’ll be landing any moment now with news.” Boon chewed her lips, dry and chapped despite the splashing rain. For a woman of bottomless confidence, her expression got stuck between a rot-toothed grin and an uneasy frown. “Have you seen what’s happened to the goddess?”

“I did.” I surpassed a shiver and blamed the rain. Perhaps it was the tiredness, but I was still torn between fear and a stubborn anxiety that made me feel queasy. “Did you?”

Boon biting her lips again suggested she had. “Only through the leaves. Couldn’t get past the crowds, but that was enough to make me want to fill my trews with piss.”

“I know the feeling,” I muttered, wrinkling my lip as the lancewing squadron arrived with a roar.

Like all the other nesthands, I crowded closer to see the spectacle. Boon made a good wedge to follow. I saw the glittering gold streak of Haidak Baran’s giant bird amid two-dozen green lancewings. Every bird seemed desperately parched and desperate to land. Their armoured lancer riders looked equally exhausted. One lancer collapsed to the ground to wheeze beside his bird. The lancewing nudged its rider with its beak and chirruped in a concerned tone.

My eyes widened as I saw the envoy of the matriarch step forwards. Envoy Okarin was the daughter of Matriarch Danaxt and second in command of all Shal Gara. Though she was barely older than I was, she strode the decking as if she had already lived a dozen lifetimes. Like all those born of noble blood, Okarin was crimson-eyed, sharp of cheekbone, and drenched in intricate chains of amber and crystal. Impeccable sable braids hung across her face.

Standing protectively behind her was an aged man of hoggish features draped in a black cloak. A silver feather hung around his neck, and he held the envoy’s umbrella high with a hand dyed bright blue. The man’s grey hair had been braided into long and intricate strands and knotted in an impressive pattern.

Despite the fact I’d failed to join the sorcer tribe, I had studied every rank, from initiate to elevate, maven to paragon, and beyond to painted and braided ones. Even if the man standing before me hadn’t been famed throughout the bloodwood, his braids and a silver feather marked him a sorcer of the highest possible position: a sage of the matriarch’s court and head of the sorcer tribe itself. Being a sage wasn’t necessarily a rank, but a person put forward to represent their tribe to the matriarch.

This man was Sage Aben Dūnekar, and his reputation had been forged fighting and winning the Scorchwars. Though over long before my birth, Dūnekar’s reputation had since evolved into a legendary status. Even the blue colour of his hands made him a marvel. The water order was the most powerful of the three orders of the gods’ magic, and water weavers were much rarer than air carvers and earth reavers. I couldn’t decide whether to stare at Dūnekar or the envoy.

“Flames!” a lancer announced to the gathering of spears and silver flags. He was promptly backhanded in the chest by Haidak. The eagleborn strode past the upstart and bowed theatrically to the royal visitors.

“Flames!” echoed Haidak Baran, as if he were the first to speak. “We saw them in the night, burning through the rain and storm. Wildfires, by their size, and no accident. They’ve already claimed a mile of the Loamsedge and show no sign of stopping.” Haidak took a solemn breath. “It pains me to report, Envoy, that Firstwatch appears to be on fire.”

Whispers of disbelief spread through the crowded workers. Several cried out in wails. First a black sun and now a bloodwood burning.

Fires were not unheard of in the endless forests of the Swathe, especially in the hot longsun, but they were dangerous and quickly stamped out. I could count the stories of wildfires on one hand and still offer a rude gesture to Karonak. For a bloodwood to be aflame was nothing short of historic and heartbreaking.

The envoy was shuffling pale stone beads along a silver string, as if counting her words. Her voice was clearly audible over the crowds. She had the tone of a godseer speaking holy words.

“What of the sun goddess and the darkness that eats at her?” she asked.

“We flew above the rains to see,” Haidak answered, “and it pains me to say that the goddess shows no sign of healing, Envoy. In fact, the darkness continues to spread.”

A measurable groan came from every soul in earshot. Heads still tilted to the sky despite the clouds. I did the same and got a raindrop in the eye for my troubles. Classic.

“A dark omen indeed, then,” decided the envoy, after counting some more beads.

Haidak’s smirk was at odds with his warning words. He stared around at his lancers. “Perhaps our goddess seeks to warn us, Envoy. I believe the fires are the work of marauders, most likely from the Scorch and mountains beyond, those with scores unsettled from the old wars. The Scorchfolk saw a chance to move against Firstwatch and set fire to one of our youngest yet proudest bloodwoods. We’ll show them the error of their ways, and chase these raiders back to their lands of dirt and ash as soon as we are able! If they want another Scorchwar, we’ll give it to them!”

The lancers around him yelled in fervour. Rain was shaken from armoured fists as they punched the air. Nesthands cheered in unison.

Okarin stepped out from under her umbrella, forcing Sage Dūnekar to jolt after her. “You’ll do no such thing until the matriarch speaks, Eagleborn Baran!” she ordered firmly.

Haidak looked vexed but obedient. Rigid, he swept his arms in another bow. “As you command, Envoy.”

I watched the envoy make a swift departure. Sage Dūnekar bent low and conspiratorial, close to the envoy’s ear. Her armour-bound highwarders barged a path through the nests. I caught her gaze of bloodwood red for the briefest of moments: a stern glance that hid a chasmic worry beneath. It lasted but a moment before I was shoved in the chest with a spear and told to move aside.

A lull was left upon the branch. The rain pattered on shoulders and bloodwood.

“To toil!” came a bark of an order. Karonak.

Riled up by the scene and the promise of a rare fight, the horde of nesthands went to work across the decks, doling sap into troughs and buckets for the starving lancewings on their perches. I was wrapped up in the frenzy alongside Boon. I wasn’t ashamed to say I used her as a shield to hide from Karonak. I managed to feed three lancewings before the shout of my name shook me.

“Tarkosi Terelta!”

I turned, expecting Karonak from the deep voice, but to my dismay, I found Haidak Baran staring at me once again. I groaned.

“Still here, I see?” he asked me with a stamp of his foot. “Stand up, nesthand. Show your betters some respect.”

I had no choice but to obey. Feeling dozens of eyes on me, I did as I was told, even bowing before the son of the man that had ruined my family. I arose, stiff-lipped and tensing every muscle in my body as I faced the noble. I hated having to tilt my gaze upwards to meet his.

The eagleborn circled around me, eyeing my soaking tabard and muddied shoes. “You’re no taller since I last saw you. Ganglier, though. The filth of the lower branches clings to you even in the rain,” he said.

I stayed stock-still even though my hair pestered my eyes. Haidak had half a foot of height on me and about twice my muscle. Without his feathered and polished helmet, his hair was a red slick, not a strand out of place all the way to his neck. Haidak studied me with his red eyes. I could see the mind behind those irises working away, loading up his insults like an archer filling a quiver with poisoned arrows.

“I thought I’d made it clear to your headman yesterday. To think my birds will be tended by the likes of you turns my stomach. You don’t deserve to be anywhere near them, nor anywhere near the high canopy for that matter. At least your sister, mother, and brother have the decency to stay out of sight and do as they’re told.”

Haidak let the silence grow while I refused to answer his goading. I had the words, they just didn’t seem to emerge past the barrier of my mind. He seemed to sense it and grinned. “You don’t even deserve the mark of a mistaken sorcer. If I’d have had my way, they would have carved that tattoo off your face instead of crossing it out.”

Though quietly and mentally kicking myself quite viciously in my backside, I simply lowered my head. With a scornful laugh, the eagleborn turned to leave, no doubt aimed towards somewhere dry and brimming with breakfast. As a nesthand and worker, I had no other place but there. No other choice. A knuckle popped as I clenched my fists.

Haidak chuckled to another lancer by his side. “Classic Terelta. A useless coward just like his dead drunk of a father. Pathetic specimen.”

I wasn’t insulted on my father’s behalf. To be compared to him was what stabbed me in the gut. My words found the force they needed to come flying out of my mouth.

“Says the man who can’t let go of a seasons-old grudge,” I hissed. “Who’s more pathetic?”

Haidak stopped dead, and slowly, he turned.

I could feel Boon and the other hands shrinking away from me, trying not be associated. I didn’t blame them one bit. I saw Haidak’s hand move to the obsidian knife crossing his hip. Other lancers loomed.

“My, my! Found some spine at last, have you, Terelta? A voice!” Haidak snapped.

He closed the distance between us slowly but with a purpose that made my throat close up. I had only been in one fight, several seasons before. A weaver had taken a strong dislike to me. Neither of us had been wearing armour nor carrying blades honed to razors, and I had still lost.

Haidak smiled with a poisonous sweetness. “Forgive me, I didn’t quite catch what you said. Say it again.”

I refused to give him the excuse he wanted and stayed silent. The request became a growl.

“Say it again. Consider that an order.”

Haidak turned to tut and shake his head at his fellow lancers, but as he turned back, the flat of his armoured hand came swinging.

The unforgiving gauntlet struck me square across the side of my face. Sparks exploded in my eyes. Half-blinded, I felt the deck beneath my knees and hands. I blinked at the wash of pain. A drop of blood landed in the rain-soaked deck. Scarlet bloomed like a flower.

I saw Haidak’s fist swinging a second time and tried to rise up, knuckles at the ready. It wasn’t courage, just pain and outrage that drove me to fight back.

Armour thudded as a shadow blocked Haidak’s blow inches from my nose. I stared down the arm hovering in front of my face and found a tall and stocky warrior of middle seasons and scarred grey armour standing at my side. By the black feather hanging from her neck and her five brands, she was of ravenborn rank. It made the fact she held Haidak’s wrist in a vice grip all the more surprising. The eyes boring from beneath the curve of her helmet were aimed not at me, but at her superior.

“This is not as I have trained you, Haidak,” the woman muttered. Her accent was of the northern Swathe.

Haidak bared his teeth for a moment before withdrawing his fist. He ran fingers through his wet hair and blew rainwater from his lips. He levelled one last shot at me before he let his lancer cronies lead him away. “Time to learn your place in the order of things, root-scum.”

A low rumble spread through the crowds at the insult. The ravenborn’s grip was as solid as ironpith wood. Even then, she didn’t look at me.

“Thank you,” I whispered, remembering my manners even as I wiped the blood from my brow.

“Eagleborn Baran is right, boy. You’d better learn your place,” the warrior grunted. At last, she offered me a scowl. One eye was a lancewing green. The other was a noble scarlet brighter than a bloodwood leaf. The offering was brief. She soon lumbered after Haidak.

My forehead pounding, I turned to Boon with a wince. She wasn’t the only one who stared. The spectacle was over, but there were plenty of smirks for me to ignore. Luckily the demanding lancewings soon drew the gawkers and mockers away.

“Who was that ravenborn?” I asked Boon.

She tried to avoid me, using work as an excuse by bustling around with a bucket. “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

“What’s your problem? I didn’t see you being attacked,” I asked, tenderly touching the cut on my brow. My fingers came away bloody.

Boon whirled on me. The bucket in her hand sprayed us both with sap. “What’s your problem, Tarko? I thought you were hard done by, that you had a streak of bad luck and a bad name, perhaps. But I see now you don’t make it easy for yourself. You’re not the best worker by a long shot, but to make it worse, you spit in the face of the Bloodlaws, never mind your own chances. I won’t have you spitting on mine. Not after the seasons I’ve worked to get where I am. You either work like I told you,” Boon said with a whisker of hesitation, “or you should leave.”

My mouth hung open, not merely through surprise, but because Boon had turned her back so quickly. So selfishly. She looked at me as if I were smeared in lancewing shit and asking for a hug.

I growled deep in my throat. “Fine.”

“Good,” spat Boon, before following the other nesthands to the edge of the deck.

I heard the tap of Karonak’s cane. I moved to the nearest pile of buckets to act busy, hoping he would just ignore me, but no. That wasn’t my brand of luck.

“Terelta!” Karonak’s croaking voice sounded unbearably close.

I turned to find the frog-shaped man bulging with red embarrassment.

“I was willing to lend you a secondary opportunity given the omen in the firmament,” he said, straining to keep his voice low for once. “But your insolence and family associations are enormously unbearable to the nobility. I cannot sustain you dilapidating our reputation, not in such dire times.”

While I was still attempting to translate, Karonak clarified for me. “You’re done with this calling, Tarko. You’re fired. Laid off. You shall present yourself to Headman Saqat in the louse-mines, on the Branch of Hoot.”

It was barely half an hour past firstglow and already this day had beaten me – quite literally – into submission. I’d thought taking a leafleather gauntlet to the face was enough punishment. But apparently not.

“Headman Karonak…,” I objected half-heartedly, already knowing it was useless. Fired again. What a worker I made.

“I shall not hear it!” Karonak yelled. He prodded me in the ribs with his cane, leaving a muddy imprint on the tabard. “Remove your tabard this instant. The day is wasting. I hear working the mines has a redeeming quality to poor workers. I pray to the Three Gods such benefits are bestowed on you.”

Seeing as punches had already been thrown that morning, I wondered whether it was worth throwing one Karonak’s way. But I had enough sense to keep my mouth shut this time.

I unfastened the blue tabard and dropped it at Karonak’s feet. Boon offered me an apologetic look before I turned away and made my way back along to the branch to the shaking heads of fellow nesthands and the roar of birds taking flight. Smearing blood and rainwater from my eyes, I shunned their judgemental gazes. I did not care for the trouble in the east, nor the sun. I was angry above all else. Angry at Haidak Baran. Angry at my father. Angry at the very hierarchy of the tree that punished me for a fate decided before I had any say in the matter.

Reaching the trunk, I stared down at a leafroad far below me, piercing the green trees of the Swathe beneath Shal Gara. I found myself loathing my brother in that moment. Texoc was the second-born of the Tereltas, and as a warrior, he was stationed in the bloodwood of Stormbeaten, far to the southwest. I longed for it to be me out there on the edges of the Swathe. Far away from the grudges of the Barans and a city that was intent on greasing the rungs of its social ladders. It was not fair.

With rain coursing in miniature rivers down my face, I held up my fists and glowered at the three crossed nails inked on my hands.

4

Of Lice

Nectra is the very lifeblood and energy of the bloodwoods. The godseers of the scholar tribe say that nectra is a bloodwood’s very soul, a concentrated essence of the spirits of the Swathe. To we humans, it is a gift of magic given by the gods themselves so that we could control the elements of our world. Without it, sorcers would not exist. That is why there are few treasures of the Swathe that rival the nectra of a full-grown bloodwood.

“ON THE NATURE OF BLOODWOODS” BY TEMACH LILO, 1807

To the citizens of Shal Gara, there was nothing fouler than a bloodwood louse. They began their lives as eggs embedded in the bark of the giant trees. If they weren’t plucked out, they would hatch and burrow their way into the bloodwood, gorging themselves to gargantuan sizes as they burrowed towards the bloodwood’s core. It was said that left unchecked, as few as one hundred lice could fell a mile-high bloodwood. All for the veins of water and nectra that ran through a bloodwood’s heartwood. The grubs’ insatiability was legendary.

Louse-mines, therefore, were essential in any bloodwood city. Unfortunately, they also demanded workers by the hundreds, day and night, to hunt the lice out of the wood.

With a face wrinkled in revulsion, I found myself standing on the root of the Branch of Hoot, staring at a portly worker in a puke-yellow tabard loading a cart with wriggling insects. Of all the callings I’d worked in the five seasons since I had come of age, this felt like the rock bottom. Even scraping mould down in the Neathering gloomfarms seemed momentarily preferable to this.

I listened to the muted bleating of the horrid insects. The larger ones were about the size of a human torso, with fourteen legs and a segmented shell that hid a soft and yellow underbelly. They wriggled and squeaked as they were stuffed into a cart and covered with woven netting. Several of the lice escaped the cart, forcing the man to run around catching them.

I washed a hand across my bloody face and sighed deeply. My anger had been exhausted by my furious stamping down branch after branch. It hadn’t disappeared, instead stowing deeper within me like a coal refusing to die.

There was one single, frail hope I clung to every time I started a new calling. Even though I stared at the man and saw the same old drudgery in a different-coloured tabard, there was a slim chance this job could be the last. That this could finally be the calling for me. I tasted blood before I realised I was biting the inside of my lip in doubt.

When I realised I couldn’t procrastinate any longer, and as the rain poured down, I faced my fate and stepped towards the man and the cart. A clearing of my throat got his attention.

“I’m looking for Headman Saqat,” I said.

“That’ll be Headwoman Saqat.” The worker flapped his jowls. “Come to join the rest of us scum, is it?”

“Excuse me?”

“Few of us work the mines through choice.” He pointed at my wound. “Either you pissed in somebody’s bed or you’re a zealous fool.”

“The first one.”

The man’s face turned moonish, eyes wide and eager. “You really pissed in somebody’s bed?”

“I thought you meant figuratively.”

He shrugged, looking disappointed. “I did, but there’s always a chance.”

I watched while the man wrestled another louse back into the cart. The creatures had a stink of sawdust about them.

“Don’t worry, lad. You get used to this kind of work. And Saqat lets us take home a louse or two for eating now and again, so it ain’t all bad.”

Louse pie was a delicacy down in the Neathering, but even the most fleeting mention turned my stomach. I’d have rather eaten Tesq’s cooking.

“Headwoman’s inside the mine,” said the worker, turning his back on me.

I followed the man’s pointing finger into the borehole in the trunk. It was warmer inside compared to the wet air of the Swathe. Thick with gloom, too, apart from the timid lights of the candlevine blooms and luminous blue streaks of mushroom dust. The mine must have tunnelled twenty paces before spreading into honeycomb chambers where workers dug at the walls with short mattocks. They carved away the red wood chunk by chunk to get at the lice burrowing within. Half the miners stood about, exhausted or bored or a combination of the two. Some pressed themselves to the wood, melding with shadows. Others picked at splinters, or waited by boreholes with empty wheelbarrows draped in candlevine bulbs.

“You look lost,” said a voice, catching me off-guard as I stared into dark chamber after dark chamber. I didn’t think I was claustrophobic, but the tunnels were testing me.

I turned to find a girl with a scrutinising face and hair somehow even darker than my own. She looked rather menacing with a stone-bladed mattock clutched in her crossed arms and her narrowed snow-blue stare. I could see her studying the crossed-out sorcer’s tattoo and the wound that had finally given up bleeding.

There was a moment where I forgot who and where I was. “Erm, I’m trying to find Headwoman Saqat. I’ve been transferred from the nests,” I said.

“Ouch. What did you do to be sent down here?”

I shrugged, feeling the weight of my shoulders. I wished I could crawl back to bed. “Nothing apart from be myself. Apparently people don’t like that.”

“I can see that.” The girl smirked. She had the nerve to poke at my wound. “And I know that feeling. We all do. Some idiots choose this calling, which constantly astounds me, but the rest of us here are the shunned and the forgotten. It’s shit work, but it’s our work. The only way you can get worse than this is going down to the Neathering to scrape mould and mushrooms in the gloomfarms.”

“I was just thinking that might be preferable.” I replied.

“You’d be wrong.” She pointed along the tunnel, back the way I had come and jabbed her hand right. “That way and further in. Look for a woman in a tall chair after the right turn. She’ll look like she’s asleep.”

She caught me with a question before I got too far. “What’s your name, greenhand?”

“Tarko. Tarkosi Terelta.”

She didn’t give me hers, but idly watched me as I departed.

Within two corners, I was already lost, far too turned around by the identical tunnels. I looked around for what could have been half an hour before I found the headwoman. Saqat was a wan reed of a figure. Her hooked nose gave her the appearance of a sun-bleached crow. Her shorn hair was spiked in places, looking the fault of a pillow rather than a style. She sat in a chair propped on tall stilts. So tall, in fact, there was even a small ladder to reach her perch. The candlevine light lit Saqat’s face from below, turning her ghoulish.

Though she looked half-asleep with slitted lids, her eyes moved back and forth rapidly. The tremble of her lips suggested Saqat was counting, or talking to herself like a mad person. Bowing formally, as I had to every other headman or headwoman over the past few seasons, I introduced myself. My lines were memorised.

“Hand Tarkosi Terelta reporting for duty. Headman Karonak of the nests sent me to you.”

Saqat’s voice had a shrill volume to it. “Transfer is it? What did you do? Are you a slacker?”

“No, Headwoman. Clumsy on occasion, maybe, but that’s my only crime.” I motioned to my wound in the vague hope that would halt any further questions.

“Are you the thieving kind, then? You don’t look the violent type, but it’s often the quieter ones that are the most dangerous, I’ve found.”

I tried to prove her right by simply staring back at her.

Saqat didn’t care for my efforts. “Speak, Hand.”

“Headman Karonak thought I wasn’t fit to tend his nests.”

Saqat templed her fingers. “Get cracking and no slacking. That’s the word of the louse-mines. We look like a sorry and punished lot, but you heed my words, you’ll realise even feeding those birds their sugar-water isn’t as important as what we do here. We’re at the sapwood of Shal Gara here, boy. You don’t work for me, but for the good of the bloodwood. We’re the true workers of the third-born.”

I hadn’t expected such a rousing speech or pride of any kind. Saqat hadn’t used any of the cumbersome words Karonak loved so much, and yet she had said ten times as much as he ever had. The severe look spearing me over that beak nose made me stand taller. My frail hope took on some strength.

“Report to your overseer and get to work,” Saqat ordered.

“That would be me.”

I near jumped out of my cloth shoes. The girl from the tunnel was beside me. In the travelling lights of the carts juddering back and forth, her hair took on the quality of a black waterfall.

Saqat snorted. “Twitchy one, you’ve got here, Ralish. Better watch him,” said the headwoman, and with a shift of her drowsy eyes, she forgot me.

Ralish snorted. After handing me a hideous yellow tabard, she poked me back down a tunnel with her mattock. “I intend to. Come on, you. Slacking already.”

The tabard was drier than the one I’d left in the nests, but it was instead covered in sawdust and wore a dubious stain. It itched my neck immediately. “Am I supposed to have one of those?” I pointed at the mattock in her hand. The one that looked far too much like a weapon. On the butt-end of its short handle was a spike.

Ralish laughed and hooked the mattock over her shoulder. “Not yet. Not for a while. You don’t just go hacking at the flesh of a bloodwood, boy. Takes a keen eye and a careful hand.”

Boy. That nettled me. Ralish was barely my senior. Maybe twenty seasons at the most.

“Terelta, you said?” she mused to the crunch and whisper of sawdust and wood-chips beneath our feet. “I know that name from the Midern.”

My groan must have been audible. It would be wonderful if my father’s ghost didn’t haunt me for just one day. It seemed it was already waiting for me in these mines.

Ralish clicked her fingers, bringing my attention back. “Terelta. As in Axera Terelta?”

It was not usually my mother’s name that followed recognition of my family. “You know her?” I asked, my voice cracking with a trace of surprise.

“She worked with my father before he went to the Six Heavens. His name was Malam, a second-born of the Lahni family. I live on Okan Branch now, twenty or so down.”

I hadn’t heard the family name, but that wasn’t unusual for a city of two hundred thousand souls. “Kī Raxa Branch,” I replied. “Only a few away. Mother doesn’t speak much about her shifts down in the Neathering. Doesn’t want to worry us, I suppose.”

Ralish snorted. “My father didn’t neither.”

Passing shirtless individuals working with small chisels and hammers, Ralish brought me to the blunt end of the tunnel. The roof was not far past my head, and the walls were close at hand. So much so, I ducked when Ralish swung her mattock into the rust-coloured wood. The scent that emerged was fragrant, rich and earthy.

“You might imagine we’re at the centre of Shal Gara, but in fact we’re not close at all,” she told me as she worked. “The mines curve more than they delve, and we only cut a few tunnels at a time along the paths of the main louse warrens. To cut too deep past the sapwood would damage the tree and risk delving into the heartwood. This ain’t the nectra cores, with their long drills and their chanting and their prayers.”

Ralish paused to dig another chunk from the tree. Her aim didn’t look precise to me.

“Problem is,” she said, “not all of the bloody lice use one tunnel. If we block them up or the bastards become wise, they gnaw new ones. That’s what we’ve got to find.”

Ralish twisted her mattock, and to my surprise, a hole opened up beyond the wall. Ralish dug the blade inwards and splintered another section free. Grabbing a nearby candlevine bulb, she began to probe inside the shadow. Wet sawdust crumbled from her hands.

“A fresh burrow, which means it must be close. Right, greenhand, put your head against the wood and listen.”

“Listen for what?”

“Lice, you moron.” Ralish laughed. “You’ll hear one if it comes along and if it ain’t playing dead.”

With a sigh, I pressed my ear to the rough and splintered wood and listened. The faint rumble of the bloodwood was deep and endless, the echo of countless feet and creatures testing its branches. The sound of rain cascading in waterfalls. The sound of the tree itself, too, and the seas of water it drank from the earth. Of sap and nectra in arteries thick as wagons, deep in the core of the bloodwood.

“So go on then, Tarko Terelta. What did you do to get put here? Why weren’t you fit to work as a nesthand? You can tell us.”

My answer chased her words. “I don’t want to.”

“Suit yourself, but there’s no reason to be shy.” Ralish slammed her mattock into the wall. With my ear pressed to the wood, the sound was painful, ricocheting around my skull. She grinned at me again.

“What about you, Coromi?” Ralish shouted down the tunnel.

An elderly man stretched up from his intricate carving with a wince of pain. He had the mark of a fifth-born: a teardrop of the healers at the centre of his forehead, also crossed out with a line. “I stole a melon to feed my children. They gave me a choice: exile, or work here for the rest of my life to repay my debt.”

“All that for a melon?” I asked.

Ralish nodded knowingly. “And what of you, Fin? What brought you to the mines?”

A woman hardly four feet tall answered between rapid taps of her chisel. She had no tattoos crossed out like mine and Coromi’s, only the humble nails of a worker. “I used to be a weaver. Spat on my headman for insulting my wife. Been here five seasons now.”

I couldn’t help but look expectantly at Ralish. “And you?”

Ralish flashed me a wink. “Me? I killed a man.”

I frowned, expecting that grin to return at any moment, but it did not.

“See? You ain’t so different from us,” Ralish said, chuckling. “We’ve all fallen down the branches one way or another.”

I had always railed at being compared to anyone, especially my fellow workers. Perhaps I wasn’t so different, in a broad sense. Of all the faces that had come and gone and been forgotten in my many worker’s callings, none had quite shared the misfortune I did. These louse-miners came close. Hope flickered.

“So what about you, Tarko?” Ralish asked again. She was a determined sort.

In the small tunnel, their expectant gazes were unavoidable. As much as I pretended to listen for lice, the silence dragged on until I caved. I still looked around as if a member of the Baran family were hiding in a louse burrow. “My father had the fine idea of getting into a drunken fight with a noble when I was barely five seasons old.”

“Which noble did he pick a fight with?” Fin asked.

“Sage Kol Baran. Though he wasn’t yet a sage at that time, just a noble first-born.”

The woman sucked air through her teeth. “That isn’t a man I would want to cross.”

“What happened to your father? They throw him in the cells? The Burrows?”

The story usually didn’t pass my lips on first introductions, but I kept talking. “No. My father was murdered less than a week later. They found him dead, apparently from his drinking and gambling debts. The only inheritance he left the Terelta family was shame. I was supposed to be a sorcer, but they marked me as a mistake the same day my father died.” I pointed half-heartedly at my crossed-out dagger. “I’ve been kicked from job to job ever since I came of age.”

“How many?”

“Sixteen callings in four seasons.”

Ralish whistled.

“Either I’m not a good fit or the Barans see to it I’m moved on. That family never forgot my father’s insult. When Eagleborn Haidak Baran saw me in the nests, well…” My point travelled to the cut on my brow and the no-doubt blossoming bruise. “Here I am.”

There was no sympathy in any of their eyes, but at least there was understanding.

“Shit, isn’t it, when the city turns on you?” said Coromi.

I exhaled in relief. “That it is.”

Ralish tapped her skull. “Plenty wrong with this city and the Bloodlaws we live by, but you ain’t going to change them anytime soon, are you? What about you, Fin? Coromi?”

The two of them chuckled in turn.

“That’s right,” affirmed Ralish. “A thousand seasons hasn’t changed them. We could yammer all day about the problem with the politics of this city, but it won’t catch no lice.”

And there, my hope died to dust. I was wrong. These workers were no different from Boon, telling me to grow up, understand, and learn my place. They had no dreams, no aspirations for something… different. They were resigned to their fates and buried in false pride for this work.

I’d almost forgotten my purpose, still standing with one ear still pressed against the wood, when I heard a noise. It was like teeth crunching against the skin of apples.

“There’s a…” Somehow I lost the word and just tapped the wood with my finger.

“A louse?”

“Maybe?”

The mattock swung past my nose, inches close. Splinters showered me as Ralish dug away. Pale, squirming flesh showed itself. A squeal split my ears as she reversed the mattock to use the spike at the end of its handle.

“Hold this and keep it in place before it escapes!” she snapped at me. I felt a gross wriggling in my grip as she prised the wood away and tugged the louse out into the candlevine light.

She held the fat, wood-gorged insect up like a trophy. Its six legs squirmed. “Your first bloodwood louse, Tarko Terelta! And a big one, too.”

While I was wondering if that was an achievement, Fin appeared with a ruler and slapped it against the louse’s soft carapace. “Just shy of two feet. This one’ll feed a family for a week.”

Ralish slapped me on the back, smirked, and pointed me back to the wall. “You aren’t done yet, worker. Get back to listening.”

And so the morning went. Four of the bastard things were hauled from their burrows, which Ralish assured me was a good catch for a day. It was tough work pushing the wooden barrows for half the day. When there was no lice or wood to clear, Fin, Coromi, and Ralish chatted idly while listening to the mine’s walls. The Bloodlaws weren’t spoken of again. The subject of choice and much speculation was, of course, the dark omen of the wounded sun.

The rumours of a wildfire in the east had not trickled down Shal Gara like a raindrop, but poured as a deluge. I had spent half an hour in the mines before some skinny lad barely of working age poked his head into each tunnel to yell the news Haidak Baran had brought back from the Loamsedge.

Fin seemed visibly rattled by the rumours of marauders and a bloodwood burning. Coromi and Ralish scoffed. The elder protested he had lived enough seasons to know it was gossip, and that a bloodwood couldn’t burn. Ralish, on the other hand, practised an indifference towards anything and everything. I caught myself quietly pondering if it was the sort of indifference that could kill a man. I had known my fair share of boasters and fibbers in my short seasons.

I said nothing of what I had hard in the nests, but it didn’t take them long to put two and two together.

“Bleeding trees, wait a moment! That cut of yours is fresh, Tarko. You were there when Haidak returned weren’t you?” demanded Fin.

I had never been a good liar. A pathetic one, in fact.

“Erm,” was all I mustered. “No.”

Ralish slapped me on the arm with her mattock handle. “Don’t you lie to us, Tarkosi Terelta. Those in the louse-mines stick together. What did Eagleborn Baran say?”

“Nothing more than what you’ve already heard.” I didn’t want to give the idiot’s words any more power than they already had. Somehow the disappointment in their faces spurred me on. “That Firstwatch is aflame and Baran blames marauders from the Scorch. He wants a war.”

Ralish looked taken aback. Fin wrung her hands.

“Lies,” Coromi spat. “A bloodwood hasn’t burned in… well I don’t know if one ever has. Not even in the Scorchwars. Never heard of such a thing.”

“I’m just repeating what I heard.” I scowled at the old man. “Haidak wants to strike out with sorcers and second-borns and get his revenge. The envoy—”

Ralish interrupted. “The envoy was there? What was she like?”

“Hard to see, to be honest. Younger than I thought.”

It was meagre information but enough to stoke the conversation. The Scorch, marauders, and sorcers were all topics of fierce discussion. I listened rather than talked, happy to take in the stories of marauders and let the faraway Scorch distract me from the hard work.

By the time Ralish poked me with the mattock and beckoned me from the mine, a day had almost passed without me realising. We emerged with our final barrows into a day still darkened by stubborn rainclouds. The shadowed sun was nowhere to be seen, and an early night was creeping through the drowned Swathe. At least the deluge had ceased. Shal Gara played a song of dripping and splashing. A breeze ruffled the canopy far below us as we hauled louse after louse into bigger carts. The air had a faint and acrid scent to it that I had never tasted before. Far above us, in a mist-wreathed canopy, crowds could be seen filling the branches. Light poured from the Crimson Crown.

“Shal Gara marches!” It was the same skinny lad as before, calling to us from along the railing. He was as breathless as he was soaked in sweat and raindrops. “Did you hear?”

“Course we didn’t, moron.” Ralish tutted at him.

Though exhausted, the boy was still too excited to notice the insult. He was already shuffling down the railing, keen to keep his mouth wagging. “Matriarch Danaxt has spoken! Shal Gara is going to war! Eagleborn Baran is taking a war-party of warriors and sorcers to deal with these Scorch marauders, to teach ’em a lesson for setting fire to Firstwatch. They march at firstglow!”

That explained the activity and beaming glow in the high canopies above. I spotted the shapes of lancewings flitting back and forth even in the deepening dark. Armourers and crafters ran to and fro with hand-carts and wagons drawn by ponderous orokan. I watched the tamed beasts plod back and forth, yawning intermittently. Their shaggy brown fur was drenched with rain, their big brown eyes as uninterested as always.

“You think you’re too good to be a worker, don’t you?”

I stared at Ralish, surprised. She put an elbow to the railing and stared at a leafroad piercing the Swathe. “What do you mean?”

“Seen it before in plenty of workers. The quiet but jaded type. Myself included.”

“If you’re going to tell me that it’s time I get used to this life—”

“Not in the slightest, Tarkosi Terelta. I was going to say it’s your life, not Shal Gara’s. Live it how you please. They put the worker above scholar and healer, but it’s a lie to put such pride in our hearts. I hate the falsehood of the Bloodlaws as much as you, yet I choose to take pride in this calling. That’s all the choice we’re given, so you choose what you want, but know you ought to be careful. You know the consequences of failing as a worker better than most, I’d wager, and you know there’s still a long way to fall to the loam, Tarko. Don’t poison your mind with what could or should have been.”

Her advice doled out, Ralish shouldered her mattock and a sack filled with dead lice and began to walk away.

“Did you really kill somebody?” I blurted after her.

Ralish turned with a smirk. “Perhaps I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

The crowds swallowed her just as they did me.

Talk of war graced every pair of lips in Shal Gara. It was as if Shal Gara had just learned the word. Those who worked tried their best to babble as they scuttled about. Those who had the luxury of loitering and yapping did so with eagerness.

Forty thousand warriors and half the sorcer tribe. Never heard of the like and I can remember the days of the Scorchwars!

Almost all the water sorcers are marching, I hear.

That young Baran. So brave. So handsome too!

I groaned at that statement.

These maradas better watch themselves.

They’re called marauders, you dolt. Scorchfolk. Jealous of our fine forest and bloodwoods, no doubt. They’ll soon learn about Shal Gara’s might!

I bowed my head and continued on, walking all the faster. My stomach was thunderous, so much so I resigned myself to whatever meal Tesq had concocted today.

My fellow pedestrians and I were forced to step aside as a formation of lancers came tunnelling through the crowds. Applause followed them. Those who were overly enthusiastic or too drunk with berry wine cheered for them.

All I could do was stand aside and stare at the warriors’ intricate, overlapping leafleather armour of red-brown and helmets plumed with green feathers. Narrow masks shaped like the beaks of lancewings covered their faces. Beneath their vambraces and gauntlets, I knew black tattoos of swords ran from wrist to elbow. The symbol of the second-born tribe.

Then came the brace of sorcers. The sight of them brought a whisper of excitement. Two of them, a man and a greying woman. Sharp-faced and with obsidian sickles hung from their belts. Their eyes shone blue in the sodden half-light from the nectra in their veins. They were air carvers, their hands dyed white for the order of air magic. Beneath the patterned cowls of their black hoods, their glowing gazes shifted constantly, measuring, seeing things I couldn’t begin to understand and longed to know of. I stood taller, hoping they would catch sight of me. Nobody in that crowd watched them closer than I did. My feet almost betrayed my deepest wish and attempted to follow them, but my place called me onwards and downwards.

Tomorrow. The word felt lighter than it usually did. There wasn’t a bounce in my step, but there wasn’t a vexed or fearful thudding of heels either. Though it shook my head to think it, perhaps louse-mining was my calling after all. It was shit work, as Ralish had said, but at least it was important work.

With a sigh, I descended onto the ring of platforms that circled around my section of trunk and the Branch of Kī Raxa. Squeezed between the backsides of cottages, I walked between patches of the vinelight with Ralish on my mind.

Blind Pel was back. The old beggar crouched on threadbare shoes where he normally sprawled and slept. There was no knife in his hand and no carvings around his fidgeting feet. His shabby snakeskin turban was gone, revealing his bald, scarred head. Pel stood as he heard me coming. He stared in my direction, his milky eyes somehow fixated on me.

“You’re late,” he said.

“I didn’t know you were my keeper, Pel,” I chuckled. “Where have you been?”

Pel did not laugh. He didn’t make a sound bar a grinding of something between his teeth. Urka seeds, I guessed.

“Who gave you that wound on your brow?” he growled at me.

“Haidak Baran, of all people. Could have been worse.”

Pel muttered something incomprehensible yet unmistakably furious.

“A ravenborn stopped him from throwing me from the edge,” I added in my awkwardness.

“Which ravenborn?”

“I didn’t catch her name.”

The beggar nodded, as if I had answered the question correctly.

A louse cart ambled by, wreathed in candlevine. In its light, I noticed the bruises on Pel’s face and scalp. He looked as though somebody had tried to club him to death. His blind eyes were blackened. A gash tore one lip. His cloak looked torn in places. Something was splattered down his chest, maybe soup. Maybe vomit.

“What in the loam happened to you?” I asked.

“I tried to tell them!” Pel hissed, enraged as a bubbling pot with a lid firmly clamped on it. His head kept shifting back and forth as he listened to passersby. “They wouldn’t listen to a word I said. They’ve forgotten who I am. Forgotten the oldest songs far too quickly, and it’ll be their downfall, I tell you!”

The urka seeds must have been strong tonight, I thought, as I edged around Pel to my ladder. His mood concerned me. The man had always been nothing but placid, drugged, or asleep. “Who didn’t listen?” I asked, buying time.

“Them. Those that think they know better.” Pel stared upwards as he shuffled closer to me. I thought I caught a glimmer of blue in those blind eyes. “Your father knew better.”

That stopped me in my tracks, one foot on the ladder.

Pel stared at me directly. “You think him a liar and a gambler and a drunk, but that was what they made him.”

I followed Pel’s pointing and bandage-swaddled finger. Through the buildings, Shal Gara’s russet canopy glowed with light. I could see the Crimson Crown of the matriarch, with its glimmering fireworm lanterns—

The blow knocked me from the ladder and to my knees. I swore my skull had split in two. Pain choked me. I managed to reel upright to find Blind Pel standing over me, face severe in shadow and a club in his hands.

“Forgive me, Tarkosi, but this is for the good of the Swathe.”

My curse for him was cut short as the club whacked me on the temple. I barely had time to feel the pain before I lost myself to a blackness that no sleep had ever managed to drown me in.

5

Stowaways

First in command of every bloodwood is its chosen Matriarch. The Envoy is responsible for exerting her matriarch’s will and decrees. Beneath the Envoy, the seven Sages of each of the tribes command and offer counsel when called. So it has been for centuries, and how it shall be for many more.

FROM “GRAND CALL OF ORDER” BY TEMACH GUWIN

Pain woke me: fiery and greedy for my attention. It was a searing sun in the darkness of my closed eyes. I tensed myself, gasping, and endured until it settled into an almost bearable throb that matched my sluggish heartbeat.

Memory came next, wading through the pain. I recalled a club and Pel standing over me, dark and menacing.

Panic seized me. I kicked out but found myself constrained, which did absolute wonders to calm me, I admit. I threw my hands up to feel my skull, convinced I would find it split and gaping open, and instead smashed my knuckles against something rough and solid. I scratched at it frantically before I managed to wrench my heavy eyes open.

Woven vines lay before me. I felt the same stiff wicker wall at my feet. It was a basket. Mother had one very similar. No wonder I was curled into an uncomfortable ball, and my knees were far too close to my chin. Somebody had dared to stuff me into a basket. More to the point, it seemed as though none other than harmless old Blind Pel had put me there.

It took all my concentration to keep still. My injury helped. I seethed through clenched teeth as the pain swelled again, pounding through not just my skull but my whole body. It was my punishment for trying to move so vigorously.

I noticed a yellow shine to the firstglow light piercing the tiny holes in the basket’s weave. No rain pattered on its lid. Before I could move to peer through one of the holes, the basket lurched as if the world jumped. I landed hard on my ribs, and my head throbbed with renewed rage.

I was moving. Or rather, whatever this basket perched on was moving. It felt like a wagon. Though the basket was thick, it didn’t muffle all the sounds around me. I could hear the roar of voices and a pounding that took me an age to realise wasn’t my headache. It sounded like marching feet.

Drums and horns blared from around me. I heard the faint cheers of a city-sized crowd. Orders were brayed by hoarse throats. The thunder of lancewings passed overhead. The snarl of an orokan far too close for comfort made me flinch.

Though it shot waves of pain through my body, I shuffled an elbow beneath my ribs to prop myself up. I hadn’t been tied up, thank the Three Gods and their spirits. The basket was clasped in rope, but I managed to poke a finger between the lid.

The first thing I saw was Shal Gara, and from no angle I’d ever seen the bloodwood before. I must have been a mile or two from the city, the furthest from my home I had ever been, and at that distance I could almost see the full stretch of Shal Gara. People filled every branch and balcony I could spy, waving and cheering. Drifting petals of white and pink filled the skies like the endseason snows of the south. I shifted upwards to lower my view, and my chin scraped against the wicker as my mouth fell open.

I was in Haidak’s war-party.

A forest of feathered spears swayed around me. Warriors wearing snarling masks and draped in armour sat high on wagons of supplies. They blew shell horns with every other breath in their lungs. Others with drums of narin wood and tanned skin thumped away in a rhythm I didn’t understand. Wormsilk and silver pennants streamed in the same acrid breeze I had tasted the day before. A leafroad of wide wooden beams lay below us.

A boot stamped the wood in front of my narrow view. I tried to angle myself to see its wearer, but it was useless. Voices made me shrink back from the basket’s edge.

“No troubles so far. They bought it.”

It was Pel’s rasp of a voice, gruffer with the morning. I bared my teeth behind the wicker, half-tempted to pounce on him that very moment and get my answers.

A nervous voice spoke from my other side. “Don’t mean nothing yet, Pel, you madman. Don’t mean nothing in the slightest. It’s only been an hour and we’ve got days ahead of us. Three Gods, why did I agree to this?”

“You didn’t. I did on your behalf, brother. I find this all rather exciting,” chuckled a woman.

“You would. Because you’re as much a fool as he is.”

Something patted the basket.

“Sure your friend is okay in there?”

I bit my tongue to keep from yelling out at being called a friend of Pel’s. If that’s what he thought, he could throw himself from a branch. How dare he.

I had assumed my first outing from Shal Gara would have been of my own accord: either running proudly and breathless from the city towards the unknown, or in exile for being frankly too useless for any worker’s calling. I had not expected it to be against my will.

Pel had kidnapped me, that much was true. I didn’t know why in the Six Hells the beggar would do such a thing, or whether he had harmed my mother and sister in the process. Whether it was for some strange ritual, or urka madness, or he had stuffed me in a basket for a snack while he followed Haidak’s war-party east, I had no clue. He was a disgraced sorcer, naught but a beggar, yet here he was: marching with the finest warriors Eagleborn Baran could summon.

Despite being further from the city than I’d ever been, or being amongst the lancers and sorcers I admired so much, I remained livid. I stayed silent as a corpse, coiled and ready, listening to the tramping of feet around me and the voices that discussed me.

“So why did you bring this scrawny loamer along?” asked the woman.

“You’ll see,” was all Pel admitted. “He’s more than he looks.”

The woman hummed. “He looks like his father.”

“Precisely.”

“This feels like a mistake, I tell you,” said the nervous man.

“You quiet down now, Redeye,” hissed Pel.

“Eztaral will notice us soon enough. She’ll bring all of Haidak Baran’s wrath down on us.”

“Silence. You talk more than you used to, and even then you were a pain. This is my problem to face, not yours,” said Pel.

I heard the yowl of something large and dangerous. Heavy paws started to investigate my prison. I felt their weight bending the basket and saw the tips of the claws poke through the wicker. A snout snuffled at my scent.

“Inwar! Away from there.”

I silently exhaled. I didn’t need to see the creature’s face or maw to know it was something I didn’t want to meet.

As the hours dragged, I bided my time by eavesdropping. I learned that the woman was far too exuberant for Pel or her nervous brother’s liking. Whatever beast walked by her side continued to paw at my basket, knowing I was awake and yet ignored by its master.

Hours more went by, until my arms grew numb from propping myself up and my head wound became still and manageable. The faint needles of lastlight poking through the basket became russet, and then died away to night.

I was almost asleep when a shrill horn called the war-party to rest. Whatever wagon I sat on came to a rocking halt. The yowl of an orokan rumbled through my spine. I heard orders to halt and make camp upon the leafroad, and after a short trundle, somebody tackled the ropes over my basket.

I coiled up, ready to spring. My heart hammered more pain into my head. I held my breath. As soon as the lid was barely an inch separated, I lunged.

To tell the truth, I was hoping my third fight would end up a lot better than my previous two. There was no plan except swinging my bunched fist as hard as possible at the first figure I saw. I didn’t care that it wasn’t Pel my fist aimed for, all I knew was that I needed to fight.

My fist stopped in mid-air against a wall of leafleather. I immediately regretted my decision, and as the pain flashed from my knuckles up to my shoulder, I was seized by the elbow, flipped over the painful extremities of my own arm, and found myself wheezing on the back of a wagon.

I clutched my arm, convinced it was broken. With my lungs slowly recovering, I spent the painful moments looking up at my captors.

Pel was there, turbaned and cowled like a sorcer and looking sorry for himself. His wounds had barely healed. Beside him was the wiry woman who had sent me arse over tit. I had expected a scowl or a victorious, haughty look. But the woman was smiling warmly, all teeth and gleaming eyes. She held out a hand as if to shake mine or help me up. She must have been as mad as Pel, but there was no blue stain of urka on her deeply scarred bottom lip. A wild crest of white hair ran along the crown of her head. Dried flowers and seeds hung in bracelets and necklaces around her neck and wiry arms. Vials of liquids dangled from a belt like candlevine bulbs and a staff of ironpith was strapped to the woman’s back. She looked like a common seedwitch, selling potions and tinctures on street corners, but on her splayed palm was the tattoo of the scholar tribe: an open eye. One brand decorated her face.

Fidgeting with his hands, a third figure stood behind. The nervous man. He was a perplexing figure: his eyes were as red as a noble’s, but his demeanour and the scruffy attire spoke differently. Had it not been for the black sorcer’s robes, by his floppy hat I would have thought him a highfield farmer. The dagger tattoo across his left eye was evidence he hadn’t just stolen a robe. As were his faintly dyed hands, stained red for an earth reaver. The three lines on his other cheek even ranked him as a maven in the sorcer tribe. My attention was drawn to the glowing vials of blue nectra poked out from within his coat and the knife pommel his hand rested on.

What gave me most concern was the creature breathing very hard in my ear through long fangs. My face was already clammy with hot breath that smelled of rotting meat. I turned my head slowly to see a mouth crammed with sharp teeth, grinning at me. The beast was poised upright with its huge claws digging splinters from the edge of the wagon.

It was a jāgu. The striped black-and-green fur and four giant fangs gave it away. I had heard plenty of songs about the beasts, and seen them in paintings across Shal Gara’s trunk, but never with my own two eyes.

“Easy now, Inwar. This isn’t a meal for you.” The woman clicked her fingers in a curiously fast rhythm and the jāgu hopped back to the ground. Sitting on its tufted haunches, it closed its mouth with a humph. Two of its fangs hung down like knives on a belt. The opposite fangs curved up over its snout, more like tusks. A spiked tail swished back and forth across the dust.

At last, my panic eased enough to stare at my surroundings. It was long past lastlight. Impenetrable gloom lurked at the edges of every direction I looked in. Trees of dark umber and green sprawled beneath and above us. The sky was awash with streaks of cloud that glowed a faint orange, from either distant fires or city lights.

Like the rest of the war-party, the wagon was perched on a leafroad that sat atop the canopy and speared the night. Crowds of warriors and other wagons squeezed around us, noisily making camp. I swivelled on my arse until I saw the shine of Shal Gara behind us. Dark bands of branches and treetops crisscrossed her proud and stubborn glow. Though I still had to crane my neck to take all of the city in, the distance of leafroad between us stuttered my breathing.

“Sorry about the arm. I’ve a tincture for the pain if you wish—

I knocked the woman’s offered hand away with a petulant slap. “What by the bloody loam have you done to me? Where is my mother and Tesq?” I demanded of Pel.

The old beggar sighed. “Don’t you worry. They’re safe back in the city.”

“I’ll worry all I like. As should you be. I hope you know they’re going to skin you alive for this!” I hissed.

Pel blinked repeatedly. The threat had rattled him. He turned away from my scorching glower as if he felt its heat. “They’ll thank me, in the end. You all will,” he said.

“What is going on? Curse it! Have you gone truly mad?”

“Quiet down, you idiot,” the sorcer snapped at me. A red and grasping hand came for my throat as if to throttle me. I dodged away.

“What’s the trouble here, you porters?” A man with a wild nest of hair came swaggering down the row of wagons. His bare arms showed the sword tattoos of a warrior. The three brands on his cheek showed him as a wilder, the third rank of his tribe, and therefore our better.

The woman’s smile grew even wider as she jumped to the leafroad. “None at all, sir! Just a bit of obedience training, so to speak. Young chap’s apparently not used to taking orders.”

“Then he’d better learn! Eagleborn Baran expects the best of the best in this war-party. Who recruited you? Speak your names!”

The woman bowed deeply. “Atalawe, temach rank and the best beast wrangler of the scholar tribe, if I don’t say so myself. Handpicked by Eagleborn Baran’s personal officers.”

The wilder jumped out of his boots when Inwar came padding from behind his master.

“Three Gods! That thing should have a muzzle!” exclaimed the warrior.

Atalawe chuckled. “Jāgu don’t take kindly to such methods, sir.” She raised a hand, and Inwar licked at her fingers. “You would lose an arm before you even got close.”

The wilder was already backing away when Inwar growled. “What’s a wrangler and a sorcer like you doing with these grimy porters?”

“Redeye here is my brother, and these porters are old friends from a past life,” replied Atalawe, gesturing to the brooding sorcer at my side. “Thought we’d pay them a visit given this most glorious day.”

“Mhm,” murmured the officer, now trying to keep Inwar’s curious snout away from his crotch. “Well, slap that worker into shape and you get back to your ranks. Or else!”

To the snap of Atalawe’s fingers, Inwar trotted back to her side. For such a terrifying creature with fangs as long as my arm, he was nothing but a purring cub to her command. Wranglers normally stuck to training the stubborn orokan to pull wagons, keeping lancewing hatchlings from escaping, or raising barkwolves to help hunters track the feathered and notedly mischievous sezal lizards. How, where, and why by the loam Atalawe had wrangled a jāgu, I had no bloody clue.

Pel’s hand alighted on my shoulder. I shrank away. The pain still lingered in my head and arm, but I managed to shimmy from the wagon. Three steps, and I felt the raised edge of the leafroad at my toes. Past the struts and ironpith chains that kept the leafroad suspended in the treetops, nothing but a drop of hundreds of feet through dark and dangerous Swathe lay beneath me. Nobody but my kidnappers would have noticed my fall. Nobody would have heard my scream. Every warrior or worker in sight was far too busy manhandling bedrolls or tarpaulins for shelter. What a useless protest my death would have been.

“Tarko, we mean you no harm,” Pel urged. His blind eyes shifted back and forth.

“Could’ve fooled me,” I hissed. “You hit me over the head, abducted me, and stuffed me into a basket for an entire day. What am I supposed to believe?”

“But all for the better, boy.”

“Don’t call me boy.”

Pel growled. “We—I had no choice. There was no other way of getting you into the war-party. No time. You wouldn’t have come otherwise, wouldn’t have understood.”

I crossed my arms, shuffled closer to the edge. “You could have spoken to me, with words that didn’t sound like the raving of a madman.”

If being called boy needled me, the branding of a madman incensed Pel. I saw the murk of his eyes flash as blue as his dry and split lips. I had never called him that until now. Both Mother and Tesq had warned me not to, and now I knew why. His face was a storm busy brewing.

“Don’t you dare call me that, Tarkosi. You act like I’ve done you some injury, when all I’ve ever shown you is kindness and care. There’s much you don’t know here, so have some respect.”

“Maybe I will when you tell me what I’m missing, old man,” I hissed. “Such as who by the loam you strange people are. Then, you can take me back to Shal Gara, and perhaps we’ll forget this whole escapade. If you’re lucky, Mother might not throw you from the branch.”

Atalawe’s chuckle was not comforting. Neither was her persistent grin.

Blind Pel felt his way back to the wagon and started rifling through the baggage and other baskets. He said no more to me or the others. The wrangler beckoned me away from the edge of the leafroad instead.

“Come, Tarkosi. Plenty of time for arguing later,” she said. “Away from that edge, if you please.”

“How do you know my name, curse it?”

The woman tilted her head. “Pel just said it.”

I tenderly touched the swollen lump at the back of my skull. I felt dizzy, which was far from a state you wanted to be in on the precipice of a leafroad. “Right.”

The next few moments passed by like the gossamer threads of a dream. I was lost in a whirl of distraction. This new world was barely a day’s journey from Shal Gara, and yet it all felt entirely too new, and all too eager to introduce itself to me. From the occasional pound of drums and the songs rising up from different ranks, to the yowl of beasts as they called to other creatures hidden in the dark spread of the canopy.

A horde of bats spun through the canopy, drawing me back to the scar of streaked sky. The obsidian between the clouds was studded with stars. I had never seen them so bright. Even beyond the roof of bloodwood leaves, the lights of the city stole the stars’ fires. I couldn’t help but stare like a newborn.

“Tarkosi.”

I jumped. “What?”

The Atalawe woman was staring right at me. She couldn’t have been more than forty seasons. I studied the faint wrinkles cresting the corners of her scarred lip. They bunched as she bared another warm smile. Her sorcer brother fidgeted nearby. His hand had yet to leave his knife, his red gaze still suspicious.

“I said, are you hungry?” Atalawe said. “I know I am. They say all you get to eat on a march is the dust from the wagons and shoes in front of you. I haven’t missed it.”

Beyond the confusion and fear, hunger had been the last thing on my mind. But as soon as Atalawe had spoken the word, like pulling a lever, my stomach growled so loudly Inwar stared at me with narrowed, bejewelled eyes.

“I’ll take that as a yes!” Atalawe laughed. Her good humour was bizarre to me. I had never met somebody so effervescent. It was irritating.

“Who are you?”

“Like I told that wilder, I’m a fourth-born, a lowly temach rank in the scholar tribe, a beast wrangler by trade, and a seedwitch at heart, however the other scholars might look down upon such pursuits.”

I blinked. “And how is it you know Blind Pel?”

“Known him a long time now. We fought side by side in the Scorchwars, for one.”

“And what’s with him? Your brother?” I pointed to the sorcer, who was busy pacing back and forth, flinching at every thud and bang of the camp.

“Redeye’s a nervous and untrusting sort. Always has been since he fell out of his mother. We share a father, but I see him as my whole blood. Sit, you buffoon,” Atalawe ordered him as she arranged crates to perch on. At last, Redeye’s hand left his knife, and he sat opposite me. The glaring he kept up.

I hovered, standing, refusing to accept normality, while on another crate, Atalawe broke out provisions. Salted and dried meats and fruits were sliced with a flint blade. A spherical sandglass vial of something thick and offensively pungent was poured into bark cups. The wrangler held up one to me.

“Akiga juice. Good for your soul and rests your nerves. I won it off another temach in a game of nutshells.”

I felt like I was betraying my indignation for accepting the cup, but my parched throat moved my arm for me. The juice smelled sickly sweet, like sapwater, but had a green tinge and the charming consistency of molten wax.

“Drink it.”

The stuff nearly choked me. A sharpness of vinegar almost caused me to immediately spit it out. It burned as it slid towards my stomach. Whether it was the effort of drinking it or the juice itself, the akiga deepened my dizziness.

I reluctantly sat. “Where are we?”

“On the Emerald Causeway, a day’s march from Shal Gara, and several more from Firstwatch.”

I knew the name. The Causeway was an ancient leafroad that connected half the bloodwoods in the Swathe. Merchants and military plied it constantly. It was also a road I had spent hours staring at for most of my seasons, wondering where across the canopies its moss-covered curves led.

“You ever been this far from the city, Tarkosi?” Atalawe asked with a smile that made me think she already knew the answer. I wondered what part she played in Pel’s kidnapping.

“No.”

“Then you’re in for a treat, young lad! I’ve walked this leafroad many a time,” she said, pausing to ruffle Inwar’s green and tufted ears. “It’s one of the safer roads in the Swathe, especially with a full war-party around you.”

In my mind, my anger and confusion wrestled with a guilty thrill at having finally escaped the city. I studied Atalawe some more. Scholars had the freedom of first- or sixth-borns. They preserved the old songs while pursuing the unknown. Some became architects for the city’s roads and buildings, or tallied the flow of merchants, or wagged their tongues on corners, educating any who passed. A few trained beasts or studied the wilderness. Others mapped the ever-changing Swathe or the stars above. Almost all, however, were content to remain in the city, in dusty, vine-lit rooms bent over carvings and dry parchment.

“You don’t look like a scholar,” I told her.

“Good! I never could stand the feathered robes the scholars insist on wearing. Itchy, to tell the truth. My tribe are a bunch of fusty loamers who think they’re better than the rest of the bloodwood. They are pompous, far too concerned with tradition.” Atalawe spoke while she took a blackened bowl of clay from the wagon and set it on the leafroad. Tinder was arranged, and taking two sparkstones from her pocket, Atalawe struck them together and showered the wood with sparks. Within moments, a small fire was crackling. “No, Tarkosi. I was born different. Songs and parchments can be lost or rewritten. Better to see the world with your own eyes, feel it, taste it. Live it.”

My gaze shifted to Redeye. “And you. You don’t look much like a normal sorcer.”

Redeye’s lip twitched. Atalawe answered for him.

“Redeye’s one of the finest mudmages Shal Gara’s ever seen.”

Mudmage. It was a slur term for the earth reaver sorcers, the lowest order of magic in the sorcer tribe and not considered as fine an art as the orders of air and water. The earth was of the loam, after all. I would have still given a limb to be one of their order.

“But you’re only a maven,” I had to point out.

Redeye snorted.

“You should learn that the marks of rank and tribe can lie, Tarkosi,” Atalawe repeated in a singsong voice. “Looks can deceive.”

I sucked my teeth. “That they can,” I said. “Just like you lot pretending to be porters. Or what was it, visiting old friends?”

Atalawe tapped her flint blade on the crate before stabbing an apple. She fixed me with a twinkling gaze as she took a bite and spoke around a mouthful. “A war-party isn’t much without its supplies, is it now?”

I felt the smile stretch my sore face. Lies. “So you’re telling me you’re here because you want to do your duty? Please. I wasn’t born this morning. You’re far from the best of the best Baran promised the matriarch. You’re here for some nefarious reason, I’d wager.” Traitors. The word crossed my mind for the first time.

The question hung like an unclaimed fart between us, wrinkling noses. Redeye’s hand slowly moved back to his knife. Atalawe chuckled to herself around her slice of apple. “You didn’t tell us he was a smart one, Pel.”

Redeye grumbled. “I don’t trust him. This was a bad idea bringing him.”

Pel was now crouched on the wagon, staring at the rest of the camp as if he still had his sight. “You want to throw Tarko off the leafroad instead, Redeye?” he asked gruffly.

The sorcer avoided my eyes. “Maybe it’ll be for the best. He’s got the kind of mouth that will get us caught,” he said. “Not too late to change our minds and go back.”

Pel arose and jumped from the wagon. His heavy boots pounded the leafroad. Rags swirled around him. “Fortunately for Tarko,” he said, “you don’t get a say.”

“What is going on?” I demanded. “Tell me straight and swiftly or I’ll start yelling for that wilder and all the other warriors. I’ll bring this whole war-party down on your traitorous heads.”

Pel tutted. “That would be a mistake.”

“Then start talking, old man.”

I watched the shadows from candlevines and cook-fires play across Pel’s wounded face, rough and pitted as bloodwood bark. The urka seed stain on his lips was coloured black in the light. Once more, his eyes roamed across the camp and the treetops the Causeway perched in. Over the muted roar of warriors and voices, Pel started to explain.

“Eagleborn Baran is an impetuous bastard—”

“That much is obvious.”

“Hold your tongue, Tarko,” Pel snapped at me. He paused to bend an ear to the warriors that hovered nearby, swigging from flasks and chatting idly about how many Scorchfolk heads they’d count between them. “As I was saying, Baran is an impetuous bastard, but he’s no fool. He simply knows no better. He thinks he is marching east to fight marauders and wildfires, and he is dead wrong. What’s more, he’s going to get every soul in this war-party killed, and him along with it.”

I looked around the ragtag circle. This was no news to them, it seemed. Though I hated the petty man, I had no designs of death on Haidak Baran. I had pondered it once or twice – perhaps imagined various ways of doing it – but this was preposterous.

“You’re wrong. How can that be possible?” I spluttered. “Haidak’s brought forty thousand warriors, wilders, hundreds of lancers, and several thousand of the best sorcers Shal Gara has got.”

Atalawe let a chunk of meat sizzle in the fire. “That’s right. On the matriarch’s blessings, he’s emptied Shal Gara of its best warriors and most of its air and water sorcers overnight. Four thousand sorcers to be exact.”

“Baran’s raised quite the force, that’s for certain. But it won’t matter. Not one bit.” Though Pel’s voice cracked at the edges with its usual hoarseness, there was an urgency I’d never heard in him. “If we don’t intervene, they’re all going to die.”

The silence was prickly. Fire and dripping fat crackled. Redeye chewed at one of his nails. From the scabs and dried blood around his fingers, it was quite the habit. Pel stared unblinking.

I felt my mouth flapping like the limp jaws of a musktooth fish. “How? Why?”

Pel almost looked smug in his confidence. “Because Baran doesn’t know what he’s up against,” he replied. “Not in the slightest. He believes he’s going to be dealing with scrubland marauders or a jumped-up, untrained Scorch warlord that’ll take one look at Shal Gara’s shining leafleather and magic and turn tail.”

I scoffed. “And you know better, do you?”

Pel bared his blue teeth. “Better than anyone else in Shal Gara.”

“Possibly the whole Swathe,” snickered Atalawe.

“It isn’t marauders setting fire to Loamsedge and Firstwatch. There are no encroaching mischief-makers to be taught a lesson,” Pel said, voice cold and unwavering. “Demons, Tarko. Demons have come from beyond the Scorch to burn the Swathe.”

They each glared at me, waiting. I looked between the ragtag group and their stony eyes. They were unflinching, even Redeye beneath his floppy, ridiculous hat.

“That is ridiculous.” I laughed loudly. It was the worst joke I had ever heard. I wasn’t quite sure if I even knew what a demon was. Something of fire and smoke and nonsense. A figment to keep pesky children in bed, and even then, tharantos and gloomsprites were far better at that job.

Pel tilted his head. “Is it, Tarko? Is it so ridiculous? With the black sun and the smoke already on the horizon? You can smell it on the breeze even now: that bitter smell. That’s not just the smell of wildfires, but the stench of a bloodwood burning with demonfire.”

“But there are no stories. No songs or scrolls about demons. Not a single carving,” I argued.

The old beggar’s laughter was cutting. “They have been forgotten, Tarko. Over a thousand seasons they’ve been changed or erased completely, breeding complacency and forgetfulness in our minds. Opening ourselves to ruin and fire without a care in our hearts. We hold to the Bloodlaws, grinding away in our chosen roles, bending the forest to our order, and thinking ourselves supreme from our bloodwood heights, and yet we forget there is another world. One of fire and brimstone that is waiting to burn and crush us beneath its heel.”

Pel was breathing hard. There was none of the slur to his voice that was normal when full of urka seed. No crossing of his eyes. No half-finished sentences. Once more, with his uncanny ability, he fixed me with a direct stare.

“I can’t believe it,” I admitted. I refused to. It was too incredible, too fanciful, too terrifying to understand, never mind believe.

“Neither would anyone else, because they’re all too confident in the Swathe’s bountiful might that they can’t see another option. I tried to tell them, boy. Who do you think gave me these wounds? I marched right up to the Crimson Crown, and I yelled at their gates for hours and hours until the matriarch and her sages appeared at the windows of their court. They had the highwarders escort me away and give me a beating out of sight. Blinded, they are, but not us.”

“You’ve heard of Kī Raxa?” Atalawe asked me.

“Of course. I live on the Branch of Kī Raxa, for gods’ sake. That’s a story I have heard. Everybody has. She was a sixth-born and Shal Gara’s champion. She turned the marauder warlords of the Scorch back a thousand seasons ago.”

Even in such dire conversation, Atalawe somehow found time to grin. “No, Tarko. She was the champion who turned the demons back and sealed their world away so they couldn’t return. Or so we thought. The warnings she left have rusted and crumbled away, and now we are left with nothing but overconfidence, throwing our best into a battle we don’t understand and are ill-prepared for.”

“Then why aren’t you running, instead of fighting? If this is that serious and hopeless, why aren’t you saving your own skins?” I asked, feeling the same impulse in my own sweating feet.

Their slow shake of their heads mocked me. Only Redeye seemed to agree with me; his icy outer skin melted for one moment in an emphatic, pleading nod.

“Because we are the Scions of the Sixth-Born,” replied Pel, with a tremble of pride in his voice. “We are what’s left of an order who made a vow to Kī Raxa before she died: to keep watch should the demons ever return. The Scions have kept our vigil for a thousand seasons, waiting for and dreading the sign of the dark sun. None but us know what waits beyond the edges of the Swathe, and we swore to keep the bloodwoods safe no matter what comes against them. Just like your father Teyak did.”

Atalawe and Redeye nodded solemnly. I narrowed my eyes.

“You should know better than to talk about my father, Pel. Especially such ridiculous lies. My father was a useless drunk who ruined my life before it had a chance to start.”

Pel loomed over me. “Your father,” he uttered, “was our friend.”

“Friend?” I shook my head and pushed past him. Pel didn’t try to stop me. “A friend would have stopped my father from trying to murder Sage Baran, from getting in the pockets of gemlenders and drinking alehouses dry. That’s how I know this is all lies. Madness. Every bit of it, and why you’ve involved me in your ridiculous ideas, I don’t know.”

My mind full of arguments and insults, I put those crazed people behind me and ambled in their opposite direction. I kicked at the wagon’s wheels in frustration. Ignoring the pain in my toes, I dragged myself past the wagon and into the lively sprawl of Shal Gara’s finest.

“Where are you going, Tarko?” Pel shouted after me.

“Home, no thanks to you!”

6

Past’s Shadow

All shall be paid a tithe of gems for their service to the Bloodlaws, and in relation to their tribe.

DECREE OF MATRIARCH HELAQASA OF DORLA SEL, 1431

I had no idea where I was going. I simply followed the distant lights of Shal Gara like a beacon of safety.

The gloom was a hungry mould, seeping anywhere a fire didn’t burn or candlevine bulb didn’t glow. Where fire or fauna couldn’t shine, luminescent paint and dust ran in striped patterns across wagons and even some of the beasts, now fitted with nosebags and blinders.

I weaved through a pair of snoring orokan, noting warriors using a nearby treetop as target practice for arrows and slingstones. My pace slowed so I could hover and watch. Every miss was ridiculed. For every missile that thudded against the target, cheers and beakers were raised to cackling laughter. I watched the slingers with judgement, and had to drag myself away from challenging them.

The scent of glory was in the air. The war-party thrummed with excitement instead of the fear I expected. There were patches of silence between the raucous camps. Some meditated or prayed to wooden carvings of ancestors they had made precious room for in their packs. These individuals were the old and wizened kind, the ones who presumably had seen their days of drinking and shooting at trees.

As I wandered the busy leafroad, I saw an order dividing the camp, just as it did Shal Gara. Not all second-borns mingled together but instead clumped together in their respective ranks.

The lowest were the warders, most of which had remained in the city. Next came the warriors, and they filled the widest stretches of the camp. The further I moved down the leafroad to the rear of the war-party, the higher the ranks climbed. Wilders, festooned with orokan pelts and grimacing barkwolf masks, sat about honing their broad obsidian axes.

Beyond them, lancers strutted in dun leafleather armour and beaked or fanged masks. They camped in a section of leafroad where their tents formed a wall of mosscloth and pelt. Expensive fireworm lanterns of iron pitch and sandglass stood on poles. Campfires crackled between them. Here, the sorcers gathered, but even then they kept to themselves. Their dark, hooded groups glowed blue as the sorcers checked and polished their vials of nectra.

A lancewing blasted overhead, trimming leaves from overhanging treetops. The pennants of the tents flapped as the bird landed amongst their tangle. I weaved in another direction, trying to find a way around.

I soon found it: a narrow strip between a crooked tent and the perilous edge of the leafroad. I stared into the darkness that sat between me and Shal Gara’s glow. The lights of the war-party could only reach so far. Wild candlevine shone here and there. Streaks of glowing moss wrapped around tree trunks, shining a path down into the murk of the loam far below. The leafroad was a meandering tunnel through the night-soaked canopy. Its pale and well-trodden wood planks stretched a mile before it was swallowed by the shadows.

“Oi! You there!”

A voice shook me from my staring. A lancer without helmet and shockingly pale eyes had taken an interest in me. A green feather hung from his ear.

I tried to slide my worker’s tattoos inside my sleeves, but he’d already seen them.

“What are you hanging about here for, porter?” he demanded. “Get back to work, you lazy creature.”

Behind him and between the tents, I saw a bustling horde of lancers and sorcers tumbling around Eagleborn Haidak Baran. He looked angry and, from his brisk march, eager to be somewhere.

The lancer banged his spear on the wooden road. The noise and his shout drew looks from the others. “You hear me, boy? Get gone!”

He reached to shove me, but a brisk shoulder barge from somebody behind me beat him to it. The force sent me stumbling up against a nearby snoozing orokan. I got snarled at for my troubles and turned to see a hooded Pel wagging a finger at me.

“Curse it, you wretch!” he said in a gruff voice. “What have I told you about wandering off, eh? Lazy as he is stupid, this one, sir! A thousand apologies for the disturbance.”

“Get back to where you belong, both of you,” the lancer ordered.

As Pel seized me by the collar and dragged me back the way I’d come, I heard the lancer mutter, “Worker scum,” before returning to his post.

No sooner had Pel dragged me behind a tall wagon did he throw me against its painted sides. Glowing dust spiralled between us.

“Are you trying to get us noticed, Tarko?” he snarled at me. I thought I saw a sorcer’s glint in his blind eyes. The grip around my neck was strong, quivering as if he reminded himself not to squeeze. “If Haidak recognises you, there’ll be no explaining it. We will be finished before we started.”

“I couldn’t care less. I’m trying to go home,” I gasped.

“All these seasons, I’ve watched you moan about being stuck in that city, about its Bloodlaws, and now you can’t wait to get back to it? I don’t understand you.”

“I didn’t want to be forced into it!” I hissed. Pel didn’t get it. Freedom was what I lacked. To be press-ganged into some batshit cause and a dangerous battle was no choice of mine.

Pel relaxed his grip. His tone became pleading as he somehow guessed my thoughts. “Then choose to help us.”

“To what? To help you fight demons? To interfere with the war-party? Even if I believed you, Pel, I’m nothing but a worker!”

His grubby finger poked at my face, right at my regretted sorcer’s mark. “You,” he said, “just like anyone, can be much more if you simply believe. There’s much you don’t know, but you can help us, Tarko. You can help all of these people.”

“Can I now? And just how am I supposed to do that?”

“By reminding somebody of a promise they made.”

“Oh, is that it?”

“If the Three Gods and their spirits are with us, that will be all we need. I promise. That is all we’re here to do. You could save everyone, Tarko. You could be a hero like Kī Raxa or Suluz the Strong.”

I wondered who was the bigger cretin between us. Pel and his urka-made stories of demons, or me for falling for the faint promise of mattering. He throttled not only my neck, but my curiosity. I put my cheek to the glowing paint and stared at Shal Gara. “You’ll be explaining this to Mother and Tesq when you get me back to the city,” I sighed.

Pel let me go, leaving me to brush the paint and powder from my tunic.

“If you don’t somehow get us all killed or executed in the meantime,” I added.

“I’ll keep you alive, Tarko. That was the last promise I made to your father. Besides, if I let you die, then I better hope I go with you. That would be a preferable fate to telling your mother.”

The humour was dark as the gloom, but I still managed to splutter at it. It was utterly laughable. “She’d skin you alive and throw you to the loam.”

“That she would. I’d rather face demons than Axera Terelta.”

Demons. I sighed, wanting to hear no more of them. I sniffed the air once more, but I couldn’t tell if it was the campfire smoke or the acrid air I smelled.

Pel and I bent our heads low as we walked back through the diminishing ranks. Soon enough, we were past the wilders and back amongst the sprawl of lowly warriors.

Inwar bared his sabre-fangs at us as we entered our little hollow made of wagon, slumbering orokan, and the endless darkness of the Swathe. Atalawe had lit a small fire within a clay bowl as wide as a shield. She clicked her fingers sharply, and the jāgu retreated. Redeye was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s your brother?” Pel sniffed at the air. For a blind man, one who had even taken my stiff arm to walk through the war-party camp, Pel was far too observant for my liking. I had always wondered, but now it was getting infuriatingly curious.

“Wandering, much like you.”

“How do you do that? How do you see as if you weren’t blind?” I asked Pel, suspicious.

The old beggar tapped his nose. “Magic.”

He and Atalawe picked at the morsels she was roasting over the small fire. I stared at their glow. I was never normally given the chance to sit and watch the simplicity of flames consuming a log. It calmed me, transfixed me. I watched it until my eyes grew dry.

“Fine,” I grumbled to the silence. “If I’m to be part of this madness, how will an old promise turn this war-party around when they wouldn’t listen to you before?”

“This time, we’ll speak to the right person.” Pel picked at his cuts and bruises as he spoke. “Somebody, hopefully, with enough power and enough sense to listen.”

I was momentarily crestfallen. “You don’t mean Haidak, do you?”

Atalawe laughed. “Three Gods, no. Haidak thinks he has power and adoration. He has no idea what he faces. He’s just something pretty to look at and a pup to his father’s commands.”

“No,” replied Pel. “A woman named Eztaral. A woman who owes your father a debt, like I said. As we all do.”

I understood this talk of my father less than I did the threat of demons. I remembered nothing but a man who argued constantly with Mother, who came home doused in ale and bruises across his face from gemlenders who had run out of patience. Tesq, two seasons older than me, had told me all I needed to know about him.

“What debt could anyone possibly owe a man like my father?” I asked.

For once, Atalawe’s resilient smile faded. It seemed as though I had insulted her.

“My life, for one,” she spoke, voice like two stones colliding.

Pel nodded beneath the shade of his hood. “Mine too. And if Redeye was here, he would say the same. Your father, Tarko, was the head of the Scions. He led our remnants for decades.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The man had barely managed to get home for supper on time, if at all.

Pel held his hand up to the fire as if he were causing its ripples. “I told you: there’s plenty you don’t know. Teyak Terelta was the son of a sixth-born just like all of us. He was a sorcer of great power. Beyond me… beyond half the paragons in the sorcer tribe. He could have been a painted or braided one by now.”

“Mother said he was a passable air carver in the Scorchwars, but that he squandered his gift.”

“No, boy. He was much more, but Sage Baran put a mighty effort into ruining your father’s reputation because of his beliefs.”

“And what were they?” I asked, feeling myself becoming irritable with confusion.

“That one day, an omen of a black sun and smoke in the east would come, and with it, demons. He tried to warn the council and the matriarch time and time again, but they called him a liar, maddened by magic, and cast him from the sorcer tribe. His reputation crumbled over the next few seasons while the recalcitrance of the matriarch and her sages drove him to desperation. Baran knew this well, and had gemlenders pursue him. Finally, he provoked him into a fight in an effort to ruin him completely, and it worked.”

Atalawe exhaled. “Teyak almost killed Baran that day.” She and Pel stamped their feet in unison, making Inwar look up from his slumbers.

“It sent your father into a defeated spiral. He lost his rank, his tribe, and his respect.”

I shook my head slowly. To believe Pel branded my mother, my sister, and my own memories as liars. To believe him not only meant that I had been wrong for seasons, but that I had spent them sullying the name of a father who was undeserving of it.

“I…” Words failed me. My world, as small as it was, had mutated so drastically in such little time I hardly recognised it. My head spun like a winged seed.

The wrangler was not dejected for long. Before I could make sense of it all, she placed a conical lid upon the fire-pit with a clunk and held her hands to its warm pottery. “Think no more on it. It’s too much for a young mind to handle to learn of demons, never mind the truth of their own history. Our tongues have wagged enough for tonight. The road to Firstwatch will not be simple or safe,” she said.

Before I could bluster or flap my mouth any more, Atalawe bedded down against the orokan’s furry side. Inwar coiled his front paws over her like a terrifying blanket. By the time I looked to Pel, he had already shut his eyes, crossed his arms, and hunched over. In the faint glimmer from other lights in the camp, I saw his mouth muttering in prayer to the Three.

I had no choice but to curl up where I sat: on the rough surface of the leafroad and feeling the heat gradually die away until I shivered in half-dreams born of a thousand questions. Skittish conjurations, fictions of my own making. The kind of sleep that isn’t sleep at all, just a terrible way to spend the evening hours.

��

To the blast of rude horns and even ruder drums, I awoke to a world I didn’t recognise and, to my delight, soaked to the bone in dew. I humphed.

Mist hung between the treetops. Like blankets of moss, it clung to their barren spiked tips as if clouds had been snagged in the canopy. The leafroad was slick and glistening with moisture. Light speared the mist, and in fainter patches an orange sky of firstglow could be seen. No breeze blew across my cold skin. Muddled birdsong filled the thick morning air while crows cawed and clucked. The fringes of the leafroad were lost to mystery.

“What by the loam is going on?” I asked, clutching my wet tunic to me. I looked back to Shal Gara, but the city was shrouded like the rest of the Swathe. Gone. The city lights had been a rope around my waist. I was truly cut free and lost.

“The war-party’s moving on,” Atalawe yelled at me. She, Redeye, and Pel were standing by the wagon. The old beggar was absently carving one of his animal shapes into a pebble of wood. Atalawe was busy fastening our orokan into its harness. The fellow looked as sleepy as I felt, but that was nothing new for the average orokan. The beasts of burden were known for sleeping for days in a row if their masters let them.

With sleep-numb legs, I tottered up and took a breath to stretch my aching back. Sleeping on the bare leafroad had put a crick in my neck and pain in my sides. Though the campfires were long burned out, I still smelled smoke in my nostrils. I refused to pay attention to it.

Pel spoke to me while he checked on an ornate, curved bow beneath the bundles upon the wagon. Why in the Six Hells the blind old beggar had or needed a bow, I didn’t know.

“You smell it, don’t you, Tarko? This isn’t all mist, but smoke.”

“Let me guess. Demons?” I croaked.

Redeye scowled at me. Pel put a finger to his lips. “Remember now. We aren’t supposed to be here. If we want to pull this off, then you need to play along like us.”

My mind was still a mess of questions I wasn’t sure I wanted answers to. The night before had opened sore wounds long closed, but I decided to play along. I still clung to curiosity and the promise of mattering. “I’m a worker, aren’t I? I know how to work.”

“Good boy.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“You’re just like your father.”

“Don’t say that, either.”

I grumbled something foul as I climbed the wagon and threw myself in between the sacks and crates of random supplies. Atalawe took the seat and gripped the reins. Around us, Haidak’s war-party pulled itself into its ranks and practised formations. The orders were few and the warriors well-trained. A long shell-horn blast from the back of the column set their heavy boots to the leafroad.

With a flick of the reins and a musical whistle between her teeth, Atalawe moved us along the road towards the east. I hadn’t seen much in the dark, but I now realised a small sea of wagons, porters, and their orokan stretched behind us. We plodded along in close formation behind the bulk of the war-party.

I turned around to look to Pel but found Inwar grinning at me with his giant teeth, tongue lolling and breath far too hideous for the early in the morning. Pel seemed deep in a concentration I didn’t understand, murky eyes half-closed and muttering to himself like before.

Redeye stared at me, but every time I caught his eyes he looked away. Or spat a charming gob of spit on the wooden road.

Atalawe whistled as if she didn’t have a single care in the world and traded jokes with nearby porters. How she was so calm and carefree was mystifying, but all I knew was jealousy of how few shits she seemed to give for the troubles of her place in the world. I was jealous.

I spent the whole morning staring at the Swathe passing me by. It was a fine distraction from my strange situation. Instead of dwelling on the burning questions of my father’s true self, or the fact that demons not only existed but were invading the Swathe, I watched a world I had longed to venture into slip by to the tune of rattling wagon wheels. I found myself forgetting all else as I watched treetop after treetop amble past the edges of the broad leafroad, or the flocks of parrots and waifs darting between high branches. I even sat upon the wagon beside Atalawe for a better view. Fascination mixed with trepidation as I kept watch for the dangers I had spent a life being warned of.

Before long, merchants and travellers appeared along the Emerald Causeway. The beat of the war-drums ordered them to move aside. I will admit, even though I was an imposter, an actor, I felt proud to be amongst the war-party when they began to clap and cheer for Shal Gara’s finest as they passed.

By midday, the haze had almost cleared, and the full sweeping sprawl of the Swathe was once more revealed. Beyond the shadow of Shal Gara, ironpith, pine, maple, cedar, and narin trees sprouted to scrape at the sky. Though they were barely half the height of a bloodwood, they clustered together in a thick emerald canopy. The leafroad forged a path across their highest reaches, meandering through the branches that sloped like a mountainside down towards the east.

The sky, however, remained marred. There was a dun-orange tinge to the heavens, and the sun goddess was still injured by darkness. I swore a larger portion of her had been carved out since yesterday. She wore a crimson halo I had never seen before. The sight caused me to shudder, and I wasn’t alone. The sight of the sun set off a muttering and a mumbling throughout the war-party.

The leafroad had changed course by the time the sun slipped from its zenith. While I stared up at the sun, hand shielding my eyes, I felt the ground sloping out from beneath us. Where the Causeway had been flat before, supported by tree after tree, it now delved into the darker world below the canopies. Leaves and branches now stretched overhead. Songbirds trilled along to our drums and tramping feet. Lancewings pirouetted overhead as they ran patrols around the war-party.

It was late afternoon when the leafroad reached the colossal pillars. I had already seen their stark shapes through the foliage. Giant ironpith trees stood like roofless columns around the leafroad. No tapering treetops for these ironpith giants. Beaks of ravens and lancewings cast long shadows. Orokan slept with their long claws crossed. The snarling faces of barkwolves, jāgu, and tharantos glowered down at us as if angry they couldn’t snack on the delicious morsels below. Matriarchs long-dead and crowned with flowers sat atop faces of old heroes. The pillars’ red and silver paint had faded here and there where the sun shone through the canopy.

“The Ancestor Towers,” Pel breathed in my ear.

The air in their grove took on a colder touch. Between the pillars, great beards of hoary moss hung from the branches. From other branches, it chilled me to see skulls swinging on long ropes. Not all of them were human. Rough-hewn teardrops of pink quartz, jade, and striped obsidian hung suspended like droplets caught in a rainbow.

No birdsong broke the stifled air. A silent reverence held sway between the Towers. It felt to me like a payment of respect but also a mark of fear. Unease prickled me as the war-party halted between them. A sickly scent of flowers pervaded. Every scrape of boots or orokan claws made me flinch. Redeye coughed as quietly as he could manage, but heads still swivelled accusingly.

More than a few warriors broke formation to bend a knee and pray. I stayed where I was, too haunted by the carved stares above me. I watched their painted eyes, expecting them to move and watch me back. They were not graves, but they felt the same.

“This is the edge of Shal Gara’s boundary,” Atalawe whispered. “Every passing traveller pays their respect to the ancestors if they want a safe journey. Our heroic Eagleborn Baran will do the same, as is traditional for any war-party. Not since the Scorchwars has it happened.”

I heard Pel’s bones pop as he turned around. “And here he comes now,” he said.

Pel was right: Haidak emerged from the rear of the column. “How by the loam…,” I mumbled. I was quickly becoming convinced the man wasn’t blind.

The ranks around us parted for their commander without an order. Wearing a helmet crested in proud golden feathers, Haidak marched with purpose. Blue-handed sorcers and polished lancers trailed behind him. No cheers were raised for him. My mischievous streak told me this was a perfect opportunity to boo him, but I got the sense it wouldn’t have ended well. I bit my tongue just in case he spotted me and hunkered behind Atalawe as he passed. Pel threw a threadbare cloak at me and tutted.

Haidak walked until he stood at the front of his war-party. I imagined it was a place he was less than used to. A wreath of knotted vines and white flowers was delivered to him by a ravenborn. Wordless, he raised it up above his head, turning to each ironpith giant. To me, it seemed the gloom between the trees darkened. A breeze made the jade pendants and skulls sway.

When the respect had been paid, Haidak proceeded to the edge of the leafroad and dropped the wreath to the forest floor several hundred feet below.

“Poor bastards think it’ll keep them safe, too,” Pel muttered, barely audible. “Won’t make a blind bit of difference.”

“You don’t believe in the power of the ancestors?”

“Oh, I believe in them. Them, the Three Gods, and all their spirits. I know what roles they play in this world. I just know that demons have no such cares nor respect. They are not of our realm.”

A screeching horn broke the silence and somehow the spell of the Ancestor Towers. I nearly vacated the wagon’s seat in surprise. And my bowels, to tell the truth.

To the baying cry of a ravenborn standing by Haidak’s side, the war-party lurched onwards. Not a word was swapped between any of the warriors. They stared upwards at the faces of human and beast.

In superstition, I mumbled something that resembled a prayer to the ancestors and the Three Gods. I didn’t know what to pray for except survival, as that felt incredibly appropriate considering my company. The Terelta family had few living members beyond my immediate relatives, but whichever ancestors I had lost in the past, I prayed they would watch me, whatever mad Pel had in mind. I may have even muttered my father’s name, much to my dislike.

Pel was staring unashamedly in Haidak’s direction. The eagleborn had remained on the edge of the leafroad, arms crossed and examining every fighter and wagon that trundled past him. I hoisted up my hood and glared at the backside of the orokan pulling the wagon. Fortunately, we were now in the centre of the leafroad. Another flat cart piled high with throwing spears blocked his view of us for the most part.

I watched Pel with curiosity. For all his secrecy and caution, he was bold as day now. He sat upright with his hood barely covering his bruised face. I dared a glance in the direction of his blind eyes. Beside Haidak stood a woman in dull grey armour over a muscular form. I recognised her immediately. The black feather about her neck made her unmistakeable. It was the ravenborn who had stopped Haidak from punching my lights out or throwing me from the nests. She was without her helmet now, her shorn hair flattened like straw and sweat glinting around the patterns tattooed across her skull.

“Who is that?” I asked.

Pel was too focused to answer. Redeye sniffed at the smoky air.

“That,” he said, “is Eztaral Kraid, first of the ravenborn, and the one that will hopefully help us.”

“That’s the woman you’re trying to talk to?” I asked. “She stopped Haidak from giving me more of these.” I pointed to my bruised eye. It was tender to the touch, and had swelled in the night. At least the wound had scabbed.

Pel’s head snapped around. “When?”

“Yesterday in the lancewing nests, barely an hour past firstglow. The first of this week’s beatings, apparently.” I rubbed my skull to make Pel feel guilty. But no. That, conveniently, his clouded eyes didn’t see.

“Did she recognise you? Call you by your name?” he asked.

“No.”

“Has it been that long?” asked Atalawe.

Redeye tutted. “Eztaral’s just climbed that high and forgotten herself. Along with the Scions and Teyak. She’s not going to listen, Pel. I told you this would be pointless, didn’t I? We should sneak away tonight after lastlight. Cut our losses.”

Atalawe slapped her brother’s knee with a chuckle. “You and your worrying, Redeye! You’re not getting out of this that easily.”

Redeye tugged at the wide brim of his floppy hat in frustration.

Pel had replaced his hood and closed his eyes. “There’s no going back now. We’ll speak to Eztaral tonight. A promise is a promise.”

I hoped for my sake, it was.

��

That was how I came to spend the rest of the day: staring. Sometimes walking alongside the orokan – whose name I’d discovered was Nod – sometimes riding alongside Atalawe as she prattled on about the wonders of this plant and that fungus, but always staring. Staring at the forest in all its colours and ever-changing patterns. Staring at the warriors and the jerked movements of their armour. Staring. I felt as powerless as a man stuck in a dream.

I quickly realised the woman barely allowed her tongue a rest. I didn’t mind one bit, for she was a fine guide to the Swathe I had never seen.

“See that slender tree there, with the purple fronds, its berries will make you piss for days, whether you want to or not. Redeye ate a bunch of them when we were kids. Nearly flooded the cottage, didn’t you?” Atalawe tittered. Her mood was infectious. I found myself laughing along, much to Redeye’s scowling. I climbed the wagon once more and sat beside her.

“And that harsh call, that ratatat noise? That’s a kanalat. A snake with two heads that constantly argue with each other. They’re never seen near bloodwoods. As for the reason, that’s escaped me and my fellow scholars for centuries. You see? The bloodwoods aren’t the only wonders of the Swathe, Tarko. The forest and its beasts were here for untold seasons before we crawled from the mud into the trees.”

Inwar had heard the kanalat’s call too. He sat up, tense and growling. Atalawe ruffled his tall and tufted ears. I reached out to do the same, but the jāgu curled his lip to show off his other fangs. I huffed.

“Takes a long time for them to trust, Tarko. Don’t you worry,” Atalawe said with a grin. “I take it from how wide your eyes have been this march, that you’ve never seen the true Swathe.”

“Only from Shal Gara’s canopy,” I admitted, feeling somehow guilty.

“Ha! The real Swathe is not in its never-ending treetops, but far below this false sky of ours.” Atalawe pointed upwards to the discoloured sky between the leaves. With lastlight, it was now a deep orange, fading to an angry red. The jagged gaps of light were growing scarcer the deeper the leafroad sloped into the branches. The trees were also shrinking in gradual measure, no longer quite as mighty as those we had put behind us. With the day waning, faint mists rose from the shadowed and overgrown forest floor to welcome the war-party. I only caught glimpses of the void-like darkness between the lower leaves, which were almost as broad as bloodwood leaves in their quest to soak up as much precious sunlight as they could.

Growing up in the city, the forest floor had always been treated not just as a long and fatal fall, but as a forbidden place. A realm of almost constant night where the dark hides all manner of death and gnashing teeth. To think about treading the loam was abhorrent to any that lived in the Neathering and above. I shivered.

“Down there is the true face of the forest, in all its delights and dangers. A world within a world with death and life in constant churning balance. You’re wise to fear it.”

“It can stay down there where it belongs,” I replied. “I always wanted to see the Swathe. My brother Texoc was sent to Stormbeaten after my father died. I’ve always been jealous.”

“Now there’s a bloodwood and city I could never grow tired of. Stormbeaten. Littered in flowers in longsun, and during endseason, the ocean storms bring blizzards that can last weeks. And when they clear, all is white and perfect. All the edges are gone from the world. There is nothing that will make your heart skip like seeing a bloodwood draped in snow, Tarko.” Atalawe sighed. “Especially one as old as Stormbeaten.”

“When did you go there?”

“Oh, I’ve been all over, Tarko. I’ve walked from Scree to Dorla Sel, Rasqax to her twin Rōkama Dar. We have all travelled far and wide. Those who founded the Scions were all sixth-born like Kī Raxa, fated to range the Swathe and patrol its edges and keep its maps accurate. Their wandering spirit lives on in us. And, as a scholar, I can go where I please,” she said with a chuckle.

“Sounds perfect,” I said, hiding the jealous grind of my teeth.

Atalawe gave me a look that I first thought was smug, but I caught a mischievous spark in her eyes. From his perch on the back of the wagon, Pel cleared his throat. He went back to carving a lump of wood into a jāgu’s face, and Atalawe shifted the subject.

“The lusifers are starting to shine,” she told me.

“The who now?”

“Those broad plants down there.”

Atalawe pointed past my nose to where a crimson light could be seen between the lower branches. The giant ferns’ shine seemed to pulse like a heartbeat. As my eyes adjusted, I noticed further patches of glow spread between the thick tree trunks.

“Forest always knows best,” Atalawe explained. “There’s a strong poison in those ferns. Got to dig to their stubborn roots to get at it, but no finer potion for an arrow.”

“I’ve always preferred a sling and stone. I’m quite the shot,” I asserted.

Pel broke his silence and stopped his carving to correct me. He patted the short bow and quiver of arrows at his side. “A good shot you might be, but slingstones are no good against armour.”

“You sure about that?” I challenged.

“Are you? If I’m not mistaken, all you’ve tried your stones on is pottery. Make that shocked face all you want, I’ve heard your little antics,” Pel tutted. “There’s much more to archery than pulling a string, Tarko.”

“Yes, lots to worry about when you’re both hiding at the rear taking potshots, I imagine,” Atalawe snorted. “It’s all about a solid ironpith staff, Tarko. Brutal force, up close and personal, but not too close like a sword or short blade.”

Redeye covered a yawn. “And magic beats both.”

“Yes, and you know if I give you a good whack to the head while you’re in the middle of a spell, all that magic’s for nothing, sorcer,” said Atalawe with a wink.

I tried using the ensuing silence to my advantage. “Maybe I should learn to defend myself if I’m supposed to help in this plan of yours. You could teach me.” I probed them, staring at each in turn beneath my hood.

Redeye shook his head. “Don’t give him a weapon, Pel. He’ll stab us first chance he gets.”

“That’s not your role in this, Tarko,” Pel replied sombrely.

The refusal wrinkled my nose, and I poked at Pel. “How exactly does one fight a demon, then?”

“Keep your voice down,” he snarled. “And average people don’t fight a demon, they run from them, or so the stories go. Pray we don’t have to.” He had cocked his ear, ignoring me. “We’re stopping.”

A horn blew moments later, sounding a halt to the war-party. The thousands came to a stamping stop, drummed fists against chests and shields, and yelled as one. Formations dissolved into camps with startling speed. I had barely extricated myself from the dishevelled wagon before Atalawe had cracked two sparkstones together and lit the beginnings of a fire in the clay bowl. Redeye hunched over it with Inwar at his side, and both stared at me with dead gazes.

“Watch the fire,” Pel ordered, and with Atalawe’s subtle guiding arm, the two disappeared between the wagons. “We’ll be back shortly.”

There was not much to be done but sit opposite the sorcer and meet his noble eyes. It wasn’t long before I realised I was inadvertently in a staring contest.

“What?” Redeye snapped at me.

“What does nectra taste like?” It was the first thing I could think to blurt.

“Can’t you remember? You’ve got the mark, haven’t you?”

“No, I can’t.” The memories were far too entangled with tragedy. I had also been a day over five seasons old. Memories from that age are either vivid as a punch to the face or a forgotten shadow. Nothing in between.

“It tastes like fire, boy,” Redeye boasted. “Tastes like the very blood of the bloodwoods. Like the power of the ancestors themselves. Something so few can understand.”

I nodded, letting the flames crackle between us. I waited for him to stab an apple with his sickle knife before I pointed out the obvious. “You know that doesn’t really answer my question… right?”

“Three Gods,” Redeye hissed. “It tastes bittersweet. Like sour berries. Salt and earth.”

“There we go. Wasn’t so hard, was it?”

The sickle knife was jabbed in my direction. “Pel said you’d be no trouble. No nuisance, he said.”

“Guess Pel doesn’t know me as much as he thinks he does.”

“Guess not. Well, you won’t be with us long, thankfully.” Redeye’s puckered face cracked into a smirk.

Before I could ask the sorcer what he meant, Pel returned with Atalawe. She set to feeding Nod and Inwar while Pel propped himself against the wagon. “Eztaral’s on her patrol. It’s time,” he said.

The wait was plainly tense for the others. Pel stood at the rear of the wagon, hood up and arms crossed. Atalawe was a rare mute. The only conversation was the crunching of bones between Inwar’s fangs and the sputtering of the flames. Redeye glared at me from under the brim of his hat.

“Tarko,” Pel whispered at last. “Come here.”

I stood at the side and stared across the camp. With the long day of travel, the war-party was muted compared to the night before. Yellow moonlight cascaded through the narrow rifts in the canopy. No wind disturbed the smoke of the campfires. Columns of it arose to the heavens like totems. Occasional laughter broke the general rumble of wagging tongues and snoring from those who were tired out.

Through the tangle of wagons and scattered tents, a broad-shouldered figure came striding. She walked alone and with slow purpose, a feathered helmet tucked under her arm. The firelight scattered over her fine armour, but it offered no shine. Her head swivelled back and forth, constantly surveying every detail of her warriors and the darkness beyond.

“Stay there,” Pel whispered to me before stepping out from behind the wagon. Eztaral was still several yards away, nodding to the salutes of some warriors. My heart thudded against my ribs, and I hardly knew why.

“What is darker than night may never grasp the light,” uttered Pel as Eztaral drew close.

The words, though I didn’t recognise them, stopped the ravenborn in her tracks. She turned, eyes already shrewd, hand falling to the large sword at her hip. “What in the Six Hells did you say to me, porter? Speak quickly before I cut out your tongue and then make you eat it!”

Pel drew back his hood, showing his bruised face and frosted eyes to this proud warrior. “Where others will fall, the Scions refuse to falter. When Swathe’s days grow dire, we will stand against the fire.”

Eztaral stepped closer, her grim mouth slightly ajar. Her mismatched eyes were shrouded in a frown. Her sword slid from her scabbard with a whisper of polished stone. It was a thick strip of blood-varnished ironpith clasping a straight obsidian edge, instead of the usual undulating swords that had three or four bladed arcs.

Pel kept speaking, undeterred. “To Kī Raxa, to the Three Gods and their spirits, and to the bloodwoods, we hold this vow.”

I felt Atalawe at my back. Redeye lurked close. I watched Eztaral and her sword closely, drinking in every nervous detail.

“Eztaral Kraid. It’s been some time.” Pel extended a hand towards his old friend.

The ravenborn replaced her sword in her scabbard without taking her eyes from Pel’s. “That it has been, Pelikai Maladaq,” she said gruffly, but Eztaral ignored the hand. Instead, she removed her gauntlet, tucked it into her helmet, and then punched Pel straight in the face.

I had been too deep in pondering the old beggar’s full name and why I had never heard it before. I couldn’t help but gasp as I heard the crack of Pel’s nose.

Pel sprawled against the wagon, his turban fallen at his feet. Blind eyes blinking, he swore through a trickle of blood. I saw Atalawe wince, but even Inwar didn’t growl.

“Anyone else have something they want to say?” Eztaral hissed at our small circle. “Hmm?”

7

Grudges Reborn

The tharantos is not just fearsome in size and aggression, but they are also perturbingly smart. More than one fellow hunter has reported tharantos learning how to avoid and even disarm traps. They also find weak spots in camp defences and even recognise fights they can’t win. It is this fact alone that keeps me awake every night I spend in the loam.

FROM THE NOTES OF HUNTER QUIB’S SCROLL “LOAM SURVIVOR”

“Well.” Atalawe sucked her teeth. “That wasn’t quite the reception we were hoping for.”

“What in the bleeding trees are you all doing here?” Eztaral snarled. She had the kind of voice I imagined Inwar to have if the jāgu could speak. “You’re extraordinarily lucky I don’t call for my lancers this very moment and have them throw you from the road, orokan and all, as we would with any stowaways.”

Pel spat blood on the ground. “You know why we’re here, Eztaral. We’ve come to talk some sense into Haidak Baran and turn this war-party around before it’s too late. Before they come face-to-face with—”

“Don’t!” The ravenborn brandished her fist again. “Don’t you say that word! Don’t you dare speak that nonsense to me, or so help me, you’ll find my boot so far up your arse you’ll taste leather.”

It felt good to know I wasn’t alone in my opinions and hadn’t yet lost my mind to the preposterous notion of demons.

“They are dead and gone and banished from this world. Stories and fable,” Eztaral continued. “The wildfires are the result of nothing but an invasion of Scorch marauders. Look at you, Pelikai. Look what you’ve turned into. Blue-lipped from urka and looking twenty seasons older than you have any right to look. And you, Atalawe. Redeye. You’ve run yourselves ragged pursuing nonsense, I can tell.” Eztaral turned as if to leave but paused, feathered helmet strangled in both hands. “I’ll give you until firstglow to put the war-party behind you. If I see you again, my sword will not stay so clean.”

“If you believe all that, then you truly have forgotten who you are,” said the blind beggar. His face was a sweaty pale colour. His voice was nasal with his nose pinched tightly.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Atalawe spoke up as she helped Pel to his feet. “We took a vow.”

“The same vow as you took,” Redeye added reluctantly.

Eztaral stared daggers – humongous blades to be more accurate – at all of them. Her eyes found me shrinking away. “And who is this?”

Pel answered. “The reason why you should hear what we have to say.”

Eztaral took steps towards me. I could see the recognition in her eyes as she looked at my failed sorcer’s tattoo. “Who is he, curse it?”

Atalawe spoke up before I could. “The youngest son of the man you once considered a brother. The man you vowed to follow to the bitter end. A man whose legacy and family you promised to protect.”

“A promise that you thought died with Teyak,” continued Pel. “But it didn’t, Eztaral. As much as you might think differently, the Terelta family still lives and so do the Scions. Through him.”

“Me?” I crossed my arms. Being talked about and not to was infuriating. “I have a name, you know. It’s—”

“Tarkosi Terelta. I know who you are,” Eztaral grumbled. “You’re the loudmouthed wretch who almost got dropped from the lancewing nests like a sack of rocks by Haidak Baran.”

“I mean,” I scoffed, “I didn’t have armour on, and he’s five seasons my elder, so—”

“Mhm. A fine shadow of Teyak, you are.”

The insult was jarring. It was the first time anybody had ever accused me of failing to live up to my disgraced father, and I didn’t expect its sting.

Atalawe was peering at Eztaral. “I don’t understand you. You can’t seriously doubt the prophecies, can you? Or the word of our ancestors? It has been many seasons, but I can’t believe you would turn your back so completely on who you were.”

Eztaral scoffed. “My eyes have been opened. Yours remain shut.”

“Then explain the omen of the black sun. Kī Raxa’s own last words. Surely you still believe.”

I had to give it to Eztaral. Her conviction was impressive. I could see the fine cracks in it, but she’d clearly spent a lot of time practising.

“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” she said, shrugging her armoured shoulders.

Pel took a mortal risk by jabbing Eztaral in the arm with a bloody finger. “No, just to Tarko. Maybe you got lost in your headlong devotion to Matriarch Danaxt and her polished sages. Maybe you can’t believe in the old songs as we still do, fine. Maybe it was all too much, and you wanted a grander life. I can understand all that. I can even forgive you for letting Teyak down when he needed you most. What’s done is done. But Tarko? He’s the one you swore to protect. You looked into Teyak’s eyes and vowed to keep Tarko safe. You vowed to tell him of the Scions and our cause once he came of age, but instead you let Kol Baran ruin our leader and let the Terelta family slide into obscurity, along with the rest of us. Though, I must say, Eztaral. Those feathers on your helmet and chest suit you well. Hope they were worth it.”

The silence was unwieldy. Eztaral bared her teeth. Her fist might have trembled, but it did not move.

The sound of lancers shouting for their commander grew louder. “Everything in order, Ravenborn?” they called.

Eztaral’s hand was clenched so hard it was bone-white. “All is well,” she barked to her warriors. With that, Eztaral turned her back on Pel with no more than a snake’s hiss.

Atalawe called after her, risking being heard. “Sleep well, old friend, while you can. We’ll see who’s right or not all too soon.”

I scratched my head to the sound of silence. “What just happened?”

Pel and Redeye fell silent, withdrawing to the fire to brood. Atalawe massaged her temples while Inwar licked blood from her knuckles. “I think, young Tarko, we may have just failed miserably,” she said. Even then the wrangler found opportunity to snort in dry and defeated laughter.

I stood alone, torn over what and who to believe.

“Was it something I said?”

��

The morning came to wrap us in haze once more. Not another mist this time, but a drifting smoke that had no shape or flow. It clouded the treetops, stung the back of the throat and made me cough, and tasted sour on the tongue. The war-party marched on, subdued by the stench of burning forest. I had never smelled anything like it, and by the reactions of some of the warriors, they hadn’t either.

Despite her threats, we saw nothing of Eztaral but a distant figure amongst the gaggle of officers and nobles with far too many feathers on their helmets.

Pel’s nose might have now sat crooked, but his mind was unwavering. He was set on following the war-party the entire way to Firstwatch. When I demanded to know why we weren’t turning around, Pel had only muttered something about minimal options and sabotage and resigned himself to nibbling urka seeds until he sat in a familiar stupor.

Fifty miles. That was all that remained between us and Firstwatch. The Emerald Causeway meandered less while the Swathe became more spacious. The orange and injured sun showed her face infrequently, wrapped in streaks of dun clouds that defied the breeze.

It was around midday when the leafroad narrowed. Instead of six wagons abreast, the road shrank to two or three at most. The war-party bunched up, slowing down until the officers came to bay at their respective ranks. First the lancers yelled at the wilders, then the wilders yelled at the warriors. The warriors proceeded to yell at us porters. Even the pretend ones.

“Move that damnable orokan!” a warrior bayed at us, whacking Nod on his shaggy flanks. The beast yowled irritably, and Atalawe hissed at him.

“I’ll thank you to be kinder to the beasts that drag your provisions.”

“Shut your yap and get moving.”

The skinnier leafroad now curved downwards through a copse of stout narin that curtained the Emerald Causeway with their hair-like leaves. To my horror, the road was slowly descending to the loam. There was no dangerous gloom here, but an open clearing between the trees that still bore signs of fresh logging. The Causeway continued as a road made of horrid dirt and gravel. It took me several heartbeats and a shove from Redeye to move from the safety of the wood to the earth. I had been born in the branches, and the ground felt far too soft and unsteady beneath my feet. The smell of the dirt was pungent. Rotten as manure. I hopped back on the wagon and kicked the soil from my feet. I found Atalawe staring at me with brows raised and mockery on her lips.

It would have been nice to emerge into a blaze of sunshine, but the sun was still too marred in smoke and her own darkness. The goddess was now an amber curve trapped behind ever-darkening clouds of orange and steel smoke. Even in that burdened half-light, the meadow that filled the clearing shone with wildflowers. Tall standing stones crested a slight hill at its centre, where the road looped before delving back into the Swathe. Their weathered carvings held my attention for barely a moment. It was the crowd of dishevelled people swarming at the far end of the meadow that drew my gaze.

“Form ranks!” came the bellow of an order. The war-party displayed its training as the shielded warriors surged forwards to form a barrier. Archers readied their bows. Wilders whooped as they swung their axes above their heads. Sorcers spread out behind us, hands clutching nectra vials. I felt a rush run through me, though it could have been the shudder of Inwar’s rumbling roar.

“Who are they? Are they the marauders?” I asked.

Atalawe shook her head. “Not unless my eyes fail me, Tarko. They look like Swathefolk. Refugees running from something.”

“Hold!”

The order had the gruff bark of Eztaral’s voice. I wasn’t the only one who turned to watch the ravenborn barging through the knot of wagons. Haidak was astride his golden lancewing. It hovered perfectly still over the war-party’s heads. The bird’s blurred wings kicked up a plume, making some of the rear porters scatter for cover.

Eztaral bustled past our wagon without a glance. She was too busy howling at her fighters. “Hold, curse it! Are you growing moss in those ears? They’re no enemy, they are our people! Stow your bloody weapons before I show you mine!”

Behind me, Pel slid from the wagon and whispered something to Redeye. The sorcer slunk away into the ranks of warriors.

The war-party held its crescent formation of shields while arrows found their way back into quivers, swords in scabbards, and moody wilders slumped in the grass or angrily trimmed the meadow of its wildflowers. Like me, plenty still stared uneasily at the faint sketch of sun and heavy sky. I could have sworn a storm brewed above us. The breeze was unusually warm, never mind the pervasive smoke that had hundreds coughing over and over.

Eztaral waded through the grasses with her sword trailing behind her. Several of the people approached her with hands clasped. They looked filthy, and that was the only kind way to put it. Smeared in mud or clay by the looks of it. Their robes and pelt tunics were burned and blackened at the hems. Whatever they discussed, it was heated but brief. Eztaral spent most of the conversation shaking her head and pointing back west. Another woman tried to cling to her armour, but Eztaral gently prised her free and shook her head some more. Others wrung their clothes or yelled in anger. Brief though it was, the delay apparently annoyed Haidak Baran. His lancewing roared overhead and made half the grubby citizens scatter.

“I’ll bet Eztaral’s realising she might be wrong after all,” said Pel.

“You’ve got too much faith in her.” Atalawe shook her head. “The woman’s grown stubborn in her seasons and somehow weak at the same time. And even if she does believe, she clings to Haidak’s coattails so tightly she wouldn’t dare oppose him.”

“I expect this kind of doubt from your brother, not from you.”

“Maybe we should talk to Haidak instead of trusting in Eztaral. Warn them, at least,” I suggested.

“Look at you, Tarko. Thinking like one of us already,” Pel muttered, sounding entirely unenthused about the prospect.

I snorted. “I’m looking after myself, is all. If you’re right and we’re all doomed as you say, then I’m not going to sit back.”

Drums moved us. Feet fell in time with a sombre, soulless song that marched the war-party across the meadow. Seeds and spores floated where the warriors detoured from the road.

The shabby crowds parted for us. Their reactions were as haunting as their wide and red-rimmed eyes. Some pleaded with us, pawing at warriors or wagons as they passed, urging us to turn around.

“Shadows! Creatures of fire and smoke,” a few yelled at us, over and over. Others in their midst and in their right minds hushed them. I saw a few more in ashen robes, watching from beneath hoods, dejected and solemn.

My doubt in the nonsense of demons was rife. “Who are they?”

I met Pel’s clouded eyes, but the old sorcer said nothing. I looked to his hands. They still carried the faint blue dye of the water order.

“Can you still use your magic, if you need to?” I asked him.

“It’s been decades since I have.” Pel spat blue over the side of the wagon and bared his teeth. “I should think not.”

“How very comforting,” I sighed. “I still think I should know how to fight.”

Before Atalawe could voice whatever was making her smirk, Pel interrupted her.

“Atalawe,” he said. “What would a seedwitch of your calibre suggest to slow us down?”

She laughed bright and clear. Her wiry hands were already digging into the folds of her layered tunic, rustling her necklaces of dried flowers and seeds. “Ha! I have an idea or two,” Atalawe said, before hopping from the wagon with a bundle in her hands. Like her brother, she too vanished into the rear ranks.

Before I knew it, Nod’s reins were thrust into my hands. “Erm…”

“Keep the beast straight is all,” Pel said.

Eztaral was busy yelling at her officers when we passed her once more. Pel and I caught a single and fleeting glance from her. The woman’s forehead was deeply furrowed beneath the painted arrow and shorn hair blowing across her red and green eyes. Harrowed, was how she looked. A sorcer with silver rings on her white-dyed fingers stood close to the ravenborn. I saw her mouth moving rapidly but Eztaral kept shaking her head. I wondered how her neck wasn’t always sore.

The journey through the clearing was fleeting. Though the road never rose up into the branches again, the trees stood apart from each other in sparser order. The war-party had barely formed its column again when the sky began to empty upon us. Grey flakes pirouetted and span through the gaps in the green canopy. One landed on the back of my hand, and I examined it closely, but it crumbled far too easily.

“Is this the snow Atalawe spoke of?” I said between persistent coughs.

Pel put his hands to the air and rubbed his fingers. “No, lad. It’s ash. Wood and leaf, all burned up.”

The ash didn’t stop falling, and the war-party didn’t stop moving. Within an hour of marching, the whole forest was covered in a thin dusting. The colours of the forest died around us with every mile. Grey and sulphur yellow reigned in their stead, and the haze made a mystery of anything beyond the nearest trees. I struggled to see either end of the war-party’s column.

The ash stung the eyes and tasted bitter on the tongue. And if you were unlucky enough or stupid enough to breathe the ash in, it made you retch to the point of vomiting. I should know: I did all three in as many minutes. Luckily, I wasn’t alone. A nearby warrior fell from formation to hurl his guts. Those who had masks wore them. Others ripped cloth and wrapped it around their faces.

Redeye appeared as if from nowhere, sidling up to the wagon and spitting in the ash. I nearly jumped out of the seat.

“They’re refugees of a settlement near Firstwatch. Place called Sheertown,” he said without preamble. “They pleaded for Haidak not to go on, but they weren’t listened to.”

Pel chuckled. “I know how they feel. What did they say? What of Firstwatch?”

“Consumed by fire but still standing, apparently. Maybe salvageable, maybe a pile of ash by now. The few sorcers and workers who stayed behind managed to keep the flames from spreading deeper into the Swathe.” Redeye sniffed. “A few said the fire had a face, or that it chased them with a mind of its own. Most others swore they saw men through the flames. Men in rags with weapons of iron and bone. Sounds like marauders to me, Pel.”

“Where did you hear this?” I asked.

The sorcer glowered. “I’ve got sharp ears, boy.”

“Not to mention that Redeye has a wonderful ability to go unnoticed when he wants to,” explained Pel.

I imagined it was largely because nobody noticed someone so sullen and boring, but nodded all the same.

“No objection from Eztaral or complaints from the others? The sorcers? Surely they can feel the magic in the air?”

I instinctively looked up. “There’s magic in the air?”

Redeye glowered. “Very faint but yes. But that could be Firstwatch burning. It’s too young a tree to have nectra flowing through it, but it’d be enough for a good sorcer to notice. And no complaints from Eztaral. Haidak presses onwards like the idiot he is. I don’t like it, Pel.”

I threw up my hands. “Why do I feel like my part in this plan of yours is already over?”

“Because it is,” Pel snapped. “With the omen and the wildfires, I expected Eztaral to cave at the sight of Teyak’s son, but she didn’t.”

“But you said when I came of age, I would learn my place.”

“If we can’t change this war-party’s mind, there might not be a place for anyone, never mind you. You think these demons have come to enjoy a campfire? They would see the whole Swathe burned to cinders if they were given a chance. Every soul a blackened corpse and every bloodwood burned to its roots. There is no future for us if they win. Get that into your thick skull.”

I blinked at Pel, too shocked to process his words. He had already turned back to the sorcer.

“Spread your fear, Redeye. Make the sorcers doubt Haidak’s decision to move forwards. With any luck, Atalawe will have found an answer by the time—”

It was at that moment a trumpeting cry came from one of the foremost orokan. Through the ash, I saw it rear up and slam its claws into the ash and soft moss that lay underfoot. The wagon the beast pulled slammed into its back, causing one of the porters to cartwheel into the muck.

I would have laughed had Nod not done the very same to me. As he jolted to a halt, I slipped from my perch on the wagon and found myself in a scrambling fall down to the ash. Blustering and wiping the dirt from my face, I watched as each orokan around us halted in the same nervous way. It was as if we had reached a line they refused to cross. The orokan began to puff themselves up, looking around and bleating at each other in their ragged voices. Their sleepy, solemn eyes were unusually wide.

“What by the bleeding trees is going on?” I asked, accidentally mimicking the officers marching about in irritable circles, looking for answers and finding none.

“Something’s turned the beasts’ moods, sir!” cried one nearby porter.

Another was throwing his weight against his orokan, but it swiftly nipped at him. “They’ve been spooked!”

“How peculiar,” said a breathless voice behind my shoulder. I turned to find Atalawe picking ash from her braided ridge of hair.

“Did you do this?” I asked her.

“Hush, Tarko,” Atalawe warned between breaths, still managing to keep up her smile. “It’s a wrangler’s job to know beasts and flora, but it’s a seedwitch’s calling, like my mother before me. It’s wonderful what a knowledge of tinctures, leaves, and poisons can do for you.”

Pel’s whisper seemed shocked. “You poisoned them?”

“Gods, no! I used tharantos ichor. Males exude it during mating season when they’re particularly aggressive and hungry. Orokan avoid its stench like the plague. Those who don’t get eaten.”

“Won’t it just fade away?” asked the doubtful Redeye.

Redeye received a hearty clap on the shoulder from his sister that made him stumble.

“You let me worry about the beasts and the birds. Orokan are even more stubborn than our old friend Eztaral. They won’t move for hours.”

Though it now seemed pointless, I climbed back aboard the wagon. The soil still felt far too soft beneath my feet for my liking. Ahead of us, the war-party adjusted its wary ranks, now facing out into the forest as if an ambush was coming. Spear- and arrow-points bristled like a quillhog’s spines.

Eztaral was currently yelling at whole crowds of porters and officers. She fired off orders as if they were slingstones. People sprinted to do her bidding. However, as I knew all too well from the life of a worker, unless you were a matriarch, there was always somebody above to yell down at you. And no matter how far you climbed, the Three Gods still ruled the Six Heavens.

Once nothing proved remotely useful at moving the orokan, and with the ash growing heavier, Eztaral was soon being howled at by Eagleborn Baran. It was hard to catch the detail of Haidak’s words, but a few shouts climbed above the rest.

“…then we move on without the porters!”

“That is not wise!” Eztaral’s voice also rose.

“This battle will be swift and decisive, I tell you. We’ll resupply on our return.”

“Then we should leave a contingent here to protect the wagons and porters. Not to mention the war-party’s rear.”

I flinched as Haidak’s gaze swept across the war-party. “No, Ravenborn Kraid. They and their beasts have let us down direly. Leave twenty warriors to keep them in check. No more!”

“Curse that Haidak,” Pel hissed. “He treats battle tactics as if they didn’t have lives attached to his decisions.”

Eztaral was marching towards us, weaving angrily between warrior, beast, and wagon. The rage in her face was evident even at a distance. A distance she swiftly closed.

While I expected to be arrested at any moment, Pel did not move. He did not panic. Instead, Eztaral pushed her officers away and came alone to bare her teeth at our wagon.

“If you had anything to do with this, I’ll treat it as treason against the matriarch. I’m looking at you, Atalawe. I haven’t forgotten your seedwitch tricks,” she hissed.

“No, just everything else,” replied Pel. “You know Haidak is marching all of us into our doom. I can see it behind your eyes.”

“That’s where you’re oh so terribly wrong, old man! Wrong about a great many things,” Eztaral snapped. She pointed a finger at me. “I feel truly sorry for you, boy. They fed me the very same lies for decades, and they develop a bitter taste as the seasons go by. Pel, I’ll make this clear for you, old fellow. If I see you and yours again, I will have you all bound and dragged back to Shal Gara behind a wagon like tharantos bait.”

The ravenborn left us silent. Pel shook his head. The urka seed blue was still bright on his lips, contrasting nicely with the ashen colour of his face. I wondered how lucid he was.

“There is still more we can do. More that we have to do,” he grunted.

“What?” I spluttered. “Eztaral just said if we do anything else, we’ll be dragged to death. No stupid vow is worth dying for, surely.”

Pel clenched his wrinkled, scarred hands into fists, over and over. “Perhaps I’ve judged you wrong all these seasons, Tarko. I won’t explain myself to you any further. I am what I am. Chosen what I’ve chosen. You are a child who knows little of what he is involved in.”

“And whose fault is it that I’m involved at all?” I hissed. “I won’t have my life gambled with and endangered anymore.”

Pel shrugged coldly. “Suits me fine. It’s what I promised your father.”

I’d expected him to get down from the wagon and do something. Anything except stare blankly at me. I turned away to witness the war-party shouldering what supplies it could carry, but I still felt the beggar’s eyes boring into the back of my head. Atalawe whistled tunelessly. Redeye picked his nails with his knife.

Even when the drums sounded, and the ranks separated from the wagons, the Scions remained wordless. They waited for something, I wagered, but I had no idea what.

“They’re really going to leave us here?” I asked, voice hoarse from an hour of not speaking.

Atalawe nodded. “All except that unlucky lot.”

Just shy of two-dozen figures stood in the swirling ash of the war-party’s wake. Most of them were wilders, but a lancer stood amongst them, shoulders slumped and face dejected while he watched his comrades disappear. I wondered which officer he had vexed to get lumped with warder duty and a lack of glory. The porters stomped about moodily while they made a circle of their wagons and recalcitrant orokan.

“They’ll be safe enough far from the action. And smart enough to run if they have to,” Atalawe told me. She sniffed the acrid air. “Sun’s almost set.”

The sun was still lost amongst the burdened ceiling of fiery and granite smoke-clouds. The veil of falling ash cut the forest’s height in half.

“How can you tell that just by sniffing?”

Atalawe pointed to a patch of nearby flowers with broad, star-shaped petals. They were slowly closing, even before my eyes.

She winked. “The forest always knows better.”

“Redeye, Atalawe. Come with me,” Pel ordered abruptly. “Bring your weapons.”

“Where are you going?” I asked. “Or doing, for that matter?”

I got no answer. The others faded into the haze of ash without a word. The only reason I stayed put was the fact Atalawe had left Inwar snoring under the wagon. The jāgu was smart. It was the only place to sit where I didn’t need to brush ash from myself every few minutes. It had already formed a stodgy mud beneath the ironpith wheels and boots.

Timid fires were struck up amidst the circle of wagons. Porters and workers and those left behind hunched over the flames to mutter words of discontent. More than a few watched the forests around them with narrowed and cautious eyes.

I stayed on the fringes by Pel’s wagon, even when I heard the word “demons” mentioned for the first time. Jeers followed and then swift silence as minds battled with the possibility. I knew the feeling. Wildfires and marauders were easier excuses. Palatable to the soul and the mind. Yet my belief was like thick bloodwood bark, slowly being hollowed out by a wriggling, squirming louse of doubt. Even my instincts had apparently betrayed me. Every time I took a breath, I could feel a tension in the hot breeze that sent a shiver through my limbs, as if a predator hung above me. And yet to give in, to accept what could actually lie behind that smoke, proved Shal Gara a city of liars or idiots. If Pel was right…

“Gah!” I said aloud, making Inwar rear up. I shook my head as if I could shake the imaginary consequences of that question out of my ears. There had never been a bigger if. I thought of Pel’s blue lips. Or Redeye’s doubt. Of Eztaral’s harsh and mocking laughter. I argued with myself over and over until their shapes emerged from the ash once more.

The others carried bundles in their arms that crunched and clanged as they threw each down. Inwar and I stayed put, peering through the ash as they emptied piece after piece of armour and warrior garb onto the ground. There were breast- and backplates and made of layered and treated leafleather so thick as to be strong as heavier ironpith. Scales of the metallic wood decorated vambraces and leg guards. Without a word, the others started to change out of their clothes. Redeye looked particularly put out having to remove his floppy hat and sorcer’s robe. Beneath hid tightly curled scarlet hair that matched his eyes and a wiry fellow of middle age and many scars.

“Watching me get undressed, are you?” the sorcer tutted at me.

Instead, I eyed the ironpith mask in Atalawe’s hand: a wilder’s mask carved to resemble a snarling barkwolf.

“Do I dare ask where you got warrior’s armour and clothes from?” I spoke up.

Atalawe grinned through the barkwolf’s mouth. “From several very helpful and willing warriors. Where else?”

“Did you… kill them?”

Pel snorted. “They’re quite comfy under a wagon or two and won’t be waking up for several hours. By then we’ll be long gone.”

“On our way back to Shal Gara, I hope.”

Atalawe smacked her armour with a palm as if she were trying to remould it. “No, lad.”

“Pel thinks it’s somehow a good idea to go chasing after the war-party,” muttered Redeye. “I don’t agree, but what do I know? Nobody ever listens to me.”

“Is there one for me?” I wasn’t sure I wanted a disguise, but I had to ask.

Pel was testing different pieces of armour with his hands. “Not for you, Tarko, no. You made your position on this very clear. You did your bit in front of Eztaral, and that’s admirable, but I see now your father’s legacy is not one for you. The Scions will do as we vowed. You,” Pel paused to spit more blue on the dark ash, “are staying here with Nod and the wagon.”

I shook the ash from me. “Until when?”

Pel shrugged. Leafleather armour croaked. “Until we’re either successful, or we’re not, and you see for yourself.”

After rearranging his vials of blue nectra in his armour, Redeye bundled his sorcer’s robe and threw it at me. I caught it awkwardly. “Pray you’re a fast runner,” he hissed.

“You can’t just leave me here.”

“Would you rather come with us?” Atalawe asked.

“I…” A dozen reasons to nod or shake my head came to me. One half of my mind called me a coward and a fool, the other half praised me on my wise decision to stay put. Once more, I stood wondering if I was too useless to matter and hating those who stared down at me.

I shook my head, feeling sour and vindictive. “No, I wouldn’t,” I muttered. “Good luck to you all.”

Pel nodded in a way that cut me to my core. “Thought as much.”

There were no goodbyes, no farewells, not even so much as a look back. I looked around to find Inwar staring after his master, and for a moment my worry stilled. That was until Atalawe clicked her fingers in that rapid pattern, and the jāgu burst after them. I was left alone in the ash-choked and gathering dark, with nothing but mutters in my ears and my own churning thoughts for company.

I looked around at the gloomy forest. I couldn’t even see the road anymore. I was too turned around to remember its direction. With night approaching and nothing in the way of light, I was directionless. Lost. The thought prickled my skin.

No matter how hard I tried to make out the shapes of Pel and the others, the evening had already swallowed them. I turned to Nod in desperation, but the orokan was a curled-up mound of fur, enjoying a fitful sleep full of grunts and moans.

In anger, I threw Redeye’s cloak on the ground. My foot lifted above it, ready to stamp, when a colour caught my gaze.

Beneath the black folds of cloth, the ash was stained a faint blue. I blew ash from my nose, blinked hard, and looked closer. Blue. My eyes didn’t lie.

Reaching to investigate, it took a mere shake of the cloak for the nectra vial to tumble out. It clinked against a fallen twig.

The vial and I looked at each other for a while before I snatched it up from the dirty loam and clutched it close. I had heard of nectra thieves executed on the spot without due justice. Mother had told me of a man selling stolen nectra in Neathering markets for the price of a dozen orokan. And I had once seen a sorcer beat a man bloody for daring to touch one of her vials. They were the most precious items in Shal Gara by an arguable mile, and here was I, holding a full vial of the stuff. It was of clear sandglass from the far west, imported and wrapped with silver thread. A wooden cap kept the viscous blue liquid within.

What if Redeye needs it?

The excuse that popped into my head was a flimsy one. I knew it plainly as I knew between down and up, and perhaps it was Pel’s harsh words that actually moved me, but that was the excuse I needed to start running. Not west and towards home, as all logic demanded, but in the direction of Pel and his fellow morons. Even if it took me staring a battle in the face, I would at least know the truth. With any luck, I would find the chance to laugh in Pel’s face for too long. All I had to do was avoid the night’s terrors until I found them.

With ash pelting my face, I ran headlong into a darkness I had been taught to fear since I was a child.

8

Inferno

None of us truly knows how nectra works. The majority of scholars maintain it is a gift from the gods. Those of us who have dug deeper believe it an essence of the Swathe. A distillation of its elements that the ancestors turned into what we call spells and magic. I find myself wondering what feats and dangers they went through in the name of discovery, when we sit proudly on the comfort of their foundations.

FROM “THE STUDIES OF ORAKAL ATAMI,” WRITTEN 1661

The night was cloying. Whatever light the fauna around me shone with, it was already buried in ash. An orange glow to the sky kept the true black of evening at bay. There was no moon or stars to guide me, but I had found dark hollows of footprints and what seemed like a road beneath the ash.

So it was that I ran in quite literally blind hope, clutching the nectra vial close at hand. Its light was more blinding to me than it was helpful in pushing back the darkness. It didn’t stop me holding it like a torch, and it didn’t halt my mad dash through the forest.

A scuffle snapped my head to the side. Somewhere in the darkness, I heard an unmistakeable snarl. My heart climbed up my throat until it choked me. Surely my end was not to be this swift. I clenched a fist as if that would help defend me. Why I hadn’t found or stolen a weapon, I didn’t know. My decisive bravado withered immediately. I found myself running at my very limit: feet pounding the loam as I stared breathlessly into darkness that refused to give me any detail.

Feet. Paws, maybe. I heard them drum alongside me, then swing behind to chase me from the opposite side. I was being toyed with.

“Bleeding trees!” I hissed to myself. What have I done? As I fled, I looked around in despair for a stave of wood or something sharp that would keep me alive a little longer.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw silver eyes staring back at me. I caught the brief flash of white fangs open wide. “Three Gods help me!” I hissed aloud and in startling, idiotic volume.

My last thought – as I heard a roar behind me and turned to see claws outstretched – was that I was an idiot of bloodwood-sized proportions. I wondered if this was what death was: a waterfall of regret accompanying me to the Six Heavens. Was I even worthy of such places? Had I been enough of a dutiful citizen?

All these questions and a torrent more screeched through my mind as I felt sharp claws seize me by the shoulders and push me to the ground. The weight upon me was shocking. Hot and stinking breath blew past my ear.

To my credit, I didn’t go out limp and squealing. I thought I would, but some savagery within me fought back. My elbows and fists hammered the creature. I roared and spat and told it all the ways it could go fornicate with itself before it – blessedly – let me go.

Before I could roll over, sharp jaws seized the back of my neck. I felt wet fangs graze my neck. And then a tongue. The creature had the gall to taste me before it ate me. My last hope was that I would choke it to death and teach it a vengeful lesson.

The voice cut through my rabid breaths and struggles.

“Easy, Inwar. Scrawny wretch like him wouldn’t make much of a meal now, would he?”

Inwar.

Sense flooded back into me as the weight lifted from my back. I was not angry or scared. Relief was a breeze washing all panic away.

I pushed myself up to see Atalawe, Redeye, and Pel looking down at me. Their faces were stuck between amusement and indifference.

“Nothing gets past Inwar,” Atalawe chuckled as she helped me up. “He heard you coming from the camp, blundering through the loam like a one-legged drunk.”

Redeye watched me intensely. “Changed your mind did you, coward?”

The word stung me. So much so, it made me palm the vial of nectra. Besides, my excuse now sounded even weaker than before. “I…,” I stuttered, trying to think up another reason. The truth came out instead. “I need to see for myself.”

“Bigger fool than I thought,” Redeye said, already walking away into the darkness.

Pel chewed for a moment before speaking. His eyes had the same glow about them as a sorcer’s. It had taken the darkest night to notice it. He was nodding slowly as if appreciating my change of heart. I didn’t have it in mine to correct him.

“Put this on,” he said, swinging a bundle from his back. I was surprised to see it was a fourth set of warrior’s armour.

“You knew I’d come?” I asked, feeling stupid. “You tricked me. Baited me with your words.”

Pel smirked. “I said nothing except what you needed to hear. Now, keep close and keep quiet. The war-party isn’t far. Haidak’s marching them through the night, the idiot.”

With that, Pel strode into the gloom. The others and Inwar followed. I hung back momentarily to check on what I felt were gaping holes in my back before slipping on the armour. To my surprise, the jāgu had barely scratched me. A faint smear of blood stained my fingers, and that was it. I didn’t dwell on how, as I was already being left behind, and I struggled with the ties and clasps of armour my hands had never touched before. The leafleather was heavier than I expected, weighing me down in a way I wasn’t sure I liked. Lastly, I slid the vial of nectra beneath the ridged breastplate and tied it to the thick leather belt.

We walked in silence. The others held a constant vigil on the darkness, one that I copied, even though I wasn’t sure what to look for. My imagination dreamed up all manner of grinning teeth and gleaming eyes to keep my head flitting about.

The notion of marauders was constantly on my mind. More so than demons. I imagined they would be bristling with flame and easy to spot in the night. A foe with a blade hiding behind a tree was much more likely. It was an easy way to keep my worry at bay, knowing my enemy was mortal flesh and blood.

That was until the forest started to take on a fiery glow. Red light sketched the broad shapes of tree trunks and branches ahead of us. The breeze became difficult to bear, unbearably hot and laced with thick smoke. The others wore their stolen masks to keep it at bay. I covered my mouth with a corner of the cloak I still wore over the armour. All I could taste was ash and char.

I don’t know how long we marched for. Pel did not run or dawdle, instead keeping a solid pace that never let up. I wasn’t sure if it was firstglow or the wildfires, but the light grew gradually. The ash was chased away by the scorching winds, replaced by cinders and sparks that flurried and spun. One landed in a gap in my meagre armour and singed me before I could scratch it away. I raised a cloth hood over my head and growled.

“Are we close?”

Pel blew ash from his obsidian blade. “Not close enough.”

“Oh. Good.”

The tracks of forty thousand boots were beginning to fade, but we pressed on towards the heat. No birds or animals were seen or heard. All that filled the forest was a slow and constant rumble of fire, broken every now and again by a crash of a defeated branch or tree.

The firelight was fierce by the time we took a moment to rest, outshining firstglow even if it had risen. The sky had been replaced with charcoal smoke. The Loamsedge trees were only a few hundred feet tall and as such, they huddled closer together. And yet between their trunks, I caught my first glimpse of the wildfire’s flames. Tongues of fire bursting above the canopy. They were fleeting, never the same for a split second. The closer we walked towards them, the more I felt their raw heat. After several more curves of the road, we came within distant view of Firstwatch.

“We were too late,” breathed Pel.

From what I knew of Shal Gara’s songs and the gossip that ran up and down the city like vines, Firstwatch was one of the youngest bloodwoods. Stunted by its age and tortured by the hot Scorch winds, it stood at the very limits of the Swathe as a watchtower for what lay beyond. I had even seen painted carvings of it: a bloodwood curled in on itself with spirals of a large town in between its stubby branches.

Now, the bloodwood they called Firstwatch was burning. The scent of the wood was one I had never hoped or wanted to smell. A skeleton of existence was all that stood of the bloodwood. No life remained except what the fire fed upon. It was the same feeling as staring upon a flayed body: skinless, bared to the bone. Lifeless and inhuman. I had seen such a thing only once, when a murderer had caused havoc in the Midern. The bodies had been brought up past Kī Raxa Branch, and I would have gladly stared at them again to save myself from the sight of Firstwatch.

Thick branches, still carrying the charred remnants of city buildings and roads, were stark black against a blinding inferno of yellow and scarlet flame. Smoke streamed from any portion of the tree that wasn’t already aflame. A section of branch crumbled before my eyes and fell to a landscape of coals. Sparks cascaded in waves under the breath of the hot winds. Lightning blasted through the smoke and carved a nearby smouldering tree in half. Thunder rolled behind the roar of the inferno. North and south, the entire edge of the Swathe I could see was aflame.

“I never thought I’d see such a thing with my own eyes,” Atalawe breathed.

Her sorcer brother was wringing his red-dyed hands. “This is a fool’s errand, Pelikai. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again.”

Redeye backed away. Pel heard his steps and dragged the man forcibly onwards. The old man’s firm hand also pushed against my shoulders. We stumbled towards the monstrous spectacle, using our hands and borrowed shields to hide from the heat emanating from the fire.

“And to think,” Atalawe said without smile, laugh, or mirth, “that once upon an age, the bloodwoods moved to escape such fates.”

“What do you mean ‘moved’?” I whispered, seemingly the only one listening. Pel and Redeye were enraptured. “Trees don’t move.”

I thought I saw a tear streak a path through the wrangler’s charcoal-smeared face. “Rumours and some ancient songs say they can. Maybe still could, if they so wished. The demons would come every nine seasons, and every nine seasons, the bloodwoods would migrate west to escape their flames. Fascinating, no?”

I was too distracted to take such knowledge in. I was far too bewitched and simultaneously horrified by the flames and the sight of a bloodwood burning.

A shrill call turned our heads from the inferno of Firstwatch. A wail of anguish that could only be something wounded or dying. It turned out to be the former: an elderly woman, wounded by a burn that claimed one side of her face. Her clothes had been burned to rags and her hair singed short. A splintered stave was stubbornly clutched in one hand. She slumped up against a large mound of earth stretching like a wall between distant Firstwatch and us. It split the road in two, north and south. The tracks of the war-party had vanished in the churning ash.

“Lost!” the woman cried to us as we emerged from the haze and clutches of the thicker forest. “All lost!” She recoiled when she saw the jāgu amongst us, but Inwar stayed put at his master’s heel.

Atalawe moved to help the woman, but Pel shook his head. He instead kept his distance, his sword now in his hand. “Can you hear us, mother? Which way did they go? The war-party?”

“They went north to Sheertown! As should you if you want to see another day!”

Pel didn’t seem even a smidgeon perturbed by the woman’s plight. “Why that way?” he demanded of her.

“People are still trapped behind its walls, gods save them! After the marauders set Firstwatch alight, they moved north, razing everything in their path.” The woman winced as she lifted her hand. “Fifty miles of forest burns!”

Pel was already leaving us behind.

“Lost!” the woman screamed after us. I watched her until the haze stole her from view.

“We could have helped her,” I caught Atalawe muttering to Pel.

“Wrong. We need to reach the war-party while there’s still time.”

“But she was injured,” I added. Pel recoiled as if he had no idea I was there. He stumbled, almost falling, and both Atalawe and I caught him. With a snort, he stuffed a handful of his precious seeds into his mouth and shrugged both of us away. Even in the flickering firelight, I saw the blue shine in his eyes.

“There are many forces at work in the Swathe, Tarko. Not just the churn of nature and the will of the gods, but foul minds opposite to what we Scions believe. Minds that hate the order of the Swathe and long for chaos instead of the order humanity has forged. They remember the same stories as we do, and they would happily see the demons return.”

“If that’s true, then they’re bloody idiots.”

Pel smiled then, a rare thing since the sun had been wounded. His bruised face creased into wrinkles. “You are your father’s son, Tarko. You think that as an insult, but perhaps one day, you might think that a compliment. I will tell you after we have done our duty.”

“If we all manage to live through it,” Redeye muttered behind us.

Atalawe shoved her brother. “I’ve never wandered as far as Sheertown.”

Pel explained. “It’s a flat town, one that sits on the ground rather than the treetops. Surrounded by walls of stone and barely a tree within them.”

“Sounds abhorrent,” I whispered.

Pel’s resolute march led us onwards. When I wasn’t wincing in the wildfire heat or choking on ash, I spent the next hour staring back at the burning corpse of the bloodwood. Every tree in the Loamsedge was either aflame or already turned to ash and cinders. More than once, I caught Atalawe and Redeye staring in the same direction, and they shared the same expression: one you could have called fear.

Our distraction caught us off-guard when the walls of Sheertown loomed out of the smoke. Made of cut and stacked stone, the featureless walls stretched twice my height in places. Burned and wooden slats sharpened to points ran across their tops like teeth. Whatever vines had wrapped the stone were now streaks of ash and brittle charcoal. They crumbled under my hand as I reached to touch the wall. It was smooth. Still warm.

In the light of the fires burning painfully close, the length of the walls could be seen. Something had broken through a broad section, scattering blocks across the earth both inside and out. I could see tapering points of towers with zigzag roofs behind the smoke. Their paint had been scorched. Narin trees also, their leaves burned away and bark smoked black. One was burning like a torch.

“Where’s the war-party?” I asked, growing more nervous by the minute. I hadn’t been able to keep my hands from trembling since witnessing Firstwatch burn. My neck was sore from the amount I looked around at every crack of twig or crash of burning branch. My skin felt as though it was beginning to blister in the constant waves of heat. I didn’t dare take the cloth from my mouth for fear of choking. The walls shielded some of the roar of the fire and the falling cinders, but by fractions only.

“This way,” Pel said. His determination and unwavering voice were little comfort but enough to keep me moving.

Inwar abruptly snarled. I saw a shadow in the murk ahead, where there looked to be some sort of gate in the middle of the wall.

“Somebody’s ahead, Pel,” Atalawe hissed.

Pel flourished his bow and had an arrow nocked before the sentence was ended. Inwar scratched the ash with his claws. Atalawe’s staff howled as she spun it in a blur. Redeye cowered under his hat but raised his hands, one glowing blue with a vial. I looked around for a rock, a stick, or something else other than my fists, and prayed Pel was wrong.

Eztaral Kraid’s gruff voice suited the rumbling inferno well. “Arrest them!” came her order.

Bursting from the haze, the ravenborn and a dozen lancers has us surrounded in moments. Their obsidian-tipped spears jabbed intolerably close to my face.

“Take their weapons!” Eztaral ordered, seizing Pel’s bow and snapping it over her knee. “And make sure to muzzle that beast!”

Before the lancers could take a step, Atalawe whistled sharply. Inwar bolted into the forest in a blur of black and green. Dirt sprayed in lancer faces while the jāgu vanished in the undergrowth. A few warriors tried to sprint after him. I listened to their futile shouts receding into the forest.

“I warned you,” Eztaral howled at us. “I bloody warned you not to interfere, did I not? Curse you all and your mothers for spawning you!”

“You know these people, Ravenborn?” one of the lancers asked as he menaced me with his spear.

Eztaral stared right at Pel as she spoke. She was so enraged she didn’t see Haidak Baran waltzing up behind her. Haidak was in full silver armour, lancewing plume streaming, and his snarling mask covering his face.

“Saboteurs. Mischief-makers. And common thieves, by the look of their stolen armour!” Haidak interrupted. “Don’t be shy with the words, Kraid. That is what they are. They oppose me, and therefore they oppose Shal Gara and our matriarch. The best word for such scum is ‘traitor,’ or am I wrong?”

Eztaral shook her head. Her lips were so taut they had turned pale. “No, Eagleborn Baran.”

Haidak removed his mask and approached to survey us. He didn’t seem to recognise Atalawe, sneered at Pel and Redeye, but when a lancer dragged my hood and a good handful of my hair from my face, Haidak almost fell on his arse with surprise.

“My my! Tarkosi Terelta! By the gods and all their spirits,” Haidak spluttered. “You are far from home, aren’t you? And here you are, betraying your bloodwood and fellow citizens. I should be shocked, but it makes sense. Your fruit hasn’t fallen far from the tree of your father.”

I caught Eztaral’s scowling eye.

“Who are these other traitors you’ve fallen in with? A dubious sorcer, a common seedwitch by the look of her, and a beaten-up old blind man, no less,” asked Haidak, finding amusement in knocking Pel’s snakeskin turban from his bald head and trampling it in the dust.

“I am Pelikai Maladaq, once a sorcer of the water order, and we are not here to sabotage or betray you, Eagleborn Baran, but to help. You’re making a dire mistake. There are no marauders out there, but something worse that neither you or your war-party are ready to f—”

Eztaral cut Pel off. “We’ve seen them with our own eyes, you blind loamer! Mangy Scorch-scum. They fled into the smoke and surrounding forest. The war-party is searching the town this very moment.”

Haidak clapped his armoured hands. “Bind them and take them into the town. Let the others see these treacherous lice for what they are. And when we return to Shal Gara, we shall have them hanged for their crimes.”

Dread gripped me, but anger seized tighter. Call it my father’s fire, the kind I had seen many times in slammed doors and broken bottles on the street, but I let it control me.

“You idiot, Pel!” I snarled. “I should never have trusted you!”

Haidak smirked as he watched me stare daggers at Pel. “There’s no honour among you Midern and Neathering filth, is there?”

Pel fought ceaselessly as they wrapped coarse rope around his wrists. “It’s a mistake, Haidak! A trap! Don’t you see it, you halfwit?”

The old man’s warnings went ignored and unheeded. Our shields and weapons were dragged away and thrown aside as if they were contaminated by our treachery. The lancers confiscated the nectra hanging from Redeye’s crossed belts, much to his muttered threats and squirming. He didn’t have the fight in him the others did. Pel kept yelling until their fists drove the wind from him. Atalawe snarled and scratched at any lancer that came near, as if she had been a jāgu in woman’s skin all along. A spear to the back of the head put her on her face.

I was hauled up so viciously my shoulders almost popped from their sockets. My heart pounded against my stolen breastplate. What would my mother and sister think of me, to hear I was a traitor and conspirator? A halfwit who went chasing after the promises of a mad, blind beggar? I hung my head, but a lancer dragged me upright by the same patch of scalp that already ached.

“You’ve ruined me,” I hissed at Pel, who was busy wheezing in front of me. I knew his sharp ears heard me. The turn of his head was subtle, but I saw it. “Ruined us all.”

After curving through a squeeze of narrow streets between square buildings, we found the war-party crammed within the walls of Sheertown. The town’s innards consisted of a sprawling plaza dotted plentifully with buildings carved of stone and wood and roofed with blackened thatch. Most of the fires inside the walls had been reduced to a smoulder. The towers I had seen were clustered at the centre of the plaza. What drew my eyes were the handful of dead bodies that lay about, yet to be cleared. Several had arrows protruding from their backs. Thin arrows with crow-feather fletching.

Marauders.

I wished Pel could see them and see how wrong he was. By the look of his wan face, I sensed he somehow already had. He was blinking wildly in the smoke, looking around every facet of a town churning with nobody but Shal Gara warriors.

They removed their helmets and masks and hissed at us as we were hauled past. It was fine theatre for anyone but us actors playing traitors.

“Behold traitors to Shal Gara!” Haidak declared to his fighters over and over, bringing about loud rounds of booing.

At last we were pushed to kneeling at the base of a stone tower. Eztaral and Haidak stood over us, the latter spinning his silver knife in his gloved fingers.

“Once we’ve dealt with the enemies of the Swathe, we’ll deal with you,” Haidak said. By the yellow teeth he showed off, he delighted more in our murder than in the war he’d come to win.

“Look at it. Look at the walls,” Pel whispered frantically until the shout burst from him with force. “Look at the walls, Eztaral! Marauders, traitors, or whatever you believe, you’re standing in a stone noose!”

Haidak rapped his knuckles on Eztaral’s breastplate. “Ravenborn Kraid, have the sorcers see to the rest of the fires before we march north. These Scorchfolk scum will not evade us for much longer.”

Eztaral followed Pel’s urgent glare to the stout stone walls. She whirled around, scanning every building until she stared at the narrow gateway behind us.

Haidak looked insulted. “Did you hear my order, Ravenborn? You will do as I command!”

In fact, she did not appear to care. Eztaral pushed past her commander and tested the limits of her impressive lungs. “To ranks! Shields at the ready! Beware archers!”

Eztaral’s disobedience came too late.

At the eastern walls of the town, a burning tree exploded in flames. Great scarlet towers of fire scorched the sky. As I cowered, I swore I saw a form to that rising inferno, of greedy eyes and a grinning mouth.

The heatwave blasted the town, scorching my face and knocking me onto my side against a dazed Atalawe. With a deep and yawning roar, the tree fell inwards against the walls. Stone crumbled beneath the weight of its scorched trunk. Sparks and debris arose in gusting clouds. The first cries came from the warriors struggling to form ranks in tight spaces, either burned or crushed beneath the blazing branches and bricks. Masked by cinders, none in Sheertown saw the flaming arrows falling. Myself included.

My first clue was one clattering against the stone slabs barely inches from my feet.

“Bleeding trees!” I cried, hunkering closer to the tower. The others did the same while the warriors ran for cover, shields raised. One of the lancers who hadn’t acted as swiftly caught an arrow in the narrow gap of his neck. He fell, gurgling blood through his lancewing mask. Pel pounced on him. At first I thought he was helping him, but he was wrestling a knife from the man’s belt.

Bodies collapsed all across the crowded plaza, writhing as the fire enveloped them. Shal Gara archers peppered the wall of fire in vain hope. Spears and slingstones were thrown in every direction and unaimed panic.

“Sorcers!” I heard Eztaral screech while the arrows still fell upon the crowds of warriors.

Half-blind, I watched the sorcers throw back their robes and brandish glowing vials of nectra. There was no hesitation to gulping the magic down, and within moments, I saw their eyes shine blue. Towards the flames, the sorcers strode. I felt the ground tremble as the earth reavers broke the paving stones with their spells. Walls of rock and dirt grew across the plaza. Warriors threw themselves against them for cover. Above their heads, air carvers weaved complex patterns with their white-painted hands and cried sacred words. Smoke swirled around them, and together, they weaved their power to push back against the heat. Arrows tumbled from the sky to be stamped out or to relight the thatch roofs. Only the water weavers looked to be without magic. Most strained and clawed at the ground.

“What’s happened to the water sorcers?” I yelled.

“The ground’s too dry with the fires burning so long!” Redeye shouted over my shoulder.

“By the loam!” Pel had cut himself free and was currently working on Atalawe’s ropes. “And they have no wagons of water to call upon!”

A paltry handful of water sorcers had managed to drag water from forgotten vats and jars and privies in the buildings. They manipulated it like potters with clay: driving tendrils of water into the air, poised like scorpion tails, or spinning whirlpools to catch arrows. Even in that moment, with arrows raining down and terror in the air, I was in awe.

The sorcers advanced until they stood in a broad line between the warriors’ ranks. With their combined spells, a wall of swirling debris pressed against the flames. Every step they took, the inferno was thrust back an equal amount. Behind them, shield barriers bristled with spears. Archers bent their bows and waited for a face to fill with arrows. Wilders spun their axes and yelled their war-cries. Inch by inch, Shal Gara magic pushed the fire back to the broken wall until it was almost evicted.

For a blessed moment, it looked as though Shal Gara’s finest had gained the upper hand. I thoroughly believed it myself until, just like every soul within those walls, I saw the dread face appear to shatter our hope.

It was revealed as the fire withdrew, like skin peeled from a black and charred skeleton. It remained motionless, a sickle-moon smile spread across its inhuman lips and orbs of fire burning in its eye sockets. Ridges of bone like the roots of gnarled trees spread in a crest around its wolfish features.

The creature emerged from the fire to stand against the power of the sorcers’ spells, ten feet tall and looming like a storm cloud. Its body was the same knotted and twisted bone, covered in a charred hide. Fire shone within its cracks like sorcers’ veins. A black crown hung around the beast’s neck. A curved sword of black iron lay in one hand, and in its other, a gleaming jewel of white flame clutched between elongated and hooked claws.

I had just reached my knees only to fall again in shock. Pel seized me by the scruff of my breastplate.

“Do you believe me now, curse you?” he shouted in my face.

I could only make my head bob limply up and down. My mind was dizzy, my legs weak. My freed hands were shaking. Despite his proximity, I couldn’t look at Pel, only the demon.

I was not the only one: the war-party stood stunned. Spells sputtered out. Eztaral’s orders halted for the briefest of moments. Patches of warriors started running for the gates. Beside me, Atalawe had picked up a discarded spear. Redeye clamped a vial of nectra between his teeth and cracked his knuckles. I thought of my hidden vial, but it was madness to use it. Without training, it was as good as poison to me. Instead, I seized the copper knife from Pel as he sought a sword. Redeye handed him another vial, but Pel pushed it away.

“We need to get out of here or we’re doomed!” he barked. “They’re already dead and don’t know it!”

To punctuate Pel’s point, the demon raised its fistful of fire to the blackened skies. White lightning coursed through the smoke. To the north and south, blackened and fire-wrapped shapes swarmed above the walls. Flames billowed at the demons’ backs. Swords and vicious axes of metal glowed in the heat. Some took aim with huge longbows. Each one of them bayed to their master in a deafening cacophony.

“He’s right, Pel!” I yelled, coming to the abrupt agreement that we were indeed stuck at the centre of the fiery trap. He dragged us westwards to the gate as the demons began to charge the war-party.

“Give us some cover, Redeye!” thundered Pel.

Mid-dash, the sorcer spun on his heel to face the fire. His noble eyes now shone a piercing blue. I flinched as he unleashed his magic and broke the paving stones behind us with a mere flick of his fingers. Spikes of earth burst upwards to swat flaming arrows from the air. I made a mental note to thank the sullen sorcer when we arrived in the Six Heavens.

Panic seized the town in its jaws. I stumbled as we hurtled towards the gate. I rolled, glancing my head on the stone, but somehow came up sprinting. Atalawe pushed me ahead as she took aim and threw her spear at a blazing shape chasing us. I didn’t know exactly what threat a spear posed to a demon, but it roared loudly enough for my and Atalawe’s liking. Bringing up our rear, Redeye conjured a pillar of earth that had a fist at its forefront. The demon took the blow before the spell exploded in a black curtain of dirt.

“Best mudmage around, just like I told you!” Atalawe howled. She had one hand on Pel, guiding him where he seemed to be lagging. Though his legs might have been weak, the old beggar showed no such worry in his snarling face.

“Run, curse you all!”

I spared a breathless glance behind me to see the mass of towering demons clash with the warriors. Bodies cartwheeled through the air. Blood hissed and steamed against burning hides. Hot iron cleaved through lances as if they were twigs. Sorcers railed at the demons with every spell they knew, but in the confines, charged from almost all sides and with terror in their hearts, the pride of Shal Gara failed swiftly and bloodily.

The horror became too much. My legs pounded the earth. I threw all my attention into hurtling into the narrow gaps between the buildings, but the horror followed. Bodies slumped across the pathways, arrows still burning in them as if they were candles. I tripped on one and fell with none of the grace I had before. Gravel stung my palms. A stone against my temple put some dizziness in my eyes, and in the murk of smoke and panic, neither Atalawe nor Redeye saw me tumble.

“Wait!” I cried after them. Only Atalawe turned. I could see Pel yelling, but no sound reached me. Before I got halfway to my knees, barely inches from grasping Atalawe’s stretched hand, the cottages either side of us exploded in flame. We were torn apart as the shockwave tossed us like pebbles.

Fire burst through their triangle windows. A piece of stone the size of my head hammered me in the side, fortunately denting my armour instead of my ribs. I scrambled blind through dust and smoke. Burning thatch rained down on me.

“Pel! Atalawe!” I rasped, crawling as fast as I could in what I hoped was the direction of the gate. My dagger was gone. All I had left was the nectra vial.

“Atalawe! Wait, curse you!”

The only attention I gained was that of a demon, only visible through the smoke by the fire streaming from it like a mane, and the burning eyes hooked on me. It thumped through the debris on what looked like hooves. Claws slashed a path towards me, scattering thatch and rubble left and right. I saw its face now as I scrabbled to escape: framed by fire, grey as ash between the scars and twisted antlers. Its skeletal grin was gleeful in its thirst for prey. I was transfixed.

My scrabbling only got me so far. I felt the immovable chunk of wall at my back, and with it, all my hopes tumbled into a bottomless void. The surge of demon heat made me shield my face. I expected to feel my skin crackling at any moment. The realisation was a blade to my gut.

I was going to die.

Resentment, not sorrow, welled up in me. A coward, Redeye had called me. Pel had manipulated me. Haidak had seen nothing fit for me but execution. This was not how I had planned to die, remembered as a traitor, a fool, and a coward, before my time in the grip of a demon’s flame. No. For all my downfalls and massive errors, I would not meet the Six Heavens or Hells like that. Not while I still took breath.

I dragged the nectra vial into the smoke and firelight. The demon kept coming, quickening its charge. I raised the vial in my right hand, trying desperately to undo its cap before I was ripped to bloody shreds. I had no idea what I trifled with, but I knew I wasn’t dying curled up in a shivering heap.

My time ran out as the demon brought its claws to bear. I threw up my hand, but before I could get the vial anywhere near my lips, fingers of burning stone seized my fist. I didn’t need the musical crunch to tell me the sandglass shattered in my palm. The vial’s shards running my hand through were clue enough. I cried out in pain.

A claw punctured my arm just below the shoulder so it could draw me closer. Shivering from the pounding ache in my arm, I stared back, boring into its cinder-white eyes and roaring maw of black fangs and fire with what I hoped was a casual sneer. As its jaws widened, I saw a white light searing through the demon’s veins. The screech that filled my ears was not anger. Pain tainted the monster’s roar. I was on the verge of hope when the same fire shone through my dusty skin, coursing up my arms and across my chest. My own serving of pain racked me. My cry was lost to the growing whine of forceful wind. I battled to escape, willing to sacrifice an arm in the face of such pain. Yet not even the mad convulsions that seized me could separate me from the demon. Before the light blinded my eyes, I saw the fear and confusion plain on the demon’s face as it tried in vain to be free of me. The bellow of the wind grew all-consuming.

An explosion of light ripped us apart. I felt my limbs fall free of my body. I felt the fire consume my skin. I felt every brick that rained down on me, crushing the light from my eyes and breath from my lungs. A dark came swift as raven’s wings.

At least I had not died a coward.

9

Inconveniently Entwined

Stargazing is a fancy habit of the gem-rich and noble-born. First-born heirs playing at being scholars. As one of the Neathering, I thought stars to be a mere handful of lights. A rare treat of the night sky. Let me tell you friends, that there are more stars in the gods’ skies than there are leaves upon trees. What does that make of us?

FROM “MUSINGS FROM THE MULCH,” AUTHOR UNKNOWN

The Six Heavens were not what I imagined. They were dark and dusty and stank of death. Through the blurred crack of my eyelid, I could see a wall of stone, not the golden meadows and silver trees the godseers and their holy songs promised us. The reek of ash pervaded my senses, not the foretold perfume of the gods’ gardens.

Despite my valiant – if last-minute – efforts, the Six Hells had claimed me after all. My fogged mind was filled with curses. I had heard of plenty songs of the netherworlds, of stone lands trapped in constant lastlight and populated by shadows with insatiable appetites for lost souls.

I blinked again at the stone, finding it cracked and blackened. It was rubble, to be precise. I had never been in a cave, but this matched most of the descriptions I’d heard. As I stared, a thin thread of light pierced a crack in the tumbled stone. I gasped only to choke on dust. The rubble shifted to widen the fissure, and sunlight speared me.

I was not dead. Against all odds, I had survived the white fire and the demon’s grip. In what state I had survived in, I didn’t know. Panic struck me as I realised I hadn’t much sensation beyond what I could see and think.

It was in dire situations like this that the gift of imagination is naught but an evil. For a terrible moment, I thought myself to be no more than a head. Thankfully, the anxious thudding in my skull saved me from passing out. It was a heartbeat, and thankfully mine.

It took me a dozen tries to clench my toes and fingers. I could have yelled in relief, but the moment I tested my limbs, the numbness gave way to pain. I seethed as each beat of my heart brought a stab of a knife into my skull. I distracted myself with the fact I couldn’t discern my right arm. I could feet a heat with my left. Something hurt in my side when I breathed.

Forcing my eyes open, I gasped at what polluted air I could and began to attempt moving. The rubble had fallen so as to leave a small cave-like space, like a grave for somebody much bigger than I am. Sunlight was a thin and precarious roof of rubble and wood away. After some careful and difficult wiggling, I found my left leg and right arm were pinned by thick blocks of stone and a fallen beam. My leg certainly hurt enough to be broken, but I managed to pull it free regardless. Thankfully it was bruised, sprained at the worst, but good enough for me to push against the rubble’s grip and pull my numb right arm free. A pile of wooden slats lay across me. They clattered and shed dust as I extricated myself inch by inch. The rubble above me flinched and grated. Another part of my tiny cave buckled.

I clutched my right forearm to me and felt my bones. They seemed whole, still numb, but unbroken. My skin was black with ash and char, and black dried blood ran in stripes down my arm. My hand, however, was sorely wounded. Sandglass shards protruded from deep wounds from my fingers to wrist. Thick splinters of it, deep between the bones. The pain swelled as soon as I saw them. Traces of silver had been melted into the cracks of my palm. Blue crystals like dyed salt ran between the shards. I poked at them gingerly, baring my teeth at the torture. In the gloom, I saw the veins beneath my skin glow a faint cobalt before blood oozed afresh.

Recollection of the fight with the demon rushed back to me. I remembered crushing the vial in my hand. The stare of death from a demon twice my size. The blinding of a white light I didn’t understand.

In what little space I had, I pushed myself up to run my hand up my arm and felt something solid protruding from my shoulder. Pain shocked me. I blinked, trying to make out what it was. I set my hands to it, and the agony struck again. It seemed to be a shard of obsidian, but it had none of the smoothness. It was rough as stone, twisted like a quillhog’s tusk. As I felt the torn, sharp edges to it, I realised it was a claw.

My heart pounded, making me feel sick. I swore the sound of its fearful beat filled my makeshift grave. I looked around, expecting to see the warped horns of the hulking creature poking from the stone next to me. All I saw was dust and dark.

I began to push at the rocks, not caring if I was buried again. I dug frantically with my left hand until a weak and orange sunlight warmed my face. I drank in the charred air in gulps and ragged chokes. When it hurt to breathe, I cleared my eyes of filth and looked out of the small window I’d made between the rocks. Firstglow had broken. I saw nothing of the inferno. The burned Swathe beyond the ruined walls still smouldered and smoked, but the flames either had been vanquished or had moved on. Sheertown had been left in a halo of ash and dust. The dead competed with the flagstones to pave the town. Fallen warriors littered the rubble and broken plaza in their thousands. Crows and huge ravens had already arrived. They roamed in swarms to pick at the dead and bicker over choicer scraps.

I saw not one demon corpse lying amongst Shal Gara’s dead. And it seemed I hadn’t won my valiant fight after all but instead had been beaten and left for dead. As mad as it sounded, I was happy enough with that.

The crunch of rubble caused me to tense. I peered until I spotted a hulking figure halfway across the plaza. A lone demon stalked between the dead, scattering the carrion birds. A long, flowing cloak of smoke trailed behind it. Spines ran from its horns down to its lower back. In its claws lay a long spear with a jagged iron blade that looked fit for sawing saplings.

Pounding about on its goatish legs of gnarled charcoal and bone, the demon poked at body after body. What it was looking for became apparent when one of the fallen moaned and raised clasped hands. I heard the cry for mercy, but the creature didn’t know the meaning of the word. It shook its horns, making iron pendants and jewellery rattle along to its cackle. The demon brought its spear down in a cold stab, and another of Shal Gara’s perished.

All that held me back was the thick beam of narin wood. Fortunately for me, the reason carpenters like to use narin for building houses was for how light it was without being weak.

Still, much to my anguish, it took both hands to push the beam off me. I used the back of my right hand, but I still had to bite my tongue to keep from roaring with pain. My upper arm was aflame with agony. I threw all the strength I felt I had in me, but the rubble refused to budge. The panic returned swiftly.

“Please,” I muttered. I was pretty sure the Three Gods had taken a disliking to me, considering all they’d put me through, but some spirit had seen fit to keep me alive, and I prayed to that.

Still, nothing moved except dust and clattering pebbles. I shut my eyes and tensed.

RELEASE ME!

I didn’t know what shocked me more: the deafening yell between my ears, the fact I bellowed the same words without thinking, or that the beam finally shifted. Rubble fell inwards, and I had to scramble to avoid being buried again. Breathless, I burst into the open and into a hobbling, clambering run, somewhat reminiscent of a drunk spider missing half its legs.

Release me, I command you!

The voice stopped me dead. I crouched and looked about frantically, expecting a demon to loom over me at any moment, spear raised. But there was nothing around me but cowed and crumbled buildings, irreparable, and an eerie silence broken only by birds arguing.

So it was that my panicked breathing and scrambling over loud rubble had attracted the demon’s attention. My first clue was the giant spear whooshing over my head and piercing the ruined wall to my left.

I turned to find the demon already sprinting for me, jaws wide and claws grasping just like before. “Come meet your end, worm!” it roared. The fact the beasts could speak, never mind speak Swathe tongue, was horrifying to me. I ran all the faster on my numb legs. I heard more yelling behind me. It felt so close by that I couldn’t look back. I had the trees of the Swathe fixed in my smoke-raw eyes, and I wasn’t going to stop. I dodged and weaved between rubble and ruin. An arrow as long as my leg slammed into the gate as I ducked through what was left of it.

“Six Hells!” I hissed, finding more dead second-born and sorcers on the scorched road. I glanced around for Pel and the others, but there was no sign of them, dead or alive.

The trees beyond Sheertown and the road had begun to smoulder. They were not yet swallowed by it, but the fire was moving inexorably on. I ran straight beneath one tree whose branches were aflame. The cinders scorched me. Bushes scratched at me. Flames seemed to nip at my heels, but I heard more deep roars chasing me, and yet they only spurred me on. All I could hear was my pounding heart and ragged, hoarse breaths.

Once I had escaped beyond the line of burning forest, I did what came naturally to a bloodwood citizen like me and climbed straight up a tree.

Ironpith trees might have been tall and unwaveringly straight, with branches only sprouting far above the ground, but their gnarled bark was full of natural handholds. Every child of the Swathe can climb before they can run. My dread drove me up the trunk of that tree faster than a shrewbat. Misfit would have been proud.

Climbing with just the trembling fingertips of my right hand, I soon made it to a branch and slumped on it belly-first to catch my breath. I didn’t dare let go. The branch was barely wide enough for me. This was no bloodwood, merely a puny Loamsedge tree.

Below me, in the haze of the smoke, I saw scrawny figures close on my trail. Not demons, nor humans. They looked like the tortured spawn of both. I didn’t see their faces, but their charcoal skin and nocked bows suggested strongly to me they weren’t friendly. The creatures snarled and chattered at each other, pointing this way and that with their elongated arms. Some I swore had four arms, each holding an iron knife. I thanked the Three Gods and all their spirits that none of the creatures thought to look up as they charged on into the forest.

You scurrilous whelp! Explain yourself and this foul magic!

The insult boomed through the forest, making me clutch the branch. I peered down, looking for the fire of demons but seeing none.

With care, I pushed myself up so my back was to the bark and my legs gripped the branch. Once again the hoarse and booming voice came, and with it a sharp headache.

What have you done to me? What is this abominable spell of yours, wizard? I demand an answer, you worm!

Wherever the demon was, I hoped it was far below. I had no idea if demons could climb trees. That prospect was far too bothersome to deal with now.

My mother was not a drinker since my father’s death, but she had occasionally, mistakenly or otherwise, gotten drunk. She was the pleasant kind of drunkard. The ones content to sit and let the words flow as much as the wine. The kind that finish the night singing harmless old songs, clutching friends and telling them they’re the finest bastards in the Swathe. Or, as Mother often did, the kind that tell stories filled with tangential lectures full of boastful yet questionable advice. It was advice I never thought I’d needed, and yet one nugget of Mother’s wisdom came to me then: that in dark and hopeless situations, one should take a knee, take a breath, and take stock. I wasn’t about to kneel on this branch, but I did breathe deeply through my nose and hold it.

I had escaped Sheertown and the demons. It seemed few if any from Shal Gara had done the same and for that I counted myself lucky. But escaped to what? I was now alone in the loam, injured, quite lost, and being hunted by wildfire and demons.

“But I am alive,” I told myself aloud with a shuddering exhale.

There it was: the simple beauty of my mother’s wisdom. As depressing and fearful as my situation was, being able to take a moment of breath meant you were alive, still beating. Still fighting. Even if I was a scrawny worker who had lost every fight I’d been in.

I held my right hand in front of me. It was dingy under the sky of smoke and the needle leaves of the ironpith, and once again I saw the faint glow of blue in the vile wounds. I gritted my teeth and reached for the largest chunk of glass. Merely touching it sent agony shooting up my arm to the base of my skull.

I twitched, accidentally pulling the piece of glass free. Black blood pooled in my palm while I seethed and strained to keep quiet through the hurt. My entire arm throbbed. The veins of my wrist shone a brighter blue as if a flickering storm hid beneath my skin.

Stop that!

I froze. All the heat of running and climbing drained from my face. The sweat on my brow turned cold. No twigs snapped. No leaves crunched. Nothing moved in the loam and bushes beneath the tree. There was no tremor or shake in the trunk, no scrabble of claws scaling bark to reach me, and I exhaled.

I reached for a second shard. Eyes shut, I wrenched it free. Inexplicable pain lanced through my body.

Stop it, I say!

It took an age for me to summon the courage to speak aloud. My worst fears ran rampant once again.

“Stop what?” I dared to whisper.

For a moment, the voice did not speak. I was on the cusp of cursing my imagination when to my looming, chilling dread, it answered me.

Fool! It pains both of us!

Both of us. I pawed at my skull with my good hand as if that would offer an explanation as to why I could hear a voice. I knew it wasn’t my own thoughts. It couldn’t have been. They did not speak with such a scraping, oily tone. A tone that was undeniably female. I tensed my jaw and slapped myself in the face, praying it was a dream. Much to my dismay, I opened my eyes to a stinging cheek and the same forest.

You are pathetic. Release me this instant!

“You’re not real. I’m still under the rubble.” My breath came short and fast. I had seen Tesq have these sorts of attacks of fear, all wide-eyed and hands shaking, impossible to talk sense to. “I’ve hit my head, and you’re my imagination making a voice for itself, that’s all.”

I am no such thing! How dare you dismiss me, you repulsive trickster. I shall reap my vengeance on you, worm, mark my words—

“Stop calling me worm!” I snapped, louder than I would have liked. I hugged the tree. “I don’t want to hear you anymore! You’re a figment, that’s what you are. A figment of nonsense.”

The voice sounded shocked and spent a few moments seething. I could even hear its fuming gasps while it gathered its words.

I will peel the skin from you while you still take breath! I will boil you in oil—

I scrunched my face, trying to block out her threats, useless as they seemed. “I hit my head. I hit my head. This is all temporary,” I uttered over and over. “Demon magic, I’ll bet. A spell or some curse. That makes far more sense.”

The ensuing silence was full of tenuous hope.

Are you done, worm?

“Gah!” I could bear it no longer. I decided the best way of ridding myself of the haunting voice, barring knocking myself out again, was to keep moving. I heard it muttering threats to skin, skewer, roast, and otherwise devour me, but I refused to listen. Gritting my teeth, I yanked the final shards of glass from my hand. The voice echoed my pained cry, and that seemed to shut it up just fine.

With care and much scrabbling with my injured hand, I made it down the trunk almost all the way before falling into a berry bush. Naturally, thanks to my kind of luck, it was covered in spines. I extricated myself with a muttered stream of curses, thankful to still be wearing most of my stolen armour, even though the breastplate was cracked in two.

I picked up the first fallen branch I could find that was remotely stout, tucked one end under a knotted root of a pine, and snapped it into a sharper point. Holding it like Atalawe’s staff, I hunkered down and set out into the forest.

How formidable you are.

I was not mad. It was demon magic, plain and simple. A dark spell of confusion and madness or so I assumed. Ignoring the voice, I thought only of Shal Gara as I ran towards what I knew was west. The winds had only blown in one direction since the day of the black sun, so I let them push at my back.

I made it a dozen steps before the accursed voice bothered me again.

I demand you release me this instant!

The voice had been silent so long it shocked me into stubbing my foot on a root. I stared around as I ran, keeping an eye peeled for the creatures that had chased me.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re the one with a spell on me,” I scoffed.

Lies! I swear upon my father’s glory, I will—

“You’ll skin me. Or gut me. Or eat me. I get it. Is this what your demon magic does? Drive me insane through repeating yourself over and over?” I didn’t want to admit it was starting to work.

Free me, I command you!

I clenched my hand, hoping that would shut her up, but this time it did not work. Although I could hear her seething, she did not fall silent.

I cannot bear to be trapped in this loathsome cage a moment longer! To be imprisoned in your puny body is an insult! Free me from this spell and this putrid sack of meat, and perhaps I will let you live. Here that, worm? Does that entice you?

My tired feet staggered to a halt. Sweat ran into my eye. “What do you mean… imprisoned?”

Play your mind games if you wish, wizard. They will not work on a demon such as me. I know it was you and your precious nectra magic that did this to me. Your magic that bound me here within your mind. Now release me!

“That’s not possible,” I snapped, so certain despite having close to zero understanding of magic or demons. I still wasn’t sure if I wasn’t actually in some death-dream beneath a pile of rubble. “And how do you know of nectra?”

The voice laughed coldly, a sound more fitting to a serpent’s slither. I know much that you do not.

I held up my right hand, staring at the wounds and the blue light shining beneath my skin. The longer I stared, the brighter the light grew. The veins around my wrist had turned a darker shade, like the blackened stalks of burning trees.

I shuddered, then, at the memories of Sheertown. If I closed my eyes, I could see the grinning demon, wreathed in fire and swinging claws, and behind its black blades, a pair of burning orbs fixated on the blue vial in my hand. I remembered being wreathed in its smoke and the howl as the white light blinded us both. I felt for the demon claw lodged deep in my arm and shuddered. The glass I had managed, but this hooked claw barely allowed me to touch it without making me breathless through pain.

“No…,” I whispered. “No, I don’t trust you.”

Yes, you dimwitted worm!

“You’re lying. This is nothing but your spell at work. And stop calling me worm!”

Yet your kind suits it so well.

A distant crash of stone or fallen tree spurred me to run on.

In the silence, I battled with the preposterous idea of a demon stuck within me. “How is this even possible? You’re a whole demon, and I’m…”

You tell me.

“It can’t be!” I protested.

The voice simply growled at me.

I wiped the nervous sweat from my face. “Let’s… let’s believe you for a moment and say you are trapped in my mind and this is no trick, what’s to say this isn’t your fault?” It was just like me to argue the minutiae of blame with a demon who was apparently stuck in my head. “That sounds far more believable. I’m no sorcer.”

Your insolent lies grate on me. Why would I wish to succumb to this curse? Your form is weak, disgusting. And the stench—

“You’re one to talk,” I hissed, pausing for a moment behind a huge tree stump to relieve my nervous and inconveniently timed bladder.

How revolting.

“Who are you, exactly?” I asked after a while. “Do you have a name?”

You wish to know my name, worm? Very well. I am Serisianathiel of the Voidborn, blessed in angel-blood, spawn of the mighty Faraganthar, King of the Last Clan. I have known five hundred ages, and I will know a thousand more after my father conquers your world. I have watched suns die and stars born. I have seen gods bleed and worlds eaten. You should be bowing before me, wretch, with your nose to the ground. And you shall, for what you’ve dared to do to me.

I tutted. “That’s far too much of a mouthful. I should just call you demon. Or murderer. That would be fitting, after what your kind did to mine in Sheertown.”

For a being of fire and charcoal, the demon’s voice was as ice. I think you mean to call us victors. Your frail forces were no match for our might. Your confidence was your downfall.

“Some of those people were my friends, demon,” I growled, thinking of Pel, Atalawe, even Redeye. “You didn’t fight with honour but with deception.”

The demon’s voice turned vicious again. Honour, it spat. A practice of the dead and defeated. Enough talk! Release me, or—

“Shut up, demon,” I said, unable to take any more.

Something lay ahead. I saw the shaking of a giant lusifer fern. I ducked to the left and ran a curving path through a grove of white pines. They looked quite at home coated in ash, standing like stately warders refusing to leave their posts.

And what name did your mewling mother give you, worm?

I didn’t know what a demon would do with my name. Perhaps there was some curse she could whisper to stop my heart dead.

“Nothing.”

Nothing. A fine name for a guttersnipe and trickster.

“Shut it, unless you want some more pain. That seemed to keep you quiet before.”

The threat worked. I was left to scarper through the forest in relative peace, though albeit with a storm of a thousand questions churning through my head. First and foremost, how in the Six Hells I had wound up with a demon inside me.

It still felt resoundingly impossible to me, and yet barely a day ago, so had the very notion of demons. It couldn’t have been me that caused this. I had no magic in my blood. The only comfort was that I had ended up as the jailer. The demon was trapped within me, and I thanked the gods it wasn’t the other way around. The only choice I had was to find help. For me, for Shal Gara, and judging by what the demon had threatened, for the whole Swathe.

Where are you taking me, Nothing?

“I’m going west, away from Loamsedge and your fires. Hopefully I’ll find another survivor to talk to so I don’t have to listen to you. Hopefully somebody who can explain how to get rid of you,” I said, clenching my good hand in desperate hope.

The demon tried to deafen me. I will be no prisoner! Release me, I order you!

A meagre pain lanced across my head. It made me wince, but that was all. “Is that all you can do to me, demon?” I challenged, silently hoping it was.

If you will not free me, then I will soon learn how to free myself. I will break your skull open if I have to. And should I fail, my father Faraganthar will come searching for me. He will grind you to dust with his bare claws.

That threat was the first one to chill me. More laughter echoed between my ears, loud as my own voice. “Be quiet, curse you,” I told her in a weakened voice.

Between the white pines, I saw a faint flame burning. It wasn’t a torch, for it didn’t seem to be moving. It looked more like a campfire, or some small blaze caused by an errant and far-flung spark. Or worse, a demon patrolling the forest.

Putting down my sharp stick, I ripped a length of cloth from my armour and fashioned it into a makeshift sling. I almost passed out tying it around my right hand, but I was useless with my left. There were few sling-worthy rocks about, only boulders or chunks of bark that crumbled between my fingers. I found two suitable slingstones: one too big, one too small. I clutched the cloth around the former and put the latter in my pocket. The familiar feel of a sling in my hand, even though my wounds throbbed beneath it, fortified me.

As I peered through the undergrowth, trying my best to ignore a caterpillar the size of my forearm inching across the log I hid behind, I recognised the boxy shapes and bright paint of Shal Gara wagons.

“Thank the Three Gods,” I whispered. The wagons had stayed put. I began to jog towards them, spear in one hand and sling in the other, ready to use both.

While I didn’t see any movement, I saw plenty of figures strewn about, propped up by the fire or curled up asleep. It couldn’t have been that long after firstglow, and the porters were likely seizing a fine opportunity to sleep without higher ranks and nobles bellowing in their faces. I was jealous, and cursed myself for not staying with the wagons when I had the chance. Hindsight was a prickly fruit, impossible to crack open without sticking yourself first.

I put a cautious foot to the ash-covered road. Nothing moved in the trees. I peered at the wagons and noticed all the orokan were gone. No shouts from lookouts came as I scurried to the ring of wagons. The hundred or so porters made not a sound, not even a snore.

“Oi,” I hissed to one of the men on the outskirts of the ring. He was curled away from me on his bedroll and tucked beneath the nose of his wagon. After poking him with my stick didn’t work, I shook him by the arm. “Wake up, man.”

It took me rolling him over to see why he slept so soundly. Death was the deepest sleep of all.

The man’s face was a greenish hue, with eyes bulging and lips purple. A ragged wound had been cut across his throat, and the wound had blackened at the edges. Dried vomit decorated his chin.

The demon chuckled softly in my head. Were these some of your friends, worm?

I ignored her. I felt eyes on the back of my head. I shuffled deeper under the shadow of a wagon, breath held and eyes roaming from one body to the next. I scuttled to five more bodies before I decided all of the porters had to be dead. Not a single arrow protruded from any of them. There were no signs of fire’s touch. Most were still slumbering under their cloaks, half-buried in ash. Each one bore a wound and showed me a discoloured, bloated face.

“I didn’t think,” I said, my voice catching in my throat, “that your kind would skulk and murder like assassins with poisoned blades.”

She scoffed. We do not. We have no need for such a cowardly weapon.

My instinct – mainly driven by the rising need to throw up – was to flee the circle of death. The pragmatic side of me looked for a better weapon, food and water, and perhaps a poultice or bandage for my hand. Nothing festered like a wound in a forest.

Timorously, I creeped between the dead, whispering what little I knew of the funeral rites. To leave them unsaid was a fine recipe for gloomsprites and other jilted ghosts.

Weapons were scarce. I could only stomach searching so many bodies, and I stopped once I’d found an ironpith dagger and an obsidian hatchet. Both were as blunt as my fingertips, but I thrust them through my belt and cast the stick aside. Atop one wagon somebody had left a satchel of dark ticabo berries, half a ūlana fruit, and some dried meat that I guessed was loamtoad. I snatched up all I saw. The clay vats of drinking water were covered but still tasted faintly of ash. I cupped a few handfuls to my mouth, eager to move on.

As I drank, I was amused to hear the demon hissing. No laughter this time. It was highly curious, and I was about to speak to it when I caught sight of a nightmare in my peripheral vision.

A figure, hooded and cloaked, was rising from the carpet of dead. I caught the glint of something metal in its black-gloved fingers as it slowly straightened to standing. My dripping hand hovered in front of my mouth. I slurped as I picked my way silently through the bodies. I let the makeshift sling dangle, heavy with the stone.

No sooner had I swivelled and raised my sling around than the figure rushed at me. The stone missed, snapping against the wood of a wagon. I saw a bright copper knife flash in the firelight. The figure made no war-cry, no threat, it just wanted me dead as soon as possible. I dodged at the last moment while I fumbled for my dagger and hatchet. The knife stabbed the clay vat behind me instead. Water spewed at our feet as it was drawn free.

I heard a muffled curse. The hooded figure was human. As he turned, I saw he had no face, only a jade mask carved like a grinning lizard, and he hissed as he approached. He was theatrical, I gave him that. Had this been any other day, I might have been cowering in confusion and fear.

Drawing my borrowed weapons, I skipped backwards to avoid a swipe of his blade, but as usual, my clumsy feet saw me tumble backwards over a body. The killer took his chance and pounced on me like a jāgu, blade-first. I threw out my hands in wild hope and panic.

When no pain came besides that of my existing injuries, I looked up to see wild and white eyes staring at me through the mask. Blood was trickling down my arm. My blunt dagger had pierced the man’s chest before his could reach my throat. The copper blade still hovered inches close, and I was painfully aware it was soaked in poison. He tried to stab me one last time before his breath gave out. The copper sliced open my cheek, opposite my sorcer’s mark. I heard the snarl of the demon in my head.

With a panicked cry, I shoved the dead man off me and crawled upright. I fully expected to drop wheezing and spitting to the ground at any moment, but no pain came other than the sharp sting of the wound. My gaze shifted to the clay vat, still dribbling a slow stream of water that must have washed the poison from the blade. And here I was, thinking my luck was perpetually against me. This day had made me doubt my stars.

“You felt that cut, didn’t you?” I asked the silence.

And you are no warrior, are you, Nothing?

“Far from it.”

I stared into the dwindling fire-pit in the centre of the wagons. Somehow, I saw a face in the crimson tongues of the last flames. Eyes and a snarling mouth, at least. They were etched in my memory.

“Is that… you?”

I am trapped in your squishy, useless body. This is your doing. Your magic.

I snorted in disbelief, but the longer I stared, the more the flames took on life and shape. Smoke swirled in the shape of jagged horns and sharp jaws. A faint face hovered in front of me, eyes aglow with embers. Sparks popped as the fire took a breath with me.

“Look, Sarsi… Serath…”

“Serisianathiel,” the fire spoke. Seeing my furrowed brow, Serisianathiel tutted with a crack of a coal. “But as that is too difficult for your worm tongue, you may refer to me as Serisi.”

I crouched down, staring at the face of the demon. I could feel her frustration in those narrowed, burning eyes. I felt the same. I touched my stinging face, painting my fingertips with blood.

“Look, Serisi, much as I have been trying desperately to deny this situation, I can’t,” I sighed. “As ludicrous as this is, I can’t figure any other explanation. So as you and I seem to be unfortunately and inconveniently stuck together, you should know my name is Tarko. Tarkosi Terelta to give you my whole name. Call this an accident. Call it a pain in the arse. Call it a cruel trick of the gods. I’m beyond caring now. It has happened, and whether we wanted this or not, it appears neither of us knows how to reverse it. So how about we don’t try to insult each other to death until we can figure this horrible mess out and find a way to separate ourselves without either of us dying?”

The fiery visage scowled. “A truce? I would rather die before trusting a mortal worm like you,” she said, “Tarko of the Swathe.”

“Well then,” I tutted, but I had another verbal blade to menace the demon with. “Like you said, I am no warrior. I almost died fighting one person, and let me tell you, there’s plenty more that wants to kill me out here in the forest besides your demon king father and the rest of your fiery kin. Others just like this man, for example. Whoever he is,” I said, as I dragged the copper knife from his dead hands. I spoke with a bravado I didn’t feel and hoped the demon couldn’t tell. I tapped at the wound on my cheek. “And if you feel my slightest pain, then I wonder what happens to you if I wind up dead? That could be the end of both of us. Do you want that, Serisi?”

Her grumbling silence told me everything I needed to know.

“I thought not. There must be somebody in my city who knows more about the magic that’s forced us together. Maybe they can free us. And then you and I can argue all day about who kills who.” I cleared my dry throat. “What do you say, demon?”

Serisi said nothing. I discerned a faint nod before the face faded from the smoke, leaving the fire to die in peace.

“Then we have an agreement,” I muttered. “We go back to Shal Gara and find answers there.”

I had no clue whether pacts meant anything to demonkind. Only the road would tell, if I survived it long enough. It was true that I wanted to be rid of her, but I also had every intention of warning Shal Gara, just as Pel had intended. I owed his and the others’ souls that much. They had been right, after all, and perished for it. That was one truth Serisi didn’t need to know.

Taking a sharp breath, I seized the demon claw in my arm and pulled. Serisi yowled with me until I managed to wrap another strip of cloth around my arm. I held the shard of black claw in my hand. Warm to the touch, its bloody point was devilishly needle-sharp. Part of me considered throwing it deep into the darkness, but something held me back. I instead pocketed it into my warrior’s trews and did not ask myself why.

Gripping my new metal knife as though it was a throat to be strangled, I set foot to the road. At least I now had a path to follow.

10

The Leafroad

Any hunter or sixth-born worth their moss knows that a leafroad’s protection only lasts so long. Night and his creatures treat the Swathe’s roads like any other branch.

FROM AN ANONYMOUS LEAFLET TITLED “TO THOSE WHO WANDER BEYOND THE BLOODWOODS”

It took me barely an afternoon to realise that having a demon in your head was nothing short of tiresome.

It was the silence. The grumbling, tutting, critical silence. Every time I slowed to check our surroundings or flinched at a noise, there came scorn and a sigh from her.

What made me smirk instead of curse was that Serisi had no idea the level of scorn and criticism a worker of Shal Gara – especially one like me – was subjected to on a daily basis. I could have endured days of this before breaking. I had half a mind to introduce her to Karonak and see how quickly she begged to be left alone.

After dashing through the clearing of the standing stones at firstglow, I had yelled aloud with relief to put feet to the roots of the Emerald Causeway and leave the loam behind me. At a gradual slope, pace by pace, the leafroad had climbed back into the low branches, barely a spear or two above the loam, and meandered between the canopies of squat trees. It was much more tiring walking west up its slope instead of east. I would have given my sore legs to ride upon a wagon, but I refused to stop or slow.

There was a tense mood to the Swathe I had not experienced before. Birds held back their songs. Waifs picked at the fallen seeds and morsels on the road in quiet chirps. They scattered in tight flocks at the faintest scuff of my feet. Animals picked their way through the undergrowth, snouts pointed west just like mine. Crows seemed to gather in great numbers in the treetops as if expecting another feast of corpses. I was beginning to believe that they followed me, chattering to each other as they waited patiently for my inevitable demise. Their voices were uncannily human. I swear I heard the mimicked screams of the war-party echoing through the treetops.

More than anything, I kept my eyes open for survivors. Not a soul trod the Causeway besides me. Had I not spent the journey wearing an ache into my neck from constant vigilance, it would have been peaceful with the amber light breaking through the spacious canopy, carving rays through the lessening smoke. The clouds and canopies still coveted the sun, but here and there I spotted a fat curve of pale light. The darkness had encroached further across the goddess’ disk. I found myself shutting my eyes to feel the sunlight, or the breeze, as I had often done in snatched moments in the city. I felt a calm break through the mess that had been my mind and body since Pel had plucked me from my branch.

How long?

Serisi’s voice broke through my moment of peace like a rock through sandglass.

“How long what?” I said aloud to the forest. I thought of all the times I’d rolled my eyes at Pel for muttering away to himself. Maybe he’d had a demon in his head all this time.

How long until your city? How much more must I endure this prison of your mind?

“At least a little longer. It took three days for the war-party to reach Firstwatch.”

A long way just to walk to their deaths.

“Do demons die?” I hoped they could.

Trying to find a way to kill me, are you? My kin cannot be killed.

“We’ll see about that,” I muttered.

What did you say?

“Nothing.”

I had hoped that was the end of it. I had my questions, but conversing with the creature was a pain. I had never met somebody who hated me so completely and without hesitation, purely for who or what I was. For my form and the blood within my veins. Even Haidak Baran had a reason for his hatred, no matter how petty it was.

How can you stand to live in this land? So green. So enclosed and airless. So far from the light of your sky—

“Then why did you come to the Swathe at all? Why attack us?”

Serisi spurned me with a growl. We do what we must.

“You must? Then there must be a reason.”

Your puny mind would call it conquest. Those who are weak are defeated and consumed by the strong. It is how all worlds have existed since the beginning of the ages.

“What do you mean, all worlds? I thought you came from the Scorch beyond the Loamsedge.”

Laughter, now. You know so little, mortal worm.

I clenched my wounded hand in punishment. I apparently caught her off her guard. Serisi hissed deep between my ears.

When I get out of your mind, I—

“I know, I know. Carve, kill, eat, peel my skin off, blah blah.”

I grow tired of waiting.

“Then you can wait a little longer. I’m travelling as fast as I can manage.”

Those of the Last Clan never tire. Distance means nothing to us. We have walked the endless stretches of the Starless Plains for millennia, we have—

“Apparently not yet learned what boasting is,” I chided, deciding I could at least try to have some fun with the cantankerous creature. If I was going to be cleaved and devoured, or if Shal Gara would greet me as a traitor, I might as well grasp at some last enjoyment. “It seems you don’t know everything.”

My laugh landed on silence.

Teach me then, worm, Serisi scoffed.

“Only if you stop calling me worm.”

Tell me then, Tarko of the Swathe. Tell me all I do not know.

My name sounded strange in a demon’s voice. I didn’t like it. “I’m not telling you anything. You’re my enemy. Anything I tell you, you could use against us. You’ll go running back to your father with all our secrets when I’m free of you.”

Again, the demon laughed. Not mocking this time, but telling. Perhaps.

“I’ve been told of you demons. The Swathe has stood up to you before and won.”

A thousand ages have passed since then. Your world has changed for the weaker. We are stronger.

“Hardly,” I said again with false confidence. “We defeated you once, and we can defeat you again.”

Can you indeed? We will see, won’t we?

I resorted to silence, much happier with the birdsong and the sound of the wind in the countless branches. The forest had its own whispers. The godseers and spiritcallers of the healers said if one listened closely enough, the gods and ancestors would speak to you. I listed with all my might, trying to find some answers to this patchwork plan of mine. All I heard was the demon sighing.

“What is it now?” I demanded.

Where is this home of yours? This Shal Gara.

“The way I’m going, curse it,” I told her, before proudly pointing along the leafroad. “You’ll see it soon enough above the canopy. Bloodwoods grow more than a mile high.”

A what?

“A bloodwood. The colossal trees of the Swathe.”

How odd for a worm to live in a tree, she hissed. What are you then, if not a warrior? You must be a wizard, to cast such a spell on me.

“What in the Six Hells is this wizard you keep calling me?” I asked.

One who wields the demonfire. Or in your case, lesser magics.

“A sorcer, you mean. And our magic is not lesser, thank you very much.”

It did not save your kind in the stone town. Therefore it is lesser.

“Because of your dastardly tactics. And I am no sorcer.”

You have the same symbol on your face as the other wizards.

I instinctively touched my crossed-out mark before squinting at the worker’s nails on my hands. “I am a worker.”

What is a worker?

“A third-born. One who works for the good of the bloodwood and its citizens.” I found myself repeating the rules of the Bloodlaws without thinking. Even then I heard their fallacy, their absence of meaning beyond tradition.

I am the first and only of my father’s spawn, Serisi said.

“Good for you. You would do well as a human.”

Disgusting. Serisi took a moment to think. I didn’t know if she was intrigued, trying to antagonise me, or hoping to drive me mad. What does that mean, to work?

“It means…” The question foxed me for a moment. What was the point of it all? I had wondered the same to myself many times. “To keep the city working how it should. To provide for others who cannot provide. Workers build, repair, grow food, weave fabric, make weapons. Others heal, or learn, or fight. We work.”

I should like to see your tree city, Serisi said. See how it will burn when my horde reaches it.

“Charming. You will see soon enough. Then I will be rid of you.”

I held my breath to hide my doubt. I knew the gaping holes in my plan: I was taking a demon deep into Swathe territory. Escorting one back to a bloodwood, for Three Gods’ sake. Never mind the fact that if any survivors had escaped before me, I may be returning as a traitor to the Swathe. I also had no idea if the magic of the sorcers could free me. It was a gamble of giant proportions, and I could feel that Serisi sensed it. And yet it had to work, because I had no idea what do if it didn’t.

The forest revolved around us, shifting with the breezes. The birds remained subdued, but not silent. I remained careful, watching every dappled shadow for dangers. I didn’t know how the sixth-born constantly roamed the Swathe, and I wished I understood.

Are you scared, worm?

“What did I tell you about that name?”

Answer me.

“Of course I am. The forest is a dangerous place. Anywhere but a bloodwood is dangerous.”

It is not as dangerous as my kin. It does not scare me.

Fists clenched at my side. I couldn’t stand her anymore. “It should,” I told her.

Then you had better get us there without dying.

“And if I don’t, then at least you’ll die as well,” I bluffed. I had no clue of the nature of our curse, of course. For all I knew, it might take my death to free the demon. But I wasn’t about to tell Serisi that.

You do not know for sure. Perhaps I’m willing to take the chance.

“Then at least we’ll be rid of each other.”

The demon paused for thought. If you are a worker, why do you fight in your pitiful horde? Serisi asked.

I don’t know why I answered, but the question hung in my mind. “Because I was forced into it.”

Why?

“Why do you care?”

I wish to know.

“I was taken against my will by people who knew your kind were coming. They wanted to save the war-party from your trap.”

Then they failed.

“Please stop talking.”

Grown tired of me already, have you?

“More than you can imagine.”

I pushed my tired legs to walk a fraction faster. The sun was shifting through the branches, telling me I had already spent an afternoon walking along the Emerald Causeway. Still, nothing stirred along the path of hewn wood.

I knew the demon stared at whatever I turned my eyes to, always watching, always judging. In some odd way, I tried to show Serisi the majesty of the Swathe, only looking at the finest parts I could find. And yet, for some reason, she still grumbled at every little detail. I tried to ignore the creature, but she grated on me every dozen steps. Over and over, I tensed every tired muscle and dug nails into my wounds to see if I could cause her pain. She winced, and she seethed, but she did not complain. I considered whether she was getting stronger, and I didn’t dare ponder what the demon could do to my mind or body if I lost control.

Steeling myself, I moved to the edge of the leafroad to make sure nothing stalked beneath us. With the Causeway now fifty feet up in the foliage, the undergrowth and loam beneath me was thick and hazed with the drifting smoke. The breeze was constant but gentle, which was why a shivering patch of orange ferns put a knot in my guts. I clutched my copper knife as I crouched down so as not to be seen.

What are you doing?

I shushed her irritably. My mind was running wild, expecting a barkwolf or jāgu to burst from the undergrowth and come charging up one of the leafroad struts.

A fearful mind will always expect the worst, and my greatest fear – and that of any right-minded human or beast in the Swathe – was a tharantos. Of all the Swathe’s monsters, they were the most feared. Not least because of their huge size, but the insects’ ferocity and ravenous hunger was fabled. I had thankfully only seen them in carvings and murals, or dead and butchered. When I was but eight seasons, hunters had paraded a giant, dead male through the Neathering and Midern branches. It had taken six orokan and four wagons back-to-back to carry it and all its spiny legs. Men and women had stood within the stretch of its jaws and laughed.

I blew a sigh of relief as a shape at last emerged from the ferns. There was no thick leg of black carapace, jointed and spiked, but a paw with the three long claws of an orokan. They dug a lazy furrow in the dirt, and a face of white fur appeared in the half-light of the forest floor. Its snuffling was loud and constant as it gobbled the tubers it had dug up. A pair of ponderous quillhogs pottered around the orokan, snuffling up whatever morsels the larger beast dropped. Their snouts were like shovels and their pink bellies fat and swollen with their easy feast.

One of the quillhogs snorted at the air. The thick spines running along its hairless back quivered momentarily. It seemed to be looking straight up at me. I recoiled, for some reason not wanting to disturb them.

With a squeal, the quillhogs disappeared into the undergrowth in a blur of trotters and dead leaves. The bumbling orokan grunted, waving its head back and forth. A single crow’s caw drew my eyes upwards, and there, I saw it.

Like a tumour, the shape hung from the upper branches of a ūlana tree, level with the leafroad. In the dappled sunlight, it was almost invisible, shown by shape and size only. It was thicker than the trunk it clung to, and its foul, segmented body bristled with thorn-like spines. A bulbous head and arm-like front claws hung down, almost bent back on itself to stare down at the orokan below it. My eyes hurt as they stretched wider and wider.

What is that creature?

I flinched as Serisi’s question boomed through my skull.

Before I could answer, the monster released itself from the branch. It plummeted through the air, sharp legs extended and jaws wide. I glimpsed its red and black colours as it fell through the shafts of sunlight.

The orokan realised all too late. The poor beast managed to let out a single wail before the predator landed upon it with a roar and a crash of foliage. Blood and fur spattered the ferns as the two beasts fought, but the victory was swift and decisive. The orokan fell limp with a whine. As insectoid jaws began to drag it under the ferns, and I heard the crunching of bones, I withdrew from the leafroad’s edge. I had seen more than I wanted to. My shoes made not a sound on the worn wood as I started to run.

“That,” I breathed as loudly as I dared, “was a tharantos.”

Serisi stayed quiet. I hoped it was because she was scared. It felt satisfying to imagine the demon was capable of fear. It made her more human. More mortal.

Are there more of them in your land?

“Many more,” I taunted her and myself at the same time. I didn’t tell her they were far more common in the deep west, in the thickest Swathe around Dorla Sel.

“Still sure you’re not scared?” I asked her with a chuckle. The demon threatened all kinds of violence in a muttering voice.

I ran on in as much silence as I could muster. My watchful gaze didn’t just extend to behind and around me, but now above. Every branch I saw, I expected a tharantos to be hanging from it. I found myself walking faster up the Causeway’s tiring slope, just to be further away from the loam and higher in the canopy, where a tasty morsel like me belonged.

��

Serisi stayed mercifully quiet until the first signs of lastlight. As the east burned with wildfires, the west burned with the lastlight of the defiant sun, like a beacon for me to follow. A beacon that half-blinded me every time a rare spear of light pierced the forest leaves, but a beacon nonetheless.

The canopy glowed. Eager fruit bats and flocks of waifs duelled back and forth between the high branches. The air was filled with a muted chorus of birds, lizards, and frogs. I heard the arguing chatter of a kanalat snake wrapped around a tree somewhere. Through the undergrowth, I saw the red glow of the lusifer ferns Atalawe had pointed out. For a while, I could forget the fires chasing me, the fact that I had a demon in my head, and even the encroaching threat of night.

Night’s coming.

The silence was shattered.

“What a keen observation,” I muttered.

The Voidborn know nothing but night.

“And you know nothing of night in the Swathe, so stay quiet.”

I tried to ignore her, but it seemed curiosity was another thing we shared besides my mind. I noticed a curtain of candlevines draped over the edge of the Emerald Causeway and cut a few of their fronds. They had only just begun to flicker. I ran my hands over the frail bulbs, hiding them from the sunlight to make them shine brighter. “What does that mean? Voidborn? You said that before.” It almost sounded like a tribe the Bloodlaws had forgotten.

All demonkind are Voidborn. Born in the Starless Plains that lie between all worlds and lands. It has been our home for countless centuries.

“Then why don’t you go back to it, and leave us alone?”

That is not for you to know, said Serisi, sounding more irritable than usual.

I would have pressed her, but I didn’t care to hear the life story of an immortal demon and her kin. That story sounded far too long for my liking. The other part of me was distracted by the slight hump in the leafroad I had begun to climb. A rift in the canopy lay beyond, caused by some stunted or fallen tree. Through that rift, though still painfully distant, I saw my home.

Framed by the leaves, the towering bloodwood of Shal Gara was a mountain peak of crimson amongst the undulating slopes of the Swathe. Even wreathed in a faint haze of smoke, with the sun drooped behind it, the bloodwood’s gigantic leaves glowed as if they were molten copper.

I took a moment to drink in the view, not only awed but proud and relieved to have found Shal Gara again. The memory of Firstwatch burning had yet to leave my mind, and I didn’t dare imagine Shal Gara in the same state. I shook my head, covering up the traitorous thought with others. For all the city’s misgivings, and no matter how it had treated me, it was still my home.

By your still feet and the beat of your heart, I would guess that is where we are headed. Your rancid tree city? she asked.

“That it is,” I said with pride. “Shal Gara. One of the mightiest bloodwoods in all the Swathe. And it is far from rancid, demon. It is a marvel of nature. A city that’s stood for a thousand seasons and a bloodwood that’s stood for a thousand more. You thought Firstwatch was impressive? That was a child to a giant.”

Serisi chuckled. I could imagine her smile, splitting her face from ear to ear.

Once again, my anxiety played tricks on me. I swore the dust and leaves on the leafroad stirred. There wasn’t enough force in the breeze, and yet they were whipped into a faint cloud that hovered by my side. In the weak rays of light, I saw the ghostly form of a demon: horns, claws, and all. I didn’t have to imagine Serisi’s smile, I could see it. She even tried to swipe her claws at me, but she was no deadlier than a gust of wind. I heard her voice in the rustle of dust.

“And in your city, do workers rule? Are you celebrated? Rich? Adored?” the demon asked me.

I wrinkled my nose, still trying to question how in the Six Hells Serisi had appeared. I could make out her finer details: such as how her horns were like the gnarled ends of a dead tree, and how the roots of her skull spread across her skin. Serisi was the colour of dust, smoke, and scarlet sunlight, but I could remember the fire burning through her veins and charcoal skin.

“Not quite. They tell us we’re just as important as all the tribes of the Bloodlaws. Perhaps more important, some say,” I replied. “But we aren’t treated like it. Even the lower-born scholars and healers look down on us. To be rich and adored in Shal Gara, you need to be born first or into a noble family. Or both.”

“What does these words mean, these Bloodlaws and nobles?”

I stared at Serisi sidelong to see if she was joking. From what I could tell from her faint form, there was no mockery in her eyes. Without her fire, they were black specks of dirt. “The Bloodlaws are order. They govern the whole Swathe and have for a thousand seasons. Everyone has their place and birthright, or a calling. They say it’s the secret behind peace and prosperity.

“As for a noble, they are rich, or powerful, or important, or usually all three. Half of them don’t deserve their nobility. Most are born of older bloodlines and families that existed before the Swathe was unified by the matriarchs. You can tell a noble by their red eyes. The oldest keep their bloodlines pure as they can, and so they keep their ranks tight. Now and again, some of us lucky workers, warriors, or heirs become noble. Like my family did once, long ago.”

Serisi was not impressed. Her laughter echoed softly around me. Leaves scattered as the dust cloud drifted up the slope at my side. “Bloodlines and order. Pah! You are weak and your eyes blind. We demons respect blood spilled not blood born. We rule through might.”

“I’ll take order over the carnage and chaos I saw you wreak in Sheertown.”

“Chaos is glorious. You would know that if you were anything like warrior I am. How many lives have you taken, Tarko of the Swathe?”

“One,” I grunted, taking no pride in the number.

I could feel Serisi judging me. She clacked her teeth together in irritation. “One. In addition to the worm with the knife?”

“No. The worm with the knife was the one.”

“What?” The demon sounded deeply insulted, even through the rustling of leaves. “I have slain countless in my ages. Spilled enough blood to paint this forest red, and yet here I am, a great warrior, imprisoned within a useless wretch who will likely get me slain before I am free,” she snarled. A slight pain creeped beneath my skull as her tolerance of me wore thin.

“Stop it,” I yelped as the pain stabbed me again. “Calm down, curse you.”

Serisi’s dust swirled around me as she reached for me once more. I saw her frustration in the shivering of the dust. Her words were ground between her teeth. “By the Iron Icon, I will split your skull open and I shall take a thousand heads in retribution.”

“The Iron what? Who is that? A god?” I scoffed at her. “Don’t tell me you demons have gods?”

One god, worm. A god of chaos and blood, of constant night and cleansing fire. A god that will smite you and your kind, Tarko of the Swathe!

I had the gall to pause and wait for this god to appear. I even looked around to make my point. Nothing came to smite me.

“Looks like your god isn’t here, Serisi,” I whispered, and while the demon stewed in frustration and tried her hardest to stare death at me, I walked on with a victorious smirk. It was a good feeling, winning an argument with a demon.

I was cresting the rise in the road, still staring forlornly at faraway Shal Gara, when Serisi’s form abruptly disappeared. Her warning boomed in my head moments later. You have company, Tarko of the Swathe. Ahead of you.

“What?”

Get down.

I thought it was a trick until I saw over the rise and spotted a gaggle of scrawny figures on the Causeway. I immediately dropped into a crouch. It seemed the threat of our deaths being entwined and my utter ineptitude in the art of spilling blood had convinced Serisi I was better off alive. At least for the time being. To the growling of the demon, I carefully rose up to see.

There were twelve of them: the same vile creatures that had chased me from Sheertown and into the forest. With less smoke and without panic pounding in my ears, I could make out every repulsive inch of them. And smell them, too. They were impressively pungent, reeking of sour dung and mould.

From their mouths that looked stolen from a spider to the fact that some sported three or four arms, they were far from human. Their dun, stone-grey skins were covered in welts and ridges and scars. Some sections of their bodies were swollen into what looked like carapace armour. Bat-like ears stuck out from their bald heads, along with knuckle-shaped horns. Apparently, the creatures were in the middle of an argument, poking at each other with their iron weapons and jabbering about something in a harsh-sounding language. One kept pointing at Shal Gara.

“What are those things?” I breathed.

Navik. Foot-soldiers of our horde. They are simple beings from a plain of madness and darkness. We enslaved them, gave them a mindless purpose. Gave them meat to eat and blood to spill. Serisi cleared her throat. You need a bow.

I shook my head. Mother once kept a curved bow and full quiver at home. That was until I decided to use it in the cottage one morning. I had not only nearly shot Tesq through the calf – and given her a scar she often liked to use as leverage – but smashed a vase that was pretty much all of the Terelta family’s wealth at the time. It was the reason I had taken up slinging.

“No, I don’t,” I scoffed. I unfolded my makeshift sling and loaded it with my remaining excuse for a pebble.

So primitive, Serisi growled.

Though the navik were scrawny, easily a head shorter than I, and half of them bent almost double in hunches, I still had no intention of taking on a dozen of them. Not with one single stone and a few blunt blades. I began to crawl out of sight. Serisi likely mocked me for retreating, but she stayed silent in agreement.

The problem with a leafroad was that it offered almost nothing in the way of hiding places. My choices were retreat the way I had come, or fight. Or, as I realised when a triangular leaf landed on the back of my head, climb down into the forest before the sun died. I looked at the candlevine bulbs wrapped around my shoulder. They were shining much brighter than before. Like Atalawe had said, the forest always knew best. Lastlight was approaching fast.

“Curse it all to the loam,” I muttered, and promptly scuttled to the edge of the leafroad.

To stay aloft, most of the Swathe’s roads used a combination of branches and struts from beneath and stout ropes or ironpith chains from above. The tallest ones balance upon the very tips of trees. We weren’t yet high enough that struts weren’t impossible, but the branches were easier to climb onto seeing as they weren’t vertical pillars.

I hid the candlevine in my breastplate and hoped its light wouldn’t show. Swinging my legs over the lip of the leafroad, I aimed for the thick branch below me that the road used for support. It was double my height down and draped in shadow, but already I could hear the snuffling of the navik creatures coming over the rise. One even shouted something, louder than they had argued before.

I jumped without a thought. My landing wasn’t pretty by a long shot: my ankle crunched and nearly caused me to curse in pain. Serisi cursed for both of us. I almost slid from the branch’s slope but managed to cling on with my fingernails.

There was a small space where the road and the branch connected: a hollow under the lip of the leafroad where I wouldn’t be seen. As I shuffled on my backside beneath the road, I saw the navik’s drawn-out shadows flicker over the edge of the branch. Their chattering was rife and loud. I let my sling hang loose and raised my hatchet.

It quickly became obvious that these navik creatures were not the smartest. As a perfect example, one jumped straight from the leafroad, missed the branch entirely, and crashed into a bush beneath me. I thought it dead until it began to thrash and make an ungodly shrieking noise. As I peered over the branch to see, I heard voices, not from above and certainly far more human than the navik.

“Kill it! Kill the bastard!” came the roar. I saw shapes in the undergrowth, racing between trees and bushes. Several held flaming torches that streaked across the gloom. I saw glimpses of Shal Gara armour and the glint of obsidian. A heavyset man came into view, and with a bone-splitting whump of his axe, he beheaded the fallen navik, much to the screeching of the others above me. I tensed as they swarmed over the edge of the leafroad. The navik crawled like spiders, digging their swords and knives into the wood like claws. Almost all of them flooded straight past me, jaws wide and baying loudly.

Almost all of them.

One landed on the branch close to my huddled feet. It unleashed an earsplitting screech before sniffing at the air. Gradually, it turned to face me and spread its horrid mouth with a squeal. Its black eyes held no life in them. I froze, horrified.

Fight, curse you, worm! Don’t you dare kill me!

I lunged, mainly through fright and impulse thanks to a demon screaming in my head. My frantically aimed slingstone only clipped the navik as it dodged to the side. Unfortunately for the navik, it swerved right into my blunt hatchet blade. It recoiled, more stunned than wounded, but it gave me enough time to seize my stolen copper knife and slash at my foe. I caught it across its flailing arms, causing it enough pain to make it topple from the branch. The navik windmilled as it dropped into the gloom.

“Bleeding trees!” I heard more voices below. Two more torches dashed through the foliage, one moving slightly slower. “Come on, Nod! Curse your short legs!”

I looked so far over I almost fell in the navik’s wake. I knew that voice. It was Atalawe, far from dead. Behind her came Nod the orokan, who was determined to gallop after the wrangler even though he had something on his back. It looked like a stretcher.

My heart soared, and not least to know they were alive, but because it meant I was not alone in the loam.

I was about to yell after her when I heard snarling from behind me. More navik were taking up the chase. Half a dozen more clattered onto the branch and sprinted down its trunk with wild abandon. I had no choice but to hunker into my hiding place, knife and hatchet poised, and wait. I did so with clenched teeth as I watched the torches recede into the darkness, leaving me inexorably behind.

11

The Loam

Though we may forget, there is much the Ancestors do not. They are always watching.

A PROVERB OF THE SCHOLAR TRIBE

The dream was bathed in fire. A hellish inferno with no end. I was enveloped by it, yet there was no fear. The opposite: a serenity of calm. I stretched my hands into the fire, and there was no pain.

All was snuffed in a moment as I craned my neck to bask. The flames vanished, and I was crushed under a starless void of a sky. A rust-red plain stretched out to flat infinity. No mountains nor clouds hung on the horizon. No birds sailed the sky. No creatures roamed the blank wilderness. Only great metal machines of wheels and cogs and chimneys belching smoke.

Between them and me stood a vast horde of demons, and as I swivelled to take them in, I found I was surrounded. They stared, not at me, but past me, to great circular gates of stone and iron. They shone with the lighting that crackled above, glistening with the black demon blood that had been painted across its surface. Fire sparked at its centre. Demon after demon walked into it, screaming as they did so. The light of their sacrifice burned my eyes until the horde vanished into a plume of smoke.

A town of ash and broken stone emerged piece by piece before me. Once-proud spires lay smashed across its plaza, and I stood in their rubble. All along the walls, snarling creatures carried away the destruction, brick by brick, body by body.

On a knuckle of stone foundation that still stood in defiance, a lone demon perched on. Fire streamed from his crest of twisted horns that had more branches than a sapling. Half of one was missing, as if broken. Spines ran in a ridge down his spine. Darkness clung to him as though he had wings, hunched and humongous. His red eyes scorched the distance where a forest burned. His jaw hung open, fire trailing over his many fangs with every exhale.

As I stared, his blazing interest turning to find me amongst the rubble.

“Where are you, child?” His voice was like that of endseason storms. I felt the ground shake beneath me at its tone.

The demon stood, his cloak of black smoke unfurling, a bonfire rising from his shoulders. “Where are you, daughter?” he asked again, before his stare wandered on.

The black smoke rolled across the plaza, swallowing every detail. I shielded myself as it did the same to me. The rubble dissolved from beneath my feet, and I fell into a choking, acrid gloom. And there, amidst the thick smoke, a single eye glowed brighter than any sun.

I fell towards them screaming.

��

As it turned out, I was indeed falling, both in real life and the dream.

I came awake in mid-air, greeted by a patch of dark undergrowth racing to meet me. I promptly howled my lungs sore. “Aaagh!”

Foliage struck me in the face. Something hit my left hand hard, and I grasped it with all my might. To my surprise, relief, and the profuse thanks of my bladder, I had caught a branch. Almost torn my arm off in the process, but I was fine. It was a wispy thing, an offshoot of a larger branch, and was already starting to crack under my weight. I looked down and spied a huge fern beneath me. Its fronds were wider than I was tall, streaked white and yellow with faint phosphorescence.

I had little time for my choice, but at least the branch agreed with my decision.

With a snap, I was dropped to the fern and crashed through its leaves until I collapsed into a patch of huge, green mushrooms. Winded, I lay there and wheezed while I checked I hadn’t broken anything. The glowing mushrooms broke and scattered as I tried to get up one-armed to avoid soiling my wounded hand. I knew what mushrooms liked to grow in.

Once I was on my knees, I sniffed cautiously at my breastplate and didn’t like what I found. There was a thick splinter in my arm, and my shoulder was numb having taken all the strain of my fall. When I tried to put weight on my ankle, I gasped in pain. I heard Serisi do the same.

You cretin.

Stubborn as always, I pushed myself to my feet nonetheless, hoping she could feel it. What made that whole morning far more bewildering was that I didn’t even remember falling asleep. I had been waiting to climb down when exhaustion must have pounced. It filled me with an unease that made me sweat. How long had I been asleep? It was dark still, and yet now all was silent save for an owl hooting somewhere nearby.

I rapped my knuckles on my forehead. “Did you do that, demon? Did you push me from the branch?”

Push you? How could I? All I can do is speak in this prison you’ve made for me.

I found some of the muck on my chin and groaned. It was far too soon after waking for this. “You let me fall without trying to warn me.”

How dare you assume I did not try.

“Well, did you?”

The demon didn’t answer.

Coarse moss grew nearby, perfect for brushing myself down. Having witnessed what the Swathe seemingly hid around every tree trunk, keeping the armour seemed like a good idea. Luckily, I hadn’t stabbed myself with the knife in my fall, but the hatchet was somewhere deep in the bushes. Lost like I was.

What will you do now? We have a deal that you promised to uphold your end of, remember. You promised to free me.

“Don’t worry. It’s quite hard to forget with your constant yapping.”

I cannot wait to be rid of you.

“The feeling’s quite mutual.”

The leafroad was a dark band against the patchwork canopy. The sky was a crack of rare and smoke-marred stars. There was glow in the east. Deep within the trees, it was a constant night, and though I looked for any sign of flaming torches, I saw none. Dismayed, I seized some of the larger glowing mushrooms instead. I stabbed one onto my knife and the other I clutched in my hand. They cast a meagre pool of green light, and yet it was better than nothing.

“What I’m doing is catching up to the others.” Making the decision out loud definitely helped me start moving, but it did nothing to slow my heart. Here I was, alone in the darkness of the deep loam, running headlong into nothingness with only breathless hope and a knife to my name. I felt another wave of panic try to drown me.

Every moment that passed I thought would be my last. I ran faster than I can remember ever moving before. Twice, I was knocked to the ground by low-hanging branches. I was scraped by bushes, tripped by stones, and once I almost ran into the spiked end of a fallen tree, and all to Serisi’s mocking laughter. Yet not for longer than one of my sharp breaths did I stop running.

Where no plant shone, the loam was dark as sin. Candlevine rarely grew this deep, and I had just crushed mine beneath my armour. The smoke from the wildfire made heaving for breath painful, but I slogged on. All I heard was my own thrashing through the undergrowth. I hoped nothing else did.

A warbling screech stopped me dead. It sounded incredibly close. I hugged the nearest tree trunk, and as I tried miserably to calm my breathing, a hand clamped over my mouth. A good thing too: the sudden presence beside me almost made me soil my armour, never mind howl in fright. I made a muffled complaint behind the clammy hand.

In the almost dead light of the glowing mushrooms, Atalawe stared wild-eyed at me. A finger was pressed to her lips. She pointed it upwards, where one of the navik crouched in a branch. It was staring out into the forest, chattering at something. One by one, as cautious as could be, she plucked the mushrooms from my hand and placed them down in the mossy loam. Holding up her staff, she beckoned me forwards.

Who is this? She stinks of wild beast.

I bit my tongue to keep from replying.

Atalawe could barely be seen in the darkness. Only by her movement did I see her. She stepped expertly between the shrubs and tangled undergrowth and barely made a sound. I followed every footstep, learning where to tread and not to tread. It was a fine art, and one I think I mastered quickly, if I did say so my—

The branch snapped beneath my foot. Atalawe thrust me behind her as the navik screamed. Its shape came flying down the trunk at a speed that made my skin crawl.

I readied my knife as Atalawe raised her staff. The navik sprinted at us, blades raised and jaws wide.

“Light them up!” Atalawe snarled.

Sparkstones clashed in the darkness. Flames whooshed into life, filling the forest with bright light. A dozen other figures stood about with weapons raised. The navik skidded in the moss, shielding its eyes. Atalawe smacked it straight in the face with her staff, breaking its skull and sending it twitching to the earth.

Now this woman is a much better warrior than you.

“Shut up,” I muttered.

No sooner had Atalawe dispatched her navik than another dropped from the branches above. It snapped at her neck as it grappled with her.

I didn’t need Serisi to help me now. I stormed forwards, beating the others to Atalawe, and stabbed the creature deep in the side, under the ribs. The foul navik fell with a screech, ripping the knife from my grasp with its violent wriggling. A man put a boot to its face and silenced the thing with a cold efficiency. He even spat on it for good measure. “Disgusting parasites!”

Well, well, Tarko. I am less disappointed in you than I was before. You do have some fight in you after all, Serisi told me in a strange, singsong voice. I guessed it was a demon’s attempt at sarcasm.

“Tarko!? You’re alive! By the Three Gods and all their spirits, you’re bloody alive! How is this possible?” Before I could do or anything, a wide-eyed Atalawe grabbed me by the shoulders and examined me closely, patting me all over and poking at every scratch to see how whole I was.

I clenched my fist so she wouldn’t see the nectra wound. Not yet. There were too many folk around I didn’t recognise. A demon in their midst would likely be just as welcome as me loosing my bowels right there and then in that ring of torchlight.

“I was just about to ask you the same thing!” I gasped as she clutched my right shoulder.

“Are you hurt, lad?”

“Only a little,” I said.

“Got a bloody hole in your arm for one thing,” Atalawe said, uncorking a vial from her belt and pouring it across my shoulder. I seethed with the sting of it.

“Sheertown was a storm of fire and rubble by the time we escaped the gates,” she said. “We thought you had been lost. We tried looking for you, but…”

I had not seen Atalawe this cheerless before.

They left you behind? How pitiful. And you call them friends.

“It’s fine, is what it is,” I said, telling both of them as one. “I’m alive and that’s all that matters. Where’s Pel? Redeye? Inwar? Did they escape, too?”

“Pel’s wounded. Redeye’s… vanished for now. He’s likely finding his own way back.” Atalawe’s smile seemed forced. “Inwar’s a beast of his own devices, but he’ll come back eventually.”

I made sure to nod encouragingly. Pel was alive, at least, and that was a glimmer of light in the gloom of our situation.

The burly warrior who took the killing blow grabbed my knife from the navik’s corpse. By his jāgu pelt armour and the three telltale brands, the man was a wilder. “Fine metal knife you’ve got here,” he said while looking me and my stolen armour up and down. The others around us were all second-born, and low ranks. I noticed the orokan nearby amidst a patch of skinny saplings. It was old Nod. Asleep, as per usual.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Heirloom,” I muttered. I held out my hand out for the knife, and the wilder slapped it blade-down on my palm.

“We keep moving. Shal Gara’s not far,” he ordered. The others did his bidding without question. “And get that orokan up. I’m not having that dumb beast slow us down anymore.”

Atalawe and I roused Nod as swiftly as we could. The stretcher on his back held a very wounded and pale Blind Pel. With the shadow of his past bruises, he looked halfway dead.

“He’s alive, but barely. An arrow hit him in the back and punctured him good. I fixed him as good as I know how and gave him all the tinctures I have with me. Time’s his healer now.”

Seeing as the beggar had thrown me into a trap of fire and demons, I should have shrugged and called it fair, but Tarkosi Terelta wasn’t that cruel or spiteful. I put my good hand to Pel’s arm and listened to his ragged breathing.

“Will he live?” I asked.

Atalawe drew Nod upwards and onwards with a morsel of something hidden in her hand. “Nothing’s managed to kill him yet, and he’s faced more than I dare worry about on a night like tonight. It would be a shame if an arrow took down the Scourge of the Scorchroad.”

“What do you mean, Scourge?”

“A story for another night, perhaps.”

“And here was I thinking Pel was a simple and blind old beggar with a chequered history and an addiction to urka. Nothing grand or heroic.”

“You should be glad he’s asleep and didn’t hear you,” Atalawe whispered as she beckoned me along. “Pel is much more than nothing. He was a paragon, and if it weren’t for the scars on his cheeks, you’d see his rank. And before you start judging him for his addiction to urka seeds, any seedwitch worth their dirt knows they contain faint traces of nectra. There’s just enough magic in them for an experienced sorcer to channel into a little cantrip. Not a full spell, just something simple like helping a blind old beggar see better for a short while.”

It sounded like I was being told off, but Atalawe wasn’t looking at me. She watched every shiver and sway of the forest, listened to every whisper.

To Nod’s grumpy snorting, we followed the torches into the forest. One man hung back to light our way. It might have been the shadow of his hood, but half of his face looked burned. He kept a respectful distance as we brought up the rear. I wasn’t sure if it was the best place to be or the worst.

Atalawe put her hand on my shoulder. “You’re limping on that ankle, Tarko. You sure you’re not hurt? You’ve got plenty of blood on you.”

“I may have fallen out a tree,” I admitted. “Is this everyone? All that’s left?”

“Unless others escaped north and south, then it looks so. There were more, but two were snatched into the shadows by those demon spawn in the night. Another ran straight into a woefang spider’s web.”

How dare she? Navik are no spawn of my kind.

The wrangler bunched her jaw. “We’re sorry, Tarko. I’m sorry. You were right behind us, and when we tried to come back, I saw a demon charging you,” said Atalawe. “Before we could intervene, the buildings exploded under some kind of demon magic. All white fire. Never seen or read about anything like it.”

She lies.

“She does not,” I muttered under my breath. Now Atalawe was looking at me, and with a narrow stare, too. Not suspicion, or so my intuition told me, but curiosity.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I replied, mentally kicking myself.

Atalawe exhaled. “More than forty thousand slaughtered. I can barely believe it.”

Serisi’s dark chuckle kept my lips sealed.

“What happened to you, Tarko? How did you survive such a thing? Not two days ago you were ready to fight over the fact demons weren’t real. You were ready to turn tail and run home. And now here you are in the loam, one of a pitiful handful to survive.”

Is that so, Tarko? And now you have trapped a demon in your mind? How amusing. Do you still doubt us now, worm?

“Luck, I suspect,” I replied hesitantly. “Sheer blind luck. I…” The confession of what had really happened hovered on the tip of my tongue. To tell Atalawe about Serisi now, with plenty of ears to eavesdrop and nothing to be done about it, felt like a mistake. As everybody kept reminding me, there was a lot I didn’t know. If these Scions of the Sixth-Born were so avowed against demons, what was to say they wouldn’t have me locked up, or worse? I trusted the sting in my gut and held my tongue on the subject until I could find out more. “Maybe one or all of the Three smiled on me, but all I remember was the demon, a flash of white light. Next thing I knew, I woke up under a pile of rubble with a headache and a good deal of trouble getting out.”

“You’ve barely got a scratch on you. And to think somebody…” Atalawe trailed off.

I see I am not the only one who sees how useless you are, Serisi crowed. I had half a mind to stab myself in the leg with the knife and teach the demon a lesson. But that would have been more than suspicious.

I snorted, equally surprised. “Go on, you can say it. To think somebody like me survived alone boggles the mind.”

“For a city lad who’s never swung a blade and visibly shuddered at the sight of the loam on the Causeway, it’s impressive.”

Hearing Serisi grumble was satisfying.

“I saw a tharantos in the branches,” I said; a slight boast. “Snuck away while it pounced on an orokan. I killed one of the navik, too.”

“The what?”

“The creatures that attacked us. The ugly bastards with metal blades. They chased me from the leafroad, and when I saw you run beneath me, I knew I had to catch you up.”

Atalawe put her hand on my shoulder and drew me close. “How do you know what they’re called?”

I realised my mistake too late.

Oh dear, Tarko of the Swathe. Oh dear, indeed. Not a warrior, not a wizard, and not smart either. Are all workers as pathetic you?

“I heard one of the demons talking,” I replied, speaking over Serisi.

“Talking?”

“Yes,” I lied. “Navik is what they called them.”

Atalawe faced forwards and nodded in a slow measure. “I see. Didn’t think they spoke.”

Tell this fool there is much your kind does not know of us.

“Did you see the porters?” I asked as a distraction.

“We ran straight into the forest and curved south to reach them, but Nod, being the stupid yet wonderful chap he is, had wandered east after us. Why?”

“They’re all dead. Murdered with poisoned knives. A man in a cloak and a jade lizard mask tried to do the same to me. It was more an accident than skill, but I stabbed him in the heart during the scuffle. That’s where I got this knife.”

“Murdered?” Keeping an eye on the others ahead, Atalawe took the copper blade and examined it. It was well-made but lacking any maker’s mark or stamp. The blade was bare except for the scratches of clumsy sharpening. To my credit, though I had worked for the armourers and metalsmiths for an unsurprisingly short time, I had learned a lot from working the bellows and watching. Metal was rare and usually owned by nobles. Iron came from the Scorch. Copper and gold from the west. Silver was reserved for the highest-born, and star-iron was so rare it was almost mythical.

“The spirits of luck do seem to favour you, Tarko,” was all she said.

“For once.”

“So, do you believe us Scions now?”

More than she knows.

I sighed. “It would be hard not to believe after what we saw.”

Atalawe shivered. “The big question is, will the matriarch of Shal Gara and her sages? It won’t be easy to convince them of what happened, even with the wildfires on the horizon and the word of us survivors.”

“Maybe this will help.” I felt my pocket, where I had stashed the demon’s claw. I heard Serisi grind her fangs as I brought it into the glow. It was blacker than the night.

“What is that? Is that…?”

“The claw of a demon. Found it in my shoulder when I woke up.”

“Six Hells, lad.” Atalawe was entranced. She reached for it, and with some hesitation I handed it over.

Atalawe hissed with pain as if the claw was roasting hot. It was warm, yes, but not scorching. It seemed so painful she was forced to drop it. A slight sputter of flame came from the claw once it hit the loam, and I swiftly grabbed it up to hide it away.

“Why doesn’t it burn you?” Atalawe asked, rubbing at her singed palm and scholar’s tattoo.

“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “But it might be the proof we need if the words of these warriors fail.” I thought of any subject other than the claw. “Speaking of warriors, where’s Haidak Baran? Was he killed?” I felt a little grimy asking with hope instead of concern. It would be a thorn out of my side, to be cold about it. Maybe Serisi was already rubbing off on me.

Atalawe gave me a look that showed she understood completely. “Despite how peaceful that would make your life, no. The last we saw of him, he and his lancewing were tearing through the undergrowth at speeds I’ve never seen the like of.” Atalawe puffed her cheeks. “Nothing could catch them.”

“So he’s a coward as well as a bully.”

“That’s why most bullies are the way they are, Tarko.”

Whether it was the relief of finding others and a semblance of safety, or the fact I wanted to push this newfound luck of mine, I felt it was time for answers.

“I think it’s time you tell me everything I don’t know. About my father. You Scions. About the Barans. Everything.”

The woman stared at me down her nose. She held a branch back with her staff and let it whip back in my face. “Do you now?”

“Seeing as we’re all supposed to be dead…”

You all will perish when my father gets here.

“…and could be any moment, judging by how deep the undergrowth is getting, why not?”

Atalawe glanced back to the comatose Pel as if seeking permission. “I shouldn’t be the one to tell you, but if that’s what you wish, so be it,” she grumbled. “The demons first came to the Swathe more than a thousand seasons ago. At that time, the Scorch was another broad stretch of the Swathe, stretching all the way to the eastern mountains. The first demon attack lasted a week. One week, yet in that time, they decimated two hundred miles of forest with fire and brimstone and brought two bloodwoods crashing down.

“It’s said the demons didn’t leave because they were defeated, but they left of their own accord through the same fiery doorway they appeared from. Once they’d had their fill of devouring beasts and humans and turning the proud, ancient forest to cinders, of course. Suffice it to say, the scattered peoples of the Swathe were left reeling and distraught. All the petty wars they’d fought for centuries across loam and canopy were proved pointless. Foolish. They came together to rebuild, to restock and rearm, and to prepare for the day they feared would come again. And they were not wrong.

“From that day on, like a plague of gobflies, the demons came again and again every nine seasons. Predictable, yet devastating every time. Our defences were crushed over and over, and the Swathe died piece by piece until the Scorch was all that was left of the east. Remember what I told you about the bloodwoods migrating, Tarko? Fleeing west saved some but not all. Bloodwood after bloodwood were torn down by their claws. Towns and cities were reduced to ash. Entire bloodlines and nations massacred. For centuries, we humans trained ourselves, learned to fight harder and smarter. We learned the arts of nectra and built the magic orders. That’s why the Sorcer’s Edict and practice of testing young ones for magic is older than the tribes of the Bloodlaws. Because it was written in the time of war. With earth, then air, then water magic, we evolved to meet the demons in battle. Then came Kī Raxa. She changed everything. No sorcer but her has ever managed to harness the fourth order of magic. Fire.”

“That’s impossible,” I replied.

“Not for Kī Raxa. She was a sixth-born, a wanderer and mapmaker. That season, the demons came in numbers greater than ever before. When all seemed lost, she was left standing to face the demon horde and its king head-on. In single combat, she defeated him by wielding his own fire against him. The lost songs speak of how she cleaved a horn from the king’s head before forcing him and his dark kin into a fiery door and burying it beneath a spire of rock and molten metal they now call the Iron Scar. For the first time, we didn’t just survive; we won.”

I could hear Serisi hissing in my head. Having my enemy eavesdrop wasn’t ideal, but I had little choice.

“Kī Raxa died not long after the demons were forced back,” Atalawe continued. “A sickness took her, and as the sixth-borns’ customs demanded, she wandered out into the forest never to be seen again. It was only nine seasons later, when the demons did not return, that Kī Raxa was truly considered a hero. Before she died, she entrusted her knowledge to members of her sixth-born tribe. They were the Scions, lad. They were the embodiment of Kī Raxa, and they shone brighter than any lancer does today. They sat beside the matriarchs in their courts. The finest of the finest families, the excellence of each tribe. Some of our histories say they were the first sages.”

“Then what happened to them?”

“Like Pel said, Shal Gara and the rest of the bloodwoods grew comfortable in peace. We grew self-assured and proud, all thanks to our mastery of the demons. The Bloodlaws kept order and kept us prospering. People quickly forgot the terrors of past centuries, forgot the songs, lost the carvings and scrolls. And with the Scions having little purpose, we fell from favour. We drifted apart or were branded as lunatics and splintered off to die alone. All thanks to those bent on ruining the Scions.”

“Why?”

“Jealousy, mostly. Other nobles and those who wanted sage seats for themselves. Others saw no place for us in peacetime and in the age of the Bloodlaws.” Atalawe bared her teeth. “And as Pel told you, there were once some who, unbelievably, wished the demons to return. Religious morons who believe in the demon god and in the demons’ absolute power of chaos. They wanted them to return.”

Finally, mortals with some sense.

“Shut up.”

Atalawe looked at me strangely. “You can tell me to shut up all you want, Tarko, but it’s true. You wanted to know.”

“Not you,” I said, thinking quickly. “These halfwits, I mean. These demon-worshipping loamers. How can anyone in their right mind believe these demons are a good thing?”

“Fair enough. Good to know where you stand. In any case, Pel believes that some still exist, scattered and hiding like us Scions. They call themselves Fireborn. Perhaps if your knife and this lizard-faced attacker are anything to go by, Pel is right once more.”

I like these Fireborn already, Serisi commented.

“And how does my father play into all of this? You said he was the leader of the Scions.”

“For a time, yes. Teyak was a fine sorcer and a Scorchwars hero. He was to air carving what Redeye is to earth reaving.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“You should start believing. Teyak Terelta inherited the Scions when the order was lost and broken. He, Eztaral, Pel, and my mother, long-dead now, built us back to strength. Your father had an unwavering conviction that the demons would come back to burn the Swathe one day, within our lifetimes. And how right he was. Teyak saved the Scions from obscurity but in turn it drove him to lengths that ostracised him from the other nobles. It brought us out into the light to be mocked and challenged. Nobody wants to hear of apocalypse when life is as safe and idyllic and comfortable as ours is. Least of all Kol Baran. He was a first-born heir to a fine name and thirsty for the matriarch’s approval at the time, while your father was a paragon of the sorcer tribe. When Teyak began trying to warn the sages and the matriarch, Kol Baran took great offence and waged his own personal war against your father. He had him embarrassed, then disgraced, then ruined.”

“You know what the problem is with your story?” I interjected.

“Enlighten me.”

“It makes my mother a liar.”

Atalawe shook her head and snorted as if that was utterly wrong. “Axera Terelta is no liar. Teyak loved her so much he couldn’t involve her. Wouldn’t. Sure, Baran drove your father to drinking through the failure he caused him, but Teyak was no drunk. Nor was he a gambler, as Baran had everyone believe through tricks and false rumours – your mother included. Kol Baran is a venomous snake, and a swift and agile one at that. His lies worked their wicked charm. When he pushed your father too far, Teyak finally snapped and confronted Baran. As you know, that resulted in Teyak almost throwing him from a leafroad.”

Atalawe swallowed some emotion I couldn’t believe came from the same mention of my father. “Baran won that day. Because of Teyak’s actions, Eztaral turned her back on her vows and left the Scions. That didn’t sit well with your father. After he was publicly disgraced, he became even more desperate. Pelikai and I tried to calm him down and watch him all hours of the day, but he disappeared into Neathering and the Midern. Not long after, we found Teyak dead on Daqa Branch with a dagger-wound through his heart. Some whispered it was self-inflicted, seeing as a blade was found in one hand and urka seed husks in the other. Most blamed gemlenders taking their payment in blood, and Baran made sure that rumour reached far and wide.”

I realised I had been clenching my fists. “I remember that day well. That was the same day I had my sorcer’s mark removed.”

“That was no coincidence.”

I paused mid-stride. “Excuse me?”

Atalawe whacked the back of my legs with her staff to keep me moving. “Naturally, we blamed Baran for Teyak’s murder, just like you might be thinking right now, but the bastard wasn’t in Shal Gara at the time. Instead, he was flying lancewings with a dozen other nobles to swear for him. It wasn’t beneath Baran to arrange it, of course, but there’s never been a shred of proof. Kol Baran instead got his revenge by having the sorcers change your mark and bar you from the tribe. Pel always thought it was something to do with the fact his son Haidak had no reaction to the nectra and yet Teyak’s son did. Kol Baran became a sage, and you went on living the life of a third-born, knowing no different. So, Tarko, it wasn’t your father that ruined you. You weren’t a mistake.”

The rage sparked faster than an oily torch. “You mean to tell me… all this time I’ve been a sorcer? Denied what was mine because of Kol Baran?”

Look who’s a wizard after all, Tarko.

“Quiet!” I couldn’t help but snap.

“What?” Atalawe guarded me with her staff. “You hear something, lad?”

“I… no. Thought I did.”

“You’ve got nervous ears, you have. Too much fear in you.”

“I’m not scared, I’m furious. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be… this!” I thumbed at the three tattooed nails on the back of my hands in frustration and inwardly swore all sorts of vengeance on the Baran family. “By the Three Gods and all their bloody spirits! All this time, I blamed my father instead of Kol Baran.”

“But you aren’t a sorcer, Tarko. You’ve never trained to be a sorcer. You’re not even an initiate, and they start at five seasons old.”

“But I still could be, right?” I muttered to myself. “This changes everything.”

“No, lad. It changes nothing of what is behind us. Nothing of what is coming for Shal Gara, and it certainly doesn’t help us out of this loam. Calm yourself. That is not important now.”

“Not to you, maybe,” I hissed, refusing to keep the anger inside, bubbling away. I was quickly realising this was the problem with answers: they always led to more questions.

There was one question that lingered above all: what to do about the demon in my head. The thought of telling Atalawe about Serisi crossed my mind again. I moved as carefully as I dared.

“These demons,” I said. “What magic do they have?”

“None besides their fire and supposedly their silver tongues.”

“No mind magic or spells that control a person? Steal their soul, maybe?”

Atalawe spluttered with laughter. “Where are you getting these ideas from, Tarko? I’ve never heard of such things. Are demons not dangerous enough for your liking?”

In my mind, Serisi laughed. I knew this was your doing, she said. You are a liar, Tarko of the Swathe.

I couldn’t take it any longer. I needed to be rid of Serisi. “Atalawe, this is going to sound strange—”

A shout cut me off. And thankfully, too. I swallowed my words, already knowing they would be a blunder.

“Hurry up there!” The fellow that hung behind with the torch had stopped walking and was waving us past him. “Hatlu’s called a camp for the night.”

“Who’s Hatlu?” I asked.

“Hatlu Ko. The charming specimen of a wilder from earlier,” Atalawe said before nodding to the man with the torch. “Thank you for staying behind to give us some light…?”

The man sketched a bow and smiled warmly. I was right, half of his face had been severely burned. One of his eyelids looked to have been melted half-shut. His mouth was a frozen smile. A mosscloth bandage covered his neck and ear.

“Juraxi is my name,” he said. “And pleased to help you warriors any way I can.”

Part Two

12

No Surrender

Workers rejoice! Where other tribes are limited, workers have the entire breadth of our civilisation to explore! From the comfort of their own bloodwood, they can be farmers, hunters, carpenters, smiths, louse-miners, weavers, armourers, nesthands, and much more. Look not to the canopy and long for nobility but to the wealth of opportunity in your own hands.

FROM A SPEECH MADE BY MATRIARCH OXAN THE NINTH, 1940

The mood around the wildfire was an absolute hoot, full of conversation, laughter, and not one mention of the wildfires, murder, and chaos we had escaped from.

I lie, of course.

It was a silent affair. The warriors nibbled morsels like nervous shrewbats and stared around into the forest. One or two survivors whimpered as they cradled themselves, broken by fear. They flinched at every noise and screech and cry, of which there were many. The forest was louder at night than it was in the daylight. Something was currently crunching on bones or carapace very near to us. In the light of the torches the warriors had staked on poles and the campfire at our centre, the little huddle of survivors constantly caught peeks of glinting or glowing eyes. Twice, the warriors had to drive back a curious and rather hungry beetle with a crown of thorns and a body the length of my leg. There was not a moment of rest to be had.

I was presently staring at a cluster of eight eyes that had a red tinge to them. They kept rising and descending into the darkness. When a brief breeze brought us the smell of smoke, the flames moved and the firelight with it. I saw spindly black legs long as my arm wriggling to escape the light. I shivered from head to toe. Four limbs was the maximum both my mind and stomach preferred.

Only Atalawe’s relatively calm nature kept me from feeling sick with fear like the others. If she was not perturbed, then neither was I. She was poking the fire with a stick, keeping the dead wood we’d piled into a campfire burning.

“It’s the fire that keeps them at bay. Even a tharantos, unless it’s particularly hungry. We might have forgotten the wildfire, but the forest remembers it,” she whispered. “Many of the beasts are already moving west. You can hear them if you listen. A lucky time to tread the loam, lad. Lucky time indeed.”

I held my hands out to the fire. The warmth felt good against the chill of night. Serisi’s growl echoed around my skull as if she also appreciated it. I wondered if I was somehow feeding her, or making her stronger, and quickly withdrew my hands. My right hand sparked with pain as I did so.

“Got another injury, Tarko?” Atalawe asked, immediately concerned and reaching for more of her seedwitch tinctures. My right shoulder and ankle had already been daubed with some oily mixture and swaddled in moss.

“I…”

Atalawe seized my hand before I could object. I clenched my fingers to hide it. In the firelight, the glow of the nectra embedded within me was thankfully hard to discern. Smudged ash and dirt covered the dark colour to the veins in my wrist.

“What is this? Sandglass?”

“It’s fine,” I told her. “It happened climbing out of the rubble. I got most of the shards out.”

“And what is this blue stain? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you smashed some nectra into you. Or you clutched a handful of some ticabo berries at some point during your mad dash.”

“Sounds about right,” I chuckled nervously.

Atalawe blew a strand of her hair from her face. “Better that than the nectra. That stuff isn’t any good to you if you get it in your blood, and that’s an understatement. My mother taught me a hundred venoms and poisons and it’s more dangerous than half of them. Worse than musktooth venom. Almost as bad as a grimspore.”

Poison? What is she blabbering about? Ask her! I heard the worry in the demon’s voice. I shared it, too.

“Poison?” I blurted.

“You didn’t know? Why do you think sorcers drink it, lad? It’s the only way it doesn’t kill you. You’d know quickly if it was nectra, trust me. You’d be dead after an hour, so count yourself lucky.”

An uneasy relief took over me. I had more questions, but for the moment, I was focused on keeping my lips from wavering and giving my truth away. Before releasing me, Atalawe produced her sphere of akiga juice and sloshed it on my hand. It stung like needles to my bones. Serisi hissed with me.

“Agh! Leave me be,” I blurted.

“I know more than most healers, lad. Trust me.”

“I’m fine.”

A gruff voice interrupted us. “What are you two loamers so thick as thieves about, eh?”

It was the wilder: the thick slab of a man that the others called Hatlu Ko sat across the fire from us, all hunched like a brooding vulture perched on a chunk of log. He was busy grumbling at the darkness behind a curtain of black, lank hair and grinding a stone against a half-broken obsidian axe. Hatlu looked the sort of man who, if he couldn’t open a bottle or jar, would smash it open just to teach it a lesson. Though his paunch wobbled with his efforts, his heavy arms were thicker than both my thighs.

The others around the fire numbered a dozen survivors at most. Pel lay near to the fire to put some warmth in his bones. Even in the longsun, the nights could grow cold enough to cause a shiver. I had a feeling that would change when the fires caught up.

Atalawe stared at him through the flames. “I was saying how we’re not far from Shal Gara.”

“And then what?” muttered one of the warriors.

One of the warriors wrung her hands so hard I wondered how the skin stayed on. Her eyes were wide and red-raw with tears. “Those fire-beasts will come for us anyway. Them and their loathsome little pests. Shal Gara will burn just like Firstwatch did, I tell you.”

Correct, Serisi told me.

“Call them demons.” I spoke up. The circle looked around at me. “Because that’s what they are.”

Hatlu spat in the fire. “Ain’t no such thing. Marauder’s tricks.”

“Tarko’s right. Knowing what you’re fighting lessens the fear,” Atalawe said.

“Is that some scholar tribe wisdom, is it?” The wilder stamped a foot.

Atalawe smirked. “It’s a simple fact no matter your tribe. Not saying their name doesn’t make them any less of a threat. Demons have attacked the Swathe. Now it’s up to us to warn Shal Gara that they’re coming. That’s why we need to survive, see? So the city can be told what’s coming.”

“They won’t believe us,” came another complaint, this one from a warrior of sun-baked northern skin. “I hardly believe my eyes.”

“I think the fact that we are all’s left of the war-party proves enough, don’t you?” I asked.

Atalawe nudged me. This time, I had spoken too much. Hatlu Ko looked to me like the sort of man that only followed his own authority. That explained why somebody with so much grey in his bushy beard hadn’t ever progressed past the wilder’s rank. And why he stared at a lad half his age and likely wondered who I was to tell him what to do.

“And what do you know of such things, boy?” Hatlu stood. With a flick of his wrist, he embedded his axehead into the log with a whump of rotten splinters. He ambled around the fire, stretching his thick arms as he did so. I straightened slightly. Atalawe just watched the fire. All I saw was a slight shift of her feet, and her lean from the tree stump we both shared.

“Saying it how I see it, is all,” I replied. I didn’t like this kind of man. He was the sort who threw his weight around wherever he saw fit. The kind who had never been challenged enough to think differently. I might have been too confident, but I found myself finding a target for all the anger that wallowed within me. I saw the bully in him. I saw Sage Baran, and I sneered.

“They’ll have to believe us,” I told him, stuffing a slice of old frog meat into my mouth and chewing. “The war-party didn’t just disappear, did it? You were there. You saw what happened.”

“Course I was there!” Hatlu ran a bruised and burn-scabbed hand through his beard. “But you know what? I’m more concerned what a worker and a scholar are doing in warriors’ armour. Armour that you got no right wearing, ’specially in a war-party like Eagleborn Baran’s. Come to think of it, I remember Eagleborn Baran yelling something about traitors just before we were attacked…”

Hatlu wasn’t as much of an oaf as I’d taken the brute for. I chewed and stared while Atalawe answered.

“You’re scratching at the wrong tree, Hatlu. We took the armour off the fallen to keep ourselves safe. You saw those creatures, what would you have done? And, for your information, we were porters, not traitors.”

“That’s right,” said the teary-eyed warrior. “I saw them the night the war-party left us behind.”

Hatlu came and stood between us and the fire, making a silhouette of himself. He put his fists to his hips. I noticed the shape of a hatchet on his belt. “Then why were you in Sheertown if we left the porters behind?” he accused. Several of the warriors turned back to us with narrowed eyes.

Atalawe tutted, playing offended. “What is this? The demons weren’t enough for you, so you’ve got to pick another fight?”

“It’s traitors I don’t like. Backstabbers like the kind that led us straight into that bloody trap. The kind that sold us out to the marauders. What does your big mouth say to that, boy?” Hatlu barked.

Serisi had spent the evening in silence until now. What does it say, Tarko?

“Nothing,” I hissed at her, but Hatlu stepped forwards nonetheless.

“Speak up, boy!”

There was nothing like the accusation of a traitor to turn heads. Nothing like the prospect of a convenient culprit to soothe minds. One by one, the eyes of the circle swivelled to stare at us. Their eyes were hollow and their foreheads furrowed in the wavering light of the fire.

I stared flatly at Hatlu. “I said you’re wrong. You’re looking for somebody to blame for all the blood that was spilled. Looking for a way to get rid of the fear inside you, I bet.”

Hatlu didn’t give my words a moment of consideration before trying to seize me by the throat. Atalawe was on her feet in the space of a blink. Hatlu Ko was on his arse in the next. It happened so fast I wondered if I’d fallen asleep for the briefest of moments. The wrangler’s ironpith staff rested gently on the man’s bulbous nose. Some of the other warriors got to their feet, but Atalawe shook her head.

“If we were traitors, you would be dead by now,” she told Hatlu in a voice devoid of mirth and full of threat. “So if I were you, I’d rethink what the lad said and keep a lid on that temper of yours. You’re looking in the wrong place for a fight. Perhaps if you can get that into your thick skull, you’ll realise this is the time for us to work as one and not fight amongst ourselves. If that’s what you want, then the demons have already won this war, and the Swathe is already lost.”

That it is.

I clenched my jaw and hoped Serisi wasn’t right. The others around the circle seemed to do the same. One by one, they sat back down or turned back to their vigil of the forest. There was nothing else to be said.

Atalawe at last let Hatlu up. By his puffing and snorting, he was fuming at being outdone. He irritably brushed the loam from his jāgu fur as he went to retrieve his axe. He turned but did not advance, only staring at us from beyond the fire. Our camp teetered on violence for a moment until Hatlu spat in the dirt and went back to his sharpening.

One of the other warriors voiced her thoughts. Three deep gashes crossed her breastplate. What remained of her severed arm was clutched to her chest and wrapped in dirty bandages. “We should get back on the leafroad at firstglow,” she muttered.

Atalawe shook her head and perched on the tree stump once more. “We’ll be lucky. None of us are in a state to climb, never mind go back. It’s too high above us now. That being the point of the leafroads, remember? Other roads are ahead of us. Don’t worry, this isn’t the first time I’ve trodden the loam.”

“She’s right.” Another warrior bobbed his head. “I know one that shouldn’t be far.”

“Firstglow, then,” said the terrified warrior in a voice so shaky I knew she had zero faith we would live through the night. I wasn’t so sure either, considering how darkly Hatlu was still staring at Atalawe and me.

Atalawe leaned close. “Hatlu’s scared is all. Rattled by surviving something that by all rights he shouldn’t have survived. Men like Hatlu would likely rather die than admit weakness, so it comes out in other, more violent, ways.”

“And now you’ve embarrassed him some more.”

“I’d hoped he would learn his lesson, but men like him also don’t forgive easily. Fortunately we don’t have to put up with him much longer.”

“So,” I mused. “What’s to stop him doing something while we’re asleep?”

The wrangler sucked her teeth. She put herself on the loam with her back against the dead roots of the stump. “Curse it. A fair point. We’ll sleep in shifts, then. I’ve never one for much sleep, so wake me in an hour or so, and you can sleep the rest of the night.”

My aching bones and heavy eyes protested, but somehow, by the time I thought to speak up, she was already snoring. I was jealous.

I took up the stick Atalawe had used for poking the fire and assumed her duties. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I felt productive holding the end of the stick in the hottest parts between the logs until it was white-hot. Serisi seemed to stare as well, quiet and pondering for once. I was glad for it.

I became lost in my thoughts until one of the survivors shuffled around the campfire to share the expansive tree stump. It was the man called Juraxi. My hand stayed on my knife while he approached with an uneasy smile. It was tough not to stare at the extensive burns across one side of his face.

“Do you mind?” he asked, pointing to the space Atalawe had left. The wrangler still snored soundly.

“As long as you’re not going to call me a traitor.”

Juraxi scoffed and thrust out his hand. It, too, was burned to a painful-looking crust. He tutted at himself, switched hands, and tried again. I pressed my palm to his as was customary. Unlike the others – myself included – Juraxi didn’t seem to have a tremble of fear in him. He couldn’t have been more than a dozen seasons my elder.

“I don’t know enough about you to call you anything.”

This man smells of demonfire. I knew the demon’s silence couldn’t last long. I felt Serisi’s intrigue as if it were my own.

“My name’s Tarko.”

“And you’re from Shal Gara, right?”

“You aren’t?”

Juraxi shook his head. I noticed the straight cuts across his hands and wrists, the kind a blade makes. The tortured edge of a warrior’s sword tattoo peeked from his sleeve.

“Born and raised in Firstwatch and lived on the Loamsedge all my life. Until now, of course,” Juraxi replied, trying to laugh but sighing instead. I smiled to be polite. He was the sort of person who barely blinked and kept constant eye contact. It became a battle to match his stare.

“I was having the worst day of my life the day the sun turned black. Didn’t think it would get worse, but then Firstwatch began to burn,” he said.

“You were there when the demons first came?”

Juraxi’s stare turned glassy and distant. “That I was. Far too close. They appeared in the snap of fingers.”

“What do you mean, appeared?”

The man took some time to answer. The fire danced in his eyes. “They appeared. That’s all I can say. One moment Firstwatch was sounding its drums over the black sun and the smoke rising in the Scorch. The next, there they were. Some kind of door, but flat like a lake and made of fire. It cut through anything its path. Houses. Buildings. People.” Juraxi spent a moment swallowing whatever lump blocked his throat. “My mother and father never stood a chance. Merciful and quick, at least, and that’s what I’ve been telling myself since then. The days pass, and it gets no easier to believe. Dark times, indeed.”

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. The pain in his face was plain to see, and it tugged at me.

Juraxi exhaled, breath quivering. “To think that the end of our world has come.”

“It hasn’t,” I said. “Not yet, at least.”

Juraxi gingerly touched the burns across his hands. “You keep thinking that, young Tarkosi. You’ll see soon enough.”

Though I could see precisely why he believed that, I refused to believe it. I couldn’t. The alternative was unbearable. “Given up already?” I asked him.

Juraxi waved his hand across the circle of survivors. “None of you saw what I saw. That changes a man. Changes a mind.”

“You were a warrior before?” I asked, changing the subject. “Before, that is.”

“I was a humble warder. And you?”

I showed him the crossed nails on my hand. “Third-born. I’ve worked most callings in Shal Gara.”

“Never found one that fit, huh?”

I shook my head and let the conversation falter to the crackling of flames and the sleep-bound whimpers of the other survivors. A pained screech turned both our heads for a moment. One of the survivors leaped upright.

Deep in the trees, something died a gruesome death. I looked for the glowing spider’s eyes again but saw none. There were plenty of other flitting shapes between the faint glow of the plants and the firelight to steal my attention.

Juraxi shivered. “So why were you with the war-party? Not usually a place for workers.”

“Like my friend said, we were porters for the warriors,” I lied. “Carrying supplies is all.”

“Never seen workers or scholars like your friend before. She knows how to handle herself.”

I gave the man a nod and wry smile.

“Where did you get that knife?” Juraxi asked. The man was full of questions. His gaze had shifted to my blade, which was still clutched in my left hand.

“Heirloom.” The excuse was as poor as the first time I’d used it, and Juraxi wasn’t buying it.

“Fine blade. Especially for a worker. Seems like the kind of knife meant for a warrior or noble, Tarkosi.”

I looked into the night. “Like you said: dark times.”

The silence hovered between us until Juraxi stood up. “Sleep well then, Tarkosi. I’d watch out for our friend Hatlu over there if I were you. He seems to have taken a strong disliking to you, and if I know anything, it’s that grudges are hard to kill.”

I nodded, not knowing what else to say. Juraxi had an oddness about him that I wasn’t sure whether to pity. Perhaps seeing the demons arrive had addled his mind, in the way fear was a poison.

Naturally, Serisi was there to fill the quiet. He speaks the truth, you know. About the end of your world. My father and our kin have spent too long existing in the Starless Plains to turn back now.

“What does that mean?” I breathed.

It means this is a war for your extinction, Tarko of the Swathe. There will be no surrender. No quarter given. You stand in our way, so you must be destroyed. Even if it takes a hundred of your seasons, this world will belong to demonkind. There is no alternative for my kin. And there are no heroes to save you now.

Serisi’s threat shook me, I had to admit. She had become such a part of me in so short a time, I caught myself forgetting she was the enemy. An enemy that would have ripped my spine out without hesitation if she could escape me. It was as if Juraxi’s words had stoked her fire.

And as for you, the demon continued, the one who stole his daughter away. When my father finds you, you will regret ever being born. You will regret every breath you’ve ever taken. You will spend a century being torn apart and put back together. My father does not forgive, she seethed in my mind.

Serisi had betrayed herself. I heard it even if she didn’t. My voice was barely a whisper. “You’re scared of your father, aren’t you? I can hear it in your voice.”

If you had any sense in that filthy little mortal brain of yours, you would be too.

I smiled then. Serisi felt it and hissed at me. “Looks like I’m not the only one who has father issues,” I muttered.

Serisi said no more. I felt like punching the air. I had won another argument. Small victories, but I enjoyed them all the same. I grinned around the circle until I caught the fear-soaked gaze of one of the warriors and remembered that none of them had their own private demons. Not ones that talked to them, that is. I extinguished my smile.

Beside me, Atalawe snuffled as she came awake.

“That was all the sleep you needed?” I asked.

Atalawe rubbed her eyes, thumped a cough from her chest, and stood up. “I’ll sleep properly when I’m dead, whenever the Three Gods see fit to take me.”

I shook my head as I slumped down in the loam next to slumbering Pel. These Scions were all mad, I was sure of it.

To muddled thoughts of my father and a past I would never have a hope of knowing, I fell swiftly into a deep sleep, full of muttering voices.

��

Fire. It surrounded me once again, so real that it took me a moment to cease screaming, and realise I wasn’t burning.

The world was split in two: red earth cracked and dead below me, and above, a black sky empty of stars. Thunder rolled from clouds unseen. Mountains arose from the endless flat of the plain that had no end. Machines of crunching iron spread across the featureless desert cracked and broken. Flaming pyres rose from the ground to carve craters from the wasteland. Entire plateaus of earth were blasted forth and drifted into the void like cotton motes.

Once more, the demon horde surrounded me. Their fires burned hotter, paler. In silence, they raised their fists to a figure unseen behind me. A king of shadow stood before the circle of iron and blood-washed stone, and as he raised his flaming sword in promise, the air between the gates started to shiver. A curtain of fire filled their limits.

The horizon shuddered with the weight of black shadow: a storm almost indistinguishable from the black abyss. A single and burning eye sat at its centre, slitted as a serpent’s.

I felt as a prisoner standing before the demon king, powerless to escape his attention. He sniffed at the searing air. I felt his gaze find me and pin me to the dust like an insect. A darkness of dirt enveloped me, until all that faced me were the demon’s two fiery and inescapable eyes. They transfixed me, and in them I saw no plain, but a forest burning. A voice split my ears. The voice of thunder. The voice of a king.

“I see you.”

��

The rays of firstglow were offensive.

A spear of it found a precious gap in the canopy and blinded me in one eye. I groaned as I remembered where and who I was. I was currently slumped in the loam and damp with morning dew. Around me, the other survivors were awake and stamping the ashes of the campfire to death. I rubbed my aching eyes. At least I hadn’t been hacked to death in the night. That was a bonus.

I frowned. My dreams had been full of fire and ash and dust once more. Nightmares, more like, confusing and bizarre even for my own riotous imagination. Nonsense, I hoped, for I was too exhausted to make head or tail of it. I blamed the demon. I clenched my wounded right hand to see if she would speak, but there was silence in my head. I wondered if demons slept. I wagered she was ignoring me. Sulking, even.

I pushed myself up. My ankle had become like stone in the night. Whatever adrenaline had kept me running had vanished. It clicked as I took a step to test it. I hissed between my teeth.

Atalawe was nearby, pouring dew-water into Pel’s mouth. “Can you walk?” she asked without looking up.

“As much as I need to. We aren’t far,” I replied. “Are we?”

Atalawe smiled at me then. Her normal exuberance had returned. “You remind me so much of your father. I know you hate to hear that, but that’s because you only know him from his mistakes. But you are Teyak’s son sure enough as I am my mother’s daughter. There’s the same flame in you that refuses to be snuffed.”

Atalawe would never know how right she was in that moment. However, it was too early for me to think up any reply besides a shrug.

“How’s the hand?” she asked.

“Still sore, but better.” I looked up between the lofty trees for any sign of Shal Gara. The bloodwood was utterly lost between the press of foliage and undergrowth. Firstglow shone at an angle through the canopy. I craned my neck to see the sky. Only a patch of it was visible, and it was rust-grey with smoke from the east.

Far down in the loam, a faint mist clung to the tree trunks. It spiralled behind the survivors as we moved through it. One less, by my count. Atalawe saw me counting and patted my shoulder.

“One went walking in the night. All we found of his trail was that it ended in blood. Taken by a fisher vine.”

“And what in the Six Hells is that?”

“Hangs a frond like a fisher’s hook or a noose. If you’re unwary enough to walk into it and get caught, it pulls you high into the canopy where it… well, you can imagine the rest.”

I didn’t want to.

Hatlu Ko seemed groggy, as if he had been swigging spirits from a flask all night. He muttered something foul as he swaggered to the front of the group. “This way,” he barked, setting a path that went under the leafroad.

“No. It’s that way,” Atalawe corrected him with a point of her staff. “West.”

“By the Six Hells,” Hatlu snapped. “You lead the way then, scholar!”

Atalawe led Nod and Pel’s stretcher past him without meeting his glowering eyes. “With pleasure.”

“Three gems says we get an axe in our backs before we reach Shal Gara,” I whispered to her.

“Six gems and you’re on.”

Atalawe and I chuckled as we stepped east.

The faint light shifted above us with the sun’s wandering through the darkened sky. A rain came within the first hour of setting off. We heard its drumming on the canopy high above us first, then slowly its drip came down the levels of the forest. Some drops fell hundreds of feet to reach us and make our torches sputter. I was glad for it and raised my hands high until my right hand stung at the rain’s touch. Holding my palm close, I saw the faintest shine between my fingers. The wound had healed slightly after the akiga juice. And yet shadowy veins had spread down my palm and deeper into my wrist. They looked thicker than before, and I hid them away from sight and thought.

“Serisi,” I whispered, once Atalawe had wandered ahead to poke at some suspicious-looking leaves, and the survivors had moved on. Not in my life had I experienced such peculiar dreams, and I had a feeling I knew who to blame.

What do you want?

“Tell me, does your kind sleep?”

We have no need of such a thing. No such weakness. The demonfire and the pure will of the Iron Icon sustains us.

“Then I guess if you don’t sleep, you don’t dream, either?”

Serisi took a moment to answer. I thought I heard the grinding of her fangs. No.

“You wouldn’t happen to be lying to me now, would you, Serisi?” I muttered.

I did not know dreams until I was trapped here in your mind. They are… strange.

“The places I keep dreaming of are places I’ve never seen before. A rusted plain. Machines of great iron wheels. A storm of darkness.”

Then you dream of our dying world, Tarko of the Swathe. The Starless Plains we demons call our home.

“What do you mean, your world is dying?”

That is why we are here. Conquering your lands will save ours.

A gruff shout slapped my mouth shut. “Talking to yourself, traitor?”

Hatlu had wandered back down the file. He had trouble in his eyes. Though the wilder spoke to me, he stared knives at Atalawe. At least his axe was lashed loosely across his back. He held a cloth in his hands, wrapped around something.

“None of your business,” I shot back at him. He came close enough that I could smell the stink of sweat on him.

Now Hatlu’s gaze switched to me. He looked as though he’d take a swing at my face, but the fact Atalawe was close stayed his hand.

“You need to learn some respect, worker. You should know your place.”

I felt myself twitch at those accursed words. “Is that right?”

You’ve got some fire in you today, mortal, Serisi told me. I almost like it.

“You’ve got some nerve, boy!” Hatlu barked, making the rest of the survivors halt and turn.

Atalawe stood at my shoulder, but Hatlu surprised us all, and instead rummaged inside his handful of cloth and produced an oval fruit of a bright red colour and a waxy hide. “And just for that, neither of you can have this ūlana fruit I just found,” he said. The spite practically dripped from his blubbery lips.

“Ūlana fruit doesn’t grow down in the loam, you dimwit,” said Atalawe.

“Well, I found it hanging from a tree just up there, so clearly you’re not a very good scholar if you don’t know where ūlana grows,” The wilder held one of the fruits up and waggled it about. Ūlana fruit had a thick rind guarding its flesh, one that peeled off in three sections. The trick was to pick at the stalk first, and Hatlu was already doing that with his grubby sausage of a finger.

“Hatlu,” Atalawe explained in an exasperated tone, “the only things that look like ūlana fruits and grow down in the loam are gemspider eggs, or—Six Hells! STOP!”

Atalawe swung her staff at Hatlu’s hand but he dodged away. At the same time, his finger cracked the fruit’s skin.

I had eaten my fair share of ūlana fruit in my time. In truth, it was my second favourite after ticabo berry, if I had to put them in order. Yet out of the possibly hundreds of the fruits I’d eaten in my seasons, none of them had spat an oily tentacle at me and pierced my neck like a wriggling and grotesque arrow.

“Agh!” Hatlu cried as he recoiled. Even though he let go of the fruit, the thing clung on to him tightly. The red husk pulsated as if it breathed, pumping gods knew what into the wilder’s swelling neck.

“Nobody go near him!” Atalawe warned in a savage yell as survivors sprang to help him. “I’ll break the arms of anyone that tries.”

“You bitch!” Hatlu seethed. “Get this thing off me!”

“Get back, I say!” ordered the wrangler. “If anybody touches him, the spore will explode and infect us all.”

The word “infect” had a strong, sharp edge to it, like an obsidian blade held to a throat, and it held every one of the survivors in place. Myself included.

“What is happening?” I hissed.

“A nightmare of the oldest loam, curse it! A grimspore!” Atalawe snapped. “A carnivorous seed that waits to be picked or eaten by a beast or an idiot warrior.”

“A what?!” Hatlu seized the fruit and wrenched, but the more he pulled, the deeper the hideous tongue burrowed. The pain of his attempts turned his voice into a shrill scream. “Get it off me!”

Keeping Hatlu back with the ironpith staff, Atalawe whispered to me. “Give me your knife.”

“W—why?” I stammered.

“What’s happening to him?” cried one of the warriors.

“The grimspore infects the mind,” Atalawe told us, “slowly taking it over and turning it ravenous.”

“Ravenous for what?” I yelled, watching Hatlu was pawing madly at his neck. His complaints were becoming hoarse.

Atalawe didn’t hold back. “Ravenous for other prey. Other hosts. And by that, I mean us. The grimspore is unstoppable. There is no cure for it, no tincture known by any scholar or seedwitch, except fire. Nothing more we can do but put him out of his misery before the spore takes hold and he becomes a danger to us all!”

“You can’t be serious,” I spluttered. That seemed more like murder than practicality to me.

“Deadly serious, Tarko. Nobody can survive it, and if you don’t want to end up just like Hatlu, we need to act quickly!”

“She’s right!” Juraxi yelled by my side. I hadn’t noticed him get close. “I’ve heard of these parasites before. One almost destroyed my cousin’s village.”

Hatlu’s skin turned grey as he started to convulse through shock. “Curse you… to the Six Hells… all of you!”

“I’m sorry,” Atalawe said. I had no idea she had taken the knife from my belt until I saw her wielding it at Hatlu. “I truly am.”

A wail from a survivor pierced my ears. “Somebody stop the scholar! There must be something we can do!”

Hatlu backed away from our frightened and closing circle. His bulging eyes were turning black at their edges. Blood dribbled from his swollen lips. It was then the grimspore’s withered seed dropped loose from his neck and fell dead to the wet loam. All its venom looked spent.

The wilder lost his gall, sweeping the axe from his back and swinging it over his head with a howling cry. Atalawe spun her staff, but it cracked against his forearms without halting him.

I swung a punch at him far too early. Mostly through panic, I’ll be honest. What I didn’t expect was for the ground to mimic me.

A shower of rain-soaked moss and dirt burst from the loam and collided with Hatlu. The axe flew spinning into the undergrowth while the man tripped and landed heavy on his discoloured face, winded, choking, and with his last, desperate stand knocked out of him.

Atalawe stood frozen in abject shock. As did I. Utter confusion reigned. All was awkward birdsong and rain-patter between us and the survivors.

“Did you just…?”

Before Atalawe could finish her thought, Juraxi sprinted past us, yelling about Hatlu getting away. He was right. Atalawe managed to drag her eyes from mine and saw the doomed wilder escaping in a stumbling run. She sprinted after him into the bushes, and to escape my confusion, I followed. Branches sticky with sap snagged at me. Hammer-headed caterpillars stuck to my armour. I was so preoccupied with brushing them off I didn’t realise I had caught up with Atalawe. She had stopped dead, and I thumped into her back.

In the minuscule clearing we had stumbled into, a wooden leafroad sprouted from the earth. Ahead, a score of warders had their spears flat and pointed at us. In the light of their fireworm lanterns, the red and silver crest of Shal Gara was plain on their leafleather armour. I would have cheered to see them had it not been for the grim-faced woman twice my width that stood at their centre, a club in her hands. A wriggling, gasping Hatlu was already on his knees with rope around his swollen neck and a gag across his mouth. Mud smeared his pallid face.

“Drop your weapons this instant,” demanded the huge warder.

Atalawe slowly did as she was told, speaking calmly as she did so. “Warder, we’re from Eagleborn Baran’s war-party, and as far as we know, the only survivors that are left. We’ve come with dire news for Matriarch Danaxt. We must speak with her and the sages immediately.”

The warder snorted long and hard before finally spitting phlegm in the loam. “Run ahead,” she said to one of her men. “Tell ’em we’ve caught some more traitors and deserters.”

“Traitors?” I cried, confused. We had come all this way, survived all this breathless struggle, only to be received as enemies to the city I’d done nothing but try to matter to. It was enraging. “We’re not deserters, curse you! We escaped to warn—”

“Shut your mouth! Bind them! And go get the others trying to hide back in the bushes.”

Atalawe tried to pick up her staff again, but not before two spears jabbed at her. She stood back, hands clasped and head roving back and forth. “Believe us, we’re no deserters! We’re survivors. Firstwatch has been lost. Demons are burning the Loamsedge, and time is short to do something about it.”

The warders laughed heartily at that.

“Demons? Hah!” guffawed one with a questionable moustache and pox across his face. “At least you and Eagleborn Baran are keeping your stories straight. Never you worry. The Burrows will soon loosen those tongues.”

“What? You can’t do that!” I cried. The Burrows were Shal Gara’s infamous prisons, feared intensely even by those who had never dared to break a law. “You can’t lock us up! We’re here to help!”

Lock us up? Further imprisonment is not what you promised, Tarko! Serisi boomed within me.

Atalawe snarled like Inwar as they bound her. “You idiots! We haven’t done anything wrong!”

“Haven’t done anything right either!” crowed the pox-scarred man. He came at me with similar bindings, and I backed away.

“You do what they say, Tarko,” Atalawe hissed at me before they gagged her. “There’ll be time enough later for them to realise what fools they are!”

“Come here, boy! Don’t you test me.”

“No,” I snapped. “This isn’t fair after what we’ve been through!”

I was a whirlwind of indignation. It felt as though I stood before yet another headman lording my inconsequence over me. Every time I had been banished to another calling, every time I had been told to back down, shut up, and know my place, all those moments coalesced into a burning point in my mind.

“Tarko!”

Atalawe’s muffled shout did nothing to calm me. The scarred man seized me by the wrist a moment later. I pushed at him, and in the same moment, the moss and soil beneath our feet exploded upwards with a rumble. This was no flurry of dust, but a thick column of dirt that struck the man square in the face. He windmilled backwards with a choked cry. I stared down at my wounded hand and found it shaking. Through the drifting dust, I saw Atalawe with that wide, white look in her eyes once again.

“Deal with that mudmage, curse it!” I heard the leader’s yell.

The blow came seconds later. Somebody behind me swung a club to the back of my neck. Darkness pounced on me while the world turned sideways. My eyes rolled around, but before I passed out, I saw a warder sneering down at me.

Serisi’s voice was the last thing I heard.

You’re a liar, Tarko. A despicable liar.

13

The Burrows

Half a sorcer’s concentration leans towards the stomaching of nectra. Most cannot keep a whole vial down until their second season of the rank of initiate. A burning sensation is reported alongside the vomiting, and nausea that can last hours, even days. In severe situations, rashes and profuse bleeding. The ability to handle a full vial is often the mark of advancement to the rank of elevate.

At this rank, once nectra is consumed, it takes most sorcers a dozen heartbeats to harness and control the power of nectra. Many spend seasons training to quicken this process, and it is a devotion and an art in itself to master the swift consumption of nectra.

FROM THE WRITINGS OF SORCER SAGE QAS, 1701

Three times now, I had been knocked unconscious. Three times in a week, in fact and I was becoming enormously tired of waking up in strange places with a pounding head. At least the nightmares had left me alone. That was some comfort.

I cracked an eye to see green mushrooms glowing beyond thick ironpith bars. They formed a circular door with copper bolts fastened at ten different angles. I’d never seen a door like it, and I had prayed often that I never would.

New though my surroundings might have been, they were not unknown.

The Burrows of Shal Gara were infamous from the Rootfort to the Crimson Crown. They were the city’s notorious prisons. They existed deep down in the Neathering, the lowest rung on the neatly ordered ladder of Shal Gara, and that made it the perfect place to send those who broke the laws. As in any bloodwood city, Shal Gara’s rules were strict and the matriarch’s justice swift. Most minor criminals – the pickpockets, the drunk and rowdy, the vandals – only saw a week or month in the Burrows. The more despicable individuals, or those who flatly refused to fit the mould of the Bloodlaws, were slightly luckier. They faced the fate of either exile in the forest or a swift hanging. The murderers, the rapists, the traitors, and the truly criminal received the full horror of the Burrows. For the Burrows, like all of Shal Gara, were alive.

Any Burrow that was hollowed out grew back slowly over periods of months or seasons like a scab across a wound. This meant each cell slowly sealed itself up around its prisoner. The wood grew a hair’s breadth a day, maybe more, but eventually an inmate would be crushed, swallowed by the tree, and lost forever. Forgotten. Most went mad from the torture first, I was told. Even now, I could hear the faint and muffled screams from somewhere nearby. It put a quiver in my skin.

Like most parents of young and unruly children, Mother used to threaten Tesq, Texoc, and me with a stay in the Burrows if we were rude or ever acted up. “I’ll have them take you away!” she would say. “You’ll be swallowed up by the bloodwood and forgotten!” With the measure of hindsight, it was a nightmarish threat to throw at a young child, but it had worked. At least on my brother and sister. And now here I was, with a close-up view I never wanted.

I thought of Mother then and how in the Six Hells I was going to explain all of this to her. Even then, I could imagine her crestfallen grimace of disappointment. The one with a dash of fury hidden beneath. It was the look she used whenever she talked of my father.

I clenched my hands, feeling the pain and ache in my right. I stretched my fingers to feel the walls around me. Not only was the dark oppressive, but the borehole of a cell around me was barely wider than my reach. The wood was rough, splintered, and freshly cut. It reminded me strongly of the louse-mines, except now I felt like the louse.

Dizzy, I put a hand to the lump on the back of my head. I swore all sorts of revenge on the man who had hit me. Once I’d wasted enough time poking and probing, I decided to see if the demon was still with me. There was always the hope Serisi had just disappeared; that she had truly been a figment of my fear all along. For a short and confusing while, I wondered whether any of it had happened.

“Serisi,” I whispered, loud as my dry throat could manage. I wouldn’t have ever admitted it to her, but I was eager to hear a voice. “You still there?”

Serisi growled deep in her throat, scorned and sounding like a bucket being dragged down stairs. No thanks to you, worm. You promised me freedom and instead you have imprisoned me even further.

I momentarily grasped my throat as if to choke her. “If you haven’t noticed, my miserable life seems to be a series of accidents and mistakes and luck so fickle I swear it toys with me on purpose. When will you understand I have nothing to do with any of this?”

Don’t forget your lies. You told me you were not a wizard and that you had no magic. And yet you wielded it just like the rest of the worms.

It was intriguing to speak to another as singularly stubborn as I was. I could understand now why it seemed to annoy people so much.

“Believe me when I say that is a surprise to both of us,” I hissed. I could hear moaning from the tunnel beyond my Burrow cell, and I pressed my hands up against the bars. The ironpith was cold, and it felt good against my right hand. The confusion over my apparent magic was a layer of emotion I didn’t need on top of the terror of the Burrows.

I exhaled, chest shaking. “I’ve never done anything like that in my life. I didn’t even know I could, or how it happened just like when you and I clashed in Sheertown. For all I know, it’s your fault.”

Magic. I had used magic. I could believe I was locked in a prison. I could even trust that a demon was in my head. But I could not believe there was magic in my bones. The truth was painful and simple: I’d had no nectra in my stomach, and therefore it was impossible.

It was your fault. Say it! Serisi snarled.

“It was an accident, curse you! You are not without blame.”

The demon’s rumble filled my head. The resulting wash of pain silenced her for some time.

Fine. Let us say I believe you, Tarko.

“Finally.”

Let’s say our situation is a simple accident and not your doing after all. I can accept that. It certainly makes sense, seeing as how useless you are.

“Thank you for that.”

What I refuse to accept is being trapped in a wretch who is imprisoned in a hole in the ground like an actual worm. Perhaps… More growling and clacking of teeth came. Perhaps until we are separated, we should work together after all. You are dangerously terrible at keeping yourself out of trouble and harm’s way, and I will not let you kill us both.

“That, Serisi, is the first time I think we’ve agreed on anything.”

It does not feel good.

“I think you’re coming around to my way of thinking.”

Iron Icon, I cannot wait to use your bones to pick my teeth.

“I do mean to keep my promise, you know. I want to be rid of you just as much as you want to be free. I’ll find a way to separate us as soon as I’m sure they won’t kill me for keeping an enemy in my head. That means we need to bide our time. Not for too long of course,” I breathed. “I don’t particularly fancy coming face-to-face with your father the demon king.”

And that, Tarko, is the first wise thing you have said, chuckled Serisi.

Our pact a little less fragile than before, I pressed my face up against the bars and hoped for something more interesting than darkness.

The moaning had become a pitiful sobbing. Its echoes wafted from far down the tunnel. Mushrooms glowed in sporadic patches on wall, ceiling, and floor. Where they’d been trodden on, glowing boot prints could be seen roaming back and forth. In the gloom of the far end of the tunnels, I saw the statuesque shadows of warders and short spears. Other circular burrows and barred doors punctuated the walls like crow-picked eye sockets.

Most were empty or too dark to see much of anything. Several down the row and opposite, I saw a dejected looking man who I vaguely recognised from the Sheertown survivors. He was slumped against the bars to such a degree that his jowls dragged up to make wrinkles of his eyes and a toothy grimace of his mouth. In the neighbouring burrow, a woman rocked back and forth, muttering.

A scream came to split the silence. It was long, drawn out, and full of pain, same as the dying cries of beasts I had heard in the darkness of the loam. Once its echoes died, I forced a shout from my dust-dry throat.

“Pel?” I called out. “Atalawe, are you here?”

The Burrows warders were quick to yell at me. Their shouts came charging down the wooden tunnel. “Pipe down there, scum! No talking!”

I thumped my head against the bars and regretted it instantly.

“Tarkosi? That you?” somebody croaked. I knew that hoarse voice well and was overjoyed to hear it. Somewhere between the obliteration of forty thousand warriors and sorcers, and racing through the night-laced loam, I’d forgiven Pel’s kidnapping.

“Pel, you’re awake!” I hissed.

“It seems the gods and their spirits have seen fit to keep me alive for a little longer.” By the sound of his voice, he was in a dire state.

“Good to hear. Where’s Atalawe?”

“Here.” The wrangler sounded distant, barely audible. “Unfortunately so.”

I sighed. At least we were all alive.

Pel wrapped his knuckles around his bars. I could see Atalawe draping her hands out of her cell. “Are you injured, Tarko?” asked Pel.

“I’ve got a sore head and ankle, but otherwise I’m whole. What I want to know is why we’re down in the Burrows, as if we’re murderers? How can they call us traitors?”

Atalawe whistled. “You heard the warders: they said even Haidak Baran’s believed to be a traitor to Shal Gara.”

“I bet he’s not being kept in the Burrows though, is he?”

Pel snorted and promptly choked. It took him some time to recover. “Likely not,” he wheezed at last.

“Why in the Six Hells do they think the massacre was our fault?”

“Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? But fools cling to what they think they know rather than what they don’t. The smoke is on the horizon, and they still can’t see it. Fear is a powerful force in this world,” Pel surmised. “And for that I owe you an apology, Tarko. I called what I did keeping you safe and doing my duty, but it was fear that made me keep all of this hidden from you. I shouldn’t have done that to you. Nor to Axera, either.”

“It’s all forgotten.” I found myself smirking. “But Mother? She’s going to wallop you one for this.”

Pel sighed. “And I’m terrified of it. Part of me would rather be eaten by Shal Gara than face Axera.”

Ask him how we get out, you moron.

“So what happens to us now?” I asked.

“Now, we wait.”

Panic stabbed me. “Wait? Is that it? Wait for how long?”

“They will want answers,” said Atalawe. “We’ll be called to face our crimes at some point.”

“Well that’s… something.”

“And every hour they waste, the demons draw closer,” Pel muttered.

The silence was lengthy. Atalawe broke it at last. “Speaking of answers, are we going to talk about what happened in the forest, lad? Twice, if my eyes didn’t deceive me.”

I sagged against the walls. I had expected them to ask about Serisi, but my secret stayed mine. I ran my tongue along my teeth, thinking. The two of them had clearly been whispering while I was asleep. “I was going to ask you the same question, Atalawe, because that couldn’t have been me that cast those spells, surely? What’s to say they were even spells?”

“It couldn’t be anyone else. Pel wasn’t there, and I have no tolerance for magic,” Atalawe told me.

“You said yourself in the forest, I’m no sorcer.” Here I was, denying my oldest and most pined-for dream: to have magic. And yet the truth was plain. I had no nectra in me, and I said as much with my head pressed against the bars. “It’s impossible. Did you see me take any nectra, Atalawe?”

“No,” she replied. “I didn’t. But I saw what I saw.”

A warder’s footsteps came dashing down the tunnel. “I said to keep your traps shut down here!”

The ironpith club clashed against my bars. I scowled at the woman. She was long of tooth, bent double and gnarled like a knot in the bark.

“You traitors don’t know when to keep your mouths closed, do you? The rope’ll soon see to that! They’ve got it in for you, y’know. I ’ear they’re going to hang you from the Crimson Crown itself for what you bastards did at the Loamsedge.”

Atalawe played her for information. “Is that so? What lies have you heard about us?”

“Lies? Isn’t no lies that you was in league with the marauders and betrayed our war-party! You’re the liars, making up stories of… what was it again, Casqal?” the crone hollered.

“Demons!” called another voice, deeper down in the tunnel.

“Demons! That was it. Demons for gods’ sake. Ha! You ’ear a lot of excuses doin’ this job, I can tell you that. You wouldn’t believe the stories people make up to feel innocent. Some blame gloomsprites. Others the very ancestors, would you know it! But demons? That really spills the bucket, it really does. That’s the most ridiculous I’ve ’eard yet.”

A whistle and a shout stopped the woman from gloating anymore.

“Oi, this one’s getting strange again! Keeps trying to spit at me,” the other warder yelled.

“Hatlu Ko?” whispered Atalawe. “You brought him here?”

“What is it?” Pel asked.

“Bitten by a grimspore,” Atalawe told him, sounding more agitated by the moment. “You’re all idiots! Why haven’t you taken him out into the forest and put him out of his misery, or scorched that cell with fire? He’s a danger to us all,” she pleaded to the warder.

“We don’t do nothing without the matriarch’s say-so,” the hunched woman snarled at us. “These are her Burrows, not yours, you mangy traitor. The bloodwood’s got you all now!”

The tramping of heavy feet echoed down the tunnels. Light spilled, showing me the roughly hewn walls and the pale faces of prisoners. They consisted mostly of the survivors, but I saw one face peering from bars almost completely enveloped by pale red wood. Only a hole as wide as my fist remained. All I saw a bloodshot eye and fingers so bitten all the nails were bloody stumps. They wiggled at the figures now flooding the tunnel.

“We’ll take it from here! Step aside,” came a third and far more authoritative voice. The kind that has the power of rank behind it.

“See? Not long at all,” Pel hissed to us, and I pressed myself closer to the bars to see.

Highwarders, the matriarch’s own guards, marched past us in perfect synchronicity. They were clearly used to wider and grander corridors. Their plumed helmets brushed the roof of the tunnel. The noise of their russet leafleather armour was painful, and whereas before I would have gawked at how beautifully etched and trimmed with white orokan fur it was, I clamped my ears and scowled. Bright fireworm lanterns hung from every other highwarder fist.

“Move aside there!” yelled a stern paragon wearing a spiderthread cape and twice the plumage of anyone else. From the voice, I’d expected a barrel of a man, but when he appeared, he reached barely up to my armpit. He bellowed at the highwarders, herding them like cattle. “Step aside, for gods’ sake! This tunnel is short on space as it is, I don’t need you twats making it any more unbearable! Yah!”

The highwarder roamed the cells one by one, examining us one by one. “You’re an ugly bunch, aren’t you? Shame there’s no time to pretty you up for the matriarch’s presence.”

“The matriarch?” I stuttered.

The orders were already being bellowed. “Warder Casqal! And you there, old woman. Release these doors so we may escort them to the Crimson Crown! All except this one, the gross one here with the mad eyes and the sweaty face.”

Spike-toothed keys were brought forth and jabbed into the locks of our cells with much rattling and clanking. I was relieved when they hauled me roughly into the tunnel and out of the bloodwood’s grip. The air was just as stuffy, yet I let my lungs drink it in.

Still deeply injured and looking like death warmed up, Pel had to be carried by two of the highwarders. Atalawe was quite the opposite, shrugging them free of her and taunting them cruelly about their mothers between demands they do something about Hatlu Ko. She was thoroughly ignored.

Behind us, the other survivors were broken from their cells and forced into a line. Several pleaded with the highwarders for mercy but were elbowed sharply in the ribs for their trouble. I caught Juraxi’s eye in the huddle.

Even though the pain in my ankle caused me to limp, I was content to be marched as swiftly from the Burrows as possible. I hoped it would be the last time I would see these foul little tunnels. Hanging had actually begun to sound preferable.

The rain was still drizzling when they walked us out into the glow of the Neathering’s lanterns and vines. The winding stairs were crowded with onlookers. A low murmur spread through the crowds as we emerged. Nobody dared to stand in the highwarders’ way – they were the very fists of the matriarch – but they stared at us with a frightening amount of hate. An old man with tears streaming down his face incited a round of booing that proved the news of the massacre had escaped into the city. Accusations came flying.

“Deserters!”

“You left them to die!”

“Treachery!”

Despite knowing the truth of what we had done, it hurt to be the object of such hatred and disgust. Several of the survivors tried to argue back and plead their case, but it only caused more outrage. The highwarders raised their shields and blocked us from view. Good thing, too. A rotten carrot thudded against a shield near to my head a second later.

Serisi piped up, making me jump. These people would spill your blood if they got the chance. They loathe you.

“Because they still don’t believe in you,” I breathed over the noise. “They think the war-party was betrayed and sold out to marauders. Their daughters, sons, parents, and siblings all slaughtered, possibly because of us. They’re upset, angry, vengeful, and have been given somebody to blame. I would be the same. Wouldn’t you?”

To my surprise, Serisi did not have any cutting comments or gloating of victory and the promise of more blood. To fail or betray the Iron Icon is to know death. That is our law. My kin do not mourn the passing of the weak or cowardly.

“So no prisons, no justice before a court of sages or nobles?”

Ridiculous. Only the sword of the king piercing a demon’s heart.

“I’m surprised to hear your kind has hearts.”

We may be creatures of smoke and flame, but our sparks must live somewhere.

“A soul, then,” I replied.

Serisi changed the subject, returning to her usual spiky self. This revolting tree of yours is full of gloom. Full of mould and dripping. How do you live amongst such confinement? Is all of this tree a prison?

I smirked. “Just you wait.”

The demon did not have to wait long. We soon escaped the tangled press of the Neathering and trod a leafroad that encircled the trunk in a wide ring. From there, it was easy to gaze up into the web of huge branches and hanging buildings. Or count the leafroads spearing the surrounding swathe like spiderthread. Or see how the glowing of plants spiralled around the trunk, how nothing ever truly stood still amongst the roads and stairs and rooftops.

I had missed my home, I didn’t mind admitting. Serisi, contrary to what I had expected, was not so impressed.

It is too wet. She sounded uncomfortable. I felt her presence squirming.

“You get used to it.”

“Will you pipe down?” hissed the warder next to me. “I don’t know what you’re muttering about but it’s driving me insane.” He made sure I heard him with a vicious kick to my shin, and I fell silent.

On an adjoining road, near the Midern’s lowest branches, I paled when I saw my mother and Tesq standing waiting. Their faces were aghast at the sight of me. Perhaps it was from being bound, ragged and blood-soaked, or that I was bound alongside Pel and in the grip of the matriarch’s own highwarders. I could see plainly that they hadn’t believed the gossip about me until now. Tesq looked as though she had already written me off. My heart sank to see Mother’s proud disbelief turn into furious disappointment.

“I’m not what they say I am!” I yelled at Mother before she and Tesq disappeared from view. I received a jab in the ribs as a reward.

Stay quiet, Tarko. Every pain of yours burns in me. I am not used to such a frail and squishy body.

I squinted my eyes and stared straight ahead. Taking advice from a demon was a fine garnish atop this so far atrocious day.

While I was busy counting the branches and wondering if my sore ankle could take such a climb – and whether the warders would carry me like they did Pel – we came to a skyriser platform hanging from thick pulleys and braided ironpith ropes. Normally, skyrisers were reserved for nobles or precious cargo bound for the highest canopies, and as such it was my first time stepping aboard one. With the binds hurting my wrists and a warder’s gloves digging into my arm, it was particularly hard to feel excited about the occasion. At least my throbbing ankle was happy.

With a jolt and the rhythmic rasping of ropes, we commenced our ascent. Carved slabs of stone descended as we climbed, balancing our weight. The light changed as we rose between branches filled with fields, orokan paddocks, and tangled markets. I was the only one who looked around, taking everything in. I was trying to prove a point to the demon, that there was more to this “rancid tree.” She still couldn’t care less.

Who is this matriarch? A queen of yours?

I nodded to myself as the skyriser came to its highest point. Another lingered nearby, ready to keep us climbing. This one was packed with crates of lemons. The warders shoved us aboard, and soon enough, we were headed for the high canopy even faster than before.

“We have no queens or kings,” I whispered, my voice masked by the rasp and groan of ropes.

All we have are kings. Is she a proud warrior or wizard, then? A great slayer of men? Did she defeat another matriarch in single combat?

I shook my head. None of those were remotely true. Matriarch Danaxt was a woman of great age, and her only power was the indefatigable refusal to die. Some whispered she was older than a hundred seasons. She had ruled for seventy of them.

Then what gives her the right to rule you?

“A bloodline, like the nobles I told you of,” I breathed, facing away from the highwarder. “Her mother was matriarch before her. Only if there are no heirs is a new matriarch chosen. And no,” I added. “Not through single combat, nor any slaughter or battle of any kind.”

Foolish.

“I know, I know. Blood spilled not blood born.”

You learn quickly.

I fell silent when I saw Pel staring back at me. I turned my attention to the lancewing nest we had just risen above instead. Life had been so much simpler several days ago, I almost caught myself longing for it.

Our third and final skyriser was reserved for Matriarch Danaxt and her sages, painted red to match the bottom of the Crimson Crown. I held my breath when I first stepped onto it. Even though I was appearing before her as a prisoner, deserter, and possible traitor to Shal Gara and the whole Swathe, she was still my matriarch. Danaxt had a power over all the bloodwood, and now she held my life in her bony old hands.

You are scared, Tarko of the Swathe. I feel the thud of your heart as an echo inside your mind.

“Of course I am. As should you be. Danaxt could have us all hanged.”

Demons feel no fear.

I looked down past the edge of the skyriser and heard Serisi gulp. “Are you sure about that? Demons don’t feel fear?”

Serisi cursed me. It is merely unnatural to be so far from the ground.

I craned my neck as the lift soared through the sky at a stately place. Around us, the highest branches of Shal Gara split from the trunk and angled themselves towards the sky. Lower parts of the canopy covered what was below us with their broad, sweeping leaves. Between them, I could glimpse the vastness of the Swathe. Everybody in our rank and file – from prisoner to highwarder to the demon behind my eyes – stared to the east. Behind the sheets of drizzle, the sky was black and granite-grey with smoke.

A horn blew as the base of the Crimson Crown began to open above our heads. A square hole yawned, lined with the black-tipped spears of scores of highwarders, all waiting for us. Somewhere behind them, a matriarch waited to gift me with freedom or curse me to a death not worth thinking of.

If there was any time to matter, it was now.

14

Matriarch

Every citizen born third or later has a choice. Either accept the Bloodlaws for the construct they are, and find purpose in their calling, or reject the rules of order. And do you know what we call the latter? Heretics. Miscreants. Criminals. The Burrows and other prisons have more outspoken in them than they do murderers and rapists.

FROM “HONESTY OF HIERARCHY,” A SCROLL BY ANONYMOUS HERETIC KOJI

In my humble opinion, entering such a grand hall as the Crimson Crown demanded an equally grand fanfare. But alas, we were prisoners, and the only fanfare we got was the clunk of bolts as the royal skyriser came to a rest and the cold plodding of the warders marching us onwards.

Not a soul I knew of had ever seen the inside of the Crimson Crown. Atalawe looked as though she’d seen it before but forgotten. Pel seemed blinder than usual. Like the others, I stared at the regal hall.

Painted and carved pillars lined the pale narin wood walls. Each boasted a beauty of its own, each coloured its individual palette of hues. Between the pillars, triangular sandglass windows ran from the floor to the buttresses of the roof. Beams carved in the likeness of animals and spirits and gods supported a roof filled with more sandglass. Living branches clad in ivy twisted around the beams and tussled for space. Flowers of green and gold, pendants of obsidian and crystal, and fireworm lanterns dangled from fine threads to seemingly float in mid-air. They hung still, ominous despite their beauty.

Before us lay our regal audience, one which the highwarders forced us to bow before.

As it was in every bloodwood in the Swathe, order always reigned supreme. Broad stairs of wood and marble rose in a tall pyramid. Seven crystal seats lay staggered up the slope, and at the top was a throne of pure, uninterrupted obsidian veined with mica. Wreaths of flowers were draped across its pointed back. Upon the crystal seats sat the seven sages of Shal Gara, with silver-wrought feathers dangling around their necks. Near the top sat the sage for the tribe of the first-born, and it was none other than Kol Baran himself.

Atalawe’s story of my father was still settling in my mind, as outlandish as it all seemed to me, but it had only affirmed what I knew since five seasons old: that Sage Kol Baran was a bastard. Even now, he wrinkled his arched nose as if we were smeared in orokan shit. Narrowed red eyes accompanied matching hair, slicked back and rusted grey at the ends. Baran wore opulent and intricate clothes over a frame that was still broad and muscled even with the crooked nature of age. The tattoo of the first-born swirled intricately up his chest and neck onto the borders of his face. A dark scar cut through the tattoo’s lines and Baran’s hairline, and I hoped my father had caused it.

When I finally dragged my scowl away from him, I saw the other sages, blank-faced and patient. Just below Baran, so close as to be level with each other, were the twin seats of the sorcer tribe and the second-born. Sage Dūnekar sat with blue hands folded, his face half-hidden behind his grey braids and impassive as a dead man’s. A thin vial of nectra hung around his neck to accompany his feather.

Opposite him was his military equal, Sage Saronash, the Jade Wolf herself and another living legend of the Scorchwars. I confess I experienced a moment of awe. Even in that hall, surrounded by warders, she was the only sage armed, wearing her famed jade sword at her hip. Her right arm had been severed in a Scorchwars battle, just below the shoulder. An intricate replica of wood and obsidian now took its place, half-hidden behind a waterfall of emerald hair.

The worker tribe came next. My sage was a bald and plump man who looked like some distant relation to toadish Karonak. He rocked himself back and forth on his perch, sniffing at the smoke-stink of our clothes. In one of the remaining seats sat the scholar sage. She was a bespectacled woman who had such an incomparable likeness to a lancewing, I felt a strange urge to go fetch her a bucket of sapwater. As for the last sage, from the healers, I swore he had some giant-blood in him, and the ancient, ash-haired sixth-born looked more asleep than awake.

Reigning above them all on her obsidian throne was the matriarch herself.

Matriarch Danaxt the Fifth sat so crookedly, her shoulders were level with the circlet of grey star-iron upon her head. I had not seen much star-iron before, but I knew from its glitter and shine what it was. The intricate copper leaves that branched from it gave her the look of an ancient bloodwood. Beneath the circlet, her grey hair hung in intricate braids across a face that had a slight slope to one side. Noble crimson eyes stared out at us, keen and roving despite the aged vessel they resided in. They had the intensity of a hungry raven and clearly hid a sharp mind I was already scared of. A streak of a dried tear cut across the faint tattoos of her cheek.

Robes of bloodwood red and silver hid the rest of Danaxt’s skeletal frame. Age had crippled her. Her thin legs were supported upon a large and rare emerald beetle, curled up into a round footstool of carapace and affixed with a thick, saddle-like cushion for the matriarch’s feet.

Close at her elbow stood Envoy Okarin, the matriarch’s own daughter who I had first seen in the nests. She had no seat. I knew that rule: the daughter always stood until the mother was ready to leave the throne. Okarin did not look tired of standing, as I would be, but rather mimicked her mother’s stern gaze from an intricate fringe of braids. All the while, she counted a string of white gemstone beads between her fingers.

At last, the contingent of highwarders came to a halt at the foot of the pyramid and expanded outwards in a circle. Their spears stayed pointed inwards at us. Our ropes and bindings stayed locked in their fists.

The matriarch studied every detail of us before speaking. It took quite some time. I didn’t know I had that much detail to me. The hall of the Crimson Crown palace was so silent I could have heard a mouse fart. The quiet was like a weight around my ears, making the nothing somehow louder the longer it stretched. When Danaxt’s eyes found me, I swore my heartbeat filled the hall.

Finally, a sound. Another contingent of highwarders entered with two more prisoners dressed in grey robes. The warders didn’t jostle them as they had us, but kept a respectful distance. I didn’t take me long to see why. It was Haidak Baran, walking briskly and trying his hardest to avoid the eyes of his father. He wore the tunic and kilt warriors kept under their armour. A good portion of his long red hair had been singed away. He was shocked into stumbling when he saw the others and me. I only took a little pride in seeing him so disgraced.

Beside the disgraced eagleborn was Eztaral Kraid. She too had been stripped of her armour and came to a rest with her thick arms crossed, brow furrowed deeply, and a storm behind her eyes. There was a heavy sweat on her tattooed head. The raven’s feather around her neck had no shine to it, and there was still blood splattered up her neck. She looked as though she had fought until the last possible moment.

I saw Eztaral trading sour looks with Atalawe and Pel, but the old beggar stared straight ahead at the matriarch, sniffing at the faint smell of char and road-stink that I was sure we all wore.

At last, the matriarch uttered her words. She had a frog’s croak, but it was loud and carried the confidence that only a ruler can manage. “Our heart is heavy. An entire war-party lies dead. Forty thousand and more Shal Gara souls massacred. A bloodwood burned. The Loamsedge reportedly lost. Such tragedies we have never experienced,” Matriarch Danaxt announced. “Eagleborn Baran and Ravenborn Kraid here have the gall to blame this catastrophe on ‘demons.’ Demons. Creatures of children’s stories.”

How they had changed their tune, I thought. Haidak Baran bowed his head, wild-eyed and fidgety. Eztaral did not move a muscle.

“It is preposterous,” the matriarch continued, speaking as if her thoughts were an entire court in their own right. “Our sages tell us that we have been betrayed. That traitors led our war-party into a marauder trap and caused this massacre. And yet you survivors returned to Shal Gara and claimed the very same as Haidak: that demons are to blame.”

We survivors looked between us. It was a trap made of words. Nobody wanted to speak what we all knew was the one true explanation. One of the survivors began to tear up in distress.

“We ask you: which answer have you come to offer? Treachery or demons?”

One of the warriors broke down. He clasped hands and fell to his knees, begging at the top of his whimpering voice. “Treachery, Your Highness! Tricks and vile games! Please, have mercy on those of us who are simple survivors and loyal to Shal Gara. We did nothing but serve our bloodwood and escape with our lives. These three here are your traitors! Punish them instead.”

What an abhorrent coward, I heard Serisi mutter. I should like to see what colour he bleeds.

I forced myself to keep from nodding.

Danaxt surveyed us. “You others, do you agree? And be warned: know that you condemn Haidak Baran as a liar.”

Around me, a wave of agreement broke on a cowardly shore. The dozen or so leaf-scratched and ash-dirty wretches we had found in the forest all nodded. I noticed Juraxi behind me, and like Pel, Atalawe, and me, he shook his head.

“And you four?” the matriarch asked us. “You do not agree?”

I stared at the ragged, red-eyed warrior next to me as she snivelled and backed away from us. “No,” I blurted. Haidak perked up while Eztaral bowed her head.

“We do not agree, Matriarch.” Blind Pel’s croaking voice chased mine. It was harsh against the subdued, constricting air of the hall. He looked fit to fall at any moment, slumped on his injured side. Only the ropes held fast by the highwarders held him upright. “We’ll speak the truth even if it sees us spending the rest of our days in the Burrows. At least they’ll be mercifully short.”

The ancient matriarch twitched her head back and forth. I thought I saw a smile amongst the tendrils of hair. The matriarch levelled a skeletal finger at Pel, Atalawe, Juraxi, and me, and the warders closed in.

“These four can stay. Remove the rest from our sight,” Danaxt ordered. “Our eyes ache watching them cower and snivel. Hold them until we dig out this thorn of truth. If they have lied, they will suffer a season in the Burrows to contemplate the meaning of truth.”

I watched the porter woman’s face turn stony. Fragile. Regretful. The others wailed as they were led towards an adjoining hall. They had chosen poorly.

The sages, envoy, and matriarch studied us. The Crown was no loam in the dead of night, and yet I felt just as precarious, just as close to death, and it brought a sweat to my head as a quiet fell once more.

“You.” The matriarch levelled a finger at Pel. “We recognise you.”

“That is because he is Pelikai Maladaq, Highness. A disgraced sorcer,” Sage Baran was quick to talk. I watched Baran’s puckered face and vexed stare. He ogled me as if trying to recognise my face. “He was removed from the leafroad outside the Crimson Crown not one day before the war-party left for Loamsedge. He was yelling nonsense and drunk on urka seeds, as you can see from his blue lips and teeth, Matriarch.”

“We do not remember asking you to speak, Sage,” Danaxt admonished him.

“My apologies, Matriarch, but this is a dangerous man with dangerous ideas. I would not trust his words.”

Sage Dūnekar nodded, ringed fingers rubbing at one of his braids, but he didn’t speak. He was transfixed by Pel.

The Jade Wolf disagreed. “There was a time when we hailed Pelikai as the Scourge of the Scorchroad. I would hear him out.”

Envoy Okarin clicked her tongue. “The matriarch will decide who she will trust and distrust, hear or not hear. And a blind ex-sorcer without any nectra surrounded by fifty highwarders is hardly dangerous, Sage Baran.”

To the crackle of old bones, the matriarch sat up straight. Bracelets rattled as she adjusted her hands on the stone. “We will hear your names.”

“Sage Baran is right. I am Pelikai Maladaq, once a paragon of the sorcer tribe and water order. This is Temach Atalawe of the fourth-born. Behind me is Tarkosi Terelta, third-born.”

“Terelta?” Baran growled.

The matriarch nodded. “We remember that name and its fall from favour. Are you Teyak Terelta’s son?”

It was strange that I noticed in such a situation as this, but that was the first time in my life the question of my parentage hadn’t made me want to curse. “That I am… Your Highness.”

The matriarch nodded. “If we recall correctly, Teyak was banished from this court and stripped of his rank for violence against another noble.”

“You remember well, Matriarch,” said Pel, beating Baran to the answer and leaving him glowering. I wagered it wasn’t the first time the old sorcer had stood before the matriarch and sages. This court seemed a game of words and wit, and he played it well. I watched and learned.

“Teyak Terelta spent seasons trying to warn this esteemed court of the black sun and the omen it brings,” he continued.

“But he was banished and disgraced for his beliefs,” I interjected.

“Which were?” Danaxt asked.

“That demons would one day return to the Swathe, Matriarch,” Pel uttered. “And now that day has come.”

Almost all the sages spluttered with laughter. Only Saronash and Dūnekar stayed emotionless. Baran threw up his hands in mockery.

The matriarch cleared her throat for quiet. “None of you are warriors or sorcers. What were you doing in the war-party?”

“Sabotage, Matriarch,” replied Atalawe with a confessional sigh. “We knew that Eagleborn Baran was walking into a situation he did not understand, against an enemy that far poses far more of a threat than marauders from the Scorch. We only tried to help, not hinder. Haidak pressed on despite our efforts.”

“And rightly so,” Baran the elder muttered.

Pel spoke over him, the effort making him cough. “We tried to warn Ravenborn Kraid, but she didn’t believe us. Before we could stop the war-party, we were attacked.”

“By these… demons,” the sage of the scholar tribe sneered. “Gods, there is no such thing! They are merely creatures of story and nightmare, and I should know. I have consulted more songs, scrolls, books, and carvings than any other scholar.”

Atalawe scoffed. “Then you should know how every myth sprouts from a seed of truth, Sage Wasaqa. Looks like you haven’t read the right stories or listened to the right songs.”

“You should curb your tongue, Temach Atalawe!” Wasaqa hissed, her cheeks turning a fitting shade for the Crimson Crown.

Pel reached for the wrangler’s shoulder but his ropes held him back. “With all due respect and honour, Matriarch, what this court does or doesn’t believe changes nothing. We have seen the demons with our own eyes, every horrifying detail of them. They are nightmares, yes, but they are far from story. Demons exist, Sages. They massacred the war-party, and now they are marching for Shal Gara.”

“Show them, Tarko,” Atalawe spoke up, lip curled in a smile. “Show them what you managed to bring with you from Sheertown. Maybe that’ll convince these people.”

The sages tutted and raised their brows. The highwarders bristled around us.

“Show us what?” the envoy asked.

I already knew what Atalawe was suggesting and was currently trying to dig it from my pocket. Bound hands did not make it easy. Nor did the cold touch of spear beneath my chin.

“Show them the claw that almost took your life,” she said.

At last, I pinched it between my fingers. With a flick of my wrist, I cast it to the polished floor. The claw clattered as if it was made of metal.

“Bring it to me,” the matriarch demanded.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you…,” I began to protest, but Atalawe kept her head raised and her mouth shut.

A stocky highwarder was the unlucky one. He bent down to the claw and extended a gloved hand. Just as it had in the forest, the touch of mortal hands caused the claw to spit with faint flame. It burned the warder even through his leafleather. With a hiss, he skipped backwards and felt tough enough to level his spear at the lump of broken claw.

“What in the loam was that?” Sage Saronash demanded.

“Dark magic!” Sage Baran was quick to shout. Dūnekar gave no argument. He was too busy furrowing his brows, enraptured by the claw while his peers complained around him.

“Demon magic, Matriarch!” Atalawe called out. “I’ll wager no sorcer or living scholar has ever seen a spell like it. But please do let me know me if I’m wrong, Sage Dūnekar, Sage Wasaqa.”

As the angry shouts grew louder, the matriarch cut through us all with a sharp whistle. While she took her time mulling her words, her gaze creeped from the claw to the man behind me: Juraxi, standing apart from the three of us. His burns looked raw in the amber light of the hall. She pointed a claw of her own.

“You there. You are not known to us yet.”

The man knelt quickly. “My name is Juraxi, Matriarch. I am a simple warder from Firstwatch. I managed to escape with my life and fortunately fell in with these survivors.”

“And what do you say of demons?”

“I was there when they first appeared, Matriarch. They appeared in an instant, in a doorway of flame and darkness. Its fire cut a path straight into Firstwatch’s trunk, through wall and thatch as if it were parchment. Through people…” Juraxi’s eyes became waxy and distant until he shook himself. “Though it puts ice in my heart to say it aloud, these demons are as real as you or I.”

Sage Dūnekar hunched on his seat. “What of Firstwatch? Is it truly lost as Haidak Baran told us?”

“From the moment the demons first arrived,” said Juraxi.

Pel affirmed it. “The bloodwood is dead, Your Highness.”

I could hear the shaking of Danaxt’s hands in the rattle of her jewellery. “Yet more tragedy.”

“If I may, Matriarch,” Pel said. “It is just the beginning.”

“Speak.”

“These demons have come to wage a war against the Swathe, and it’s a war they are currently winning. This isn’t the first time the Swathe has burned with demonfire. We managed to repel them a thousand seasons ago thanks to the legend that was Kī Raxa, but since that day, they have been plotting, preparing, dreaming of the day they could return to set the Swathe on fire. Now they have returned, they are not going to stop at Firstwatch. They will keep marching forwards, turning the Swathe to ash mile by mile until they reach Shal Gara. And then nothing will stand between them and the other bloodwoods.”

Serisi’s voice flinched me. The old blind man is right.

The matriarch’s question was simple. “Why?”

“Conquest,” replied Pel.

“Chaos,” I blurted. The eyes of the matriarch’s court turned on me. I felt as if I alone stood on that wooden floor. “The demons worship a single god of chaos they call the Iron Icon. A god of chaos and blood, of constant night and cleansing fire. It’s what drives them to destroy and consume.”

You have been listening, Tarko of the Swathe.

Pel’s blind gaze missed me by a fraction, but I still saw the surprise in his eyes. Atalawe explained on my behalf, and swiftly, too.

“Tarko survived the battle of Sheertown buried in rubble. He saw the demons closer than any of us, maybe even than Juraxi here. He even heard them speaking.”

Hushed conversation distracted the sages. Disbelief still reigned.

“Chaos,” the matriarch repeated, as if it was a word she was unused to. She became distracted by the claw still lying on the floor, smoking softly. “Chaos is the very notion Shal Gara and every bloodwood of the Swathe stands against. Order is what the Swathe lives by.”

The third-born sage spluttered. “You cannot believe this rubbish, Matriarch, surely? These tricks? These traitors are selling us lies to keep us distracted from the marauders of the Scorch!” he proclaimed. It was wonderful to see belonging to the same tribe mattered little to loyalty.

The fury in Danaxt’s eyes was severe. “You speak too loudly, Sage Maku. You all do.”

One by one, the disgruntled sages fell quiet like children scolded.

The envoy called out to us. “What do these demons look like? What is it we face?”

If only we could show them, Serisi murmured.

I answered her. “Beings of smoke and fire, burned bone and grey skin, Envoy. They stand taller than us, maybe seven or eight feet in height, with horns stretching like antlers and branches. Their claws are as long as daggers, their fangs black like iron blades, and their smiles are full of fire. We are nothing but meat to them, and our trees are only fuel for their flames.”

Deep in my mind, Serisi tutted. Such a paltry description, but it will have to do, I suppose.

Atalawe was also now looking at me with confusion.

“I couldn’t have described it better myself,” Juraxi affirmed.

“Nightmares, just like you said, Sage Wasaqa,” said Pel, much to the woman’s insult.

I saw the horror in Haidak’s face as he remembered the demons. I should have felt some victory over him, seeing him so reduced, but instead I felt pity. Here I was: saving him from the shame and ridicule I had always longed to put him, just as he had me. Haidak was a coward, but he was no liar. That much was true, no matter how disappointed his father seemed in him. He had risked his position to tell Shal Gara the truth.

“What drove you to try to stop our war-party?” the matriarch asked us. “Why you?”

“My friends and I have been waiting the return of these demons for seasons. Centuries, even. While Shal Gara and the Swathe slowly forgot, we remembered. The black sun was the sign we have been waiting for. When it came, we knew that we would go unbelieved and ignored. We had to do something,” answered Pel.

“Who is we? All of you?” the envoy asked.

Atalawe nodded. “Those and others before us. Like Teyak Terelta, who tried to warn you, Matriarch.”

As before, no apology came. There was no sign of remorse for the father I had only just come to understand.

I watched Pel change before my eyes. Despite his injuries and still being close to death’s door, he forced the hunch from his shoulders. His head lifted, hands clenched and firm by his sides. “We are the Scions of the Sixth-Born, Matriarch. The name might not mean anything anymore, but we’ve been serving you since the days of Kī Raxa. We serve you still.”

“I cannot believe we are taking the word of a disgraced sorcer, a failed scholar, and a worker child with the mark of a mistake right there on his face! This is utter madness!” Sage Baran growled. He was not alone: Maku and Wasaqa were also beetroot-faced.

Danaxt dismissed him with a wave. “Then you may leave our court, Sage Baran. However, it seems to us that you should be thanking them, for it is because of this sorcer, this scholar, and this worker that your son has been redeemed.”

For a moment, I thought Baran would continue to rant. The Jade Wolf and Dūnekar glowered at him. Instead, he arose, swung his spiderthread robes about him, and marched straight past Haidak. Maku and Wasaqa took their time deciding whether to follow him. They did so with much muttering and bustling, and I was glad to watch them leave. Only once they were gone did the matriarch speak.

The matriarch sat back in her obsidian throne. She looked small against its giant proportions and, for the first time, frail. “And what do you Scions suggest we do?” she asked.

“We must fight, Matriarch,” replied Pel, causing Eztaral to look up from her cowed position. “The demons will be here within days.”

Sage Dūnekar slapped his hand on his thigh. “Fight? They have already killed over half our sorcers in the massacre of Sheertown. Our finest water weavers and air carvers were in that war-party. Painted ones. Paragons!”

Half. The word struck me. Half, in one battle. I hadn’t yet come to realise the demons’ victory had been that dire. I swallowed. All I could hear was patient breathing in my head and the rattling of claws.

“Not forgetting forty thousand of my warriors, all slain,” muttered Sage Saronash. “The finest of Shal Gara marched east with Eagleborn Baran.” Her face had the stormy glare of betrayal, and it was directed at Haidak.

While the eagleborn stayed quiet, Eztaral Kraid spoke at last. “This next fight will be on our terms.”

The healer sage rumbled in a deep voice. “And when was the last time you saw to the defence of a city, Kraid? Or you, Pelikai Maladaq?”

Pel snorted. “When I saw to the defence of Firstwatch during the Scorchwars, you were likely still a boy, Sage Tok.”

I pressed my lips together to keep from smiling. It was brief, but I saw a matching coy smirk on the face of the envoy.

The Jade Wolf confirmed it. “Pelikai is right. There is a good reason why they called him the Scourge of the Scorchroad.”

Atalawe raised her hand. “There’s another option. One that could buy us some time.”

Pel’s head snapped around. “Not now, Atalawe.”

“You have your ideas, let me have mine,” she hissed.

The matriarch rattled her jewellery. “You may speak, scholar, seeing as this hall is now without one.”

Atalawe shuffled forwards. “Shal Gara needs to move.”

I expected those words to make everyone present guffaw with laughter. This, however, seemed to be half as ridiculous as the suggestion of demons. I rubbed at my dry eyes and felt an ache behind them. I blamed Serisi.

The sixth-born sage sat forwards in his crystal seat. He was the only one not in silver wormsilk and spiderthread robes. Fine leafleather and copper mail covered his withered frame. “Not in eight hundred seasons has a full-grown bloodwood moved more than an inch. You should know that, scholar,” he said.

“Then we have to make it move, Sage,” Atalawe said. “The oldest songs tell us the bloodwoods used to move great distances in times of danger, in rhythm with the demons when they came, cycle after cycle. If Shal Gara will move, even a little, it could buy us days. A week perhaps. Enough time to build better defences.”

“Such things are impossible!” the healer Sage Tok barked. He looked fit to join Baran and the others.

“A lot seems impossible to those with limited knowledge of the possible,” Atalawe snapped. “There’s greater power in the Swathe and beneath our feet than there is in this hall.”

Tok slammed a fist on the crystal arm of his seat. “Outrageous!”

For a group accused of treachery and betrayal, Atalawe’s words came dangerously close to sounding guilty for my liking. To my relief, Danaxt raised a hand for silence and not for the highwarders.

“We will ponder this matter further in our own time,” she said.

“Don’t ponder too long, I beg you.”

The matriarch flexed her fingers. “Do not push your luck, Temach Atalawe. We suggest you accept your victory of vindication instead.”

Atalawe bowed respectfully while Dūnekar clacked his fingernails together. “There is another matter I wish to discuss.”

“And what is that, Sage?”

“If I may, Matriarch,” Dūnekar said, “the reports from the warders mention an earth reaver in these prisoners’ midst, one who attacked them when they tried to do their duty. Yet I see no sorcer amongst you.”

My skin prickled under Dūnekar’s shrewd stare.

Pel shook his head. “Then there must have been some confusion. Another one of us was an earth sorcer, but Redeye was lost in Sheertown. There are no others.”

I saw Atalawe’s eyes becoming glossy as she fought her emotions.

“How peculiar indeed,” Sage Dūnekar uttered.

“We have had enough of discussion and worry for today.” The matriarch sighed. “We would have action, instead.”

“What do you command, Matriarch?” asked her envoy.

She took some time to answer. Her sharp nails tapped a rhythm on the obsidian, counting out the moments as they passed us by. The envoy didn’t fidget. She knew better than to rush her mother. As did the remaining sages. All of us held our lungs until we were forced to take a breath. Only then did the matriarch utter her decision.

“We refuse to let Shal Gara fall to chaos. If these demons have come to ruin us, we will show them what has kept the Swathe standing for thousands of seasons. We shall fight them with all the might and knowledge we have at our disposal. We will show them the power of order and civilisation.”

I felt my body begin to shake in relief. I saw Pel and Atalawe nodding grimly. Haidak was so relieved he melted into a heap. Eztaral remained blank of face and staring into thin air.

“Pelikai Maladaq, Temach Atalawe, worker Tarkosi Terelta,” Danaxt continued. “You will tell us all you know of the demons and of the stories we have lost. If the Swathe has forgotten the Scions, then we shall remember you now. You have our blessing, and you will have the aid of Haidak Baran and Eagleborn Eztaral to protect Shal Gara at all costs. They are fortunate we are a forgiving Matriarch.”

Haidak and Eztaral were dragged to their feet. Eztaral stood tall, muscles of her stout arms bunching.

“You will speak none of this to the citizens. None of these words leave our hall.”

“As you wish, Matriarch,” muttered Dūnekar.

Here the matriarch raised a finger. “Hear us now, you three. Should you fail us or should a word you have spoken here become known to be a lie, you will all long for a punishment as sweet and forgiving as the Burrows. You will all wish you had died in Firstwatch. Do you understand us?”

“Every word, Matriarch,” Pel and the others echoed as one.

All I heard was the rumble of Serisi’s voice. You have chosen poorly. You are fools to stand and fight.

“That we might be,” I breathed, as the highwarders came to free us. “But we will see.”

My claw.

I raced to seize the demon claw from the floor, where it had left a smoking scorch-mark. Its rough surface was hot but not painful. I stowed it beneath my armour, hidden once more.

While the others were cut loose, the sages descended from their pyramid of wood and stone. The beetle at Danaxt’s feet was awoken, and the matriarch was lifted by her daughter onto the insect’s cushion. Danaxt sat proud and tall, reins in hand, as the beetle rose upright and clicked its way down the stairs in a trained motion. The matriarch swayed barely an inch, and she sat a whole head taller than anybody in the hall. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I had never been fond of the insects that called the Swathe home as I did.

The warders held a wall of spears and shields between us as Danaxt and the sages departed. Dūnekar was the last to meet my stare. Within moments, we were left standing in the Crimson Crown alone, shabby, burned, and no doubt stinking, but alive and without nooses rubbing our necks.

I almost collapsed with the exhaustion of relief. Where I fit into a war, I wasn’t quite yet sure, but I was determined to find out.

15

Tested Souls

The levels of magic are unflinching. They lie in the mastering of certain spells. First comes the wall or shield in most schools, then the dart spell, a projectile. Beyond that there are tendril spells, and a dozen spells with names I care not to mention until we get to shadow and construct spells. Only several sages and high-ranking sorcers have existed in the Swathe’s history that can cast constructs. No sorcer in the last fifty seasons has ever managed such a feat.

FROM THE WRITINGS OF SORCER SAGE QAS, 2115

The skyriser thunked to a rest with careless speed, and I quite nearly staggered over the rope railing. Though we had been pardoned and blessed, the highwarders clearly couldn’t wait to be rid of us. Perhaps they still thought us liars and traitors. Perhaps we did stink of loam and orokan shit. Nevertheless, I scowled at the biggest one amongst them in challenge before limping from the riser. The platform cranked back upwards at the same wayward pace. Haidak and Eztaral were still descending on their riser.

“What’s the plan, Pel?” asked Atalawe, as she hoisted me up. Her usual cheer had returned, but my injuries complained loudly.

The old man moved slowly and painfully along the bustle of the branch. At its edge, in a quieter spot, he hunched over to gaze down upon Shal Gara, still doused in the sheen of rain and a haze hiding her depths. Behind the bloodwood’s leaves, a white semicircle of the sun goddess fought to be seen.

Pel put a hand to his dirty, bloody bandages and showed his stained teeth. “You heard Danaxt. We prepare for war.”

“That simple, eh?” I said drily, unable to ignore the nauseous trepidation that the word “war” instilled in me.

“Not now that she has put us in charge,” Pel said weakly, but the pride in his voice couldn’t be stifled. “Suffice it to say, I am surprised to still be standing. Bless the gods that Danaxt still has some sense in her old bones.” He reached to feel my and Atalawe’s shoulders and squeezed. “The Scions have returned. Dark days might lie ahead, but we walk in the light once again. Teyak has been vindicated.”

Atalawe had a grin on her face it was difficult not to match. Survival was a blissful feeling when death hovered close.

Juraxi interrupted our moment. The warder held up a finger as if he had a question. “If I may, I’d like to say my thanks. You were a fine group of people to run into. I didn’t think it at first, but you seem to have saved my neck from the noose.”

“What will you do now?” I asked him.

“What anyone can do in times like these: keep going on until something stops me.” Juraxi flashed me a smile. “If a warder like me can be of any help—”

“We’ll be sure call on you,” Atalawe said.

Juraxi smiled. “You’ll be seeing me, I’m sure.”

I met his offered hand. “Hopefully in better circumstances.”

Juraxi chuckled as withdrew along the branch. “I believe that’s down to you.”

Once Juraxi had departed, I rubbed my hands. “So how exactly do we prepare for war? Don’t I need a sword or armour or something?”

Atalawe chuckled beneath her breath. “So eager to see the demons again, Tarko?”

“I’m eager to be prepared. I’m a Scion now after all, aren’t I?”

“Hah! Not yet, you aren’t, lad,” Atalawe shook her head. “Not officially.”

“Wait, what?” I spluttered.

“You’re not officially a Scion until we say you can speak the words.”

“But I thought I had earned it?”

Pel frowned. “You will earn it after you learn how to be a Scion, as we all did,” he told me, unyielding.

My indignation crumbled away in the face of a trepidatious intrigue. “You mean you’ll train me?”

“Just like you asked me in the forest,” Atalawe needlessly reminded me. I had discovered two things in the loam: one, that meeting death was easier than it looked, and secondly, that I needed something else besides a sling and a rock to keep that meeting at bay.

“Well let’s get to it,” I blurted. “Will I be learning magic or fighting first?”

“Calm, Tarko, by the Three Gods. All in good time, my impetuous friend, but first things first.” Pel massaged his bruised nose. “I hate to say this, but we must take you home, Tarko.”

“I don’t want to go home. I want to help.”

Why does the old blind man seem scared? Serisi asked me.

I knew precisely why. “You’re worried about facing my mother, aren’t you?” I asked. In truth, I wasn’t sure if I was ready either. I hoped the matriarch’s blessing would be enough to calm her.

“You’re bloody right I am. I would rather face the demons at Sheertown again, but it is the right thing to do. Think of your mother and the last she saw of you. She deserves an explanation as much as you did.”

“And I still have my questions,” I warned him.

Pel reached for me until he found my shoulders. “As do I, Tarko. As do I,” he said quietly.

“Pelikai.” It was Eztaral Kraid. Haidak stood behind her, tall and proud once more now he was out of the Crimson Crown and the threat of death – at least one in the form of a noose – had vanished. I could still see the sweat on his forehead beneath his unkempt, singed hair.

“How in the Six Hells you loamers survived Sheertown, I don’t know,” Eztaral began, “I’m not sure I want to.”

“With luck and a lot of running,” Atalawe said before wagging a finger at her. “Have you changed your mind, Eztaral? You believe us now you’ve seen the demons with your own eyes?”

By the way the eagleborn chewed her lip, she was not used to being uncomfortable. “That is what I want to talk about. Somewhere without so many uninvited ears.”

Pel bowed his head. He seemed more relieved over Eztaral’s words than Danaxt’s decision not to hang us. “That we shall, old friend. Give me an hour, perhaps two, and I will meet you in the old place.”

Eztaral departed in silence and with a pack of warders about her. I had meanwhile caught Haidak’s stare. He said nothing to me until I turned to lead Pel away.

“A moment, Tarkosi, if you would.”

I watched him gnaw his words as if he hated their taste.

“I am… appreciative of what you said to the matriarch. You could have lied and sold me out to the Burrows,” he said in a volume few nearby could hear.

“I’m no traitor,” I replied, unable to resist my moment.

“I… Thank you.”

“I can see how difficult that was to say.”

Haidak raised his chin. There was no hatchet buried between us yet, but it was a weight on my mind I was happy to shed. I gave him a nod, and I had a feeling that was the last we would speak of it.

The highwarders manning the nearby platforms were kind enough to spare us the walk, and we were dropped slowly through the branches. The day was winding down. The city still dripped with rain, but the clouds had been replaced by smoke. An eager wind from the east wafted the stink of wildfire. I had been glad to be rid of it, and now it was back. I grumbled away to the sound of Serisi drinking in the stench through my own nostrils.

“Don’t get used to it,” I hissed beneath my breath.

The skyriser only took us so far, and the rest of the way was down to us. The highwarders were some of the same that had escorted us up in shackles. I smiled at them broadly as we left them standing and wondering how by the loam we were free.

“Atalawe,” said Pel. “If you would be so kind as to find our old armour and perhaps any urka, if you have some left. I’ll meet you at the Terelta house in a short while.”

“Good luck.” Atalawe whistled as she walked away.

Pel was weaker than I was, but at least he didn’t have a twisted ankle. We made quite the pair of warriors hobbling and weaving about, leaning on each other and holding the other up in equal parts. It actually made me laugh more than once. The onlookers who recognised us were equally as curious. The attention went unnoticed by Pel. He heard the whispers, no doubt, but he was preoccupied with treading the branches of Shal Gara again. Or the prospect of facing my mother. All I got was a wry smile.

“Weren’t those the prisoners?” I heard somebody mutter. I thought it was Serisi at first, playing tricks. I let their gossip into my ears. I wanted to know what the tree thought of me.

“The last ones of the war-party.”

“Talk of monsters, there was.”

“Creatures from the Scorch, I heard.”

“Monsters, said a weaver in the Neathering. Monsters!”

“Hah! Can you imagine?”

I wanted to stop, correct them all. I wanted to inform them just how wrong they were and how scared they should be. I hadn’t struggled and almost died just for them to mock me. To jeer at all Pel and Atalawe had fought for.

Pel saw my bared teeth. “Pay no heed, Tarko, they will know soon enough when the matriarch sees fit to tell them. Danaxt is on our side now, and that means we don’t need their approval. That way lies a madness that has ruined many a hero in the past. Look at me: what do you think disgraced me other than my fame and success. It’s like that ticabo pie I can smell there.” He pointed out a steaming rack of pies on a baker’s stall, hollowed into Shal Gara’s trunk. “Once you have one mouthful, you want it all.”

I said nothing. The louse-mines had caught my attention. We were passing the Branch of Hoot, where I had hauled lice back in forth in barrows only several days ago. It felt like a whole season had passed. The same fat worker in the puke-yellow tabard was tending a flat wagon that wriggled something awful. Forty lice might have been packed under its net.

What are those things? They look delicious.

“Bloodwood lice. And no. Just no.”

“Fine observation, Tarko,” Pel mocked me.

I didn’t see Ralish amongst the workers, and I turned my face just in case. I heard the man bark to another passerby, remarking on the repulsive wagon.

“Beats me!” he was saying. “The lice are practically throwing themselves out of their burrows for some reason today. I don’t mind; makes my job easier!”

“Strange,” I muttered.

“I might be wrong, seeing as I’ve spent the last two days running from death and using more urka than I should, but do I remember smelling sawdust on you the night I…”

“The night you knocked me out and kidnapped me? Yes. You probably did.”

“Karonak kicked you from the nests then, did he?”

“Like a turd from his shoe.”

“How was working in the louse-mines?”

“All one day of it? Surprisingly satisfying.”

“You finally found a calling you can stomach? By the Three.”

“Don’t tell me I have to go back to those mines.”

Pel’s stern face broke into a smirk. “Nothing will ever be the same now. But don’t you worry about tomorrow. We’ve got to survive today first, and—oh shit. She’s waiting for us, isn’t she?”

Axera Terelta was standing outside my diminutive cottage. She had filled Pel’s usual spot, her warder’s cloak wrapped around her to stave off the dripping rain and hood down low. Mother leaned heavily against the wall, but when she saw us, she exploded into the leafroad, almost knocking over a man balancing clay vases in his arms.

“Tarkosi Terelta! You come here this bloody instant!”

I felt Pel detach himself from me and linger in a shadow between a patch of candlevines.

“Oh, no! No you don’t, Pelikai Maladaq! I see you there, and you aren’t getting away with anything. Don’t you walk away from me, you useless, good-for-nothing, disgraceful, son of a loam-eating bastard! I swear to all the spirits I’ll chase you down and skin you!”

Is this your mother?

“Mhm,” I said, trying my warmest and most apologetic smile.

I like this worm.

Pel shuffled up behind me, arms open to the canopy like a godseer and head low.

Mother stood before us, arms crossed and face quivering with emotion. “I am so furious I could actually strangle you, Tarko! What in the Swathe possessed you to run away? I thought you were dead, curse it! Fallen or crushed in a mine or worse, but to think you left? That you would run off to join the war-party like you did? I always thought you were joking about leaving Shal Gara! How dare you do that to us? To our poor hearts, Six Heavens and Six Hells!”

Guilt swarmed me like gobflies hungry for the salt of sweat. I went for the only defence I could think of: the “but everything’s turned out fine” approach. “The matriarch freed us, Mother. We have her blessing.”

“I couldn’t bloody care! And you, Pelikai. To think you didn’t stop him but went along with him? What by the bleeding trees were you thinking, you old fool? I’ve let you loiter under my cottage all these seasons out of the goodness of my own soul because you were a friend to Teyak. I’ve fed and watered you, curse it, and this is how you repay me?”

“Axera!” Pel clasped his hands. “It wasn’t his fault.”

“Speak quicker, curse you.”

“Tarko didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. I sort of… took him. Against his will.”

Mother smacked Pel in the face with the back of her hand. I thought the man might crumple to the ground, but the old loamer had some ironpith in him. He dabbed some blood from his lip and sighed.

“I deserved that.”

“You’re bloody right you did! He could be dead by now, just like his father, and that would be two Tereltas you’ve gotten killed, wouldn’t it? Curse you, Pelikai!”

Pel bared bloody teeth. “I did what I had to do, Axera. Tarko not only survived, he excelled. Proved himself every bit the Terelta I remember.”

Her sharp fingernail came an inch from Pel’s eyes. “Don’t,” she said. The word was like an arrow striking bark. “Don’t you dare fill his head with this nonsense just like Teyak’s was. I swear, if this is anything to do with your little band of cretins—”

“It’s too late for that,” I said. “I’m one of them now.”

“Well…” Pel winced.

I was adamant. “I will be.”

“Don’t say it!” Mother smacked me, too, cuffing me around my head so much that Serisi and I both seethed.

“Stop that!” I yelled.

Mother looked at me, full of rage but taken aback. A shade of disgust lingered in her face. I had never seen such an expression before, just as I had never spoken so loudly to her. “You have the stones to talk to me like that, after what you’ve done? Inside, now! Before I change my mind and permanently lock the hatch on both of you.”

Like the chided children we were, Pel and I followed Mother up the ladder. The old beggar took some helping.

Tesq was crouched in the corner. She glared at me under her heavy brows and said nothing. A cup of fruit wine was clasped in her hands. Mother stoked the hearth through its guard. I heard Serisi hiss as the sparks arose. Pel and I perched on short stools and waited.

“Call it false hope,” Mother said, “but when I figured the war-party was where you’d gone, I imagined you safe with such a force around you. But when Haidak Baran and the others returned with news of a brutal massacre, I feared the worst. No, not feared. Believed.” Axera drew in the breath she had been running out of. “I had not even begun to mourn for my dead son when I heard of survivors, and not just any survivors, but traitors to the bloodwood. Imagine my surprise when I hear from the lowest levels, from loam-warder trash just like me, that these traitors came in the form of a young man with a crossed-out sorcer’s mark; a blind man, half-dead; and a middle-aged scholar with a stripe of white hair and a staff.”

Pel shrugged. “Atalawe was in on this, too.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Mother snapped.

I frowned. “You know Atalawe?”

“Barely, and that’s not the point. Down we go to the jails, Tesq and I, to find you. The warders would only speak to me on account of me being one of them, and they tell me yes, the boy and all the other deserters and traitors are down in the Burrows, of all places. Further down we go, but they wouldn’t let us see you. Matriarch’s orders. Gods no, I think to myself, and once more, you put my very soul to the test, Tarko.”

“We stood in the dripping rain for hours until the highwarders came to fetch you,” Tesq muttered. I hadn’t thought she cared this much to be so angry. “When we saw you in ropes and heard the booing crowd, all our doubt disappeared. They called you a traitor. A turncoat to Shal Gara.”

“That wasn’t easy for me, either, you know,” I complained.

“Humiliating, is what it is. Another blow for the Terelta family just as we were climbing again. Now you bring this upon us? Today a stranger spat at my feet when they heard the gossip,” Mother said.

“Is it true, Tarko? What they say about you?” asked my sister.

“Are you mad?” I spluttered, but both Mother’s and Tesq’s eyes shone with injured anger. “No, Mother, of course it’s not. Don’t you notice the profound absence of highwarders around me? Or the lack of ropes on my wrists? It’s not true, Mother, we aren’t traitors. Pel and the others tried to save the war-party. The matriarch herself saw fit to spare us, and not only have we been pardoned by the matriarch, but we’ve been given her blessing.”

While Mother was less intrigued and still quietly fuming, Tesq cocked her head. “To do what, exactly?”

Pel held up his hands. “We better start at the beginning.”

My mother’s voice was ground out in her throat. “Please do.”

“When Teyak was alive—”

Mother immediately thumped her fist against the wall. “Gods, not that beginning, you idiot.”

“Fine. You might have written Teyak Terelta off, but I still owe him my life.”

“I know. Both he and you have told me many times.”

“We all took a vow. Teyak, Atalawe, and Eztaral Kraid, too. It was a vow to protect the Swathe against an enemy it had forgotten. When the black sun came, I knew it was time.”

Mother was shaking her head already. “If you say monsters or spirits or whatever they’re all gossiping about in the markets, I swear, I will throw you out of this house so fast—”

“Demons, Axera,” Pel said. “Not only do demons exist, they’ve come back. Teyak was right.”

“Right!” A footstool clattered as Mother moved to grab Pel.

“We saw them!” I yelled. “We saw them with our own eyes, Mother.”

Axera Terelta came to a halt with her hands around Pel’s neck and the scruff of his battered, stolen armour.

“Don’t you dare lie to me, Tarkosi.”

“I may be largely useless, clumsy, and not much of a thinker, but I am not a liar. I’m tired of people laughing in my face for what I know exists.”

Our little secret, said Serisi.

Mother seized me instead and looked deep into my eyes. Like any mother, she knew my face better than I did my own, and I was terrified what she would see in it. The fire of a demon behind my eyes, maybe, and the one secret I could not yet give up. Pel spoke as she studied me.

“I took Tarko against his will, Axera, but I took him to help me save the war-party from walking into the trap the demons had laid for them.”

“Why him?” Mother whispered to Pel, still looking at me. “Why endanger my son’s life like that? Why risk your own, you cretin?”

“I took Tarko to remind Eztaral of the vows she made to the Scions and to Teyak. Being second to Haidak Baran, I hoped she would turn the war-party back. Yet like all the others, she refused to listen to us.”

“Of course she did, you idiot. I remember every word Teyak spoke about your little group, what few he gave me. I might not know everything, but I know Eztaral has no honour. Not since she left Teyak alone on his last night.”

Those words were etched in my mind.

Pel sighed. “Unwise as it may have been, she was our best hope. When we tried to sabotage the war-party instead, they captured us. The demons attacked not moments later, and through luck or the very hands of the Three, we managed to escape with our lives. An arrow wound put me to sleep for the rest of the journey.” Pel gestured to his wound. “The rest, Tarko can tell you.”

I met my mother’s heavy stare square-on. “It’s all the truth,” I said. “I swear on the Three Gods and their spirits. We managed to survive the loam to come back and warn Shal Gara of what was coming. The rest you already know. The matriarch believed us enough to put us in charge of defending the bloodwood.”

Mother crossed her arms. “All of you?”

“All of us.”

“You?” Tesq scoffed. “A worker?”

I narrowed my eyes. “I’m no worker anymore.”

“No,” Mother hissed.

“What? Don’t you believe me?”

Axera shook her head. “My mind begs me not to, but I believe you. I just won’t allow it.”

“What?”

“You heard me, Tarkosi. I won’t have you putting yourself in such danger. I know the life of a warrior, and this is not… not you!”

I poked at the crossed mark beneath my eye. “You should know better than most people, Mother, how much I’ve always wanted anything else than what the gods gave me,” I said. “I used to think it was Father’s fault, but now I know it was Sage Baran’s doing, I have a chance.”

Pel looked at me with an eyebrow raised.

“You are a worker. You are not a sorcer or a warrior,” Mother told me.

“But I could be! And if what I saw in Sheertown comes to Shal Gara, we’ll all have to fight for our lives. I’d rather be wielding a sword or a spell than a shovel when that day comes.”

“No! Enough!” Mother yelled at me. “Fighting… demons, Tarko? This is ridiculous. It’s time for you to realise your place!”

Wood shrieked as I stood and made for the door.

“Tarkosi Terelta! If you leave this house, the door might not be open for you when you decide to come back,” Mother warned me.

I hesitated on the ladder’s first rung for a short moment. “I’m sorry for what you think of me, but this my life.”

My feet thudded on the leafroad, sending a shock through me. There was little pain from my ankle, which was surprising. Perhaps I was so full of pain already there was no space for more to fit. I could understand their anger, but their doubt was too much to bear. I had journeyed so far, survived all this breathless struggle, only to be received as a deserter and traitor by the city I’d done nothing but try to matter to. Even my own family saw me as a stranger. It was enraging.

I slumped at the railing, staring out at Shal Gara’s limits. The weak daylight had died in the haze of rain and smoke. I saw torches where usually only candlevines glowed. Patrols bearing fireworm lanterns crisscrossed the leafroads below me, far greater in number and frequency than usual. It looked like Eztaral was already hard at work.

What nonsense. I do not understand much of families and their ways, Serisi admitted. Her voice was as brusque as usual, but it there was a bluntness to her cutting words.

“Fortunate,” I hissed at her. “Families are always complicated, even the ones that don’t look it. Always somebody to tell you what to do, just like the bloodwood. Don’t you demons have families?”

We are born from two fires joining. You could call these mothers and fathers, but most do not know or remember theirs. We exist as the horde. We live and we die as the horde.

“You said you demons can’t die. Who’s the liar now?”

Our little secret, perhaps, Tarko. We can die. Many of us have starved to death without the light of the demonfire. Others, your kind once killed with magic and obsidian and water.

I shrugged, mulling my mother’s words.

But your mother, she seems to – though I cannot understand why – care for you.

“Because I’m hers, or so she told me once. She’s stuck with me.”

All I know is my father, and I am bound to him just the same.

While I was wondering how in the Six Hells two demons procreated, and whether I even wanted to know, Atalawe came marching along Kī Raxa Branch. Somehow she had rescued Nod out of whichever pen he was being held in and put him to work. Baggage was piled on the orokan’s back, and a number of heavy sacks were slung over the wrangler’s shoulder.

“Tarko! Where’s Pel?” she hollered.

“He’s inside. Talking my mother down from disowning me, or so it sounds like.” The shouting was muffled but evident.

Atalawe whistled a low and cautious note. She passed me a sack without a single comment. “It didn’t go well, I take it?”

The sack was heavy, and my tired muscles struggled. “Mother thought me dead, then a traitor, and now she’s forbidden me to play any part in the Scions or this war.”

I heard the rasp of Pel’s boots on the ladder. The man wheezed as his injury doubled him. The door shut above him, but I heard no slam of the bolts.

“Let’s go,” I said, but Pel caught my arm and staggered against me.

“Go back inside, Tarko. You heard what your mother said. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger. You will only wake up with resentment in your heart. I’ve been down that road. You should not.”

“But I can help.”

“And so you shall. We’ll take the evening and convene at firstglow.” Pel and Atalawe poked Nod back the way he had come. Atalawe was already daubing the old man with her tinctures and mosscloths.

“Shal Gara can wait for you a few hours more. You need to sleep, first and foremost. In the morning, come up to the Branch of Yacada, and we’ll see what kind of help you can provide. No arguments and keep talk of Sheertown and our fiery foes to yourself until then. If you’re to be a Scion, you’ll obey those who outrank you.”

“That’s a cheap trick,” I mumbled as I strangled the ladder with my hand. “Wait, what about this?” I held up the sack.

“It’s yours!” came Atalawe’s cry, and it was the last I heard or saw of them that night.

Inside the cottage, the mood was sombre. Only the hearth made a subtle crackle. Mother stood with arms crossed. Tesq loitered beside her.

I shut the door. “It wasn’t locked.”

Mother marched towards me. It looked as though I were getting another cuff around the ears, and I was about to protest when she seized me in a hug that crushed the breath from me.

As quickly as she had embraced me, Mother shoved me back. “And it won’t be, just as long as you don’t dare to worry us like that again. I will not send another Terelta to the loam, you understand me?”

“Perfectly,” I said. I should have held my tongue, but it was a skill I had never honed. “But you know none of this was my fault.”

I could see Mother’s patience being tested, but all she did was nod. “Pel explained himself.”

Tesq looked me up and down. “I’m glad you’re alive,” my sister admitted, although making a point to barge past me and disappear behind her curtained hollow.

“I am going to help Pel and the others, you know,” I told my mother. “I’m involved now whether any of us like it…”

In ways she cannot imagine.

“…and I know this is what I’m meant for.”

Mother’s stare switched between my eyes. “I can’t deny war is coming. Pel has given me his word. Anything that happens to you I will do to him twice over. Now, to bed with you. I don’t care if the matriarch’s given you her wrinkled old hoof in marriage, under my roof, I am in charge. Not even a demon will change that.”

Mother pointed to the other ladder and my tiny room. I obeyed, grateful for not having to sleep outside. She didn’t question the sack over my shoulder, nor me trying clumsily to wedge it through the hatch.

Misfit hissed at the loud clatter I made as I closed myself away. He was hanging upside down from the branch holding up the roof, his striped tail swishing. He stretched his tiny claws out towards me. I held out my right hand, but to my surprise, Misfit hissed again and backed away along the branch.

“Do I need to apologise to you, too?”

What in the Void is that thing? Serisi demanded.

“It’s called a shrewbat.”

It is vermin.

“No, this is a pet. There’s a big difference. It’s a friendship, sort of. His name is Misfit. Fell into my window when he was nothing but a pup and stayed here ever since.”

This vermin does not seem to like you.

Whatever I had done, the little creature refused to come to me. I blew a sigh, already far too tired for any more arguments, even if with a shrewbat.

I tried to work the knot to the sack Atalawe had given me, but my fingers ached so much I gave up. Instead, I slumped against it like a pillow and listened to the dripping of the rain-soaked city, all the while turning Serisi’s broken claw around in my fingers.

��

Tree after tree came crashing down to the whooping and hollering of demons and their grub-faced warriors. Through the eyes of a ghost, I flitted amongst their churning horde, searching for something I knew not.

I saw hulking specimens standing as giants amongst swarms of navik. Their heavy iron armour crashed as they wielded axes against the charred trunks to the pounding of drums. Demons in robes of iron leaf held wildfire between their claws. Great orbs of it spun before their shining, grinning faces. Others wielded the wildfire as tendrils, encircling trees and scorching them in black spirals. Everywhere the dream whisked me, I saw them. Five thousand and more demons I passed before I saw him.

At the head of their number, the demon king stood tall upon a fallen tree, alone and aloft as a watchtower upon a mountain. Black wings wide, his sword pointed ahead, his chest swelled with a desperate anger. Below him, rivers of navik swarmed around the tree and on into the unburned Swathe.

A blink transported me behind the king’s shoulder. Across his armour of spines, I gazed at the lights of a distant Shal Gara. In the sky of smoke, I saw black claws outstrip the horde and reach for the city’s shine. A tempest filled the air with lightning and thunder. As I stared, the clouds revealed the giant serpent’s eye, one that opened into a maw of teeth that looked fit to swallow worlds.

A roar dragged me from my horror. The demon king faced me, claws reaching for my neck.

16

Aptitude

While the learned soul strives to break each limit of knowledge, the fool’s stupidity knows no such bounds.

A PROVERB OF SHAL GARA

Misfit was perched on the sack alongside me when I woke with a start. His big eyes went even wider before he scurried away in fright.

“Suit yourself, silly beast.”

The sweat was a slick on my forehead. An ache in my left hand was revealed to be the demon’s claw, its markings etched into my palm. I had apparently gripped it all through the night. Even now, it was tough to let go of it. Instead, I ripped a thick fibre from my bedding and tied the claw around my neck. Even against my bare chest it didn’t burn me.

I poked my window hatch open to find Shal Gara wrapped in a haze that was part mist, part smoke. A lancewing blasted over the branch above and disappeared between the leaves.

Strange, how firstglow was such a dreaded time when I was bound by work. The first day of freedom, and it wasn’t early enough. As I drew my leaf window shut, I caught sight of the dark veins running up my forearm. They had grown since the loam. The sandglass wound had gone past the stages of red welts straight to scabs and the shiny skin of scarring.

I probed my ankle. The faintest whisper of pain was all I felt. Every bruise that had ached the day before had disappeared in my sleep. Not daring to question why and how, I chalked it up to a good night’s rest and not having demons nipping at my heels.

All that gave me pause was the nightmare. It had been different than the dreams that had come before. They felt fainter. More like nonsense, but this had the clarity of a memory. And worse, a consistency that made me think twice about sleep. Even now, when I thought of the demon’s stare, I shivered.

With fingers eager for distraction, I began to tear at the knot to the sack.

��

“I don’t know what you lot have done, Tarko, but all of Shal Gara is abuzz,” Mother called to me at the sound of the hatch and the ladder creaking under my feet. She turned only to freeze. The surprise on her face was tempered by a narrowed stare. “Well, look at you.”

Tesq rubbed her sleep-wrinkled eyes to check if she could see straight. “What in the Six Hells are you wearing, brother?”

It was a good question. The armour wasn’t like any I had ever seen the second-born or sorcers wear. Grey leafleather scales covered most of my torso and neck in an overlapping fashion. In a triangle across my chest, copper plates had been woven. Over my shoulders sat more copper in curved arcs that hugged my skin. My arms were clad in archer’s bracers, laced with ironpith plates, and I had gloves of leafleather, perfect for hiding my wound away. A tunic and kilt of hide protected my nethers and legs.

In the burnished shine of a sandglass mirror, I studied myself and came away grinning. “I think I don’t look like a worker anymore.”

Mother muttered, attacking the grains she was grinding in a clay mortar. She was not as impressed as I was. I’d thought a night’s sleep might blunt her reticence but no such luck.

“We already have one warrior in the family, and I haven’t seen Texoc in four seasons.”

“I think we both know now that if Father hadn’t died the way he had, I would have been a sorcer all this time, and Texoc would be right here in Shal Gara. We should start blaming Kol Baran for that, and not Father.”

“Five days in the forest and you think you know the world,” Mother told me coldly.

“I know what Pel and Atalawe told me. I’ve seen Kol Baran look at me.”

Mother slammed the pestle down so hard “And here’s you wearing the same kind of armour I had to sell to gemlenders to keep us from ruin.”

“I thought you’d accepted this?”

“For as long as Pel keeps you out of danger. Doesn’t have to mean I like it.”

“Did you threaten him?” I asked.

Tesq snorted. “Of course she did. Said she’d feed Pel each finger, toe, and eye before she threw him from the tallest branch.”

My kind of woman, Serisi spoke to me. I twitched at the surprise and played it as a shiver.

Mother shrugged. “And I’ll be sure to see my threats carried out.”

I smirked. Mother didn’t. There was more healing to happen between us. I saw that the fear of losing me hadn’t yet subsided. The guilt of keeping the true nature of my predicament from her started to creep through my gut.

To my fault, I escaped quickly, lifting the hatch to let the noise of a rudely awoken Shal Gara into the house. The smell of fires was thick. Tesq, born with highly sensitive nostrils, or so she claimed, sneezed immediately. It was just a shame she didn’t have such sensitivity when it came to cooking something that didn’t smell like shit.

Tesq shooed me away with a yawn. I knew she dreamed the same as I did: anything but to be lumped with the heir’s mantle. “Away with you, brother. Go be useful for a change.”

My boots thudded loudly on the branch’s leafroad. I was immediately stared at by a passing warder, probably trying to figure my tribe and rank and what the in the Hells I was wearing. I smiled and nodded as he went by.

I needn’t have gotten too excited about the attention. The rest of the branch and the roads around the trunk were full of people far too busy or just plain uninterested. Mother was right: the city was abuzz. The messenger children scarpered faster than usual. Half the merchants were busy shuttering their stalls and peering into the forests through the slats, keeping an eye out for something to prove or disprove the gossip traded at their counters.

Further talk of wildfires and monsters had spread in the night. I overheard the same conversations as yesterday, although now more hushed and without as much laughter. I clenched my jaw, vindicated by the worry I heard in their tones. Not that I craved their fear, only their belief.

A night-haired figure stepped into my path, arms crossed and eyes shining. She had been leaning against a louse wagon that I hadn’t noticed. “Dear me! Is that Tarkosi Terelta, I see? Or is it some gloomsprite that’s stolen his body?”

“Overseer Ralish,” I said. “What’re you doing here?”

Ralish hooked a thumb behind her and laughed. I had been distracted enough to forget which branch I was on. The louse-mines churned close by.

“Oh, of course.”

Who is this, Tarko?

“Here to work, then? You’re a bit late. Missed a few days, didn’t you? And here was I thinking you would fit in.”

I smiled awkwardly. Ralish appeared to be irritated, and I was the culprit.

“Didn’t you… didn’t you hear?” I asked cautiously.

Ralish rolled her eyes, each the colour of the true sky. “Of course I did, you dolt. I thought you’d found another calling or run away, but then yesterday, who should march past in ropes but you?”

“You saw me, then.”

“Half the bloodwood saw you being taken to the Crimson Crown. Yesterday you were a traitor, and today you’re free and wearing armour, or so it looks like. Whatever you’ve gotten yourself into, there’s something else in your eyes than there was before. Though it could be the bruises around them.”

I couldn’t stop the guilty laugh that snuck from me. “It’s a long story. One that you wouldn’t necessarily believe, but it involves me escaping the wildfires and the massacre at Sheertown.”

Ralish tutted. “Two of my cousins were in that war-party.”

I bowed my head. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Gossip says they’re more than just wildfires. Monsters, they’re sayin’. You were there, what do you say?”

The matriarch’s orders rang in my head like a horn. “I say maybe they’re right,” I muttered.

“Fine. Keep your secrets then, Terelta,” Ralish replied with a sour tone. “Shame. Thought you made a good fit in the tunnels. You could’ve have made a difference here.”

“What I’m involved in, Ralish, will make a whole world of difference,” I replied. “A real difference.”

I couldn’t stop the words or my wince. Ralish saw it immediately. “Well, I wish you the best, Tarkosi Terelta. Maybe see you around. I’ll be right here, working towards nothing.”

“That’s not what I meant…”

But Ralish was already walking away. A nearby worker was picking his teeth with a splinter. He puckered his lips and laughed. I put my back to the louse-mines and kept walking.

You have quite the silver tongue, Tarko.

“Don’t you start,” I hissed at the demon.

Is that your mate?

I snorted. “No, she’s not my mate.”

Do you have one?

“No,” I said. It had never been a priority. I already struggled to not trip over myself at least once a day and hold a worker’s position for more than a week. “And what about you. Does the mighty Serisi have a worthy mate?”

I managed to climb up two branches on spiralling leafroads before she answered.

My father will choose for me once the Swathe is won, she said. There was not a single rise or fall to her voice.

“How does he choose?”

Righteous combat, of course.

“Of course.” A billow of steam wafted around us as a nearby kitchen opened up vats of soups for queuing workers. My nose must have been ruined by the stench of smoke, but the smell of the food still gurgled my stomach. Gems rattled in wooden tins at rapid speed as bowls were doled out. Slices of meat were being carved off a giant haunch of lizard leg.

“So, you’re like a prize?” I asked her.

Serisi ground her fangs. I am no prize, mortal. I am the one who fights. I am a warrior, daughter of the king, and one day queen should chaos choose me.

Once more, the notion that Serisi was my enemy had slipped from my mind. I cursed myself as it returned and for daring to ignore the fact that inevitably she would stand before me, hungry for my blood. The cold splinter of trepidation stung my chest. I elbowed the thought out of my mind. I would cross that leafroad when I was forced onto it. There was trust to gain first, from both demon and Scion alike.

What are you thinking, Tarko?

“That our lives in the Swathe sound easier.” I bent the truth, huffing slightly with the effort of taking so many stairs in heavy armour I wasn’t used to. By all rights, I should have been breathing like a forge bellows, but my feet kept hitting the stairs with relentless attitude. I weaved between carts and orokan wagons and those clamouring outside their doors to watch the hive of activity. “Look around at all these people, free to live and be. There is no conquest, no chaos.”

But your world is slanted. There is no plain for all to stand on equal footing, but a ladder to climb to reach your sunlight. Chaos has little care for rank. Are you free to live and be as a worker?

“I… Well. That’s more… The thing is—”

Aha! You do not believe in it. You see your precious order as a chain and manacles.

“It works if you believe in it. Order is how the Swathe flourishes, and from what you’ve told me, chaos is nothing but violence and destruction. I know which I would fight for,” I said, adamant.

I had expected her to seethe and roar at me, but there was nothing but silence.

“Serisi?” I said, drawing a flinch from a woman passing by. I bowed in apology and scuttled on. I wished this armour came with a mask like the lancers and wilders.

The demon did not answer me again. Perhaps she saw Atalawe before I did.

At last, I reached the Branch of Yacada. It was far above the Midern, almost in the crown of the Bloodwood, but did not stretch as high as the lancewing nests. Atalawe leaned against a railing, her hands clasped around her ironpith staff while she admired the flashes of emerald feathers above. She was wearing a hooded jacket and tunic of the same copper and grey as my armour, but a thin mosscloth. The usual belts crisscrossed her chest and hips, and polished vials and pouches hung from them. Only the kilt seemed to match my armour.

The wrangler grinned at me broadly when she saw me. I of course grinned back, thinking she was eager to start the day, but her clapping confused me deeply. “Ah, Tarko.”

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” I demanded.

“You didn’t look deeper in the sack I gave you, did you?”

I had not. The armour had been far too enticing. “Erm…”

“We only wear armour for battle.” Atalawe chuckled. “Come on, this way.”

To Serisi’s laughter, and while I pulled off the bracer on my left hand with a loud humph, Atalawe led me along the branch and away from the bloodwood’s trunk. She walked at an unforgiving pace.

“You’re walking well today. Barely a limp,” she noted.

I nodded, still bemused by it myself. “Still aches.”

Atalawe looked proud. “Then it looks like my tinctures and mother’s recipes work even better than I thought!”

“Any sign of Redeye or Inwar?” I asked, hopeful.

Atalawe shook her head and stabbed that subject dead. “Not yet. Now come on. No dawdling.”

Few bloodwood branches grew straight, and Yacada Branch was such an example. At one point in its ancient growth, the branch had twisted around itself and now a thick knot dominated its middle to form a natural hollow. Carpenters had given it walls, windows, and a door, and either they had been shoddy carpenters or it had been seasons since they had wielded their hammer stones and saws. Vines grew across the walls like cracks in old skin. The paint that hadn’t peeled off had stained the wood with its weak colours. Graffiti had been carved across the door, and two out of three windows were without sandglass or shutter.

Atalawe opened the door with a creak. The inside was narrow, dark, and vine-lit, but she ushered me in despite my hesitation. We wound through the narrow, rift-like space within the wood. I ran my hands across the bark, made smooth over centuries.

A smoky light lay beyond, where the rift opened out into a roughly circular space. Walls made of tree-bark rose like the sides of a bowl. The entire clearing was open to the higher canopies. A few vine leaves tried their best to keep the light out, but I could stare up into the highest branches and the orange sky. The sound of a waterfall came from the far end of the space, where a skinny stream of rainwater splashed down the wall and into some hidden rift. Mosses swarmed it from every side. Apart from tables that lay about the place, some slumped with their legs broken, the space was mostly empty. There was a curious patch of dried blood on the floor just near the entrance. A circular and painted card lay in it, also smeared red. I looked sideways at Atalawe.

The woman just shrugged. “There were some squatters that had to be kicked out. A hive of urka addicts to be precise, gambling their tiny gems over talta cards. This is the Scions’ Den, not a place for thieves and cheats.”

I couldn’t argue with that. “I like the name.”

“Pel’s great-grandfather thought it up.”

At the far end of the clearing, figures stood in the haze of firstglow. I made out the hunch of Pel. Eztaral Kraid was there also, judging by her formidable shape. She wore a simple grey ironpith mail and a copper mosscloth cloak similar to Atalawe’s. An obsidian sword was at her hip once again, and across her chest, a gleaming white-and-tawny eagle feather. The symbol of her new rank.

A robed and distinctly unarmoured Pel shuffled towards me. A new mosscloth turban perched on his bald head. He looked a fraction healthier and more colourful than he had the day before, though his face and arms were a patchwork of salves and bandages. Atalawe’s potions had worked. He also wore a grin for my attire.

“A fine morning to you, Tarko. And my, my. You’re bold to be training in full armour,” he wheezed.

“I… shut up.”

“Good to see you alive after your encounter with your mother, Tarkosi! Though you are a little overdressed for the occasion, it has to be said,” Eztaral greeted me gruffly. “Now that you’ve finally decided to grace us with your presence on this wonderful morning, we can at last get started.”

While my head spun, Atalawe coughed. “Surely you’ve got something else to say to the lad?”

Eztaral thumbed her nose and stood arms crossed. “Yes. Fine,” she said, looking me square in the eyes as if her script was written on my face. “It seems that across the years, it’s possible I lost my way and forgot the truth. How and why is my own business, and what it cost us is my own burden to carry. But as Atalawe and Pel have delighted in repeatedly reminding me, it means I also let you down. I regret that deeply.”

“Is that… was that an apology?" As apologies went, the eagleborn’s was awful.

Eztaral sniffed. “What do you want, flowers?”

I could have been angry, but I knew what guilt looked like. To throw her mistakes in her face would have been cruel, and it wouldn’t have halted the demons one bit. “Even if you had listened to us on the road, I have a feeling Haidak would have been too proud to turn the war-party back no matter what,” I replied.

Eztaral’s mismatched gaze twitched. I saw her green eye narrow, intrigued. “Pel’s right. You’re older than your seasons, and here I was expecting a brat, just like how Teyak started out.”

Pel shuffled towards us. His lips were a fresh blue and his eyes fidgety. Clearly he was channelling some urka magic. “You were all brats,” he replied.

Atalawe snickered. “Especially you, Eztaral.”

“That’s enough,” Eztaral tutted. “We’ve got a lot to do whilst Haidak is seeing to the lancewing squadrons and the outer defences—”

“One second.” Serisi muttered the question and I said it aloud as I looked between Pel and Atalawe. “Why do I get the impression that she’s now in charge?”

“Because she is, thick-skull,” Eztaral replied.

“But you left.”

Atalawe explained. “Eztaral was the head of the Scions after Teyak couldn’t lead us any longer. Pel has led us ever since Eztaral left.”

My mother’s accusation of Eztaral abandoning my father had stuck in my mind. “So,” I said, “just like that, you change your mind about the demons and you’re back in?”

The eagleborn stepped uncomfortably close to me. “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought the time for stupid questions was already over. Seeing as we know each other very little, Tarkosi, let me illuminate you. You see, I’m not an idiot, nor any other kind of person who doesn’t change their minds when the world changes around them. And a flaming sword being swung at your head tends to alter a perception. I made a mistake, and I am here to rectify it. So yes. Just like that. Is there anything more?”

“No,” I mouthed, deciding it was best to keep quiet. Eztaral had shades of my mother and none of the love.

“As I was saying,” Eztaral continued between strides around the Den, “Haidak is seeing to the defences. Sage Saronash has dispatched lancewings to watch our new foes and to other bloodwoods to ask for reinforcements. It’s left to the Scions to raise enough might to fight back.”

“And to move the bloodwood,” Atalawe reminded us.

“You think you can actually do that?” I asked.

Atalawe ignored my doubt. “Not me, lad, but Shal Gara will move herself if she so chooses.”

“That is why I want you back in your tribe’s scrollcaves, Atalawe, digging through every bit of information you can find like a quillhog snuffling for roots,” ordered Eztaral.

“Gladly.” Atalawe couldn’t leave quick enough, spinning her staff around her as she walked.

“You,” Eztaral waggled a finger at me.

I stood tall. “Me?”

“Yes you, greenhand. You’re lucky Pelikai here is long enough in his blue teeth for me to listen to his request to make you a Scion. According to Atalawe, you survived not only Sheertown but the loam as well, which is no mean feat that I can easily ignore. While I suspect it’s more to do with luck than anything your father left you, we need every scrap of help we can get, even if it is a scrawny excuse for a worker.”

“So you will train me after all.” I exhaled, relieved.

“Yes. If you stop lying to us.”

Eztaral’s words choked me. “Lying? What do you mean?”

“Eztaral,” Pel began. “He—”

“You’ve said your piece, Pelikai. I want to hear it from him now.”

Serisi was equally concerned. Tarko… Do they suspect us?

“Hear what from me?” I asked.

“Don’t be coy now. We need answers, and you’re going to give them to us without a single question asked. Understand?”

“All right,” I said, finding myself shuffling on the spot as if somebody had challenged me to fight. My throat was made of sand.

Eztaral poked me in the shoulder. “Where did you get the nectra to cast the earth spells you did in the forest? And don’t even think of lying to me. I’ll smell it from a mile away, and I’ll gladly beat the loam out of you for it.”

“I… I didn’t,” I said.

“Lies. Atalawe told us what she saw, for Three Gods’ sake, boy. So, tell me loud and tell me quick, greenhand, where did you get the nectra?”

“I didn’t have any, I said!”

“Just as I told you, Eztaral.” Pel clapped his hands, peculiarly agitated. “He had no nectra.”

“Have you ever touched nectra?” Eztaral demanded of me.

“Of course I haven’t.”

“What did I say about lying?”

“What are you accusing me of?” I protested.

“What we’re talking about, my young and very naive Terelta, is how in the Six Heavens and Hells you summoned an earth spell without any nectra whatsoever. Unless you’re saying Atalawe was mistaken?” asked Eztaral.

I stared between her and Pel until the truth came forth. “I—I don’t know. It just happened. I’m still not sure if it did happen.”

Be careful, Tarko. You have seen their vehemence. This Eztaral will have us both killed if she finds out, Serisi whispered in my mind. Although I had little desire to trust her, I believed the demon in that moment. Eztaral’s gaze was too serious, too severe, and yet I had to say something.

“Redeye left behind a vial of nectra the night you three sprinted into the forest and left me behind with the porters,” I admitted. “When Redeye insulted me, I decided to keep it. Petty, I know, but I did what I did. When the demons attacked Sheertown I tried to use the nectra—”

Careful…

“—and instead I ended up smashing it in my hand.” I showed them the healing slices the vial had cut in me. In the light, the glow had disappeared but the black veins were telltale.

“Rookie error,” muttered Eztaral.

Pel seized me with his wrinkled hands. No matter how much I tried to shrink away, he held me fast as his clouded eyes examined me and fingers probed. The old beggar seemed shocked, and a worry gripped me. “It’s a fatal error in most instances. Sorcers who survive are the lucky ones. Drinking nectra is the only way to survive and channel its power. In your veins, it’s a poison.”

“So Atalawe told me,” I said, my voice breaking with hope. “She also said I would have been dead within an hour. And yet here I am alive days later.”

“She speaks the truth. All the same, Atalawe or a healer should look at this.”

I withdrew my hand sharply. “No, that can’t be. I feel stronger than ever.”

Resolute, Pel shook his head. “A human isn’t meant to be able to survive this.”

Yet you are not entirely human, are you? Perhaps I saved you from this poison.

I shrugged Serisi away.

“The point you and Pel keep conveniently missing is that whatever you did, it’s clearly given you some power you shouldn’t have,” Eztaral surmised.

I wasn’t sure if I should be terrified or excited. The gleam of my future as a sorcer was immediately tarnished. “What power? Why shouldn’t I have it?”

“Oh, you mistake me, boy,” said Eztaral.

“I don’t like being called boy.”

Or worm, for that matter.

“Well, boy, I don’t much care,” Eztaral told me, looming close. “It’s not the fact that you shouldn’t have this power, it’s that nobody should be able to cast magic without nectra. If you ask me – which nobody here has thought to do – I wholeheartedly believe it to be a spurious accident.”

While I was still wiping the spittle from my face, she and Pel abruptly backed away from me. “So let’s see it,” the eagleborn ordered, already sounding unimpressed with me.

“See what?”

“This supposed magic of yours, you dolt!” yelled Eztaral. “What, did you think I wanted a dance or a song? It’s time to go to work! Show us what you did in the forest, if you can.”

I had no idea what to do, but the challenge had been laid down, and I wasn’t about to ignore it. I took up the centre of the Den and made a show of stretching until Pel buried his face in his blue hand. I brushed my hands, feeling the twinge in my right palm, and reached for the dust around me as I had seen earth reavers do. I strained, reaching with shaking fingers to grip the earth.

Nothing happened.

“What an anticlimax,” Eztaral sighed. “I told you, Pel. It was either an accident or Atalawe’s imagination.”

“Give him a moment, for gods’ sake. You’re not the sorcer here, I am. Nothing of magic is simple.”

I crooked my fingers at the dust, beckoning it forwards. I stared at a small leaf, willing it to rise up to my hand, or tumble across the dirt, or even shiver in the slightest. It refused me. I could almost see a pattern of a face in the leaf’s veins, and it was grinning at me.

“You’re trying too hard,” Pel instructed, when the clearing remained painfully still.

“Then what? Try less? That’s ridiculous.”

Eztaral was examining her fingernails. “Says the barely schooled.”

“The mind is the power. Calm is the key. Emotion is the disturbance,” said Pel. “Feel the earth around you and believe it can move. Imagine it. We sorcers don’t create, but we borrow. We take and manipulate to our will.”

I did what Pel told me, and went one step further by closing my eyes. I let my hands hang limper than before but still facing the dust. I tried not to tense a muscle and tried to empty my mind. It was punishing with a demon stuck in it.

What’s wrong, Tarko? Perhaps it seems you are no wizard.

“Will you please!” I yelled, utterly forgetting myself. I kept my eyes screwed shut.

The eagleborn’s forehead was so furrowed I could have planted seeds in it. “Please what, boy?” she yelled. “You want more space? Cup of water? A fresh bucket of dirt? Hurry up, because right now you’re failing to impress me.”

“Don’t rush him, Eztaral.”

Eztaral snorted. “You think of him as Teyak, Pelikai, but Teyak is dead and gone. That burns me as raw as any of you, and yet he can’t be replaced. You should stop trying before you hurt yourself.”

I was scrunching my eyes hard, watching the colours behind my lids flash and swirl. I shut everything out, from the bickering of Pel and Eztaral to the demon breathing in my head. I thought of the rain pattering on my roof in the hovel of a room I called mine and all the times I had dreamed – wished with all my heart – to have a choice of my own.

“By the Three and all their spirits,” breathed Pel.

I opened my eyes, expecting to see a cloud of grit and tiny stones about me and a dose of pure shock on Eztaral’s face.

There was not.

Instead, Pel was working his stained lips, eyes to the ring of sky. Eztaral was picking at a dirty nail. I hung my head.

“Whatever in the Six Hells happened in that forest, looks like it’s of no use to us,” she said. “I’ll have Atalawe train you in the sling and the blade as much as we can before the demons arrive. Perhaps you’ll survive long enough to prove yourself a Scion, Tarkosi. Come, Pelikai. There are far more important matters that need our attention.”

Eztaral scuffed the dust as she about faced and made for the doorway. The nauseous feeling in my gut deepened with each step she took. Pel was dragged along slowly, shuffling his feet.

How disappointing, Serisi said. You must be embarrassed, Tarko. As a proud warrior of the Voidborn, I know I am. I actually had some high hopes.

“Shut up,” I snapped between gritted teeth. My cheeks burned with a mortified fire. “Not now.”

If I stood in your place, I would teach this eagle woman a lesson with my claws.

The demon was quite right. I wanted to chase them down. I pushed all my fury and frustration into my gut, and I did the only thing I could think of – or do, for that matter – and swung my hand as if I held my loaded sling. I imagined an aim at Eztaral’s scorning back.

The eagleborn stopped dead as a handful of dust was whipped from the ground and smacked her in the back of her tattooed head.

Eztaral turned her head to examine the dirt lying on her shoulder. She took a moment to brush it away before looking to Pel. The old beggar was grinning ear to ear like I’d never seen, blue lips straining to keep up.

“It is true,” he whispered. “By the bloody Three, it’s true.”

“Pel, you old dreamer. Do it again, boy!” Eztaral ordered, whirling on me. “Prove yourself.”

“If you hadn’t noticed, I don’t know what I’m doing,” I hissed.

“The mind is the power,” Pel repeated. “Calm is the key. Emotion is the disturbance.”

It took me a long time to find the same concentration to repeat the spell. I didn’t know if it had a name. I did not know how it was accomplished. I did not even know if it was really me and not Serisi, but I fixed my imagination into the dust I felt beneath my cloth shoes.

When I managed to open my eyes without the spell fading, I found a faint, ring-like haze of dust hanging around me. It collapsed instantly.

Eztaral stayed silent and foot tapping.

What does it take to impress her, I wonder?

“Again, and this time, manipulate it,” Pel breathed, as if he, too, were worried about breaking my concentration. He spoke so plainly, as if I had been a sorcer for decades. It was empty advice, lacking anything applicable, and yet somehow I could feel a pressure under my fingers and in my head I might have called magic. It took both the physical action and the clear thought of something in my mind, but lo and behold, after a dozen tries, I held the cloud steady enough to move it. The stirring lasted for barely a moment, and the spell faded when I let myself bray with laughter. A headache pounded in my head, but that didn’t stop my elation.

“This is unreal!” I cried before finding Eztaral bearing down me. She seized my left hand in a grip that was like ironpith.

“As unreal as it may be, you need to remember that this is no game, no feat to impress your mother, no butterfly to admire the colours of. I might only be a second-born and have no dagger across my eye, but I know enough to know magic is not a mere trick. It is a gift from the gods that should be feared and respected and put to use. It is a weapon, and this is a time of war. You have been given a true gift, but if it doesn’t help me kill demons, then I couldn’t care less about you. If you are the weapon we need after all, then I’m bloody well going to use you, Tarkosi. I’m going to put you to work for your city and wring you out for all your worth. So if for one breath you think you’re special, remember this is about Shal Gara and the Swathe, not you. Do you understand me?”

I saw a faint blue hand reach to rest on the eagleborn’s.

“Eztaral,” Pel said. “The lad’s spent seasons dreaming of such a thing as magic. Be still.”

Eztaral worked her lips as if she had plenty more to say. It was Serisi that explained her to me.

She is afraid. She reeks of fear.

The demon was right. I saw where the passion and fire in Eztaral came from, and it was fear. Plain as day, I saw it. I saw the fire of Sheertown in her stare.

“I was there, too, you know,” I said. “I know what’s coming to kill us better than most here. Better than everyone, to speak the truth. So if you think this is some kind of game to me, then you’re sorely mistaken. This bloodwood is the only home I have. If this power keeps it safe, then why would I dare squander it? Pel’s right: I’ve dreamed of mattering since the day I understood the word, and I intend to. You would be wrong to think otherwise.”

Eztaral released me and Pel her. She withdrew, and with a clearing of her throat, she uttered her order. “Again.”

Once more, I stilled my heart and bent my hands to the ground. I felt a shake as the dust peeled from around my boots and rose up around me.

“Manipulate it. Direct it,” Pel urged, pointing to the side of me where a target of wood hung against the wooden walls. “Earth reavers can build walls, fashion darts from dirt, and create a cloud to obscure an enemy. Try to bend it to your will.”

It took me half the morning until I could shape the dust into something I was able to throw, but at last, with magic pounding in my head, I found I could drag enough dirt into some semblance of a ball and force it at the target. The target rocked back and forth, but only marginally, like a wet sock had been thrown against it. It was paltry, but it was magic. And magic that I had created, no less. I still couldn’t quite believe my mind was attached to the body that was casting the spells. Any amount of it entranced me, and I understood I hadn’t known true obsession until that moment.

It did not, however, impress Eztaral. Even Pel grinned as I managed to pass challenge after challenge.

I thought I had managed to impress her when I slammed stones into the target so hard that several actually stuck in the wood. I turned to Pel, who was nodding appreciatively, but Eztaral only thumbed her nose once more and took a breath.

“Again!” she yelled.

��

With Eztaral and I understanding each other at last, the hours fell away to practice. I spent the day in a daze of headaches and elation as the magic swelled within me. Spell after spell was taught to me, and spell after spell, I seemed to manage. Through it all, the pains in my skull and bones subsided, until I was able to summon earth almost naturally. Almost. It still required a huge amount of effort and concentration. And calm. The kind I had desperately sought but never found. Pel was right: my mind was the power, demon and all.

The spells had names, or so Pel told me as I trained. One by one, he drove me through them, never letting up until I had managed them at least several times. And by managed, I mean barely.

A rush was the sweeping spells that moved like waves across the earth. Fort spells stayed still and grew tall to form walls. A dart was like an arrow or slingstone, designed to strike and stab. And then there were difficult tendril spells that moved like the needles of weavers.

There were spells I didn’t accomplish but got close to. The thunderclap, for example, where two stones clashed together around an enemy’s head. Time after time, I got close, but failed, much to Eztaral’s chuckling self-satisfaction. Or construct spells: magic for the braided and painted ones only, or so I was told. Constructs were shapes forged of earth or water that the sorcer wielded. And here was I, who had barely achieved an accurate dart and an accidental tendril.

As the hours limped by, the practice gradually turned from an effort into somewhat of a reflex. Magic was like an endseason leaf, delicate and one squeeze away from crumbling. To seize it between your fingers too tightly turned it to dust.

When the faint glow of the sun goddess beyond the smoke slipped behind the western canopy, Eztaral finally called a halt. I was sweating from every pore, breathless, and nursing a headache I hadn’t ever felt before. I could even hear Serisi huffing hard as if she had trained with me.

“Well, that proves it,” Eztaral spoke at last. She hadn’t moved in several hours, merely watching. Always watching.

“Proves what?” I said, my chest heaving. I was caked in the dust I had been working on all day.

Pel spoke for Eztaral. “It proves what Atalawe and I had hoped. That you’re an anomaly, and that somehow, against all odds, the nectra that seeped into your veins has given you an aptitude that no sorcer has possessed in centuries.”

I was already beaming.

“In the last hour, you’ve cast spells I used to see Redeye struggle with even seasons into his training.” The old beggar bowed his head at the mention of the missing sorcer.

Serisi was there to fill Pel’s moment of silence. Look at you, Tarko. Who thought you would be such an interesting vessel to be caged in after all? Perhaps you won’t die before my father arrives.

Pel pushed his emotions away and spread his hands wide. “Earth, you seem to have an aptitude for, but we should test you for other orders of magic.”

Eztaral shrugged. “The lump might have a way with spells, I can’t deny that, but Pel, your hope is as blind as you are. I know as well as you do that very few sorcers can manage more than one order.”

“And how many can cast spells without nectra?” I piped up, cocky.

The eagleborn glowered at me. “It’s not that you have no nectra, boy, it’s that you have a dangerous amount in the wrong place.”

Pel interceded once more. “And, as such, we need to explore this power. Try the air, Tarko. Try to grasp what you cannot see.”

It sounded like nonsense, but by now Pel’s cryptic encouragements were starting to make some sense. Dust and earth I could sense like strands of spiderthread dragging at my fingers. To attempt to seize the air or bend it to my will was as exactly as futile as it sounded. I strained, and I clawed my fingers back and forth, looking most likely like a complete idiot.

Eztaral seemed to agree. Pel kept encouraging me until Eztaral got bored and busied herself with rolling a barrel from the clearing’s wall. The barrel sloshed as she righted it with one hand.

“I think we can safely say air carving is not the order for Tarkosi. But if you must sate your curiosity, here.” With a blade of a knife, she cracked open the barrel’s waxed lid and revealed dark water within.

I took a breath, simultaneously hearing the grind of Serisi’s teeth at the mention of water.

“Now, Tarko,” Pel said. “You’d think air would be the toughest order of magic, being so intangible as it is. Water, though we can feel its force, grasp it like dirt, is stubborn. It has a mind of its own.”

Pel started by plunging my hands into the cool water. I hissed as it stung my injury. “Of all the magic that demons we have on our side, water is the order they supposedly fear the most. Just our luck that it’s also the most difficult. Only a fifth of all sorcers are water weavers.”

The pain grew in intensity. I hadn’t even begun to try to bend it to my will; the water felt like fresh shards of sandglass in my hand. I ground my teeth until it became too much to bear. Serisi growled in my head, becoming increasingly high-pitched.

“I can’t,” I hissed as I snatched my hands from the water and wiped them on my new leafleather. Naturally, the cloth was waxed to be rainproof, and it took me a moment to rid myself of the pain that seemed to permeate my whole arm.

Eztaral caught my arm as I took a step backwards. Her hands were cold to the touch. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded.

“It must be my injury,” I said, far too quickly for my liking. “Something to do with the nectra.”

“That’s enough for today, Eztaral,” suggested Pel. “We’ve worked Tarko harder than any sorcer initiate on their first day.”

“That’s because he’s got much to learn, you old fool.”

“Does this mean I’m now an actual sorcer?” I interrupted. Though initiate was the lowest rank, it was still a sorcer’s rank and it meant the death of my existence as a mere hand. As such, I hung on Pel and Eztaral’s silence as though it were the brink of a high branch.

“No. Not until Sage Dūnekar says you are,” Eztaral hummed. “Perhaps you should curb that swollen head of yours and see how it’s really done. Want to show him what an actual sorcer looks like, Pel?”

The old sorcer hid his faint blue hands in the sleeves of his Scion’s coat. “I am forbidden. Disgraced, remember?”

Eztaral wielded a finger at him. “I won’t have your skills wasted when the time comes.”

“Dūnekar won’t allow it. And it’s been seasons, Eztaral—”

“I don’t care.”

While they argued, my attention was drawn to the flaming torch in the corner of the clearing.

“What about fire?” I interrupted.

“What of it, boy?”

“It’s another form of power, right? Another order of magic. Shouldn’t I try it?”

Eztaral grinned. “Oh, I’m a great believer in confidence in the right places and times, Tarkosi, but there was only one sorcer who could warp fire and bent it to their will, and that was Kī Raxa, and you are not even a shadow of her.”

Serisi whispered in my ears. Perhaps you’re something different altogether. Perhaps we are.

“I think I should try it,” I insisted.

Pel said nothing as Eztaral’s smile withered. “Don’t get arrogant now, boy. Stronger and smarter than you have tried and failed.”

I took that as a challenge and stepped towards the torch.

“Tarkosi! I gave you an order.”

“Let him try, Eztaral.”

“Fine!” she cried, “I normally abhor wasting my time, but I haven’t had a good laugh since before the war-party, so by the bleeding loam, why not? Come on, then, get on with it, boy.” She put her elbows on the edge of the barrel and her chin in her hands, playing a youngling listening to a story.

The torch crackled just beyond my arm’s reach. The amber flames danced their jig before me. I let my attention fall into their unpredictable flicker and glow, let all the rest of the clearing grow gloomy. Fingers clawed, arm and head aching, I found the calm amid the darker spaces of my mind. All I felt was the growing warmth of a demon claw hidden against my chest.

I reached, aiming only to push the fire as if I were an interfering breeze. There should have been more heat against my hands, but all I felt was a pressure instead. Eyelids barely open now, I growled with the effort of trying to bend the flames.

And there, just as I thought I felt magic bite my fingertips, I saw two black slivers of eyes staring out from the flames, and I recoiled sharply.

“Told you,” Eztaral said from over my shoulder. She and Pel had snuck up behind me. They were staring at the flames as intently as I was. “That kind of magic is for demons and ancient heroes only. Not jumped-up, would-be sorcers that are more mistake than miracle.”

It was in that moment I decided I didn’t like Eztaral. And yet somehow, her approval was something I thirsted for. I hung my head and glared at the dust beneath my boots. I stretched my left hand downwards momentarily, but Eztaral slapped my wrist.

“None of that. Your training is done for the day. Be here all the earlier tomorrow.”

“What then?”

Eztaral snorted. “Why, more training of course, Tarkosi! What? Did you think you’d be ready to go to war after one day? We will train tomorrow, the next day, and so on, until the day comes when you are ready to fight for this city without killing yourself or others. And you better hope the demons don’t beat you to that day. This is war, Tarkosi, and I’ll wager demons don’t sleep like we do. Neither will you if that’s what it takes. Go to Belarhana Branch, where the scholars have their scrollcaves. You can help Atalawe with whatever she needs to get this bloodwood moving.”

I still couldn’t quite understand how exactly a tree moved, but my curiosity was enough to get my tired legs shuffling across the dust. Pel and Eztaral remained behind, arms crossed and watching me go. If I had a tail, it would be tucked between my legs. The day was a strange mix of elation and doubt. To be lifted from the lowly worker tribe was all I’d ever wanted, but it was jarring to find myself placed so low once again amongst the sorcers, even with my strange ability.

“And Tarkosi,” the eagleborn called to me before I weaved through the dark of the narrow branches, interrupting my muddled thoughts. “No matter how much you might want to, I don’t want you using even the faintest scrap of magic outside of the Scions’ Den. You won’t bother a mote of dust, understand? You so much as pester a leaf and I’ll train you until you black out. Sorcers have been exiled for less. Do you hear me?”

“I do.”

Eztaral just squinted at me in suspicion while Pel shooed me on. I ambled through the half-dark and out into the bustling city.

That Eztaral… Serisi smacked her lips. I am starting to like h—

“Don’t you dare say it,” I hissed, as I pointed myself down the bloodwood. “Don’t you dare.”

17

Bloodwood’s Core

Does the bloodwood endure or enjoy our human presence? I am one that believes in the latter. We protect it as much as it protects us. We would be nothing without the bloodwood.

FROM THE STUDIES OF ORAKAL ALAMSA

The warders to the scholars’ scrollcaves were a different kind of bastard.

While I was staunchly unenthused by the Bloodlaws as a whole and their enforced hierarchy, it was always hilarious to find somebody so deluded by their place in the bloodwood. These warders were such types: so puffed up by their importance I was surprised they didn’t float through the canopy like candle balloons. You could have confused their confidence for lancers if you weren’t aware. Precisely like the man standing in front of me.

“I don’t care who you think you are, wretch, or who you been sent here by, you ain’t no scholar, and I don’t recognise your colours. Bugger off!” the warder shouted. He was a bespectacled and officious-looking man who, despite having several decades on me, was still a head beneath me in height. He held a staff before him, barring my way into the caves. I say caves; they were perfectly hewn holes that were rectangular in shape and lined with a multitude of balconies and boreholes leading deep into Shal Gara’s bark. Their entrance glowed with manicured vinelight.

I crossed my arms, feeling far too tired for such a battle. It had been enough spending all day convincing Eztaral I deserved to be where I was.

“I’ll say it again,” I said, feeling some of the demon’s fire in me. “And, slowly this time, if it helps. I have been sent here by Eagleborn Kraid to assist Temach Atalawe. All three of us have the blessing of the matriarch – I shall assume you’ve heard of her – to deal with the impending threat from the east. We’re the Scions of the Sixth-Born.”

My bravado fell on unwilling ears and an empty mind. “Never heard of ’em.”

“Well, you will soon enough, I’m sure, so let me pass.”

In impatience, the warder swung out his ironpith staff, similar to Atalawe’s, and tried to smack me on the legs for my cheek. I don’t quite know how I did it, but I managed to trap his staff beneath my boot. He dragged it back with a snarl. “You’re close to a beating, boy! Clear off!”

“Or what? You’ll fetch some real warriors?”

That’s more like it, Tarko. Earn your place as a demon does.

The demon’s praise seemed like that of a fellow traitor praising me for my treachery.

“Have you not noticed what’s happening in the city?” I gestured around me. It had taken me an age to reach the caves, a mere ten branches away. The corners of intersections were crammed with fresh-looking warders, wearing either incredibly old armour or armour far too fresh. In any case, the sets had been mismatched and ill-fitting. Warriors, wilders, and lancers tramped back and forth in ranks and columns. Workers and merchants followed them with all manner of supplies. Lancewings blasted overhead in constant patrols. The air was heavy with carpenters working in the night, building all manner of fortifications, platforms, and towers to hang or sprout from the broadest branches. For a city that was so unused to the concept of war, Haidak Baran had managed to change Shal Gara’s mind in less than a day. I guessed that was the power of guilt and fear.

“And that is why I am even more suspicious of chancers like you trying to get in my sacred caves!” barked the diminutive man. A vein on his forehead zigzagged down his skin in an aggressive and swollen fashion.

Thankfully, I saw Atalawe emerge from the glow of the scrollcaves. She looked exhausted, but as almost always, the smile on her face was defiant. “And we are appreciative of your vigilance!” she called out.

“You know this little scrotum?” asked the warder of Atalawe.

Little? That is rich.

Atalawe flashed me a wink. “He’s clearly full of himself after a day of training, but I think I recognise him. I’ll vouch for the lad. You can stand down, Kalabash.”

Kalabash did as he was told with much grumbling. I smiled at him broadly as I passed him by.

“There’s a lot of fear in the air, Tarko. Some don’t know how to handle it,” Atalawe said as she guided me past the threshold of the gateway. “Welcome to the scrollcaves.”

The ancestral home of the scholar tribe was not so much a cave as a canyon. The walls, the height of which tested my tired neck, were carved wood covered in a range of frescoes and paintings of stories I’d known since childhood. Of Suluz the Strong and the Scorchwars before I was born. Of the plague centuries ago. Where they ended, shelves took over, lined with trinkets and treasures of Shal Gara, along with hundreds of animal skulls or stuffed specimens.

Balconies peeked from the highest reaches of the scrollcaves’ walls. Each had a system of pulleys for hoisting baskets from shelf to shelf and to the terraces in between. Where baskets couldn’t reach, fat, mottled lizards meandered along railings delivering scrolls tied to their backs.

Before us lay a stone-paved avenue between the walls wide enough for a row of slim narin trees. Waif birds twirled between the shelves and treetops, keeping a constant song and occasionally seeing fit to paint a passing scholar with dung.

“For all my tribe’s downfalls, this remains our finest achievement. My mother said that, and I’ve never found a reason to disagree.” Atalawe sighed wistfully as she paused to let me take it in. I got barely a moment before her elbow was in my ribs. “But enough out of me. How did your training go? Am I proven a madwoman yet?”

I tried to con her for a moment, but the pride couldn’t be kept out of my smile. “It looks like I’ve got more of my father in me than I thought. I’m a sorcer after all,” I said.

“Ha! I knew I was right! You can’t con these eyes.” Atalawe thumped me on the back so hard I almost fell. Her shout had an echo to it and drew more than a few stares and shushes from nearby scholars.

“That you were, Atalawe. Turns out I’m a mudmage just like Redeye.”

The name stilled Atalawe. I inwardly cursed my slip. Serisi sighed within me.

Clever boy.

“That’s incredible news,” Atalawe said. Her grin failed to die, but I saw the twitch in one of her eyes. I had never been able to find the right words to blunt an awkward moment, and I didn’t do any better now.

“Any sign of him?” I grimaced. “Or Inwar?”

“Not yet, but there will be. My brother will return. For seasons I’ve been told my optimism verges on the abusive, and I refuse to change now. Come,” she said, clapping my sore shoulder once more, “we’ll talk more of your magic later.”

Atalawe led us a weaving path between groups of scholars gathered in hushed conversation, tracing her hands across the intricate walls whenever she could.

I could see the seasons etched in the scrollcaves’ architecture. The deeper we weaved into the stately tunnel, the paler and more worn the carvings became. Some had even been utterly destroyed by a tunnel being carved through them. Statues of jade and pink crystal watched over us at intervals. Their wooden pedestals were carved with famous names in fancy glyphs. Descriptions and dates joined them in tiny writing I had to peer at.

Atalawe could see me looking and wondering. “Tut tut. You don’t know your history, do you, Tarko? These are the heroes of the Swathe. Matriarchs of Shal Gara, Dorla Sel, and other bloodwoods. Their generations stretch back from the first matriarchs fifteen hundred seasons ago to the plague, the Orphan Matriarch, and mother of Danaxt’s line.”

“I knew that. Just hard to recognise at first,” I said. I could feel Serisi staring through my eyes, examining our history. There was scorn here and there, but mostly curious silence. “Who’s this one?” I pointed at an older statue made from obsidian. She was of a brutish and muscular shape. Curiously, she was without a head. It looked as though it had been hacked off without care.

“That there is the Mad Mother. Alatash. She was as dangerous as half the Hells and a brutal killer. A cannibal, some scrolls say. She controlled a bloodwood of her own, and one day decided she wasn’t happy with just one. She marched on Shal Gara and would have continued on to Dorla Sel if the people hadn’t revolted against her. Good thing, too: Alatash was ready to burn the whole Swathe to the ground.”

Sounds a pleasure.

The older statues were worn and weathered, but the artisans had clearly honed their skills over the centuries. By the time we reached the deep innards of the bloodwood, the matriarchs of recent seasons were so lifelike I expected them to reach for me. Their eyes certainly followed me. Danaxt’s mother was made of jagū-eye, a rarer stone that toyed with the light. It looked like pitch and molten copper trapped behind sandglass. Beside her, last in line, was an empty pedestal. I stared back at the long avenue of statues. I had seen Suluz, carved in stone the colour of a bloodwood leaf, and the great explorer Bamosh, but a hero was missing.

“Where’s Kī Raxa’s statue?” I asked.

“Conveniently missing, isn’t she?” Atalawe muttered, looking about with a wry smile. We weren’t alone in the grand and shining corridor, not by a long shot. Other scholars in green furs and robes passed us by at a stately pace, staring at our rushing feet. A few of their gaggles actively pointed at Atalawe and me and whispered conspiratorially. One or two stood upon the balconies, looking down their noses at us while they sipped at wine in crystal cups.

“And why do I get the feeling we’re not welcome?” I asked.

“My tribe – from temach, to orakal, to godseer – always turn their noses up at those who choose to specialise in wrangling or seedwitch crafts. But that’s not all,” she said. “I’m somewhat of a… pariah here. Nobody likes to hear they’re wrong, and I’ve told them many a time. And I’m a little unorthodox, you could say.”

I noticed one man with gold trim to his robes stop and stare at us.

“Temach Atalawe! What a surprise to see you in the scrollcaves for once instead of being out in the loam like a sixth-born. At least you’ve managed to wash that jagū-stink off you for a change,” he called to us. “Where is that beast today?”

Another temach was quick to join in the mistreatment. The woman had a puckered face as if she had just bitten into a lemon. “She’s been here all day, Orakal Lilato. Says she’s here on matriarch’s orders and something to do with the Sheertown tragedy.”

Lilato laughed. “By the Six Hells you are, Atalawe! If I heard right, you were one of the traitors being marched to the Burrows yesterday.”

Atalawe was already pushing me past them. “Things change, unlike the lot of you.”

The other temach’s wrinkled face was now creased in laughter. “She’s been looking at all the sacred texts sworn only to the orakals and godseers. Down in the deep rooms.”

Lilato’s disdain turned into abhorrence. “She’s what? What do you think you’re doing, Atalawe?”

“Like I said to this waste of space earlier,” Atalawe said, laughing, “try to stop me. I have every birthright to be here, and if you’re not going to help me assist the matriarch, then you can all piss off out of our way.”

The orakal spluttered. “How dare you, Temach! I—I outrank you!” When hierarchy clearly had no effect on Atalawe’s work, Lilato threatened her instead. “I shall tell the godseers of this!” he yelled after us.

Atalawe couldn’t have cared less and led me through a narrow and inordinately tall door.

“What a bunch of loamers,” I tutted, staring back at the swollen Lilato.

“That slug hasn’t ever forgiven me for turning down his slimy romantic proposals seasons back. He spluttered and yelled and insulted me. Even laid hands.”

“What happened?”

Atalawe’s eyes twinkled with mirth. “I broke his jaw, and he’s loathed me ever since. When people can’t have what they want, they come to hate it.”

To hushed laughter, we changed course along skinny corridors shaped like ravines. Levels of shelves and burrows stretched up into a dark where fireworms buzzed about free of their lanterns. Thin walkways had been carved between the shelves and were occasionally frequented by ambling scholars with lanterns. The larger burrows glowed with vinelight, like eyes out from a cliff-face of scrolls. Their numbers were staggering. If there was an order to them, it was lost on me. Some were huge and ragged at the edges, others dyed green or blue, and between them were leafleather-bound books, their pages of thin, carved wood.

Atalawe guided me on to a hollow at the end of the faintly curving corridor. A wary pair of warders protected a door ajar. Unlike the others, they didn’t try to stop us.

“Who’s the wretch?” asked one of them.

“He’s with me. Another of the matriarch’s chosen.”

The other warder seemed a twitchy sort. “I’m telling you, Atalawe, the godseers aren’t going to like this. You didn’t give us enough gems for this trouble.”

“Like I’ve already told you, it’ll be my problem. Don’t you worry. Your purse is fat already,” Atalawe reassured the man with a hearty pat on his back that made him stagger. I knew the feeling.

Behind the door, a squat and ornate room of muffled air welcomed me. There was a table, lanterns, and shelves, but what was unexpected was the giant pile of disarray that filled the room. The shelves had been cleared. A mountain of scrolls my height and taller spilled over the table and onto the floor. These scrolls looked older than the ones I’d already seen. Their parchment was yellow with age. Some were so ancient as to be inked on animal skins and stretched on boards. More books with wooden pages and faded paint lay sprawled open.

“Next time I hear the word ‘unorthodox,’ I’ll know it’ll mean making a mess.”

“Ha! I don’t make it a secret I have a distaste for my tribe. We made a mistake when we stopped singing our stories and started to carve and write them down. It made us forget, made them something to be owned,” Atalawe ranted away as she picked through her mess. “Looking at these shelves, you’d think we knew it all. You’d be wrong. Those scholars are caretakers and nothing more. We don’t pine for knowledge as we should, but instead organise and reorganise our shelves to look important. And worse, half the scrolls filling these caves are nothing but accounts from drunken, amateur scholars centuries forgotten, claiming to tell the truth. Any texts of use are declared sacred and hidden in rooms like these, out of bounds for temachs and most orakals. Even these stories talk too much of the gods or of nothing at all. Here we have supposed methods of summoning ancestors. Story after story of the gods’ deeds in ancient days. And look here! An old matriarch’s recipe for frog stew, would you believe it? This is not history nor scholars’ work. This is why I am glad to be unorthodox. A pariah. The fourth-born have become lazy, pompous, self-indulgent, and, frankly, stupid. Not unlike the rest of the tribes, to be honest. Anything truly useful has been buried, or worse, lost and ‘destroyed’ by those I told you about.”

“The Fireborn. The ones who worshipped the demons.”

“And may still.”

I picked at a scroll that was purple in colour. Broad figures painted white and red seemed to be praying around giant seeds shaped like arrowheads. They spread across ten platforms that looked to be wheeled like wagons.

“Well then,” I said, brushing my hands. “How exactly are we going to move a bloodwood?”

“Oh.” Atalawe chuckled. “I have no idea.”

“What?” I asked, immediately deflated.

Atalawe thrust her hand between the scrolls and cleared a space to reveal a thick book of wooden pages, fat and faded. Burn-marks crisscrossed its cover. It looked not only ancient but well-worn.

“I have clues, but that is all. Found this hidden at the back of a shelf. Only took me several hours. I’ve always wanted the excuse to look for such things, but I’ve never been allowed to.”

I nodded along. “We’re not supposed to be in here, are we?”

Atalawe laughed. “Absolutely not. The moving of the bloodwoods isn’t so much a fable as a fact that’s no longer true. Small bloodwood saplings are often known to follow the sun until they decide to settle, but that is all that’s believed. My theory is Shal Gara hasn’t forgotten, but that she simply needed to be told to move. In these carvings is an account of the last time Shal Gara moved, more recently than six hundred seasons ago. A fire broke out on a leafroad and burned half the Midern. Shal Gara moved half a mile, presumably in response to the flames or heat.”

I processed her words while Atalawe flipped pages. “Tell me you’re not suggesting we set fire to the tree?”

I do hope so. My father would be most pleased we saved him the trouble.

Despite Serisi’s vote of confidence in the idea, Atalawe laughed heartily.

“No, lad. The scholar that wrote this had less of an empty mind than most fourth-borns I know,” she explained, clenching the hand that bore the tattooed black eye. “He proposed a simpler idea, that exposing the core of a bloodwood to certain wood-smoke might urge it to move. He suggests the sand of the Scorch as an alternative or – even better, he says – the essence of a demon.”

“What essence?” Serisi and I spoke together. Atalawe heard only my voice.

Atalawe slapped the book shut. “I have no idea, but we’re going to try two of them at least. I managed to gather a few supplies before you arrived. No demon essence, sadly.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight?” I echoed.

“Haidak has been clearing the leafroads all day just in case. No merchants have come from the east since the sun first turned black. I have to say, for the son of that bastard sage Kol Baran, Haidak’s surprised me.”

Serisi explained. One does not look into the eyes of a demon and stay the same. Death has the same effect.

“Isn’t that the truth,” I said without thinking.

Atalawe nodded, distracted by something behind me. “And here we go again,” she sighed mockingly. I turned to see a group of angry-looking scholars swaggering down the corridor towards us. Three wizened figures accompanied a furious Orakal Lilato. From the stripes of paint across their faces and garish pendants of a third eye draped on their foreheads, they were godseers and the highest rank of the fourth-born. It was claimed the godseers were so wise they could walk in dreams and understand the Three Gods’ will. I had always been highly doubtful of that. A few warders were in tow, mostly looking as if they had been awoken from a nap.

Tucking the book of carvings under one arm, Atalawe picked up her staff with the other and strode to face them as if she were marching to battle. The two warders at the door looked bemused and awkward. One stared at me and postured as if he was going to seize me. I don’t know if it was something in my eyes, but he backed away instead. Serisi chuckled.

Orakal Lilato was full of pomp and outrage, and that was before he saw the book under Atalawe’s arm. “How dare you, Temach Atalawe! Surrender that relic immediately!” he hollered, voice filling the layered hallway. “That is a sacred text meant only for the higher ranks of this tribe! You have no right—”

“I would argue I actually have every right,” Atalawe countered. “When will you realise that knowledge is not to be hoarded but to be explored and put to work? The dust on these supposedly prized relics almost choked me to death when I entered that room. What are you doing with all of this if not learning from it?”

“Stagnating,” I muttered.

Atalawe nodded. “Correct.”

One of the wintry godseers, one with a braided beard wrapped around his neck several times like a scarf, stamped his foot. “Who is this boy and what in the Six Hells is he doing here? He has workers’ marks.”

Atalawe flashed me a smirking sideways look. “That he does, and he’s still smarter than half of you.”

“Put. The book. Down,” another godseer hissed, prodding her tattooed palm with every word.

“Ordinarily, I might respect your wishes, but these are dire times, and dire actions are needed, as you’ll see tonight, when Shal Gara begins to move. You’ll have the matriarch to answer for if you stop me.”

The godseers laughed between themselves. Lilato gesticulated madly. “You see? She is deluded! The loam has driven her insane.”

Atalawe sighed dramatically. “I don’t know about you, Tarko, but I’m bored of being doubted.”

“Bored is an understatement. Fed up, to be honest.”

I do not like these dusty creatures, Serisi told me. Teach them a lesson, Tarko. I might as well have some fun while I am imprisoned in your mind. Spill their blood.

It was a fine idea, but I clenched my fists and remembered Eztaral’s threat of using magic.

“Now if you’ll excuse us,” Atalawe said, beginning to circle the angry gaggle.

“Stop her! Arrest them,” cried the bearded godseer.

It seemed Atalawe’s reputation preceded her. With a single menace of her staff, the warders backed away. “You fourth-borns can see to your own troubles. Something isn’t right with this city,” muttered one of them. Another silently made for the exit.

“Don’t want none of the matriarch’s fury.”

The last warder shrugged as he joined his friends. Atalawe laughed.

In a rage, Lilato shuffled forwards with a hand raised, but Atalawe was too fast. With a crack of bone and a nasal squeal, the ironpith staff clocked the orakal in the nose.

“My nose! You’ve broken my nose, you bitch!”

To the shocked and confused faces of the godseers and one whining orakal, we tailed behind the warders as they jogged out of the scrollcaves, eager to be free and away from any trouble they could be blamed for.

The statues watched us leave in silence. The godseers, now minus Lilato, did their best to bustle behind us. They shouted all kind of threats of punishment, expulsion, and banishment to Atalawe and me. They waved their wrinkled hands. Several scrolls were thrown after us, bouncing harmlessly off our heads and around our feet.

I looked to Atalawe several times to see if she was worried, and every time her face had the same confident expression, and her bold and bright eyes yelled the same sentiment: good riddance.

“And stay out!” was the final shout to ring in our ears.

Outside, the sunlight had died, and yet the eastern half of the sky had a fine orange glow to it. A bright fingernail of moon hovered between the streaks of ever-present smoke. An awkwardness had taken over the city. People gathered in clumps. Those nearest the kitchens and food merchants nervously swigged from bark cups or half-forgot to eat as they stared upright. The underside of the Crimson Crown had opened up and burned with light. The matriarch and her sages stood upon their regal skyriser, mere specks from Belarhana Branch.

“They’re waiting for us.” Atalawe informed me as she pushed a path through crowds.

“Who is?”

“Who else but the matriarch and her sages?” Atalawe laughed.

At least this time I could fully enjoy being in royal company without expecting to be hanged. “Do you think we can do this?” I asked. “Move the bloodwood, I mean?”

“I don’t think. I believe. All we can do sometimes is believe.”

Hidden in my pocket, I clutched Serisi’s sharp talon.

We waited in silence as a skyriser whisked us upwards through the branches and colossal leaves. We were past the Midern when the drums started to pound. They began slowly, so deep I thought it was the rumble of my starving stomach. One by one, they built into a crescendo that put a shiver in my heart. Call it fear, call it anticipation, but they were the sounds of war. All of Shal Gara would soon know the truth as we did.

Our next skyriser arose as the matriarch and her entourage descended from the Crimson Crown to meet us. The two platforms met where the bloodwood’s crown began. It was where the trunk of the bloodwood divided into six enormous upthrusts that split again and again as they soared. While the lower branches ran at right angles to the lower trunk, these sought the sky and held the entire upper canopy of crimson leaves in their web. The largest of the branches before the split was appropriately named the Branch of the Matriarchs, and it was where a great plaza of wooden decking ringed Shal Gara. It was so large that smaller, decorative trees grew in neat circles between pillars of carvings.

Blind Pel and Eztaral were waiting in their leafleather Scion’s cloaks, hooded and shadow-faced. Highwarders stood close at their side, as did Haidak Baran. His eagle feather had been reinstated around his neck, and yet he still had the habit of scowling at me. Several other lancers and ravenborns stood around him, dour and exhausted. Atalawe stood beside her fellow Scions.

“Did you manage it, Atalawe?” muttered Eztaral.

The wrangler had no time to answer. The matriarch maintained her distance behind a thick wall of spears and muttering sages, but Envoy Okarin parted the ranks to greet us. Along with the regal chains of amber and crystal around her neck, there was a warrior air to the envoy thanks to her black trews and stiff, red shirt. With her head entrenched within its tall, sharp collar, her hands on hips, Okarin’s crimson eyes toured the gathering.

“Well, Scions?” was all she said at first. “Can you get Shal Gara to move? What of that promise?”

Atalawe nodded to Eztaral. She spoke for us all. “It was no promise, Envoy Okarin, but we may have found a few ideas I would like to try.”

“Try? The matriarch wants answers. Solutions, not ideas and guesses.”

Eztaral cleared her throat. “I trust in Atalawe, Envoy. I’d recommend doing the same.”

Haidak, as humbled as he had been in the Crown, still bore a streak of his old self. I hoped it would stay a streak and not widen like a fissure. “You really think you can do this?” he asked of me.

“I don’t think, Haidak, I believe.”

Atalawe smirked as silence was called.

At last, Matriarch Danaxt emerged from her entourage atop her emerald beetle. She sat legs folded and perched as rigid as an arrow despite the sheer weight of crystal jewellery that draped across her chest and shoulders. She moved her beetle towards a large ornate horn of birch bark and polished narin. It sat before her on a pedestal at the platform’s edge. The matriarch halted the insect at the horn’s skinnier end and raised her bracelet-heavy hands wide as she prepared to speak. In the vine- and lanternlight, Danaxt shone with the silver spiderthread that wrapped around her body. A crest of crystal feathers rose above her head. I noticed then that her jewellery glowed with its own shivering light from tiny ampules of nectra.

As the drums fell silent and Danaxt prepared to speak, cheers thundered from all around us. The branches and leafroads encircling the tree were full of people. The vines shone brighter than I had ever seen.

“Hear us, tribes of Shal Gara! Hear us, citizens!” Danaxt uttered. The bark horn gave her withered tone an unnatural volume and reach. I expected even the Neathering could hear her.

“A dark age has fallen upon us, unprecedented in recent centuries. Word of the massacre at Sheertown has spread, but we can now confirm its truth. A truth that lies heavy on my heart. A truth I cannot bring myself to believe even now.” Danaxt took a breath. “Our brave warriors and sorcers died not at the hands of marauders and trickery, but at the hands of foul creatures not of the Swathe. Demons, as they are known to us.”

The roar of disbelief spread through the city and chased the matriarch’s voice into the forest.

“We scoffed, just as you do now, yet you shall believe the word of your matriarch! We have seen proof with our very eyes. The night that still plagues our sun is a sign of their coming. Even now, their wildfires can be glimpsed. Their smoke chokes us, and they grow only closer, my citizens. Believe us when we say we do not take this threat lightly, and that we would not speak these words to you unless we believed it absolutely necessary.”

I watched the fear spread. From my vantage point you could see it in the wild and waving hands, demanding sense and reason. Others crowded along the branches, perhaps eager to return home or escape the bloodwood altogether. Even half the nearby sages looked torn.

Matriarch Danaxt held her hands high for peace. All across the city, warders and other second-born stamped their feet or spears for silence.

“What can be done, Matriarch?” wailed a voice from somewhere in the rich canopy above. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The nobles had the farthest to fall, after all.

While Danaxt took her time in gathering the right words, I stood nearby and useless, vainly hoping a few eyes had found me amongst the important crowd. Rubbing it in Karonak’s face would have been satisfying, but I was thinking more of my mother, Tesq, and even Ralish. I wished they had let me keep the Scion armour on.

The matriarch’s exhale ran through Shal Gara like the sound of a breeze through the Swathe. “We will attempt to move our Shal Gara.”

Half of the city fell deathly silent. I knew the feeling: a confused awe. A sense of being painfully small thrown in for good measure. Just like demons, moving bloodwoods was rooted in fable. At least this memory had survived in better shape. The other half spluttered and blustered. Litter began to rain from branch to branch.

“Let there be peace, tribes and citizens! Believe in the order and majesty of the Swathe. Our mighty Shal Gara has moved before, and she will again, Three Gods willing, and she shall give us the time we need to prepare ourselves for the demons’ coming. It is a blessing of escape from the fires of these would-be destroyers that have come to face us. They have chosen poorly, we tell you! These demons challenge dynasties that have survived for thousands of seasons. Bloodwoods that have stood for centuries longer than memory! These demons have come to our forest before, and we drove them back then, and we will do so again!”

The promise roused the city. My own heart lifted, shivering with anticipation that was equal parts bloodlust, pride, and fear.

“There will be no panic, not tonight nor any other night!” screeched Danaxt over the din of the city. “There will be no fear. There will be no trouble! Every citizen will remember their place and calling. We will have order! We will keep to the Bloodlaws, and by the Three Gods of sun, soil, and rain and all their spirits, we know we shall prevail!”

The resulting roar deafened us all. I had to give it to the matriarch. She was adept at rousing a crowd. I knew words were weapons or tools depending on how you wielded them. Danaxt had spun the truth but wrapped it in pride, duty, and honour. I knew Shal Gara was far from reassured and countless miles from being content. I could see it in the stream of individuals running from the crowds. And yet the shouts remained rampant, ringing out after the matriarch had withdrawn.

Danaxt did not return to the seclusion of the Crimson Crown, but she instead guided her beetle to us, and beckoned to her gaggle of stern sages and warders. “Let us proceed,” she ordered. The branch scrambled to do her bidding.

This queen of yours is impressive for somebody so frail. She is wrong, of course, and likely has more dust than blood in her, but at least she speaks well.

“Not now, Serisi,” I muttered as loud as I dared.

“What are you mumbling about, third-born?”

I turned to find the envoy walking close behind me. Okarin had better hearing than Misfit.

“Erm. Nothing, Your… Envoyness,” I said.

Okarin rolled her wide eyes, and I turned away, mentally kicking at myself. Perhaps it was Serisi dancing a mocking jig. I subtly watched her hands roam over the string of white beads she carried before the demon bothered me again.

Are you this profoundly charming with all other mortals? Or is just with the female ones? Odd, how you are brave in some ways but a coward in others.

I fixed my eyes on the bloodwood’s trunk and surreptitiously tried not to slouch. I had plenty of time thanks to the slow pace of the silver-haired matriarch. We marched at such sedate rhythm it felt like a funeral ceremony. My heart, however, pounded as if I was being marched to execution after all.

“Prepare yourself, Tarko. You’re about to enter the core of the bloodwood,” Eztaral informed me in a reverent whisper. And rightly so. “Only a select few ever get a chance to see such things.”

At the base of the Branch of the Matriarchs stood great doors decorated with intricate and spiralling carvings. Sorcers in ceremonial armour stood guard on tiered scaffolds. Warders at the doors sketched bows before going to work. It took twenty of them on either side of the door just to make it creak. We passed beneath bolts as thick as my head and into a hallway that ran straight as a spear for the heart of the tree. Godseers in ceremonial masks of blue stone lined the hallway, bowing or kneeling in respect. The walls had been polished to a glossy sheen. The polished wood shone blue; this was no glowing powder or vinelight, but a glow similar to that of nectra.

It seemed to take an hour to delve deep enough to reach Shal Gara’s previous and forbidden core. To my curiosity, it was worth every ponderous, silent step. I filled it by watching the sages ahead of me. More than once I caught Sage Baran’s critical glances.

Polished walls at last peeled back to form a crescent around three giant statues of flawless obsidian. Gorna, Alokaris, and Teltori were their sacred and unspoken names. To us mortals they were the gods of soil, rain, and sun, and they watched quietly over us as we entered. Their backs were to a sheer wall of what looked to be muddy crystal, not wood. A fierce blue light shone behind it, so bright it almost pained my eyes. A dull rumbling accompanied the tremble I felt in my feet. It was then I knew I stood at the very heart of Shal Gara, and I stared at the raw power of nectra running through her veins. More godseers tentatively worked away at the crystalline surface. Slender, ornate drills of gold punctured the vein at the foot of each god-statue. Sandglass vats and vials of nectra were stacked in even rows. I longed to see one being filled, but all work had stalled in the presence of the matriarch.

Danaxt broke the reverent silence. “Temach Atalawe, let us waste no time on ceremony and discussion, as several of our sages urge me to do. We shall test your… ideas, scholar.”

“As you order, Matriarch.” Atalawe delved into her satchel and produced an armoured glove made of leafleather and what looked like salamander skin. The same material the blacksmiths and sand-blowers used to handle their forges and molten sandglass.

Once firmly on her hand, and with all eyes upon her, Atalawe took a pouch from her belt and spilled its contents into her gloved palm. It looked like wood chips and sawdust. With her other hand, she ground two small sparkstones together until smoke trailed from the desiccated wood. The smell of pine and cedar infused the air. Atalawe held her hand high to waft the smoke towards the feet of the gods and their nectra. I must not have been the only one that felt a shiver in their hearts as Atalawe stepped closer and closer.

Minutes stretched. Whispers began to grow amongst the sages. Doubt creeped between all those who stood and waited. I was not immune.

Atalawe tried another pouch of wood shavings, her movements noticeably rushed this time. She stood closer to let the smoke crawl up the gods’ obsidian. When nothing happened a second time, she threw down the useless pouches and grabbed a third. That wood failed also, and Atalawe scrabbled to free a wooden box from a pocket.

Eztaral approached cautiously. “Atalawe—”

“Give me a moment!”

The wrangler snapped the lid from the palm-sized box and carefully scattered what looked like dust or ash. It had a profound rust colour, and Atalawe drew a line close to the nectra vein before stepping back to wait.

“It is useless!” cried one of the sages. It sounded like Sage Wasaqa to me, but I couldn’t drag my eyes from the nectra. My head throbbed with its rumble.

Your witch looks to have failed, Tarko. This oversized tree will not move. What a great pity.

“Quiet, demon!” I mouthed, before I almost jumped with the spark of an idea. “What is a demon’s essence?”

We have no essence, Serisi scoffed. We are beings of darkness and fire, of iron and bo—

“Fire!” I shouted, much to the loud concern of Wasaqa and Baran. Even Envoy Okarin regarded at me as if I were raving mad and had just spontaneously disrobed.

“He cannot be serious!” came the cries. Ignoring them all, I stepped from the crowd.

What are you doing, Tarko? Serisi asked of me.

“What needs to be done.”

“Tarkosi!” I heard Eztaral bark, but I was too busy pulling Serisi’s claw out of hiding from around my neck. The moment it left my admittedly sweaty pocket and came into the nectra’s glow, the thing started to hiss like a quenched coal.

Pel’s caution was barely audible. “Careful, Tarko!”

“Somebody stop him!” yelped Sage Baran.

I couldn’t have been more careful. I approached as slowly as you might approach a sleeping tharantos, if the hideous monsters ever slept. For a moment, Atalawe looked as if she might intercept me, but she held back.

“A demon’s essence,” I announced as I lifted the broken claw higher. “Demonfire.”

Traces of flame now ran across its dark surface. The closer I came to the nectra, the angrier it burned, and yet still its heat barely scorched me.

“Tarkosi Terelta!”

I fully expected Eztaral’s hands to land on me at any moment. I was saved by a trembling beneath our feet. Dust trickled from the walls. A deep rumbling grew loud.

I flashed a glance at Atalawe, whose wild eyes were now accompanied by a wilder grin. I raised the claw even closer to the Three. I closed my fist around it and felt its flames blossom. Black smoke curled from between my fingers, but I held myself towards the bloodwood’s core. Three more steps were all it took for the constant wash of blue that painted us to turn fierce and pale. Cries of alarm climbed as I strained to keep hold of the shaking claw.

“That’s enough, Tarko!” Atalawe called to me.

“Gah!” The heat grew unbearable, and despite my efforts, the demon claw fell to the polished floor. It skittered about, marking the wood with streaks of charcoal black and sputtering with fire. A shiver ran through the hall that put jelly in my legs.

With a squeak of boots against worn wood, Atalawe slammed her ungloved hand onto the claw and lifted it from the wood. I snatched it from her palm and held it close. Though I could already feel its heat lessening, it had scorched Atalawe’s hand scarlet.

The shake in Shal Gara did not fade as equally. It was incessant and unmistakeable against my ribs and hands. No imagination was required to feel the bloodwood tremoring.

“We did it, Tarko!” Atalawe laughed through clenched teeth.

“We did something,” I replied. Shielding my eyes, I turned to find Eztaral silently challenging the sages to complain, but they were wary and silent. All except for one, and to my surprise it was the worker tribe’s sage.

“What have you done?” moaned Sage Maku. The plump man’s jowls were trembling more than the innards of the tree.

“Shal Gara understands!” Danaxt intoned in a voice deep and hoarse and remarkably loud. She fixed me with her red and squinting eyes. “Shal Gara understands what we wish it to.”

I picked myself up. The claw in my hand was on the edge of being uncomfortable to hold. A stench of burned leather and acrid sulphur filled the room. White light swirled amid the nectra blue. Without a word of appreciation or congratulation whatsoever from the matriarch, she and her highwarders hurried back into the polished hallway. Without a word, the Scions followed. Once we had emerged into the night, the matriarch raised her hands to the canopy. The leaves were swaying in an unfelt wind. The shiver in the bloodwood shook some of the smaller branches. The crowds had noticed, and their cheers had turned to worried silence.

Danaxt spoke to her entourage alone. “Tonight you will at last earn your seats, Sages. Bolster and reassure your tribes. Keep peace and order. Sage Saronash and Sage Dūnekar, you and our daughter will aid the Scions in any way you can, and they you.”

For somebody who walked slowly, Matriarch Danaxt sure made a swift exit. So swift, I almost forgot to bow. As the highwarders swept the sages along with them towards the skyriser, only one sage held back. It was Sage Kol Baran. He ignored his son completely, preferring to point his painted nails at me. He clacked each one together before speaking over the rumble.

“You might have impressed the matriarch, Terelta,” he hissed, “but you have yet to explain how you are able to hold that claw while nobody else can.”

I had to bite down on my words to keep them unspoken. Envoy Okarin lingered in the cobalt shine spilling from the doors. It turned her eyes purple. They were already closing, and the column of light was shrinking on her. “Sage Baran!” she called. “The matriarch would hate for you to tarry.”

Baran tried his best to look as if it was his own decision. He bowed low and lengthily to the envoy before he chased after the matriarch, sparing not a moment for his son.

Okarin watched him leave. “Though I hate to give that man any reason to gloat, he’s right. You have much explaining still to do.”

I felt a sweat on my forehead.

Eztaral bowed low and answered for me. “All will be answered, Envoy.”

“It had better be, Eagleborn Kraid.”

We were left upon the branch, tired, quietly chewing on our thoughts and watching the churn of the city below. Haidak was the only outlier. He was cursing beneath his breath and glowered at the matriarch’s skyriser, where his father was still watching us. Me, to be accurate.

“He will speak to you eventually,” Eztaral told him with a grunt. Reassurance sounded ill at home coming from her.

Haidak blurted something I only caught the end of. It sounded suspiciously like, “Lancewing shit!” but he did not linger around to clarify. Looking mortified rather than furious, he stormed off down a road that spiralled around Shal Gara’s trunk.

Atalawe clapped her hands. She was already leading Pel in an opposite direction. “We have our own places to be.”

Eztaral followed without a word. “That we do.”

I clawed at the air. “Why does nobody tell me anything?” I tutted as I followed them.

��

Every inch of Shal Gara was now a-tremble. Disbelief in the matriarch’s words had been forgotten. Now agitation and a gawping streak of wonder gripped the city. Citizens either sealed themselves inside their homes and burrows, or gathered in crowds in the higher reaches to watch. Nobody living had ever seen a bloodwood move, and Shal Gara seemed almost ready to perform such a feat.

I shared their feelings: fascination and fear in an intoxicating blend. And I had more to worry about.

Atalawe led us along one of the lowest and thickest branches, where a lone leafroad thrust east into the darkness of the Swathe. The wrangler seemed driven by some need I hadn’t yet figured out. She clenched her fists over and over again. More than once I thought I heard a prayer on her quiet lips. I didn’t blame her: I was close to doing the same. The branch was beginning to quiver violently. At times, I had to spread my arms for balance.

Eztaral and Pel walked behind us. The blind beggar had found some of his urka seeds. With his blue eyes, he didn’t need Eztaral’s arm but he still tottered uneasily, zigzagging from railing to railing. Pel was still far from healed.

We were alone on the branch. On Haidak’s orders, scattered buildings and merchants’ stalls had been evacuated. All the warders and warriors had been pulled back to the trunk. A whole wall of them stood far behind us, watching. From their silent staring, it only confirmed this whole idea of going out on the branch was a terrible one, but it seemed important enough a risk to the Scions. Atalawe led us.

“Surely we don’t have long?” I yelled.

“Not long at all, by the way she’s shaking!” she called back

“And yet we’re still going forwards. Makes sense,” I said, looking around at the smaller twigs that poked from around the branch. Their scarlet leaves were waving back and forth as if bidding us farewell. I hoped they weren’t.

How exactly a tree moved was still one I had no answer to. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure if I wanted the answer. It made me feel even more insignificant than I used to.

“We’re gone far enough, Atalawe. This branch is reaching its end,” Eztaral called. “I won’t start this war tumbling from a great height into the loam.”

Atalawe acted as if she hadn’t heard the eagleborn. I on the other hand couldn’t have ignored her if I tried.

“Atalawe, he—”

The wrangler stopped with a loud stamp of her staff. Candlevines had been wrapped around one end. “He’s alive. You might not believe it, Eztaral, but I know he is. This is the leafroad he always uses. Doesn’t trust the main roads,” she whispered over the rumbling. I realised now. Redeye. Atalawe still clung to hope. “He’ll be here.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know it. I can’t explain.”

I believed her. It was sibling magic and nothing more. Tesq and I seemed to share a mind now and again. She could always guess my thoughts before I opened my mouth.

The noise was now constant and still increasing. Beneath us, the branch split into its leafed and sprawled hand-like limits. The leafroad continued on into the Swathe through a hollow cut between the leaves. It hung suspended in mid-air for two hundred feet before resting against the tip of another tree and disappearing into the dark.

I ducked as something came crashing through the foliage around us. It was just a dead bloodwood leaf from above us. It thankfully missed the road and continued to spin and spiral down into the unlit dark.

So there we stood, all in a line and staring into the night-gripped forest with our only solid ground ready to move at any moment.

That moment came swifter than I had hoped. The rumble of Shal Gara was interrupted by a deep boom that I felt hammer against my insides. A rending crash filled the whole city, the sound of the world being ripped asunder by an inimitable force. My gaze flew upwards so quickly I hurt my neck. Shal Gara’s leaves were swaying back and forth, yet no wind was responsible. I could barely trust my eyes, but the bloodwood was slowly beginning to lean to the west. A higher leafroad was torn slowly yet inexorably from a branch. Wooden spars and ropes tumbled onto lower thrusts of the city. Lower down, more branches were dragging away from the foundations of roads laid centuries ago. They were powerless against the strength and sheer will of the bloodwood. With the noise a painful cacophony in my ears, I watched as a dozen more roads, paths, and rope bridges parted from Shal Gara. One of the surrounding trees cowered under the pressure. A rending snap tore through the forest as it began to topple.

And still, Shal Gara leaned ever more. “It’s not moving, it’s going to fall!” I blurted.

None of the others had any words to speak. I saw their eyes grow wider. They weren’t looking at me, or the destruction raining around us, but downwards.

I had been too hasty.

By the Void and the Iron Icon, Serisi breathed in my head. She had been silent and brooding since I had used her claw against the core.

Past the Neathering and the ring of the Rootfort, the colossal and sweeping roots of the tree were moving too. While the largest writhed as if they dug deeper, others long buried exploded from the earth in clouds of dirt. The gloom of the loam was lit up in flashes of reds, greens, and deep cobalt as fauna was crushed and thrown aside. Trees splintered like twigs of dead wood. Vast sections of earth beneath Shal Gara churned.

While gawping somewhat like a newborn, and with my mind struggling to comprehend what my eyes were seeing, a convulsion shook our branch sideways. I found myself tumbling to my knees. Eztaral and Pel were not far off. Atalawe used her staff like another limb.

I watched the leafroad in front of us splinter. A crack shot through it. Ropes snapped like bowstrings and lashed the ground beside us. One smashed a railing to pieces.

“Our time is now, Atalawe!” Eztaral ordered.

“No!”

Eztaral reached for the wrangler, but Atalawe seized her hand and pointed it down the leafroad. Between the gloom and the sudden rain of splinters and leaves, I could see a figure running towards us. Well… hopping, to be precise.

“Redeye! Brother!” Atalawe screeched over the pandemonium. “I knew it!”

One foot tucked to his arse, torn cloak trailing behind him, hands already stretched and reaching, the figure was not just racing time. Another shape dashed behind him, on Redeye’s tail and closing. Even in the dark, I could see it wasn’t human.

He was trying to outpace it. He was desperately trying, running in a hobble. His face was a mask of pain, but he pushed through it. All the while, the leafroad peeled from the branch, widening rapidly inch by painful inch, and whatever was chasing Redeye gained on him.

Fearless or stupidly loyal, or perhaps a mix of both, Atalawe sprang forwards to help. Eztaral had already seized her arm. “Don’t you bloody dare!” she snarled. “I’m not losing both of you!”

“He’s not lost, curse it!”

Spars twisted as they clung to their nails. Others sprang upright under the pressure. I threw my hands up around my head as a splinter grazed my neck. Pel almost fell, and would have, had it not been for the blade he stabbed into the road.

Don’t fall, Tarko! I will not be killed by a mere fall! Serisi snarled.

Every one of us stretched our hands as far as we could and beckoned Redeye closer as if it could help. Atalawe thrust out her staff and yelled at the top of her lungs.

Redeye was barely a stone’s toss away when the branch jolted. With a rending crash, the leafroad’s last pieces separated from the branch. The gap yawned wider, and I saw nothing but darkness below. But the sorcer didn’t care. With a mad yell, Redeye threw himself from the crumbling edge of the road.

For some reason, I was apparently the lucky one he happened to aim at. The sorcer’s weight struck me like a runaway wagon. He and I crumpled to the ground, wheezing from the impact. Eztaral hauled us both up with an expedience that crunched all the bones in my hand. I promptly collapsed back to my arse and tried to breathe.

“Inwar!” Redeye gasped while he struggled to stand. He barely had a thread of strength in him. “It’s Inwar!”

The void between the branch and the broken leafroad had grown wider still, now more than a spear’s throw.

“Will he make it?” snapped Eztaral.

I sat up, aghast at the prospect of the jāgu tumbling into the night, but Atalawe was laughing with unfettered joy.

By the way the jāgu sailed through the air, huge paws extended, Inwar could have jumped twice the distance. He soared from the leafroad, and for a horrid moment, I though he too might land on me just like Redeye. I coiled up, sure I was to be flattened, but the jāgu’s claws thumped on the road close to my head instead. His claws dragged a line in the wood. The damnable thing wasn’t even panting.

Atalawe wrestled the jāgu to the floor, making Inwar roar with what I assumed – and hoped – was delight. She survived the tussle without a single scratch.

“Always showing off, aren’t you?” Atalawe said, ruffling his tufted ears. She grabbed her brother next, making Redeye yelp. His legs were quivering, bending under his weight. His damaged leg looked suspiciously purple. The foot hung sideways at an angle that brought a stir to my stomach.

“Don’t scare me like that again,” Atalawe told him, whacking him softly on the arm. “What took you so long?”

“Took the scenic route,” Redeye whispered. He was still out of breath but now with relief as well as exhaustion. He looked the way he had come and shook his head in awe. As did we all. The leafroad was now gradually fading into the darkness as we withdrew. Constant grinding and crashing came from the roots of Shal Gara, where trees crumbled before the bloodwood’s unimaginable weight. An empty void seasons in the making was left behind us. Leafroads hung and swung back and forth in tatters. Trees stood bent and broken. A great churn of earth could be seen in the sea of light the bloodwood gave off. Atalawe had done it. Shal Gara was moving, in complete disregard for whatever its citizens believed.

“Bleeding trees and all the Hells,” Redeye grunted. “What did you do?”

I blew a sigh, not knowing how in the Swathe to begin answering that. All I stared at was the orange glow far closer than the horizon. The forest was already aglow with fire, and then and there I felt the twitch of my cheek. I refused the impulse, but in my head, I somehow felt the widening smile of a demon’s jaws.

18

Of The Fire Within

Frogs? Keep your frogs and their stringy meat. Naught is more delicious that a roasted haunch of loamtoad! So greasy. So rich. So sumptuous. Just be sure to wash your hands after you peel off its poisonous skin. Far too many cooks have killed a customer or two – or themselves – in their haste to serve their toad.

FROM THE COOKING LECTURES OF KALABASQA, 1694

“Concentrate, Tarko!”

Clay pots shattering was the music to Pel’s voice.

The spell died away. I finally remembered to breathe and sucked in a cloud of dirt as I did so. Eztaral thumped a hand on my back and made me choke some more.

“Too slow!” she announced while marching to the far side of the Scions’ Den. “While you’re trying to find the wherewithal to summon your spells, a demon will be striding towards you, iron sword raised and flaming, eager to slice you from gizzard to groin. If you can’t even control yourself here, surrounded by friends, then how are you supposed to do so in battle?”

I got up, smeared dirt across my face, and readied myself again. I had been training since before firstglow. Eztaral had been there for a mere half hour and had spent it liberally shitting on all I thought I had accomplished.

“Eztaral, perhaps we should rest for a moment,” suggested Pel, removing the kerchief from his bruised face. The smoke from the encroaching wildfires had grown thicker in recent days. Pel wasn’t the only one whose throat it scorched.

“The demons aren’t resting, Pelikai. Why should we? Again!”

Atalawe barely had time to set up more clay pots before Eztaral came at me. Not charging, but not hesitating either. Her sword had been set free from her hip. The crescent obsidian blades that curved across its face glittered as Eztaral weaved a dizzying pattern in front of her.

I stood my ground and tried to ignore the eagleborn. I spun the dirt in front of me, bundling it into spheres ready to hurl.

“Cast your spells, earth reaver!” Eztaral roared at me.

The spell faltered as my calm eroded. I rushed the magic, and it only resisted me. I dug even deeper, narrowing my eyes on the clay pots and blocking out the sound of feet.

I managed to fire one dart of earth before Eztaral’s sword stopped an inch from my face. Not only that, but I missed the pot as well.

Eztaral exhaled through her nose. I felt her hot air on my cheek. That close, I saw the golden flecks in her crimson eye.

“You have a lot to live up to, Tarkosi Terelta,” she said with a tut, withdrawing to march around the clearing in a circle.

“You push him too hard,” I heard old Pel hiss.

Eztaral looked disappointed. “And you put too much hope in him. He is no Teyak.”

Pel shook his head adamantly, almost dislodging his turban. “And neither was Teyak until the time came.”

Being ignored lit a fire in me. “You know I’m right here, don’t you? As for being my father’s son, I don’t know anything about him aside from the lies I’ve heard and the truths you’ve told me. So forgive me if I’m not living up to some expectation I have no clue about.”

Eztaral glared at me. “Fine. I apologise. I will not drive you as hard. Forgive me if I care too much about saving Shal Gara and the rest of the Swathe. I had thought given your ability you would be much more use to us.”

“Why is it whenever you try to apologise it always sounds like another insult?” I asked.

Eztaral knew I was right. I could tell by the way she stormed off.

“Call it guilt over Sheertown. Call it caring too much,” Pel whispered in my ear as he guided me away.

“I call it irritating. I’m trying my best.”

“Your best, Tarko, is much more than you think it is,” Pel assured me. “If I am to be honest, I’m not the only Scion that harbours a hope you could be a power against the demons that we sorely need. You have an ability we can’t deny.”

“So you think I’m some kind of hero?” I asked hesitantly, not wishing to believe it myself. It sounded like it came with a lot of responsibility along with the glory. Pel put me back in my untrained place with a laugh.

“Confidence can be a poison to those who aren’t careful. I will tell you when I know what you are, Tarko. Take a moment. You’ve been here since firstglow. When was the last time you ate?”

I tried to remember. “Perhaps yesterday?”

Pel pressed a scattering of green gems into my palm. “Get yourself some food. You’re pale in the skin. Come back when you’re fed and rested.”

I cast a look to Eztaral, who was absently drawing shapes in the dirt with her sword. I felt I had disappointed her somehow. What bothered me was why I cared so much.

Taking Pel’s advice, I trudged from the Scions’ Den, alone and wondering if I actually deserved a place there. It was strange, to want something so deeply and, upon grasping it, feel undeserving of it. There was a paradox I didn’t understand but hated.

Free of the Scions’ Den, Pel’s teaching, and Eztaral’s baleful stare, I felt as though I had escaped the Burrows afresh. Workers traditionally only had the evenings to themselves. It was a treat to have freedom in such busy daylight hours. And busy they were. The tremor of feet ran through Shal Gara as much as the rumble of the bloodwood’s path through the forest. The city was alive in more ways than one.

I jogged to the railing to stare down the bloodwood at the passing earth. I was not alone in my gawping. Half of Shal Gara seemed to be doing the same. Leafroads and branches and platforms were crammed with people equally as fascinated and befuddled.

From what I could tell, the roots acted like limbs. Instead of walking above the loam, the bloodwood churned through it, like a hand-plough carving though highfield soil. The trail it left behind was littered with fallen trees and a gutter of rich, black earth. Birds and lizards flocked to feast on the huge worms the tree had dug up. Murmurations of boisterous waifs fought with crows and magpies as they followed Shal Gara’s wake, or roosted in the branches in their thousands. Ravens had joined the frenzy, too. Mountain birds by the size of them. Some were almost as tall as I was.

Ignoring my rumbling stomach, I walked around the bloodwood to see where Shal Gara was going. I found another railing to lean over. A hundred others alongside me did the same.

Shal Gara was headed west. The direction was unwavering, and the Swathe stood no chance against the intentions of the mile-high bloodwood. I watched as trees collapsed before Shal Gara’s might and were swallowed by the churning, complex roots far beneath. On a platform below us, a gang of workers had taken to cheering every time Shal Gara crushed anything larger than a bush. Their bar for being impressed was incredibly low, but it still made me smirk. Part of me wanted to stretch my freedom and wander down to the Rootfort, but I could imagine Eztaral hauling me back to the Den by the scruff of my neck.

Shal Gara had travelled a good distance through the night. A dozen miles, or so the chatter around me said. It was a steady and unwavering pace, but it wasn’t enough to outpace the smoke. A wind brought it streaming from the east. Not a patch of blue shone above the Swathe. A dull orange had replaced it, and what sun I could glimpse above was yet again a disk of rust. Its haze made the rest of the forest but a dream, lost to yellow haze.

“Serisi,” I whispered.

No answer.

“You’re quiet today.”

And you are too busy being a hero. First your wizard ways, and now moving a bloodwood. You have flourished while I am left with nothing but watching. Enduring.

There it was again: the reminder that we were still enemies within one body.

“Some might call that spying, you know.”

You were the one who brought me here.

As I leaned over the railing, unwilling to blink in case I missed any detail of Shal Gara’s movement, I expected Serisi to remind me of my promise to free her and separate us. Surprisingly, she remained silent on the matter. She seemed distracted. Perhaps the dreamless night had left her in a stupor, much as it had me on my morning slog up to the Scions’ Den.

A shiver ran through me from boot to scalp as Shal Gara broke something big beneath her roots. The dull bellow rang out through the forest of woollen smoke. “Tell me, Serisi,” I said, watching a fellow third-borns punch the air and whoop as a narin tree burst into a cloud of splinters. “I’m curious to know what a demon thinks of all this?”

I think… Serisi hesitated. I think it is as disgustingly green as always. The taste of smoke barely covers up your mortal stench, and you worms insist on filling every moment with blabbering. Do your tongues wither away if they are not used?

The demon’s conviction seemed frailer today. I tapped my own temple. “I know you well enough to hear a lie when you tell it, Serisi.”

You do not know me, Tarko. You cannot comprehend my mind.

I chuckled to myself and drew a stare from a nearby onlooker, a first-born like my sister. I pointed down to the loam far below as if that was what amused me. He eyed the nails on my hands and frowned. It drove me further along the railing to another space. “You can’t con me, Serisi. I can feel you staring through my eyes. I can hear your muttering. It doesn’t sound much like complaint or disgust to me. It sounds quite the opposite.”

Serisi hissed like a snake. A pain ran around my skull and made me shut one eye in a wince. It was sharper than when she had tried to hurt me in the forest. I wondered whether she was getting stronger, just like I seemed to be.

“Come on now,” I urged her with a snicker. “Despite our differences, I’d call us closer than most. You can be honest with me.”

Curious ears had heard my muttering over the bloodwood’s rumble. Everybody was concerned by a madman, and so I nodded politely, put my hood over my mess of hair, and went to see about a way to silence my stomach.

You will gloat.

“That’s not my style.”

The demon growled. I heard her teeth clicking, claws drumming in indecision. I am… confused, is what it is. And I am not used to such a feeling, therefore I hate it. It feels like a mortal weakness to me. One that I have no doubt inherited from you and being stuck in this sack of meat.

“That sack of meat is my body, I’ll have you know. And what exactly confuses you?”

I did not expect to be so… surprised. Our kind knows of your world from our elders, and yet you are not the witless beasts they described you as. You are not mindless navik, you are not simple worms scratching holes in the earth. You may be puny and frail, and ugly—

“All right, I get your point. No need to rub it in.” I tutted. I certainly felt like an insect that day; one clinging to the back of a giant beast.

But it is not you that has confused me. It is this land. I see now that what I was told of your forest was wrong. At first it was all too tangled. Choking. Brash. Disgusting. And the stench!

“Serisi…”

Every inch of this tree drips with things I should loathe, and yet I stare at it through your eyes with intrigue instead. I find myself failing to hate it as I should, but rather I wish to know more. She grunted abruptly as if she had disgusted herself. Her shiver ran through me. I blame you and your mortal mind. It must be weakening me.

While she spoke, I roamed a wall of kitchens with conical leaf-thatch roofs. In front of one kitchen, a spit was squeaking above a bed of coals. A fat scholar snake – so called for the eye-shaped patches across its body – had been skinned, boiled free of its poisons, and was now crisping up to sit between loaves of barkflour bread. Beside it perched pickled mushrooms big as my hand and cakes of red moss and yellow berries. My mouth was watering so much I almost dribbled on the counter. Serisi grumbled as loudly as my stomach.

What is this despicable rumble within your belly?

“It’s hunger, demon,” I whispered.

Laying one of the gems down before a cook with dark hair braided down to his waist, I asked for a slice of the snake. As I waited for the cook to go about his work – taking an embarrassing amount of pride and labour over a sandwich if you asked me – I stared into the bed of coals. The wind chased colours of red through their grey husk. Once again, my demon-laced imagination conjured a face within the fiery pit. While my skin prickled in the heat, I watched a patch of the coals crumble, revealing a pair of eyes. A sickle-smile curled.

There you are.

The coals glowed as if a mouth spoke, but the whisper was in my head.

“Here I am,” I breathed, staring around at the crowds around me. The cooks were busy dashing about their narrow kitchen with their clay pots and pans. A nearby armourer was striking a piece of leafleather as if it had personally insulted him.

I realised I had never stopped to see the intricacy in my own world. Its people had aways marred it for me. My Bloodlaw duty had hidden it behind a gauze. It was a pride born within me, and much like my skin or bones, I took it for granted without paying any attention. I stared around at the colours abounding across the small marketplace. The bloodwood was a marvel, one that apparently even a demon could recognise. “So you’re starting to realise your enemy has got some worth. That the insect might not be worth crushing after all?”

As I said, it must be a weakness of some mortal ilk. A foul wizardry of your forest. I do not like it.

I chuckled. “You’re just educating yourself.” I started to wonder if winning over the demon might actually be possible.

Serisi snorted, swiftly returning to her old self. It will not matter. My father will come anyway, either for me or to avenge me. He will not suffer such weakness. He will burn this tree to its roots. There is your education, Tarko.

The demon’s tone surprised me. “Teach me some more, then. Why do you crave such destruction and chaos?” I asked.

Chaos is not merely destruction, Tarko. You have made that mistake before.

“Could have fooled me. What do you call what’s left of the Loamsedge, Firstwatch, and probably a hundred miles of the Swathe by now? All destroyed by your fire, I imagine. Why don’t you consume what’s in your world instead? What gives you any right to take what’s ours?”

The coals flashed, drawing a stare from the cook. This forest is not yours, Tarko. You seem to believe that, but all I saw was it trying to eat you. I bet this tree could shake you all free if it wished.

I had to confess – just like the idea of a bloodwood moving – that appalling thought had never crossed my mind.

Serisi’s fire-eyes avoided mine, watching another passerby who already had two handfuls of cakes but was eyeing up another. The demon’s mouth contorted with another shuffle of coals, grimacing. And you know nothing of our Starless Plains, she growled. Nor of the curse of our own making that is driving us from it.

“Then tell me.”

Serisi sighed and, to my surprise, indulged me. The oldest songs of the Void say our lands used to be a world of life beneath a brighter sky. My kind were said to have plundered it for its riches. Felled the trees, broke the mountains into rubble, and turned the red rivers to gutters of bone, all in worship and sacrifice. We ascended to such power, built our own cities, but meanwhile our great machines worked day and night, ever thirstier. Our monuments crumbled. The fires grew cold. We drank our world dry, Tarko, or so is the blame the Iron Icon lays at our feet. It is he that demands glorious war, and so, as one horde, we survived by walking the now Starless Plains. We walked for centuries until we found the doors into worlds beyond ours, still rich with life. To the call of chaos, we plundered them also. For a time, we prospered once again, but the eternal fire of the Iron Icon commanded more sacrifice. More worlds fell before us, but it was not enough to sustain our own. As our lands splintered, our towers fell, and our machines rusted, pieces of our the Starless Plains began to crumble into the Void. They crumble still, where the remainder of the Last Clan and the Iron Icon waits for our victory.

“I’ve already seen it in my dreams,” I breathed.

The demon sighed. What I feel does not matter. This world must be conquered to save my own. With the plunder of your forest, and the nectra in your tree, my father can open another door to the Starless Plains and return to rebuild. It is inevitable.

I hated her in that moment. “Selfish.”

Serisi and I locked gazes until the cook’s blackened shovel carved her face in two.

“You all right, son?” the cook asked of me while he raked the coals. In his other hand he held out a thin piece of bark. The slab of bread and meat waited atop it. The traditional trio of venoms and sauces had been slathered all over, and it was in danger of dribbling onto my hand.

“Just fine, thank you,” I said, moving away into the marketplace to find somewhere to sit.

“Tarko!” brayed a voice next to me, making me almost drop my bark plate.

It was Juraxi, of all people. I barely recognised him in his Shal Gara warder’s uniform and armour.

“Well, look at you,” I said. “A warder again.”

“Dark times and all that. Shal Gara’s seen fit to take me in.” Juraxi stared out across the market to the forest that ambled past, far below. “I can barely believe what I am seeing.”

I was glad I wasn’t alone, but Serisi’s words weighed on me. “Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?”

“Are you all right, Tarko? You look like you’ve seen a demon.”

I flinched, but Juraxi’s broad smile reassured me.

“No, just distracted is all,” I said.

“A lot to take in, isn’t it? First that demons exist and now suddenly the tree moves? It’s almost too much for the mind to handle.”

The man was speaking my tongue. Speaking my thoughts, even. I couldn’t help but smile at knowing I wasn’t alone in my feelings.

“What’s the plan?” Juraxi asked, plain as daylight.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you seem to have fallen in with a group that’s more knowledgeable than most on this subject. That wrangler, for example, and that sorcer you were with.”

I felt seen in that comment. To be freed from a worker’s life was one thing, but to be recognised as something other was a treat to me. I couldn’t help but stand straighter.

“I don’t know much, to be honest.”

“Juraxi!” came a call, one that I recognised immediately. It was my mother, wading through the crowds to join us. She looked between us, frowning as always.

“You know each other?” Juraxi asked.

“He is my son,” Mother answered. She thumped her obsidian-bladed sword down on the wooden floor and stared me up and down. “Not that I recognise him these days, but that’s him.”

“If I may be so bold, madam,” Juraxi began. “He survived the demons where few others did. Even got clawed by a demon and lived to tell the tale. Not to mention surviving in the loam for a whole night alone.”

While I appreciated Juraxi’s efforts, Mother stared at me as if I’d spat on her boots.

“You didn’t tell me that, Tarko.”

“Slipped my mind, maybe.” I made a weak motion towards the wound in my shoulder and hand.

Mother grabbed my hand. “Looks two weeks healed, not recent.”

“Maybe I heal quickly,” I said. I felt Juraxi staring at me. The weight of his eyes was intense.

“What is it the matriarch has you doing? I’ve never seen anything get you up before firstglow so willingly before,” Mother commented.

“Training,” was all I said.

Juraxi smiled, shook his spear and shield in salute, and was wise enough to make his exit. “Well, it was fine to see you again, Tarko Terelta,” he said, before turning to my mother. “I’ll be waiting on the main leafroad.”

Mother nodded without looking, staring only at me. Her eyes roved my face. At last, she reached out a hand and tussled my hair. I pursed my lips but didn’t stop her.

“I’ll be fine. Pel and Eztaral have my best interests at heart.”

“They might not be my interests,” said Mother. “But I understand. You’d best come home at a decent time tonight. I don’t trust much after you Scions moved the tree.” Mother looked beyond me for a moment. “How on earth you managed it, I don’t want to know. It isn’t natural.”

“Might be the best chance we have against the demons.”

“Demons. I still don’t believe it.” Mother shook her head.

“Everyone will, soon enough.”

“You remind me too much of your father, Tarko.”

It was then she turned away, but not before I said my piece.

“He wasn’t who you think he was,” I interjected. “I found out what he believed in. What he was, instead of the drunken lump we remember him as.”

“You don’t what you’re saying, Tarko. I knew what your father was. More than anyone else did, even Pel. Even Eztaral. Whether he was right or not, he still abandoned us for a reason that ruined us. It doesn’t matter that he was right, but that he went to prove it. He should have been smarter. More patient, but no,” she told me, shortly before escaping into the crowds. The last thing Mother said to me was, “I better see you at home.”

Chastised, I stuffed the snake sandwich into my mouth and stalked back to the Scions’ Den.

��

By the smattering of highwarders standing around the doorway, we had regal visitors. After eyeing my sauce-stained lips along with my Scion threads, they let me pass on into the Den. I made sure to wipe my hands and lips as quickly and efficiently as possible as I weaved through the dark.

There was no matriarch, like I expected. It was her daughter Envoy Okarin who stood awaiting me, arms across her chest. Her favoured string of white beads was strangled in one hand. There were no braids framing her face today, but her sable hair was waxed back into a tail and pinned with lancewing feathers, and it only complimented the sternness of her face.

Alongside the envoy was the stretched pig that was Sage Dūnekar. One blue hand held a handkerchief across his mouth to keep from breathing in the smoke-laden air. Sage Saronash, the Jade Wolf, was there also. Her wooden hand was on her famous sword, and she was currently in a staring contest with Inwar. I got the strong sense this was not a friendly visit.

Thankfully, Eztaral, Pel, and Atalawe were standing between them and me. Redeye had appeared, leaning heavy on crutches. His leg had been bandaged and set with splints. The man looked utterly exhausted.

“Here he is,” Eztaral tutted, immediately confirming my thoughts. “At last.”

I barely remembered to bow. “I wasn’t aware that anybody was waiting for me.”

“This isn’t just anybody, boy,” Eztaral remarked in a whisper. “The envoy and several sages have come to check up on our progress. Though, if you ask me, there’s something on Dūnekar’s mind that I don’t like the look of, not one bit.”

“Probably my presence,” Pel said, licking blue lips. “He’s held a grudge against me ever since I was disgraced and cast from the sorcer tribe.”

“I would guess it’s about how Tarko can use magic without nectra,” added Atalawe. “That’s my wager.”

Redeye blinked owlishly. “What did you say? That’s impossible.”

The envoy’s imperious voice echoed around the Den. “Our time is precious, Eagleborn Kraid.”

Eztaral bowed. “Of course, Envoy. Sages.”

Dūnekar spoke first in his usual thrilling monotone. “Now that you are all here, perhaps you can provide some much-needed answers,” he said, looking at everybody but Pel. “The warders still swear on the bloodwoods and the Three Gods that a sorcer attacked them in the loam when they arrested you. An earth reaver.”

The Jade Wolf spoke up. “We hear your earth reaver returned last night in the nick of time. And as you were of the water order, Pelikai—”

“And forbidden to wield magic any longer,” Dūnekar interjected.

“—the question of who attacked the warders remains.”

“And you, Tarkosi Terelta,” said Okarin. “How is it you can hold that demon claw when it burns anything else it touches.”

Atalawe chuckled. “Don’t we have more important things to be doing?”

“Stow your cheek, scholar,” warned Dūnekar.

Okarin approached me. “Speak the truth, or we will be forced to have a more difficult conversation.”

While I scrambled for something to say, Eztaral answered for me. “The boy has a certain ability which we have been exploring—”

“I can wield spells without nectra,” I blurted. I felt the need to speak for myself. Eztaral and her caution could go to the Hells.

Dūnekar did not splutter. He did not laugh. He hardly looked angry. He simply shook his head. “Such things are impossible.”

“With all due respect, Sage, it’s been a week of impossible things.” I showed them my wounded hand and the blackened scars across my palm. “I broke a vial of nectra in my hand during the massacre.”

To my shock, the envoy seized my arm and dragged back my sleeve to trace the dark veins that stretched halfway up my forearm. In the fainter, smoke-thick light of the Den, there was no denying the faint blue glow.

I tried to pull back my hand, but the woman’s strength surprised me.

“Was the vial of nectra full?” Okarin asked.

“That it was.”

“Surviving this is no simple feat, Tarkosi Terelta,” she said.

“So I’ve been told.”

Okarin’s crimson eyes fixed me with a stare. I found little emotion behind them. I was reticent to hold them for so long, but at the same time I couldn’t look away.

“Those who do survive such accidents are usually crippled from their narrow escape,” said Okarin. “What makes you so unusual?”

“I’ve been asking the same question myself, Envoy. All I know is that I was a sorcer from birth, like my father.”

Sage Saronash agreed. “Teyak was a powerful air carver.”

“He was yet another disgrace to the sorcer tribe,” muttered Dūnekar.

I continued in a voice straining to remain respectful. “I was marked, but then a certain family dispute had me removed from the tribe. I was made a worker instead.”

“The tribe does not make mistakes,” Dūnekar interrupted. He looked at Pel while he spoke to me. “Not willingly. If you were removed from the tribe it was for good reason or because you had no ability with nectra. That is a fact. What intrigues me is why a worker had a vial of nectra.”

I bit my tongue. While I was wondering how best to explain, it was Saronash who spoke.

“Let’s see it then,” she suggested. “Why argue when we can see such a thing with our own eyes?”

Dūnekar grabbed me by the cheeks, pinched between finger and thumb. A wholly unpleasant experience given his clammy fingers. While I made a faint murmur of complaint, the sage looked between my eyes and lips. “He has no nectra in him. No urka.”

“You’re bloody right he doesn’t,” Pel muttered, and Dūnekar remained silent.

The old beggar’s confidence bolstered me. Eztaral had a different tactic for inspiring me. She pushed me into the centre of the Den and whispered, “Don’t screw it up, boy.”

Screw it up. I like this word.

“Why, thank you. Very helpful. Do you give your warriors the same treatment?” I uttered.

“You bet I do.”

She’s right, Tarko. Don’t screw this up. I can feel their suspicion.

“Shut up,” I muttered, drawing a sharp double-take from Eztaral before she left me standing alone and rejoined the others.

Atalawe had set up the clay pots once more. With the burden of the stares heavy on me, I prepared myself with fingers spread but not rigid. I half-closed my eyes and fixated not on the dirt beneath me but the clay.

I felt the swirl of dust around my fingers. Rocks tumbled and sand grated. With a practised motion I brought my hands together, all the while keeping my focus narrow as the head of a pin. With the dirt amassed into an orb, I split it into three shivering shards, took far too long to balance them, aimed, and hurled.

Two out of the three pots collapsed into shards. I shot a look to Dūnekar to measure how impressed he was. The sage merely crossed his arms.

“It’s true, then,” said Okarin. I stood tall and nodded my thanks.

Sage Saronash clapped her hands together, just fast enough not to be mocking. “None of our stories tells of any sorcer who can do such a thing.”

“Not all our stories have survived the thousand seasons since the demons last invaded. There are others we Scions have kept alive in our minds. Such as Kī Raxa. She purportedly had no need for nectra,” Atalawe spoke up.

“Purportedly,” Dūnekar echoed.

“It means supposedly.”

Dūnekar glowered.

“I think the sage knows what the word means, Atalawe,” Eztaral whispered.

Atalawe shook her head. “Whatever you believe, Tarko could be – is – an asset against the demons we sorely need. Maybe even deserve. A gift from the gods, even.”

Envoy Okarin was squinting at me, her fingers now shuffling over her beads. “But for how long?”

“Excuse me?” I said, holding up a finger.

Okarin pointed at my hand. “You had no such darkness in your veins when you stood in the Crimson Crown. I saw for myself. Your wound is festering, Tarkosi. Perhaps not on the surface, but the nectra eats at you from within.”

Atalawe was quick to see for herself, striding to check what the envoy had seen. Her eyes went wider than I wanted or liked. “When were you going to show me this?”

An inconvenient stutter interrupted my excuse. “I didn’t think it was important, because I feel better than ever. Stronger than ever. With all due respect, you’re wrong, Envoy Okarin.”

Atalawe pinched me, but I refused to stand down.

Dūnekar had an excellent knack of keeping all emotion from his tone, while still managing to shame me with all the finesse of his logic and words. The man spoke like an assassin would slip a blade between ribs. “Envoy Okarin is trained in all arts of the tribes, from the forest-lore of the healers, to the dreamwalking of godseers and the finer points of magic and weaponry, Tarkosi Terelta. What expertise do you bring, third-born?”

I shrugged back my sleeve rebelliously. “I know how I feel.”

“Sage Baran is right, you are nothing but an upstart.”

“That is enough, Sage Dūnekar,” the envoy said.

“Okarin…”

The envoy shot him a forceful look. “You dare address me as if I am still your student, Sage?”

Dūnekar did not flinch. “My apologies, Envoy. I meant no disrespect,” he said. His flat tone sounded like an uninspired actor rehearsing lines. There was barely an apology in it that I could hear, but the envoy forgave him with a slow nod.

“Call it hope. Call it desperation,” said Okarin, shuffling the white beads between her hands. Her bewitching eyes searched mine. “But I know enough of the Three Gods and their spirits to know they saw fit to keep you alive, Tarkosi, and to give you a power worthy of a weapon. I also know well enough not to ignore their suggestions. As such, may the Three Gods see fit to keep you, and all of us, alive a little longer. We will see each other again soon, I’m sure, Initiate Terelta,” she announced.

The title caught me off-guard.

“Wouldn’t you agree, Dūnekar?” Okarin looked to the sage expectantly.

“It appears I would have to, Envoy,” Dūnekar replied in a grunt.

“Then so it is! You are a sorcer now, Initiate Terelta. Do not let us down. All of Shal Gara will be watching,” Okarin told me before summoning her entourage and departing without another word.

A creaking, rumbling quiet filled the Den in their wake. I stared at the Scions one by one, silently swelling with pride until Inwar sneezed and broke the spell of silence.

“Well by the loam! Looks like you impressed them, Tarko.” Atalawe ruffled my hair. By the glances she snuck at my right arm, I could still tell she was unsettled by what she saw.

It was Pel who looked most proud. “And rightly so. An initiate, Tarko. You’re a sorcer, lad!”

“A sorcer with a lot of work to do and a long way to go,” Eztaral muttered.

“Eztaral,” Pel chided. “The boy’s trained hard.”

“Fine.” With much crossing of arms and grumbling, Eztaral’s usual sharp and bladed exterior faded until she found the will to slap me on the shoulder in congratulation. It was a firm thump, but, peculiarly, the force barely moved me.

“I can tell how hard that was for you,” I said with a grin. “I won’t gloat.”

Eztaral’s moment of kindness was startlingly brief. The sarcasm landed on me like a fallen branch. “How kind of you! That is much appreciated. And while we’re patting each other’s backs, I should also say thank you for interrupting me a moment ago. There I was, about to explain it gently and gradually, perhaps to ensure that our secrets are kept safe from those who would work against us, but your way was much better, I’m sure. No matter! Now, before we all start congratulating each other on how many clay pots we’ve broken, or Tarko gets too giddy over all the blood going to his swollen head, how about we do the only thing we can do and get back to work?”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say somebody was jealous,” I smirked, refusing to let her words override the envoy’s.

Eztaral had been striding away, but she curved back around and flourished her sword. “Unfortunately, you don’t.”

Stretching my hands to the earth, I tried, somewhat uselessly, to find some calm.

“Again!”

19

The Other Side

A flame has been ignited that not even the tears of the sun and moon will put out.

GRAFFITI CARVED INTO A MERCHANT’S STALL IN 2298, MISCREANT UNKNOWN

The days plodded by at the pace of our bloodwood: slow and steady. Three days, to be exact, each of them the same gruel of training and work as the previous day. And not just the day, but evenings, too. Eztaral was relentless.

And all the while, the wildfires chased us.

At night we could see the fires’ glow, eating ancient tree after ancient tree. In clearer skies, you could even see the tongues of flame licking at the heavens. There was nothing to do but stand on high branches and take in the horror of the wildfires, and hope they wouldn’t catch us.

Shal Gara proceeded without hesitation as if the bloodwood knew best. I was inclined to believe in the tree. Still, the citizens stared and gawped at the bloodwood’s movement. Day after day, the trees and loam crunched beneath us, and the race between fire and foliage progressed.

The mood in the city remained half-fascinated, half-sombre. Workers toiled night and day at the defences. Those of the second-born tribe trained without halt, throwing spears, arrows, and slingstones, or clashing swords against each other with fear-driven abandon. Sorcers broke clay pots and straw mannequins with spells over and over. Shal Gara ran hot with the anticipation of battle.

My time was not my own. It was Eztaral Kraid’s. From firstglow to lastlight she trained me. As did Pel, but always at the eagleborn’s instruction. Rarely did she disappear to help Haidak, and even in those times I never got a break.

So it was that when I was finally given a rest, I found myself alone on the roof of the Terelta cottage, sandwiched between branch and beam, staring out at a forest aflame. There was no true night any longer, not with the blaze so bright. No star or moon could compete. Barely could the sun, with half her face missing and wrapped in smoke.

I sat with my knees tucked and my hands a bridge for Misfit to run across, squeaking every time he reached my elbow. The little creature had begun to trust me again only in the past few days. It had taken half a bowl of ticabo berries to convince him.

A question lingered like a shadow, growing longer and larger as the brightness of my day had faded. “Do you believe the envoy?” I asked the noise of the city. The hammering of the carpenters was a song that went into the morning. Misfit looked at me as if I’d asked him. “What she said in the Den about the nectra slowly killing me? Killing us, for that matter?”

The demon stayed silent.

“Are you there, Serisi?” I asked.

Always, came the voice. I was thinking. Let me loose and I will tell you.

Placing Misfit on my knee, I reached to the dust spread across the leaf rooftop. The smoke and fallen ash left a semi-permanent patina on every flat and untouched surface. The dust was finer to grasp than dirt, but I managed the spell. A small cloud shifted and coiled around my fingers as I grew it, and let Serisi take over in the way I didn’t completely yet understand.

It was the first time I had seen her close to whole. The demon formed slowly. First her horns, spiralling down to her face and jaws, next her crest of spines and upturned roots that sprouted from her shoulders and wiry arms. Her hands were oversized, wide and clawed. She sat hunched with arms on her knees as I did. The breeze warped her shape, and in the darkness and dust she was almost invisible except for the slight glow caught on her features, but there she sat: Serisi, the daughter of a demon king.

Misfit scarpered with a squeak, jumping into the air and gliding on his furry wings to the nearest branch. He hissed at the sight of the demon.

I didn’t blame the creature. When I managed to drag my attention away from Serisi, I stared around, thanking the cramped nature of the Midern for once. Spending my time in the higher branches had cursed me with comparison.

“No. I do not believe this ruler daughter of yours,” Serisi replied. Her voice was a whisper of dust, sibilant and quiet. “We are not dying but growing stronger. I feel it each day just as you do. Just as I feel your mood, your exhaustion, your hunger, your pain, Tarko of the Swathe. Every piece you lack compared to us immortals.”

I scowled. “Thank you for that.”

“What I say is we become more entwined each day, and you become more powerful because of me,” she whispered. “The others do not understand.”

“I don’t even understand.” I clicked my tongue.

“Nor do I,” growled Serisi. “All that matters to me is you stay alive until I am freed from you. As you gave me your word, Tarko.”

I didn’t flinch as she stretched those claws to me. The end of one was missing.

“That I did, but as for how to go about it, that’s become more difficult, hasn’t it? There are too many eyes on me. Too much faith in me now. The Scions have spent the last thousand seasons hating your kind and each day you become even more of an enemy. You said it yourself when we first stood in the Den: telling Eztaral about you would be problematic to say the least. It’ll be the Burrows or the noose for both of us,” I explained. “Besides, we still don’t know if separating us is even possible now, or if it will kill us both in the process.”

“Then your hesitation will be your doom. It concerns me not. All I have to do is endure. My father will know the magic to separate us, and when he comes to conquer this tree, he will release me.”

“And he’ll likely disembowel me as soon as it’s done, right?”

The demon hissed and looked at me sidelong. Her dust turned orange in the wildfire light.

“Then no,” I said. “I will be doing everything I can not to meet your father, thank you very much. You’re not the only one who has no intention of dying, Serisi. Not now I’ve only just started to live. I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but you’re the best chance I have of staying alive and keeping Shal Gara standing. This whole city is counting on me.”

“I will not betray my kin.”

“And neither will I,” I hissed. “Trust me. We bide our time. There will be another way of being rid of each other. One that doesn’t involve me being disembowelled and one that means we both get to live. Even if it means I have to win a war, I’ll find a way.”

Before I could hear what Serisi made of my flimsy plan and its foundations of pure hope, I pointed at my favourite balcony. “Want to have some fun?”

“Demons do not have fun. Unless you count the ravaging of puny worlds, or peeling the charred flesh from bones—”

“Yes, yes. Here’s some human fun for you,” I said, preparing the sling I had taken to wearing at my belt. I had watched my old target tying down his pots to keep them safe as the bloodwood moved. They ached to be smashed.

“So very primitive,” Serisi reminded me. With the smooth stone loaded, I tutted loudly, cleared some space between us, and showed her the underestimated power of a twirling sling.

A whole row of pots smashed, shortly followed by the wail of my friend the gardener.

“GODS CURSE YOU!” came the distant holler.

I looked at the curve in the demon’s jagged jaws. “I do believe I see a smile in that face,” I chuckled.

Serisi did not deny it, but before she could speak, a scuffle in my room below made the demon’s spell vanish. Serisi collapsed into an eye-watering haze of dust. I cleared it away with my hands and magic, and in doing so, blew the cloud straight into Tesq’s face.

“Wonderful to see the training going well,” said my sister, wiping dust from her chin. “Really impressive.”

I shook my head.

“Were you talking to yourself?” Tesq demanded.

“No, I wasn’t,” I lied. “Talking to Misfit.”

“Figures.”

“Did you want something?”

Tesq crossed her arms and leaned against the edge of the hatch. “That Scion woman with the jāgu is here. Come to fetch you for more evening training.”

I pulled a wry face.

Tesq stabbed the air with a finger. “Don’t you dare, Tarko. I won’t hear you complain about this new life of yours. That’s not fair on me or any of the others.”

I blinked. “Others? What do you mean?”

“Talk gets around, you should know that. Talk of a worker fighting demons. Of you standing before the matriarch for treason only to be rewarded with a place in the sorcers? It’s a tale we heard as children, I swear. I’m pleased for you, but I’m allowed to be jealous. Why wouldn’t I? Father left nothing to us. We have money enough for food and this home and that’s it. I would stand in your shoes if I could. Just like any of the gossips would.”

“I didn’t ask for this.”

“Maybe not, but you certainly enjoy it. I know that look. Haven’t seen it in a while, but you’re happy, I can tell. Must be the only one in this city who is.”

If only she knew the knot of fear I kept in my own stomach. Constantly hiding Serisi was a chore, but she was right: my life had changed as I had wanted. Not exactly how I’d pictured it, but I had little right to complain.

After extending a hand to Misfit and being thoroughly ignored, I stood and threw myself down the slope of the rooftop. I had done it once before as a challenge to myself and almost broke my leg.

“Show-off!” I heard Tesq yell before I plummeted to the road below.

This time, I landed without anything more than a tingle in my heels. I stood up straight, feeling the strength run through me.

“Show-off,” Atalawe told me. Inwar just sneezed. The flurries of falling ash bothered his nose immensely.

“You should meet my sister.”

“Met her. Quiet type.”

“When it suits her.”

“How are you feeling? Ready for a third night of training?”

“Tired, but only in my mind, my bones, every single muscle, and somehow, in my soul,” I replied. “And do we have a choice?”

“I’ve never seen anyone take the punishment Eztaral is putting you through. And all the while you just keep getting stronger. I’m almost impressed.”

“Almost?” I smiled.

“Easy now.”

“Interesting you should say punishment instead of training. Why does it feel like that’s exactly what she’s doing?”

“Eztaral’s punishing herself. She blames herself for abandoning your father when he needed her the most. Making you strong enough is a way of repaying that guilt.” Atalawe shrugged. “At least that’s what I make of it. She isn’t the most talkative.”

“A colossal understatement.” I looked to the wildfires as we walked. “When do you think they’ll arrive?”

“Hopefully never?” Atalawe chuckled. “But speaking the truth, I think we have a few days before they catch up. Shal Gara has sadly proved she isn’t as fast as the flames. From what the lancewing scouts have reported, the demons are pushing forwards at breakneck speeds. They’re chasing us hard.”

Chasing me, whispered Serisi. Chasing you.

I would have paid more attention had it not been for the stares we were receiving. “Are they looking at us?”

“You, Tarko. They’re looking at you. The word seems to have gotten around about you.”

I tentatively smiled back at them before Atalawe nudged me hard.

“If you even thinking about waving, lad,” she warned me with a wink, “I’ll slap your hand right off. The envoy was right; you still have a lot of proving yourself to do.”

I tried to ignore the stares if only to keep myself from giving into them. For somebody who had been shunned for my entire life, it was quite the treat, I couldn’t deny. Not all the stares were of intrigue, however. I saw some curl their lips, unsure of me. To be feared and admired in equal measure was a strange concoction.

When we arrived at the Scions’ Den, it was surprising to see a contingent of highwarders gathered around the entrance. We had trained many hours since the envoy’s visit, and no warder had come to guard us. Once more, they nodded to us as we approached the Den. Pel and Redeye were leaning near the entrance.

“Apparently the matriarch’s sent one of her highwarder contingents down to help guard the Den,” Pel explained.

Redeye seemed put out. “Feels more like they’re here to keep a watch on us,” he grunted. His habit of staring dolefully at me had returned along with his health.

“Don’t complain, you miserly sod. Better than hiding in the shadows,” said Pel.

“Are you ready, Initiate?” Eztaral addressed me as soon as I entered the Den. At least it was better than her calling me “lad.”

“As always.”

So began our usual evening. It was a dance I was used to now. Eztaral folded her cloak and readied her sword. Atalawe propped up the clay pots in ever more inventive patterns. Inwar yawned and pawed at fireworms. Pel was there, chewing his urka seeds. Redeye rested himself on his crutch. The Scions gathered as they always did, with me at their centre.

We waded into the drills. It was the third day of such practice. Even though I was exhausted, my muscles still followed the order I’d become used to. Eztaral’s sword had barely pointed to a clay pot before it smashed under my magic. When Eztaral came at me with her blade, I dodged as I had been taught and brought spells to bear against the obsidian. Again and again the pots were reset, the drills were run, and I fulfilled every challenge but the last one. When my magic missed the last clay pot, I used my sling instead, punching a hole through it.

By the tenth round of tests, I stood without a single breath out of place, ready and waiting. If I wasn’t mistaken, there was a beading of sweat between the patterns of Eztaral’s tattooed forehead. I smiled at her, ignoring the eagleborn’s previous warnings of hubris.

“Looks like it’s time to give me a proper challenge,” I suggested.

Eztaral sheathed her sword. “Redeye. I think you should show our young initiate how it’s done. He seems to have ideas above his station. Sorcers need to learn how to fight sorcers as well, you know.”

Serisi seemed stuck in a mood since our talk on the roof. This should be entertaining to watch.

The sorcer looked shiftily between his sister and Pel. They shooed him onwards. Though Redeye still had a wooden crutch under one arm, he no longer hopped and put weight on the thick bandage and splints instead. He took his place before me and reached within his shabby leather coat for his nectra.

Best mudmage Atalawe had ever seen. That was what she had called Redeye. It didn’t scare me but rather spurred me to test my limits. All my tired mind longed for was Eztaral to say I was ready. Fighting the best earth reaver around was a fine way to skip the tediousness of her training regime.

Redeye broke the cap of a skinny blue nectra vial and swallowed half of it. Stowing the rest for later, with closed eyes he clicked his neck back and forth. I could hear him gargling deep in his throat. When he looked at me once more, his eyes shone a deep and bewitched blue.

Eztaral had seen to the piles of loam-dirt stacked in the corners by the barrelled water. Redeye crooked a hand towards one of them, and without hesitation, the dirt poured towards him in a steady stream. It whipped around him like a snake’s tail before springing at me.

No matter how hard I tried to wrest the spell from him, the force caught me straight in my gut and knocked me into a somersault. I came down hard on my face and ribs.

“Little point wallowing on the ground,” Redeye warned me with a mutter.

Despite the pain I knew we shared, Serisi laughed in my head. I silently cursed her. Instead, I should have been paying attention to Redeye. Dirt had encircled my wrists and formed shackles firmly rooted to the ground.

The demon sighed at me. It looks as if I was wrong: we aren’t growing as powerful as I thought.

The calm I needed to fight back took an age to come, and even then, I felt more that Redeye loosened the shackles than I managed to break them. I reared upright and dragged a spell together: a flat shield of tumbling dust and dirt that Redeye repeatedly battered with dart spells. My face was a contorted mask of effort as I fought to keep my breathing steady.

Pah! If this is anything to judge by, we will not survive the first battle, and the question of being free of you will not likely matter at all. We will both be too dead to worry.

Redeye tore at my shield like an axe cleaving a log. I hauled its halves back together just in time to block what looked like a rolling wagon wheel of earth.

My kind will show you the true meaning of magic, the demon promised me in between gasps of pain.

“Show me then, curse you!” I hissed in spite. My calm and concentration shattered, but instead of the spell collapsing, it held fast under my control. It was as if fingers had snapped in front of my face. There was barely any effort to seek the necessary calm, it simply existed: something to be wielded My arms trembled, numb yet holding strong. Redeye paused, confused. I pounced on my opportunity.

I swung my fists in arcs as pillars of dirt assailed the sorcer from all sides. He fought back with shield after shield. I managed to dodge out of the way while slapping a cloud of dirt around him. Pressing and pushing, I made the cloud spin and shrink. Redeye railed against me, yet I managed to hold him back long enough for Pel’s hand to rest on my shoulder. The spell broke, and whatever focus I’d had became ragged. A fierce headache pounded through my skull. Redeye hunched on his crutch, staring with those glowing eyes of his. The sorcer’s expression was not a scowl, but it most certainly wasn’t a smile.

Pel said nothing and simply turned me to face Atalawe and Eztaral. One woman was equal parts shocked and bemused, the other frowned.

“He’s ready,” Atalawe hissed.

Even after my best efforts, Eztaral wasn’t convinced. “I’ll say when he’s ready. As will the envoy and Sage Dūnekar.”

“He’s worked hard, Eztaral.”

I shrugged from Pel’s grip. “I’m ready to fight.”

“You’re impetuous, emotional, and lucky is what you are,” Eztaral snapped. “There’s a difference between a training circle and a battle. A difference to taking a man’s life, never mind a demon’s.”

“I’ve killed before. I know what it’s like.”

And I have killed thousands.

“Who exactly have you killed?” Eztaral scoffed.

“A man in the forest.” Why I felt like a child explaining where a monster was hiding, I didn’t know, but ignoring it was impossible. “Several of those navik, too.”

“A man in the forest. Several navik, which I highly suspect was probably just one navik,” said Eztaral. “My, my. Your hands are positively drenched in blood, aren’t they? Can’t you see I am trying to keep you alive, Tarko?”

I couldn’t hold the words back. “Really? Atalawe says it’s guilt over letting my father down when he needed you most.”

Eztaral’s eyebrows shot up her forehead. She looked over her shoulder at Atalawe. The wrangler stood her ground silently, arms crossed and lips whistling. “And here I was, thinking old grudges were long buried.”

Pel’s attention had shifted to the doorway. “Eztaral.”

“What, Pel? What have you got to say?”

“Our highwarders have grown curious. Listen.”

I had already seen the glow of their fireworm lanterns: highwarders, quietly tramping through the dark entrance of the Den.

“The envoy or a sage must have arrived,” said Atalawe while the warders spread out from the doorway like a seeping flood. They took up formations across the walls, forming a crescent around us. They looked to the entrance still as if waiting. No robe-draped sage or envoy appeared. Only Eagleborn Haidak Baran, flanked by two of his own lancers and bearing a flaming torch. The man’s armour matched his scarlet eyes: a polished suit of copper and bronze as red as bloodwood leaves.

“What is the meaning of this?” Haidak demanded of us as he marched proudly into our little circle. The two lancers remained by the entrance, nodding to their fellow second-borns.

“I could ask you the very same thing, Haidak?” Eztaral shot back at him.

Haidak pointed his obsidian glaive at me. “Is it about him? I have no interest in watching you show off, if that’s the case. I hear enough gossip, and I have much to see to without you summoning me at such ugly hours. You know what? You might be my rank now, Eztaral, you might have been my trainer for a decade, and you and this little… gang of yours might enjoy the matriarch’s blessing, but I am of far nobler blood and shall not have you sending a pox-ridden messenger boy to fetch me like some common warrior.” Haidak’s threat might have been a touch more menacing had he not been running out of breath by the end of his sentence.

Eztaral unsheathed her sword. “Haidak,” she said, slow and careful. “I sent no such message. If I wanted you here, I would come to your mansion, kick in your door, and drag you down here by your scruff all by myself, wouldn’t I?”

The noble looked between us all. “Then… who?”

A gurgling cry came from behind him. One of the lancers clutched at his throat as blood poured between his fingers. His murderer stood beside him, a highwarder brandishing a copper knife. The other lancer couldn’t draw his sword fast enough. Two more of the highwarders stabbed him repeatedly with their own blades; the same kind I had lost to the forest. The others, almost two-score, swarmed towards us with weapons drawn and obsidian spears levelled.

“Assassins!” Eztaral bellowed, eyes aflame and grin wide with the ferocity of her battle-cry. “With me, Scions!”

20

Fireborn

The scholars count five thousand kinds of tree in the Swathe, not including the plants and flowers that call them home. Nor even the cornucopia of animals that tread the branches, air, or loam. We are but one kind amongst countless. Human. This world is not ours, despite what the matriarchs and sages would have you believe. And even that knowledge cannot unite us.

FROM “MUSINGS FROM THE MULCH”

For all my training, anxiety strangled me surprisingly quickly. The exact same thought raced through my mind alongside Serisi’s screech.

Don’t you dare kill us now, Tarko!

Redeye downed the rest of his nectra vial before crushing two of the fake warders against the walls with fists of dirt. I saw Inwar leap over Atalawe, using her shoulders as a springboard, and drive another to the ground screaming. The wrangler’s staff was a blur that cracked leafleather and bones. Eztaral and Haidak flourished and parried with their fine blades. Pel held back, standing near me and blinking frantically.

“Move, Pel. I can fight!” I yelled, even as the doubt assailed me. Half a dozen of the feckless bastards swarmed around us. I had my sling ready in one hand, and earth sputtered shakily around my other hand, ready to be unleashed. As it turned out, so was Pel.

The blind man had no bow to hand, only a borrowed obsidian sword which he swung back and forth with surprising alacrity. I barely saw the blade strike. The only indication that Pel landed his blows came when one of the highwarders collapsed to his knees. The jolt dislodged his severed head, and it fell to the ground still in its helmet. Pel was already dealing death to the others. He fought like Inwar, savage in his approach and yet so nimble I doubted whether he had ever been blind.

For every assassin the Scions and Haidak fell, another swarmed into the Den. These were not gleaming highwarders. To my shock, they wore jade masks carved like snarling lizards. Copper knives were clutched in their hands, raised high and murderous.

I loosed my sling, catching one in the face and shattering his mask. It did little more than earn me the attention of his fellow assassins. A handful bounded across the dirt to smite me before I could reload. I turned to my magic, but I was a thousand miles from calm. I instead teetered over a precipice of fear I’d known in the forest.

Practice saved me. A ring of dirt spiralled from the earthen floor and blocked their charge a mere spear’s length from me. Frantic and messy though my magic might have been, the spell worked. The attackers fell back choking on dust and kept at bay. At least until somebody kindly smacked me on the back. I sprawled on my face. Only my wild flailing managed to keep the copper knives at bay.

Fight better, curse you, Tarko! Serisi howled.

The demon’s indignation flooded me. Pounding my fists on the floor, I drove a wave of earth outwards, seizing some space for myself. My breath came in ragged growls like some beast. I heard the muffled shouts over the sound of battle and the ringing in my ears:

“Protect the boy! Protect Tarko!”

I didn’t need their help.

A knife darted at me. I managed to seize the hand that held it and glared at the wide, white human eyes behind the lizard mask. I snarled as I pushed him away, dragged the knife from his grip, and threw it back at him amidst a tumbling mass of dirt. The blade missed, but the handle struck him between the shoulders. I buried him in earth before he could retaliate.

Knowing they faced a sorcer, the knives withdrew, and spears advanced to pen me in. Riding a bloodlust I blamed on Serisi, I welcomed the remaining assassins, beckoning them forwards. They didn’t meet my eyes but instead stared past me. Several began to back away, their spears shaking.

I didn’t waste my time or chances waiting on them to charge. My fingers clawed for every scrap of dirt around me. I brought it streaming in great tentacles and hammered ceaselessly against my foes. Two were beaten senseless. Another I choked with a stream of earth that filled his mouth and throat.

A spear flew from the haze and managed to score my side. I faltered as the pain shot through me. I felt it doubly, first in my own body and secondly in Serisi. I lashed out, carving a dust-cloud in two and driving the remaining attackers back into Eztaral and Pel’s swords. The Scions’ blades cut their final throats, Inwar snapped his last neck, and Redeye let his spells die. The haze of mudmage spells hung thick in the air.

With shoulders heaving and breath burning in my lungs, I stood separate from the others, further across the circle of corpses we had made and hidden by the dust. One of the fallen around me was alive enough to groan and point with a black-gloved hand. I watched the man reach above my head. In the sporadic glow of escaped and fearful fireworms, I saw my shadow had become a monstrous shape.

“Demon…,” the assassin gasped. “Demon.”

Serisi stood behind me, formed of dust and dirt. Whether it was her magic or mine that had done this, or some bastard child of both, she stood hunched over me in undeniable detail, claws outstretched, glaring as she worked her jaws. I tried to quash the spell as I had done before. I felt her do the same, but to no avail.

“Serisi…”

“It is not me,” her voice echoed around me.

“Are we all alive?” Eztaral yelled. “Tarko, are you hurt? Answer me now, boy!”

“I’m alive!” I cried out. I saw the eagleborn’s shape coming closer. My throat began to close as the fallen assassin found more of his voice.

“Demon!” he rasped.

I heaved at the dust but failed to get rid of the demon. “Curse it! He’ll expose us both!”

“Demon!” the assassin said again, louder still.

“Then kill him,” Serisi whispered urgently.

This time, I had no such excuse as self-defence or an accident. Overwrought, I threw reckless magic at the man. He screamed as Serisi’s shape enveloped him. Even as Eztaral came running, I pushed harder and harder until his thrashing stopped. Still, I drowned him in dirt.

“Tarko!” Eztaral seized my hand, and the spell broke. Serisi did not rise again, but I heard her whisper in my head.

That was too close.

All I could do was stare at the corpse I had just created.

“Are you okay?” Eztaral shook me.

“I… I’m fine.” I clamped a hand to my side and it came away bloody. “Almost fine.”

“You’ll live.” Eztaral patted me heavily on the shoulder. She counted the dead bodies around me while I took note of the contorted, smashed poses they had fallen in. I felt an unusual bile rising in my throat as I saw one assassin with his own copper knife buried in his eye socket.

Pel and the others found us. Unlike Haidak, who had a cut across his brow, the blind beggar was practically untouched. His sword dripped with gore. Redeye’s scarlet stare was fixated on me.

“Who are these spineless bastards, Eztaral?” demanded Haidak as he snatched one of the jade masks from a corpse. It was a man of Shal Gara, a healer by his forehead tattoo, but none of us recognised him.

It was Pel that answered. He brandished one of their copper knives in his bloody hands. “Fireborn.”

Haidak kicked at the nearest corpse. “Who?”

Pel explained. “The true traitors of the Swathe. They were once deluded fools who worshipped the power and fire and chaos of the demons. I’ve never managed to prove their existence before, but I always assumed that if we Scions survived the centuries, then the Fireborn could have done the same. I think this might be the proof we’ve always needed.”

“And why risk themselves by coming to kill us, the dirty loamers?”

Atalawe began taking the remaining masks from the faces of the dead. All of them were citizens. Some warriors, others workers. “We’re the best chance Shal Gara has against the demons, aren’t we?” she answered. “It makes sense to me they would want to attack us. The real questions are who and where are the rest of them?”

My mood switched from relief back to worry quicker than a sneeze. “With highwarder armour, these Fireborn could be anywhere. What if we aren’t the only ones they’ve tried to murder tonight?”

“What do you mean?” Haidak spat.

“Tarko’s right. The matriarch. The sages!” Atalawe hissed.

I was already running for the archway, others far from the matriarch in mind. “My mother and sister!”

“Tarko!”

��

I was surprised to find Haidak nearly in step with me. Eztaral was not far behind, and hobbling at the rear was Redeye.

“What do you care for my family?” I yelled at Haidak Baran.

“I don’t, I care for mine! If the matriarch and the sages are all in danger, that means my father is too,” he snapped right back as we burst into the night neck and neck.

A loud screech greeted us. A stone’s throw away stood half a dozen Fireborn, trying in vain to get near Haidak’s enormous golden lancewing and stab it with their black-tipped spears. A leash and stout strut kept the bird from escaping. The assassins had already wounded it several times, but its forceful wings kept throwing them on their backs and breaking bones. One had already been skewered by the bird’s sharp lance of a beak. He lay writhing on the wood, clutching at his bloody stomach.

“Get away from her!” Haidak roared as he charged. He managed to barge one assassin over the railing and slash the lancewing’s leash before he began slicing spearheads.

His lancewing came to his defence, skewering another assassin through his heart and tossing him into the air screaming. I managed to seize a fallen spear and stab a Fireborn in the leg before Eztaral and Haidak’s blades cleared the branch.

“You go with Haidak, Tarko!” ordered Eztaral. “You’ll be much faster. We will see to Axera and Tesq, don’t you fear!”

I was torn so deeply that Eztaral had to physically push me towards the lancewing. The great beast had now landed on the deck and was chirping furiously at the corpses. Blood streaked its plumage in a dozen places, but it cared not.

“Three Gods! Hurry up, Tarko!” Haidak yelled at my hesitation. He had bounded up the bird’s back and was already half-strapped into the double saddle. I threw myself on its wing and the lancewing irritably tipped me on its back. I seized the straps and buckles of the rear saddle just as it took flight. I was instantaneously crushed against the saddle.

At an almost literal breakneck speed, the bird ascended vertically while weaving back and forth through branches and suspended roads. Three panicked lungfuls. I swore that was all it took to reach the Crimson Crown.

“Look!” I shouted. Behind the court’s painted sandglass windows, the flashing lights of a commotion could be seen. As for how we would get inside the Crown with its solitary and secure skyriser, that question was swiftly answered as Haidak Baran spurred his lancewing in a loop that twisted my insides and sent it roaring straight for a window.

“Hold on, Tarkosi!” he yelled. It was a useless order: I swore my hands were already fused with the saddle through sheer will alone.

The lancewing’s beak pierced the sandglass with all the efficacy of a slingstone. In a downpour of crystal shards, the lancewing flared its wings and the sudden halt drove the wind from me.

Haidak had already vaulted from his saddle. I had to hand it to the infuriating man: he certainly played the dashing hero far better than I did. As I tried to do the same, I was batted to the floor by the bird’s thundering wings. I found myself sprawling and breathless amidst broken glass while a battle raged around me between highwarders.

That was a hideous experience, Serisi told me, sounding suspiciously nauseous.

She wasn’t wrong.

At first I had no idea who to strike out at. Precious, dangerous moments passed until I decided the ones holding a shield wall before the matriarch’s dais were probably the trustworthy ones. The matriarch stood at her throne with her sages gathered around her with ornate knives and daggers drawn. Sage Dūnekar was nowhere to be seen, yet the Jade Wolf was in the midst of the fray, green sword flashing. To my surprise, so was Envoy Okarin, wielding a fine metal blade of her own with deadly efficiency.

With the assassins’ backs turned to us and with the strong element of surprise – not to mention the terror of a giant lancewing thundering in their midst – the Fireborn fell like cornstalks before Haidak’s glaive. I had little to do but drag dust dervishes from the frankly spotless floor. That was until I felt the pull from a nearby set of urns holding plants. The grey dust was desperately fine, but there was enough of it to form sharp dart spells that pinned assassins to the floor left and right.

With them trapped, the slaughter was over alarmingly quickly. The matriarch’s true highwarders put their spears to good use. They advanced with stamps of their feet, stabbing in rhythm over and over until the last traitor lay dead.

“Haidak! My family!” I bellowed, and before the eagleborn and I had a chance to scrape a bow for the matriarch, we were aboard the lancewing once more. With glass shards raining, Haidak drove his bird in a sickening dive. Worse, it accelerated with all the might of its blurred wings. Somehow, the pair of them seemed to enjoy the plummet. I was too busy trying to keep myself from flying from the saddle like a ragged flag.

“Kī Raxa Branch!” I screeched. “There!”

Haidak responded by sending the lancewing hurtling through the canopy barely inches from the leafroads and heads of workers toiling at fortifications. Serisi yowled in my head.

Shal Gara’s trunk drew rapidly close. Once again, the lancewing threw out its wings. This time, it pivoted in mid-air to hold us over the leafroad encircling the bloodwood. I jumped, rolled, and narrowly avoided slamming my forehead into an abutment of trunk. Scrambling to my feet, I glimpsed Eztaral and Atalawe dashing along the road. Pel and Redeye hurtling along behind them, the blind leading the cripple.

A smashing of pottery drew my attention upwards and to my nearby cottage. I flew up the ladder and hurled myself against the trapdoor. Whether it was my strength or pure intent, I smashed against the weight of another body and drove it upwards. A frenzy of yells greeted my arrival as I saw a woman in simple warder’s armour tumbling into the stove. For a horrific moment, I thought it was my mother, but the brighter shade of hair and copper knife stopped my heart from bursting. That, and the sight of my actual mother pouncing on the warder to hold her head against the coals.

Something stabbed me in the shoulder as I tried to drag myself indoors. I cried out and wrenched to the side to find a man aiming a spear at me. I snarled at him, and whether it was something in my eyes or the rush of dust I felt rise up around me, he hesitated for a fateful moment.

It was Tesq who rescued me. I watched as she snapped a bone spoon in half and stabbed the man through the throat with its fragmented ends. The man writhed and fell with Tesq still clinging bitterly on.

Two more assassins dared to occupy my home. One wrestled with Mother. Another tried to stamp on Eztaral and Atalawe’s faces as they struggled up the ladder.

Without pausing to wonder whether they would obey, I reached for the clay walls. Shards of the dry clay broke from the wood beneath and pelted the assassins. I was trying to smother them when a furious tendril of bark and earth blasted through the floor of my home and nearly decapitated the nearest foe. His head snapped back at an angle that left him looking behind at his own arse. The mangled shape cartwheeled back into Tesq’s sleeping quarters, dragging curtains down with it.

The woman wrestling with my mother had broken her knife free of Mother’s grip and was moments from stabbing her. I did what came to my instincts and hands first and hurled a nearby pan. The solid ironpith struck the woman in the ribs and elicited a winded cry. Both a terrible and lucky shot by all accounts, but it stalled her enough for my mother to push her backwards.

A tendril of earth burst through the floorboards. I was halfway to her when our kitchen’s barrel of water exploded under the spell’s grip. As I skidded across the floor, wondering how in the Swathe it was suddenly raining in my house, I watched the earth combine with the water and surge towards the last Fireborn.

Mud wrapped the woman’s face, forming an unwanted helmet. The assassin’s screams choked off as the spell forced itself deeper into her skull and throat. She clawed at the spell to no avail. There was nothing to hold on to. The Fireborn collapsed to the broken floor to convulse and perish.

I found Redeye crouching half in the cottage, half on the ladder. His red fingers waved back and forth. A sapphire light brighter than I had ever seen shone in his eyes.

With a gasp of effort, Redeye released the spell from the woman. I couldn’t help but stare at the grotesque body, mud dribbling from its bulging eyes.

Mother was still full of battle rage. She hauled the now smoking body of a Fireborn from the stove, dumped it on the broken floor, and began to viciously kick at it.

“Who in the Six Hells dares to attack me in my own house? Tell me that!” she roared.

Pel appeared beside Redeye, sniffing at the blood and smoke in the air. “Fireborn! Traitors to Shal Gara, Axera.”

“Worshippers of the demons,” I added.

“As if demons, the tree moving, and you abducting my son all the livelong day weren’t bad enough! You’re telling me now there are idiots that worship those bastards?” Mother stared between Pel and me.

“It would seem so,” I said. “As ridiculous as it is, consorting with demons.”

Nice touch, Tarko.

“And what makes us so special?” Mother demanded.

“Tarko, I’d assume. They came to attack the rest of us. And the matriarch and sages too.”

Tesq was staring daggers at me as if I’d trained the assassins myself. Mother was still full of fight. The only battle she could wage now was against the mess. She tried twice to right a cracked pot before it fell and smashed.

“Gods curse it!”

“We can’t stay here now,” I said to her. “It’s too dangerous without knowing how many there are and who sent them.”

“This is our home, Tarko.”

“And I’m not having you die for it,” I growled.

“You can stay in the Den,” offered Pel. “We have rooms and ways of fortifying ourselves. Safer than a cottage and a hatch door.”

Mother took a moment to think, and then, after dragging Tesq up from the floor, she stepped over the dead woman and shooed Pel from the ladder.

“Come, Tarko,” she beckoned, as if I was still the wayward child pausing to stare at the beads hanging from market stalls.

Even now, I disobeyed her. “One moment.”

I jumped up to grab the remains of the inside ladder and pulled myself into my room. There, under my moss pillow, huddled Misfit. The little beast came straight to me without hesitation. I clutched him tight to quell his shivering and joined the others. Neighbours and passersby had come to gather and linger with mutters aplenty. They had heard the commotion, though with all the dead warders out of sight, they just stared at the broken, mud-smeared cottage and the one dead arm dangling out of our hatch. Above us, the warning drums started to thunder.

“Atalawe, you’ve aged more gracefully than most,” Mother was saying.

“It’s been a long time, Axera.”

“And you, Redeye. Even though you've destroyed my home I should thank you,” said Mother, staring at the sorcer for a long time without saying anything. At last she turned to Eztaral. “Though I am surprised to see you here, Kraid. More than I am to see Haidak Baran, in fact.”

“Mother,” Tesq hissed while the nobles both bowed. “There’s been enough fighting tonight.”

“Only here to help,” Eztaral said, after sheathing her sword and thumbing her nose.

“Mhm,” Mother hummed, before clapping me on the back. “Then you’d best guide the way to this Den of yours,” she ordered.

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Axera Terelta was a force the Scions’ Den wasn’t ready for. It was as though she took the hollow as payment or reparation for our ruined cottage and the inconvenience of being hunted. With the warning drums of Shal Gara still alive and every second-born running up and down checking on every barrack, we turned our attention to clearing the dead.

It was a grim task and one I hoped never to repeat, but that seemed unlikely given the prospect of war looming so close behind us. We gave the traitors no ceremony besides the required words of consecration to the sun, the soil, and the rain that had abandoned us. We pushed the bodies from the branch one by one to be swallowed by the half-mile of dark and the churned soil far beneath us. It seemed fitting for such traitors.

Once I had washed my hands of the stink of blood and bodies already beginning to rot, I slumped alone against at branch’s railing with my back to the glow of the wildfires. Eztaral, Atalawe, and Redeye lingered nearby, cleaning the wooden decking of blood.

A fine battle.

“Is that what you call barely surviving?”

You thrashed about like a newborn navik spawn, but you’re alive and almost unhurt. Your foes lie dead and defeated.

“And worse, you almost revealed yourself.”

That was both our faults, and you know it as well as I do. I told you: we grow more entwined.

She had me there.

You know, Tarko, if I had to guess, I would say you had experienced some chaos tonight, and I think you liked it.

“I absolutely did not.”

I felt it within you. The thrill of killing.

“Call it the thrill of surviving.” I turned my head to face the direction of the wind. It had grown hotter over the waning of the evening. A thin and glowing vein of moon could be seen amidst the rolling blanket of smoke.

Enjoy it while it lasts. My father draws nearer, reminded Serisi. Your time is wearing thin.

“That he does. But I think he is in for a surprise when he gets here. Conquering Shal Gara will not be so easy as you think, not if I have anything to do with it. You’ll see.”

Serisi muttered incomprehensible nothings to herself that echoed around my head like wind-blown leaves. I stood firm. It was my body we shared, not hers.

When she didn’t speak for some time, I shook my head as if to rattle her cage. “I should thank you for helping me stay alive.”

Serisi seemed utterly uncomfortable with the notion of being thanked. I did it for myself. If you insist on fighting this war then I won’t let you be the death of me. Not before I am reunited with my father.

The others were moving gradually into the Den, but it was Redeye who stayed behind to guard me. He was sorer and stiffer after the battles of the evening. He took some time limping over to me, and once nearby, he stood a good six feet away, leaned against the railing, and chewed his nails while he said absolutely nothing. Neither did I. The night had been long and full of dark toil. The weight of taking lives and spilling blood had settled on me, and I lacked the words to explain the flashing images behind my eyes. The ones I couldn’t take back.

“You’ll have to teach me how you did that tendril spell of mud some time,” I said.

Down came Redeye’s gaze. Fleeting, but scrutinising. He was even more fidgety than usual.

“Why’d you keep the vial?” he asked me.

“I’m sorry?”

“Pel told me you took a vial of mine. One you said I left behind before Sheertown,” he said, staring out at the city lights.

“I…”

The sorcer’s whistle was damning. “As I see it, you had plenty of time to give it back to me. But you didn’t, and that makes you a thief. And not just any thief, but one of nectra, too. They hang people for such things, you know.”

He’s dangerous. Kill him. Push him over, Serisi urged me.

I shook my head at the demon, making Redeye tut.

“Shake your head all you want. Won’t change what I already know. Thought you’d want to have the opportunity to come clean. Why’d you keep it?”

“Maybe because you didn’t ask for it or seem to notice it missing. Maybe to teach you all a lesson for the way you’d treated me.”

“Poor excuse,” Redeye tutted. “What I really want to know is why you’d dare use it.”

I let my stare clash with his. The stress of the evening fuelled me. “I don’t know. Call it blind hope. Call it desperation. Call it stupidity for all I care. That vial saved me from a worse fate, and I’d do the same all over again if I had to. I’m glad I took it from you.”

Redeye, for the first time since I had met him, cracked a smile. It was a stunted, fleeting thing, but a smile nonetheless. He pushed himself up, tapped his crutch on the ground, and snorted. “In that case, then I’m also glad,” he said through the effort. “Glad that I left the vial behind for you.”

With wide eyes, I watched Redeye hobble back towards the Den and wondered why in the Six Hells the sorcer had risked such a gamble on me. It did not take my long to realise, even after all the fear and struggle, that whatever his reason, it was a good thing he had.

21

The Night of Copper Knives

The Three do not speak in such means as common as spoken or written word. Our gods prefer to communicate at higher levels, in omens and events too quickly considered coincidences. It takes mastery to interpret such signs. One method is to dreamwalk – to take control of our dreams and move through them as if they were reality. With practice, dreamwalkers can open their minds to messages from the Three and their spirits and attain visions of events present, past, or perhaps future. Sadly, in the history of this art, rarely do dreamwalkers seem to share the same visions nor agree on what they mean.

FROM THE TEACHINGS OF GODSEER MACAL, 1960

The nightmare did not begin with a storm of fire, as the others had, but a darkness and muffled silence that only a forest could provide.

The rustling of creatures fleeing in silence and swiftness surrounded me. A subtle yet constant thunder shook the earth and sky.

Scarlet veins cracked the darkness as a demon came to stalk the churned earth. Beady eyes occupied the gloom. Navik lurked in their hundreds.

The demons stopped with a roar that echoed through the murky dreamscape. Three figures stood before them, hooded and cloaked and of human size. Copper knives shining like brands lingered in their hands. Once more, the king of demons stood before me, and I was a ghost unnoticed. A grin of flame greeted these figures of shadow. They knelt before their king, voices muffled and indistinct. While they spoke, fire weaved in between them, painting me a picture that sent a shudder through my nightmare. Trees began to crumble as I saw a vast horde gathered beneath a black storm and before dead gates, waiting for the curtain of fire to fall again. And when it did, crimson blood swept me away in a river. The serpent’s eye watched me drown. Gates of obsidian and fire opened around me, spewing demons by their thousands. Bloodthirsty howls filled my ears as I took my last breaths.

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Hands grasped me and hauled me up from the nightmare as if I were indeed drowning. I tried to fight them off until somebody cuffed me.

Mother’s unmistakeable voice broke through the haze of a burning forest. “Gods of soil and rain and sun, Tarko, what in the Hells were you dreaming about? You were so fast asleep I thought you were dead.”

“Nightmares, not dreams. Ones filled with flames and blood,” I gasped, trying to steady the frantic beat of my heart. The sweat that soaked my moss pillow was cold. Mother held my shoulders to calm me, but the unfamiliar surroundings of the small hollow of a room only added to the spin of my head.

“Nightmares?”

I nodded. “I’ve had them since Sheertown. I blame the demon.”

Mother narrowed her eyes. “What demon? The one that attacked you?”

“Demons,” I quickly corrected myself. My mind was still full of sleep. “Why did you wake me? Is there something wrong?”

Mother tutted. “I woke you because it’s almost midday, and there’s somebody here to see you.”

“Who?”

Mother smiled proudly. “The envoy of the matriarch, as it happens. So you better look bloody smart. I’m not having you ruin this family’s chances now we’re back in the matriarch’s good graces.”

Eztaral cleared her throat. She stood at the arched door to the small burrow the Den called its quarters. Three smaller rooms sat in a row like honeycombs, mine included. “That might not matter for long if we haven’t got a matriarch to bow to.”

My mother looked unimpressed. “I see you still look on the bright side of things, don’t you, Kraid?”

Eztaral stared balefully at Mother. “Axera’s right, Tarko. Armour up. I know you’ve been keen to do so,” she said, before swiftly departing my burrow.

“You should go easy on her,” I said to Mother. “She’s trying to make up for her mistakes.”

“You were five seasons old when she turned her back on your father, Tarko. I love you, but you don’t know half the shit you think you do,” Mother told me with the ironpith firmness I knew was inarguable. “Now you heard her, get moving.”

Once the Scion armour was finally donned, with all of its infuriating straps tied and secure, and still knuckling the sleep out of my eyes, I made myself present.

The presence of a crowd of highwarders jarred me. They wore no helmets or masks and carried only their spears. There wasn’t a glint of copper to be seen and they were far outnumbered by Haidak’s lancers, but I still didn’t trust them.

Fine flakes of ash drifted lethargically through the circle in the ceiling, dusting the shoulders of Pel, Atalawe, Redeye, Inwar, and now Tesq – who held an obsidian sword in her hand and looked mightily pleased with it. Eztaral and Haidak Baran loitered at the entrance of the Den with the envoy. Save for her warders, Okarin was alone and free of sages for once. Her hands were folded behind her as if she were a stern second-born standing in rank. An expression of impatience was on her face. A single suture of white leaf patched a wound from her ear to her chin. Her fine metal blade was hidden behind the folds of her silver snakeskin gown.

“Always keeping me waiting, aren’t you, Initiate Terelta?” Okarin said. Her smile was so faint it was likely my hopeful imagination. I had the instinct I was in trouble for some reason.

I performed my best bow despite the armour trying to constrict me. “And as always, I don’t mean to, Envoy.”

“Far too busy saving lives alongside Haidak and your fellow Scions, I expect,” she replied, “and for that, the matriarch and the sages wish to thank you for your loyalty and your bravery. Though why you felt the need to use the dust of the previous matriarchs for your reaving spells, I don’t know.”

I saw Eztaral and my mother wince. Redeye covered his face. Atalawe and Pel tried to stifle their grins behind kerchiefs. Haidak was not so worried about hiding his amusement.

“I’m sorry… dust?” I asked, confused.

“Yes, Initiate. The bone-dust of dead matriarchs, kept in most sacred urns in the Crimson Crown. I understood it was a dire situation, but I’m not sure my ancestors deserved that kind of treatment.”

My realisation was like the Crown’s stained sandglass windows shattering in my skull. “Yes… well.” I cleared my throat. “About that, er… I’m just glad the matriarch, sages, and you are safe.”

Then came the hint of a smile I was hoping for: the one that let me know I was safe. It was the kind of smile you would use for a simpleton’s clumsiness, but it was enough. I tried not to look too relieved.

Envoy Okarin gestured to some servants amongst the crowd of warders. They came forwards with boxes of food and clay pots of water and wine. Bundles of weapons, too: swords of metal; short, double-bladed spears; and knives of toughened crystal and jade. I even saw fine slings of ironpith fibre and animal leather. Much better than the old and worn example hanging from my belt.

“I convinced the matriarch to provide some gifts to illustrate her appreciation,” explained Okarin while the gifts were stacked and stored. She pointed to a patch of blood still staining the dirt of the Den. “In return, I need answers. Who were these traitors that attacked us? Who leads them?”

“Fireborn, Envoy,” Pel answered with a tip of his turban. “Traitors who believe in the chaos of the demons. We thought them as extinct as the demons, but it seems they’ve returned along with them.”

“And they have returned to attack Shal Gara from within. They are calling it the Night of Copper Knives. A sad night indeed,” replied Okarin. “Several high paragons, ravenborns, and painted and braided ones were murdered in their beds before the warning drums sounded and the element of surprise vanished.”

Haidak was busy teaching the dirt a lesson with his heel. “They were organised, in disguise, and well-trained. They must have been planning this for seasons, but how?”

“Or,” said Pel, blinking at them, “they have noble weight behind them. A lot of weight. How else would they gain access to highwarder armour and the Crimson Crown?”

Guesses ran rife in my head. My immediate thought was Sage Baran, as it always was. The accusation hovered on my tongue, burning me like a hot coal. “What if it’s one of the sages?”

Haidak shot me a look that told me he knew precisely what I was suggesting. “How dare you, Tarko? We all know what you’re getting at. Even now, you try to wound my family in some petty revenge? My father was in the Crimson Crown when the Fireborn attacked, not to mention you’re suggesting he sent assassins to kill his own son.”

I couldn’t help myself. “And when was the last time you spoke to your father? Or rather, he spoke to you?”

Haidak’s sword was half-drawn when the envoy raised her hand. Her face was like a storm over the distant mountains.

“You throw blame about too freely and eagerly, Tarkosi.”

Feeling the stares like arrows in my skin, I kept my mouth shut.

“This is our problem, Envoy,” interjected Pel. “These Fireborn could be anyone and anywhere, and seeking to betray us at any moment. And when the fighting starts, they could cause us ruin. We don’t know enough about them.”

I didn’t blame any of us from looking around the crowd filling the Den with suspicion.

“Then hopefully last night decimated their despicable order,” said the envoy.

Pel shook his head, sounding more like Redeye. “I’m not convinced.”

“No?”

I spoke up. “I’m not so sure, either.”

Envoy Okarin walked circles around me and the others. “And why’s that, Tarkosi?”

“I don’t know. A dream, maybe.”

“A dream? Three Gods,” Haidak scoffed.

Eztaral pinched her forehead. “Your magic might be impressive for one so young and untrained, Tarko, but leave dreamwalking to the godseers,” she said.

The envoy seemed more intrigued. She held up a hand for silence. “What did you dream, Tarkosi? I wish to know.”

“Three figures, hooded and bowing before the demon king in the darkness of a forest. It felt far too real for a dream. It felt as if I were watching something happening far away.”

Haidak Baran seemed greatly amused. “Pardon me, did you say a demon king? Nonsense! Is it not enough that you have no need for nectra, you must be a godseer as well? That really is too rich.”

I don’t know why I said it, but Serisi whispered the name alongside me. “His name is Faraganthar.”

“Did you dream that, too, Tarkosi?” hissed Haidak.

I shot him my sourest look. “Heard it in Sheertown.”

“Dreams are more often what you want to see than what is truth,” the envoy said, putting an end to our bickering.

Eztaral cleared her throat before she spoke. “I’m quite sure what Pelikai and Tarkosi meant to say is that we should keep our wits about us, stay vigilant and merciless. Anybody that sides with the demons or dares to consort with them should be shown the full rage of the matriarch’s justice, if you ask me, Envoy. Not if they have the gall and lack of spine to come at us in the night with deception and knives. Never mind siding with an enemy that sees us as nothing more than beasts for the slaughter. For them, I choose violence.”

How promising for coming clean to your Scions, Serisi sighed at me. They were her first words of the day and a fine good morning at that.

“Worms,” I muttered. “They see us as worms.”

Eztaral scowled, and I tried not to look so uncomfortable. “Worms, indeed.”

“What of the demon horde?” Pel changed the subject for me.

Haidak leaned on his sword as if he had already spoken these words three times that morning. “The morning patrols are due back shortly. From what the lancewing scouts and their long-glasses see, the nearest fires are but miles away. They swallowed up a huge amount of ground in the night. A thin spear of their formation outstrips the wildfires and burns as they go.”

“I would speak to Initiate Terelta alone,” ordered Okarin.

“Of—of course,” I replied to the awkward silence. I looked around to see which corner she might prefer, or which patch of bloody sand was fit, but she had other ideas. Much to the staring of the others, the envoy and I proceeded like two boats through a river of maskless highwarders.

We escaped the confines of the Den and walked into the amber light of the day. The sun was a red and faded jāgu eye, ever-shrinking the closer the demons came. Orange and grey smoke commanded the sky in place of clouds. Ash replaced rain. Shal Gara’s broken trail was swamped with haze, hiding from view what chased us. The only sign of the core was fire shining sporadically through the murk, red and hungry.

While we walked towards the end of the branch, the envoy did not speak. A handful of lancers followed us but kept a distance at her dismissive wave. Okarin seemed far more interested by the fortifications the worker tribe had toiled at day and night. Branches had been connected with broad and sweeping arcs of leafroad to form spiked battlements. With time precious, they reached only halfway around the bloodwood, but what the fortifications lacked in orbit, they more than made up for in their outlandish defences.

Giant bows stood tall and waiting patiently to be drawn. Winches powered their thumb-width strings. Spears had been split and bound with fletching to provide their arrows. The undersides of the battlements bristled with spikes like upturned quillhogs. Boulders had been dragged from the loam on ironpith chains. They hung poised to swing or drop on any individuals with violent ideas. Tree trunks stood stacked, ready to tumble into thin air. Huge blades of obsidian swayed on ropes and chains. Upon the bustling platforms, baskets of slingstones bulged alongside barrels of bright-fletched arrows, water, and soil. Shal Gara, against all odds, looked almost ready for war. The bloodwood had become a fortress instead of a city. A fighter instead of a stately ancient. I felt a kinship with it.

Envoy Okarin paused at the edge of the branch, placing her foot up on the railing and her hand on her sword. She watched the lancewings circle and flit over the branches below. They ran nauseating spirals around the tree in their drills.

Are you not going to say anything? Serisi goaded me.

“I didn’t say you’re welcome,” I blurted, immediately hating the demon.

Okarin raised her brows.

“Earlier,” I elaborated. “When you thanked me.”

“My mother and your matriarch thanked you, not I. You were a fine distraction, Tarkosi, but your help was not necessary. I was turning the tide of that fight when you came along. Haidak was of more use, if you wish to know.”

“Ah,” I said.

By the Void. That is hilarious.

I flinched, and Okarin laughed then, clear and confident and in a way that unnerved me.

“You are brave. A warrior in a worker’s form, I can see that. There is something unusual inside you, isn’t there, Initiate?”

That put a stop to the demon’s mirth. Serisi and I both cowered under Okarin’s probing glance.

“Excuse me?”

“As Dūnekar told you, I am trained in many arts. I can understand the winds and the movements of the stars with the scholars of the skies. I can know an opponent’s intentions through the quiver of his sword blade, and I can read eyes and bodies like a spiritcaller. That is why I can see there is a fever in you to outdo yourself and others. I was not sure about you when I made you an initiate, but it was why I took a calculated risk for you. What I want to know now is why. A week ago you were a worker; now you’re face-to-face with war, and I have yet to see you shy from anything. Why do you fight for Shal Gara? What’s this wildfire burning in you?”

Those red eyes searched me, inside and out, while the envoy’s fingers moved over her string of beads. I felt my forehead becoming clammy.

Careful, Tarko.

The best lies always had roots in the truth, and I spoke mine. “I’ve always wanted to be more than just the worker I am born to be. Always felt I was cheated of my true place in the world.”

“There’s great pride in being a worker. You are the core and roots of the bloodwood.”

I danced along the knife-blade of heresy whilst trying to hide my weary grimace. All the times I’d complained of the Bloodlaws to my fellow workers, I had wished for a chance to tell somebody who mattered. Now the chance had fallen right into my lap, and I couldn’t deny it.

“Have you ever tried to dig a louse out of bark, or tried to stay on your feet while a lancewing slops sapwater over you, Envoy? Or tended a forge with sparks constantly seeking to blind you? Or weaved so much in a day that your fingers bled, only to wake up and do it again the next day?”

You hold that blabbing tongue of yours, Tarko. Now is not the time for your honesty and your griping. She will have you hanged for your insolence and me with you.

Okarin did not look pleased, but she was listening. “I cannot say I have.”

“Forgive me being blunt, Envoy, but we workers spend a life grinding away for our gems and our place in the bloodwood. Yet all we see day after day are the proud-eyed sorcers marching about in the armour we make, the lancers on their glittering lancewings we feed, or the nobles staring down at us from mansions we built. The Bloodlaws tell us we should be grateful to be a part of this city. All the Bloodlaws have ever shown me is everything I dream about being and everything I can never be at the same time. All in the same, unflinching gesture. Only those with red eyes and good family names can seek to be better, and lower-borns are cursed to a fate they can’t change. It’s the truth of the Bloodlaws as far as I see it, and I’ve hated it ever since I was marked a mistake.”

I was breathless after my speech, I had to admit. Okarin remained staring at me until I began to fidget. Her pale beads lay still in her hands. My gaze snuck away to see how close her highwarders stood and whether I could outrun them should the next words out of her mouth be, “Seize him.”

They were not, thank the Three Gods. Even my demon sighed in relief.

“I don’t think anybody has ever spoken to me like that before,” Envoy Okarin said with an imperious sniff. “If I were my mother or any of the sages, you would be in ropes right now facing the Burrows or the noose.”

“And what about you?” I asked.

Still, Okarin held my eyes, flitting from one to the other as if trying to read my thoughts. I tensed as if to keep Serisi hidden.

“It is refreshing to hear the truth, no matter the truth itself. Much preferable to the waffling of sages,” the envoy replied in a mutter. “It’s not the first I’ve heard of it. I’ve seen the graffiti. Heard heretics preach change on street corners. I see it all.”

“There is my answer, Envoy. I don’t fight for the Bloodlaws or even for your mother. I fight against the demons and the Fireborn because this bloodwood, like the rest of my Swathe, is my home. Despite the constant pain of worry in my gut over what’s chasing us, I will matter to Shal Gara as much as it matters to me. I’ve been given a power to do something worthwhile, and I refuse to waste it. I hope that answers your question,” I said, the thudding of my chest audible.

Tread lightly, Tarko. You’ve lied well. Do not screw this up now.

Okarin raised a sharp eyebrow. “It sounds a lot like you fight for yourself. Your words are dangerously close to pride, never mind heresy.”

My mouth flapped. “I… No, I—”

“And were it not for the fire in the eastern sky and the ash littering this branch as we speak, I would care more. But I believe I understand. You’ve satisfied my doubts, Initiate Terelta. What Shal Gara needs is a hundred of whatever you are, but I’ll take just one if that’s all the gods have given us.”

“Call me Tarko.”

“And you can continue calling me Envoy Okarin,” she said with a smile of confidence only a noble could master. A smile that showed me I was still far from her echelon. “Seeing as you have no worry speaking the truth, do you really suspect a sage of leading these Fireborn?”

“I do. Or at least, I wish it was.”

“You wish?”

“It would be easier. We could cut the head from the Fireborn’s snake before lastlight.”

“And how satisfying for you, seeing as you blame Sage Baran for your father’s death. How convenient.”

“Murder. My father was murdered.”

No emotion crossed Okarin’s face. “My mother tells me there is no proof Sage Baran had any hand in your father’s murder.”

“No, apparently there isn’t. And yet there is plenty of proof that the Barans have spent seasons ruining the Tereltas.”

“That may be, but it does not mean Kol Baran is a traitor to Shal Gara and setting assassins against the whole of the bloodwood. Against himself and his son, I might add.”

It was truth I could not silence. My hesitation was proof.

“No, Tarko. I won’t trust in guesswork and grudges.” Okarin sighed, moving her beads rapidly across her hands. “And I am not used to trusting in hope.”

I had already been bold enough, but I couldn’t help but wonder. “Can I ask what the beads are for?”

Okarin did not answer for some time. Her lips moved as if she were silently counting the passing moments. “Nobody asks that anymore. The matriarch would call them a useless habit, but they help me to remember,” she said at last, quieter than her usual demeanour. “Though you might not be able to recall what words they spoke yesterday, I count these beads and every moment that unfolds before me is set in their stone. It isn’t a magic, but to me it is. I don’t enjoy people’s… unpredictable ways. I don’t understand instinct or optimism. I prefer to calculate. Order. It is why I try to understand you. You don’t fit in my calculations.”

I smiled. “Story of my life.”

Okarin regarded me for a moment before she tilted her head to the sky. “The last patrols are returning,” she said.

The envoy had sharper ears than I did. I tried to hear anything but the rumble of Shal Gara and the roar of a chasing fire. She pointed, and I followed her hand to the squadron of glistening green shapes darting towards the bloodwood. Watchtowers above had glimpsed them. A distant drum beat a warning to the lancewing nests above.

“Come. Let us see how close these demons are,” the envoy ordered me, and with that, our conversation was over. With a sharp whistle, she summoned her highwarders into formation. They enclosed us while Eztaral and the other Scions emerged from the Den. They too were swallowed by the ring of warriors and paragons and escorted aloft.

The presence of the envoy alone was enough to bring a crowd, never mind the return of the patrols. Given the murderous night Shal Gara had just survived, onlookers and citizens were shoved far back without so much as a warning. Fear and suspicion seemed rife in Shal Gara that morning, and in that way, the Fireborn had won the night.

Serisi drew my eyes to the growing fall of ash. It was almost as if she savoured the taste of the smoke on my tongue.

“Calm yourself,” I reminded her, knowing full well the talk of our kinds clashing remained awkwardly unfinished and unsettled. I instead stared at the children clamouring around their mothers, worried by the loud tramping of the warriors and the thud of the bloodwood’s drums. When I was their age, I had cheered, naive and unbothered by apocalypse.

We spiralled our way upwards to a branch I recognised all too well. After all, it had barely been two weeks since I had toiled here.

Skyrisers were few around the lancewing nests due to the nature of ropes and their propensity to tangle things. As such, our approach was by stair and leafroad. It took half an hour until we marched along platforms I had sprinted along, trying to avoid being late. Several weeks only, and somehow it felt like a season had passed.

As usual, the presence of any nobles, paragons, lancers, sages – or indeed, an envoy – was cause for much nervous stir in the nests. The nesthands flocked around us, and I confess that I stood taller. I might have even stretched a little to peer further over the heads of the circle of armour.

I locked eyes with an old and familiar face. Boon stood amongst the crowds, staring right back at me. She was wide of eye and full of shock. The envoy left us no time for chitchat. Okarin was too focused on the lancewings and the prospect of war.

The lancer riders were busy coughing up the smoke from their lungs. Their birds were streaked with ash, painted grey. When they shivered their wings, dust shed in all directions. Even they sounded nervous, cheeping in their staccato and earsplitting tones.

“The highest of honours, as always, Envoy!” called a familiar voice ahead of us. Lo and behold, Headman Karonak stood with his arms wide and his cheery face at utter odds with the tension of the nests. “Welcome once more to our humble branch. Shall I have wine conveyed, perhaps?”

The pompous man was utterly ignored. Eztaral went as far as to barge him out of the way as though he were a door ajar. I, however, did not. As Karonak’s head flitted back and forth from each one of us that passed by, I made sure I paused before him. For the briefest of moments, his smile widened at getting attention, and then recognition set in. The smile tumbled like a rock from a leafroad. Karonak’s jaw fell so far it almost rested on his chest.

“Headman Karonak,” I greeted him.

“Terelta… What are you doing—?”

“That would be Initiate Terelta. I need you to move out of my way.” Admittedly, I had plenty of room, but I wanted him to know how far I had surpassed him.

Karonak slid to the side with much snorting and huffing. For a man of vast vocabulary, he was hilariously short on words.

“Ravenborn Gaakaran!” Haidak called to one of the lead riders, a man with an eyepatch and a dour face. His raven’s feather was stained grey.

“Envoy… Eagleborn Baran.” Gaakaran wheezed in between his hoarse words.

“What of our foe?” the envoy asked.

I could see the fire still shining in the ravenborn’s broad eyes. “The demons refuse to tire, Highness. Nothing slows them. Not rock, not tree, not rift. They’re getting closer by the hour.”

The crowd was whispering so much that Haidak had to shout. “How close are they, curse it?”

“Far too close, Eagleborn,” Gaakaran yelled back. “We have a day at the most before they reach us!”

As if the wildfire heard the ravenborn’s prediction, a deep booming filled the forest as a huge and flaming narin tree fell across Shal Gara’s path. Sparks and smoke billowed to further blot the sky. I swore to the Three Gods I saw a face in that cloud, one with hellish eyes and a never-fading grin.

Whether the crowds of the nests had seen it too or Gaakaran’s words had been enough, the whispering became a rumble. I felt a shiver of fear run through me to the sound of a demon clicking her fangs together.

A day.

“Calm yourselves!” Karonak ordered in vain.

The envoy seized Gaakaran by the collar of his breastplate, switching between his eyes. “A day?”

“I pray to the gods and all their spirits I am wrong, Highness.”

The envoy turned in a circle to survey the waiting Scions and clamouring nesthands. The restlessness subsided slightly and slowly under the watch of her red eyes. I saw the matriarch’s blood in her run strong. She stood tall and imperious, reached towards a nearby lancer and seized his spear. With a thrust of her arm, Okarin raised the weapon up and pointed it at the wildfires that chased us.

Eztaral and Haidak stamped their feet. The lancers took up the rhythm alongside the older hands. More fists punched the air. The riders with mile-long stares blinked themselves back to normality. I hammered my feet on the decking with the others, sharing wild looks with Atalawe and Boon as the beat grew louder and spread to surrounding branches.

I turned to find Okarin’s eyes spearing me. Again her weapon met the sky. Her voice rose above the rhythm and dragged my heart from its pit into my throat.

“Tomorrow, Shal Gara wins this war!” she roared.

Even in that thunder of voices and feet, I heard Serisi clear as my own thoughts.

Your princess is confident.

“So am I, Serisi,” I spoke aloud. “So am I.”

Part Three

22

First Fire

They say no obsidian in the Swathe is sharper than Shal Gara’s, no war-paint as bright, no arrows as fleet.

AN ADAGE OF THE EAST

“Are you ready?” Pel asked me. His clouded eyes searched my face as if he knew how much of a mess the night had tangled my mind into. Or how hollow-eyed I no doubt looked, as if I had spent a night at an alehouse instead of battling sleep.

The morning was still ashen and dark and my eyes blurry. The nightmares had come again, full of loam crushed to cinders beneath pounding, clawed feet. Of flames consuming tree after tree. However, I had never been surer of any answer in my life.

I nodded dutifully to Pel. “I’m ready.”

His hands patted the clasps and ties of my Scion’s armour. Every time he moved to check me, the bow strapped across his back narrowly missed poking me in the eye.

“A sore shame that your father isn’t here to see this moment. Though I’m sure his spirit is watching all of this,” he said.

“Perhaps it is, though I already have enough of you watching me, what with Shal Gara’s hopes pinned on my chest.”

I was being observed even now, and not by Pel. Mother and Tesq had also made the journey. They stood far back at the root of the branches, just shadows against the half-light of distant torches. Only sorcers were allowed this far into the Sorcer’s Temple. I was immensely grateful they were there, but for a reason my heart wouldn’t tell me, I was glad I was out of reach and alone on this. This was my ritual to undergo.

Will this hurt us? It was the third time Serisi had asked me that morning.

“It doesn’t hurt, does it?” I asked.

“Gods no,” Pel snorted. “That should be the least of your worries on this day. Better not keep the sage waiting.”

I nodded, knuckled the sleep from my eyes, and followed the old beggar towards my destiny.

The Sorcer’s Temple was a grandiose name for such little effort of construction. It had no walls or roof and was simply a flat and circular section of branch. Bare wood formed the floor. A single shaft of vinelight lit the temple’s centre. The only decorations seemed to be the curtains of picked narin fronds that gave the temple its enclave.

But if you took a moment to look a little closer, a little longer, the detail of it all became staggering. Every inch of the wood underfoot was inscribed with glyphs so intricate I couldn’t understand them. Swirls of boggling patterns filled the spaces between them. Carved trunks stood around the temple’s edges in groups of three. Faces of animals leered down at me, so lifelike I almost staggered over the border of the temple. I hadn’t even realised that I had left Pel behind me. Pel hovered at the edge of the temple. His shoes scuffed its border.

“This is as far as I go,” he whispered, glancing to the figures waiting for me. “I am not welcome on this ground, but you go on.”

My never-ending curiosity would have to wait for a moment. The day I had dreamed of repeatedly, the day that had been snatched away from me so young, had come at last. I pressed on.

Before me, Sage Dūnekar stood before three vats of copper and wood. One red, one white, and one blue. The former lay at the far end, and it was the only one that gave off a faint steam. Eztaral and Envoy Okarin flanked the sage and stood draped in morning’s shadow.

My feet were the only sound in the temple. It was strange, similar to breathing, how you never pay attention to the act of walking unless you’re forced to. And quite instantly, I wondered if I had forgotten how. I placed my feet one after the other in a slow march that seemed appropriate for the ceremony. Perhaps too slow, I realised, by the time I reached the light and saw Eztaral narrowing her red eye at me.

The hog-like features of Dūnekar looked down upon me without scorn or pleasure. My attention was drawn by the vat of scarlet, iridescent liquid steaming between us. Some inner current swirled its contents. My gaze struggled to escape it.

The ceremony had already begun. Dūnekar spoke his lines slowly and with careful measure.

“By nectra and the gods of sun, soil, and rain, you have been blessed, and it is and shall be your right to wear their blessing upon your mortal skin. By the spirits, you have been blessed to wear the mantle of magic. And by all mortal laws, you have been blessed a sorcer. By these three blessings, I name you one of the tribe of sorcers and of the order of earth reavers. Bring honour to your bloodwood, your matriarch, and your family name. Through might and magic.”

“Through might and magic,” I repeated earnestly, as Pel had schooled me.

Laying my hands flat and palms upright, I let Dūnekar hold my wrists and plunge them into the scarlet liquid.

There was no sensation other than the slight sting of my wound and the oily feel of the dye between my fingers. It took moments only before the sage withdrew my hands and released me. I remained still, inwardly wincing, as he then reached to the brazier sizzling behind him, and brought a thin glowing blade from its coals. Whipping it up to my face, I fought to remain still as Dūnekar branded me with not one, but two ranks on my right cheek. The pain was sharp but brief, and I took them with pride. Serisi seemed to savour the touch of the hot metal.

My dyed hands shone in the vinelight. After Eztaral wiped them with a towel that was far too rough to have any business calling itself a towel, I stared down at the red colour of my skin. It had failed to dye the worker’s tattoos of crossed nails on my fists, as I had hoped, but now thinking about it, it was the perfect reminder of where I’d come from. And where I refused to go back to.

“Stand tall, Elevate Terelta,” Okarin told me. “You’ve got Shal Gara’s hopes to bear.”

With that, the ceremony came to its abrupt end. Dūnekar and the envoy passed me. The sage did not lend me another glance, but the envoy gave me a slow nod. Soon, Eztaral and I stood alone.

“Your father would be proud of you, you know,” said Eztaral quietly, as if she attempted to see how softly she could whisper.

“Pel’s said the same thing. I never knew him enough to know one way or the other.”

“You don’t much look like Teyak, I will tell you that. You have more of your mother in you, but it’s plain to see you’ve still got your father’s spirit. He never had the eyes of a noble, but he sure had the guts and entitlement of one. Irritatingly stubborn, but unflinching.”

“Thank you?”

“He wanted you to follow in his footsteps, just like he wanted us all to follow him.” I couldn’t ignore the wistful tone in Eztaral’s voice. “That’s how I failed him. The day Teyak attacked Kol Baran, I was blinded by shame. I’ll never forget his face when I renounced my Scion’s vow. I broke him a little more in that moment, and yet he asked me for nothing but a promise. A promise to keep his family and legacy safe when he could not. I’ve wondered many times whether he knew what would happen.

“I never speak of this, but on the day he died, Teyak came to me one last time, all full of warnings and worries. It wounded me to see him like that, and yet I turned him away. I was a fool for thinking I couldn’t help. I forgot who I was and followed my foolish heart instead of my head. I thought the Bloodlaws and the matriarch were my calling instead of trusting the old stories, and trusting Teyak. I took an easy road instead of the right road, and while I owe my apologies to Teyak for that, not you, I apologise for not doing what I could to protect Axera and your family. For not keeping my promise. It makes not a hair of difference now, but I came to your cottage many times. Could never quite bring myself to knock.” Eztaral shook herself as if a spider had crawled beneath her armour. “That’s all you’ll get from me on the matter, you hear? And if you tell anyone what I said I’ll dangle you from a branch by your stones.”

I nodded deeply, almost a half-bow. I was as useless as communicating emotions as Eztaral, and that’s how I understood how hard it had been for her to speak so frankly.

“And as for you pining for my approval, a sage just made you an elevate in a tribe few citizens are ever a part of. You still need me to pat you on the back and say well done?”

“Well…,” I started to say.

“You can forget it. I’m here to make sure you’re able to fight, and I need no thanks for that. You should be proud of yourself, not so fixated on what others think of you, Tarko. But if you must, then there’s no better way of getting noticed than preventing us all from dying. Understood?”

“As always.”

“Good man.”

Eztaral’s slip away from calling me boy was, to my surprise, all I needed. Turning to follow her sweeping path, we gathered a proud-looking Pel in our wake and made our way to the nearest road.

Mother and Tesq still waited at the entrance where paragons stood guard, stoic and silent as carvings. Eztaral and Pel went ahead, and in the gate formed by sharp spears, both my mother and sister clasped me by the shoulders and pressed their foreheads to mine in silence. Their smiles weren’t as broad as I hoped, but it wasn’t the day for smiling. At least not yet. I held up my dyed hands and turned them back to front.

“What do you think?” I asked.

Tesq nodded. She had a coat of leafleather on and beneath it was the obsidian sword that I swore she had yet to let go of. “Suits you.”

I smirked. “And you.”

Mother had no compliments or congratulations. “Where are you going to be fighting?”

“Front and centre.”

Mother’s dismay was obvious.

“What about you?”

“With the lack of warriors and sorcers, they’ve got us warders in the back ranks. Just shy of the Neathering. Tesq will be safe in the Den where an heir belongs, isn’t that right, Tesq?”

Tesq grumbled something that sounded roughly like agreement.

“I—” The doubt stumbled my words like a branch underfoot. “I’ll keep us safe.”

Serisi hissed deep within my skull.

“You’d better!” Mother tutted. “Otherwise what has all this strife been for?”

We siblings nodded silently. Mother angled her head to the canopy and sighed before seizing us in a grip that threatened to choke us. “Make the Tereltas proud, Tarko. And if you dare think about dying, I’ll find a way into the Six Heavens and Hells and drag you back myself.” Keeping her glinting eyes fixed on me, she let Eztaral and Pel lead me on, though not without one last warning of pain.

“Remember what you promised me, Pel. And Eztaral? Try not to let another Terelta die.”

Neither Scion spoke but bowed their heads as we pressed on. The rush of the crowds beyond the temple soon parted us, no matter how long I tried to hold my mother’s and sister’s stares. The quivering, doubt-ridden part of me told me it could be the last time I would ever see them, and I cursed that thought into silence.

With a strangled throat, we waded through the citizens and warriors to the nearest railing. No sooner had I gazed down upon a shining Shal Gara than the drums began to sound. They thundered through the bloodwood like a second heartbeat. To their pounding, thousands of feet trod the branches in rhythm.

I counted the arcs of battlements and defences. Bodies crowded every scrap of wood and branch. Leafleather, obsidian, and scarce metal reflected every shine of fireworm and vinelight. Even in the haze of falling ash and smoke, I could spot the richer nobles in their suits of copper and silver.

Archers and slingers were poised on every untouchably high platform. Those with spears, both the throwing and the stabbing kind, filled the battlements below. I saw hunters and wranglers with barkwolves waiting to pounce. I saw leather-clad workers in their dozens waiting to work levers and cranks, ready to send all manner of sharp and blunt objects tumbling. In the last days, machines of rope and cogs had been built. They now stood loaded and sprung and ready to unleash pain. Some held buckets of arrows tipped with lusifer fern poison, others bundles of spears, others swollen skins of water.

The city itself was shuttered and barricaded as much as possible. All those who were not involved in the fighting were hidden away, shoulders against bolted doors, or crouched under tables, or casting sacrifices to the Three Gods.

Shal Gara was ready for war. All that it needed now was an enemy.

To the throbbing of the drums, all of Shal Gara looked east, waiting with full bladders and bated breath and sweat running down their skins. I knew the feeling well: the air was hot and the ash falling thick, and I sorely wished I had found a privy before the ceremony. There was no time to ease my bladder now, and I followed Pel and Eztaral nonetheless.

The skyrisers whisked us down to Branch of the Seasons, the broadest branch Shal Gara owned and one of the main sections of the Midern. Battle platforms had been extended along its sides and a squat, spiked tower erected at its very end. It was the tower we aimed for.

With Eztaral leading the way, the ranks parted for us swiftly. Warriors in their thousands gazed at us. Their chatter was tough to hear between the drums and the footfalls, but I caught plenty of their stares. At our armour, at me and Pel. I let my freshly dyed hands hang free and visible.

Soon enough we came to the ranks of sorcers. They were much shorter than those of warriors and archers, but far fiercer. Their dark cowls and intricate plates of leafleather gave shadow to their eyes. Some already shone blue from nectra. The rest watched us with intrigue as we passed between them. Those with greyer locks or braids seemed to recognise Pel. The younger sorcers questioned me with furrowed brows.

A fully armoured Haidak was waiting for us at the end of the branch. The tall obsidian glaive in his hand shone. Alongside him stood a painted one, with the usual stripes of silver and red paint across his face.

“So this is the one Dūnekar mentioned. Is he ready to fight?” the sorcer asked of Eztaral.

“You can ask him yourself,” I said. Perhaps the dye had gone to my head. “I’m ready as anyone else.”

The painted one raised an eyebrow but otherwise nodded. “And old Pelikai Maladaq, Scourge of the Scorchroad. I thought Dūnekar had lost his mind when he said you had returned to the living.”

“These days have taken us all by surprise,” Haidak said. I noticed him studying my dyed hands.

“Not us,” Pel replied, as he passed them by to stand at the battlement’s edge. I followed. A nearby formation of lancers and sorcers talked amongst themselves.

“That’s the one there. The one the paragon said doesn’t need nectra.”

“Orokan shit. Everybody needs nectra.”

“And I’m telling you he doesn’t. Haven’t you heard? Some kind of freak.”

“Who are the others?”

“The scythes of something. Got Danaxt’s blessing, they say.”

“He’s just a boy. And a mudmage, at that.”

Their whispers stirred me into standing taller as I stared over the battlements at the ground far below. The earth passed by at its stately pace, while barely a few miles away, the wildfires shone brightly, racing from one tree to the next.

“What’s your plan, Baran?” I heard Eztaral ask.

Pel muttered so only I could hear, “Hope it’s better than the last one.”

“We keep it simple and fierce,” replied Haidak. “These demon bastards can’t fly, and they’ll have a tough time climbing with Shal Gara on the move. We keep them from touching the bloodwood at any costs. Barrage these demon bastards with a constant stream of anything and everything blunt, sharp, or heavy. My lancewings will run lightning attacks with spear and arrow.”

Even though it was Haidak’s, it was as sound a plan as I could hope for.

“I have two thousand sorcers spread between here and the Midern, standing ready to unleash every spell at their disposal,” added the painted one.

Eztaral nodded. “Have the workers ready with dirt and water for any fires.”

“Already done,” said Haidak.

“And watch out for the navik creatures that Tarko and Atalawe reported,” said Pel.

I spoke up, not caring if it was out of turn. “They’re smaller than a demon, faster, and fierce as a serpent. I wouldn’t underestimate them.”

Eztaral clenched her fist so hard her leafleather gloves creaked. “Then all that remains is to win.”

It was far from the speech I had expected. Her red and green eyes switched between us as a dozen drumbeats thundered.

“Is that it? No rousing call to arms? No inspirational speech?” I said, privately hoping for one. I needed something to quell my fear and the demon’s greedy anticipation. My heart was trying its best to imitate the war-drums.

“Gods’ sakes,” Eztaral huffed. She shouted over our heads as she swept along the ranks and thrummed her fist against her Scion’s armour. “Listen up! I’ll buy a vat of ticabo wine for the one that kills the most of these demons. You hear me, Shal Gara? Let that be a promise to you all!”

The cries were muted. Eztaral raised her voice to the limits of her lungs.

“You’ve all heard what happened at Sheertown. You’ve all heard the matriarch’s words, I’m sure. And for those who still don’t believe, know that it is all true! There are demons in the wildfires that chase us. Demons from a world of barren dust and fire, and they seek nothing other than to burn this bloodwood and the Swathe to ash. While I wouldn’t wish it on any of you, it falls to us to hold them back, and that is exactly what we will do! No quarter will be given. No mercy. No retreat! We will fight to the last body to keep them at bay. Not for yourselves, not to save your own skins, not for glory or honour, but for our survival. These demons think they know fire, but they haven’t yet seen the fire in our hearts. We are Shal Gara! We are the Swathe! We will not know another day of defeat again!”

The drums were momentarily drowned by the cheers. Though they might not have heard the words, the shouts spread from branch to branch until Shal Gara trembled with the sound of voices. Warriors and sorcers alike filled the air with their fists and weapons. The Branch of the Seasons shook gently with the thousands jumping up and down. Chants broke out amongst the warriors. War-songs, hollering and powered by many voices, rose to the canopy. Lancewings added their earsplitting drone as they took flight and hovered above the branches. Ash spiralled in their downdraughts. My heart rose with the birds. Though nervous sweat still dripped down my face, my bladder still complained, my fear melted into a nervous, sickening thrill.

Atalawe, Redeye, and Inwar came traipsing through the roaring ranks. “Eztaral’s quite good at the whole rousing leader thing, isn’t she?” said the wrangler.

Pel nodded. A grin had snuck across his face. “At least one of us is. That’s why she leads us.”

Atalawe had her ironpith staff, and it had been enhanced since last I saw her. Each end of the staff had been bolted and capped in copper. A bristle of spikes protruded from the metal. A quillhog would have been intimidated.

Like the other sorcers, Redeye was aglow with nectra. Vials of it hung across his chest. Smaller ampules waited on his forearms. His sickle knife was at his belt. His floppy brimmed hat was cleaner than I had ever seen it and yet still at complete odds with his Scion armour and the crutch under his arm.

“Anyone else think that we should be fleeing instead of fighting?” he asked, sounding doubtful as always and out of breath from his laboured limping.

“We don’t have a choice, dear brother. Not now,” chuckled Atalawe. “You had your chance to flee.”

“How long until they reach us?” Redeye asked.

Somehow, I could feel the demons drawing closer. Not in the growing warmth in the air, nor the cinders now joining the ash in the air, but a pressure in my head. There was tingling in my right arm as if I had fallen asleep on it. Serisi’s emotions flowing through me, perhaps. She could feel her kin, and therefore so did I.

The horde is but moments away, Tarko. This battle will soon be joined at last. You will see our might firsthand.

“Not long now,” I said aloud, clenching my right hand. “They are moments away.”

Serisi snarled.

“How do you know, Terelta?” Haidak hissed at me as he donned his plumed helmet. “Even the lancewings can’t see anything through this smoke.”

“I know more than you think, Haidak,” I shot back.

The eagleborn scowled once more for good measure before he walked the ranks to check his lancers and lancewings. His doubts only spurred me on. I pressed through the others to reach the battlements. Pel stood at my side muttering encouragement and instructions repeated over and over.

“Keep your spells focused and narrow. Keep your calm strong. Keep your wits about you and your eyes open. Don’t hold on to any spell that’s not working or slowing you down. There’s no shame in quick and easy. We have a job to do, not a stage to perform on. We will be at your side every moment. You hear me, Tarko?”

“Loudly and clearly, Pel.”

The old beggar nodded, his blue lips working away. “You might not have the training, but you’ve got twice the spirit and power of half the sorcers I’ve ever met.”

“Answer me one thing,” I said, turning to face him. His eyes had a glow to them, and they were fixed on me.

“What?”

“Why did they disgrace you? What happened to the Scourge of the Scorchroad?”

Pel’s smile was short-lived. “I’ll make you a promise, Tarko. If we live through this, then maybe I’ll tell you.”

“I’ll take you up on that, old man.”

A crash sounded over the roar of Shal Gara. A tall tree that had survived its brush with our march fell across the bloodwood’s tracks, barely a mile beyond the reach of our branches. Sparks shot into the smoke. Lightning stuttered across the sky, and I shielded my face as a cloud of flame bloomed, consuming the lesser treetops.

In that storm of fire, the city saw its foe for the first time. Only brief, dark faces within the smoke, or the grin of a curling flame. But the collective mutter and gasping around me was telltale.

I feel your heart stuttering. Do you see my kin now, Tarko? This is it: the moment when we see who is right and who is the fool. Do you see what doom you have chosen?

To my unease, I had to admit I did.

As the chasing flames swirled around tree after tree, the demons showed themselves at last. As in my dreams, they marched towards us wreathed in fire, iron weapons raised like banners. Their black shadows contorted in the inferno. Their roars and wide maws added to the ceaseless din of the forest burning, a song of chaos and thirst for blood.

The increase in the nervous fervour of Shal Gara’s drums was noticeable, driving our hearts faster like a porter whipping an orokan. Ash billowed around us, along with the putrid stench of sulphur. A sorcer in the ranks behind me spewed his guts. Further along the lines, I saw the shake of spearheads. The tremble in hands. One warrior shivered as a puddle of piss formed beneath his boots. I quite honestly almost followed suit. Fear is the first weapon of any war, and its blades cut us deep.

Even the Scions, who had all seen a demon, had to steel themselves. Pel closed his blind eyes and filled his ears with the cacophony. Redeye bit at his lips nervously. Atalawe gripped Inwar’s nape until her knuckles were pale. We were initiated, and yet it still didn’t quite remove the horror as I expected it to. Witnessing demonkind for a second time – despite having one stuck in my head – struck me into a stupor.

In the glow of the inferno, inhuman screeches rose up as the dark earth began to writhe with movement. A wave of black shapes could be seen spreading towards the bloodwood, as if the very dirt had come alive to join this battle. Dull glints of metal weapons flashed across their wriggling, sprinting forms. I remembered the shudder that flashed down my spine.

“Navik!” I yelled. The shout sounded out of place and admittedly high-pitched. I thought I had gone ignored or unheard until Eztaral raised her sword. The ranks behind us clanked with synchronised movement. Training battled fear. Archers and slingers and spear-throwers stepped forwards where lancers shrank back. Pel advanced with them, arrow nocked and listening to the noise of the battle. I had yet to see if the blind man was any good at archery, and my intrigue almost distracted me from loading my own sling, a new weapon of black leather, pilfered from the matriarch’s gifts.

While Eztaral kept her sword high, I watched our enemy swarming towards us. My hands ached they gripped the battlements so tightly. In the blinding shine of the wildfires and lightning, I could see the bulge of their eyes. My breath became short, and it was nothing to do with the smoke in the air or the sulphur in my throat. Closer and closer still, the navik charged.

As the first wave of navik drew what I thought was dangerously close, Eztaral dropped her sword as if she were trying to split the wooden battlement in two. Arrows flitted over my head in a roaring cloud. Pel turned his face to the sky as he unleashed his arrow, not even looking at his target. He shot lower than the rest, aiming at the frontrunners, and buried his arrow in the heart of a navik. I followed suit and saw my slingstone reduce a navik’s skull to mush before stopping a second dead.

Before I had chance to cheer, animal screams of rage and death drowned out the inferno. Score after score of navik fell to the arrowheads, stones, and spears of Shal Gara. Yet it did not stall the countless others thirsty for war. So thirsty they trampled their own wounded into the dirt, even as the missiles poured in wave after wave.

Your primitive weapons will not stop them, Tarko. The navik are bound to my father. His will controls them.

“Thank you for the useful input!” I snarled while I leaned far over to aim at the ranks of navik trying to assail the bloodwood. I slung stone after stone at them, fingers scraping in the barrel at my side. Swathes of the creatures were churned into the dirt by the inexorable roots of Shal Gara. Those that clung on only survived a brief moment before being buried or smeared into grey paste against another root.

The next wave of navik changed direction and approached like two pincers. I followed Eztaral and the Scions as we turned the corner of the battlements. The navik now tore madly through the passing trees. Like fleas, they hurled themselves into the air, insectile limbs splayed. Sharp-eyed archers like Pel and slingers better than I knocked them squealing from the air. The majority fell flailing into their dirt graves, but a few gained purchase on the slopes of Shal Gara’s roots.

“Unleash the first defences!” boomed Eztaral. A blast of a horn carried her orders down the branches.

Boiling water and sharpened stakes fell from the lower fortifications in a downpour of mayhem. Skulls were crushed in abundance. Skin melted. Navik screeched so loudly it put a momentary lull in the pounding drums and the clattering of machines. It took a moment to realise that it was not just the navik’s voices, but the demons’ too. They had begun their charge. I felt the heat of Serisi swell within me.

I bared my teeth. The demon might have vowed not to betray her kin, but I would be cursed to each of the Six Hells if I would let her stop me from saving mine. I ached to prove her wrong. I locked my eyes on the nearest mound of dirt and flexed my fingers.

Orbs of fire streaked through the air as if they had been launched from a bow. They arced high, half-lost in the smoky sky until they appeared again, plummeting like a dead star to the lower branches. I craned over the balcony just in time to see the flames strike leafroads, fortifications, and buildings. One cottage completely exploded, scattering cinders across the Neathering.

“Fire magic!”

“Very good, Tarko!” Eztaral bayed at me. “Now if you’re done stating the obvious at crucial moments, then how about you and Redeye show these bastards some magic of your own!”

The sorcer stood behind me and clenched his fists to hide the slight quiver I’d seen in them. “Remind me to tell you how much I regret meeting you all,” Redeye hissed before he prodded me in the back with the crutch. “If we live through this, that is.”

Eztaral’s orders chased us along the battlements. “Sorcers, ready yourselves! Get crews working on those fires. Archers, don’t you dare stop firing! Ready the big bows!”

Pel followed us, his bow in his hand rather than a vial of nectra. He caught my questioning expression and shook his head.

With the beggar on one side and a sorcer on the other, we stood at the precipice of the fortifications, in thrusts built for sorcers to stand and wield their spells. Ropes lingered underfoot, and copying Redeye, I looped a hoop around my ankle in case I had the sudden urge to hurl myself from the branch.

Behind me, a hundred sorcers were reaching for their nectra. Eyes began to glow bright and brave. The barrels either side of us trembled as they dragged at earth and water. Ash shuddered and spiralled as carvers sought to manhandle the very air itself. I felt a throbbing in my arm pound its way to my head as I tensed my magic and fought for calm. Even then, I felt others watching me to see if the rumours of the strange new mudmage were true. Beneath my armour, I knew my veins glowed blue. I curled my lip and pulled.

The dirt obeyed me, splitting a barrel in half and pouring in ribbons around my hands. I let it swirl, but the spell buffeted me as I lost my focus on the magic, too worried about the eyes upon me.

“Easy, Tarko!” Redeye hissed. He was wreathed in his own spirals of dirt. “Otherwise you’ll be the death of me, not these demons.”

My eyes darted about to see braided and painted ones performing spells that I hadn’t seen before. It was thrilling, and as the pressure in my chest built to choking, I seized the magic like a navik’s throat. Power shook my bones.

The timing couldn’t have been more vital. The closer the demons charged, the higher their aim creeped. Their fire spells were now pelting the bloodwood above the Neathering, and I looked up to see several soaring for our battlements.

Don’t you freeze again, Tarko. Keep us alive, curse you! Keep that worm head down.

My straining hands aimed a wall of earth at the closest spell, but not before the ranks of sorcers unleashed their own powers. The incoming fireballs collided with blasts of air, earth, and water. Fire withered in spheres of bubbling water or slowed to a stop in mid-air, fluttering like a ragged flag. Demon magic crumbled before Shal Gara’s power. The gods appeared to be smiling, but not that widely.

Despite our retort, one of the fireballs made it through. Screams came from the battlement below as the spell tore into the ranks. Burning bodies tumbled to deeper levels. Shal Gara’s blood had been drawn.

“Water sorcers to the Midern ranks! Protect the defences at all cost.”

I struggled to comprehend the details of the next several minutes. My only certainty was that they felt like hours. Hours of frantically throwing spell after spell at every ball of fire that climbed towards us. More and more scraped through to strike Shal Gara as the demon wizards closed in. Though I heard the crashes and cries all around me, I couldn’t dare look away from my gruelling task.

You won’t last long playing such games, Tarko. The wizards will rain fire until those with claws and swords creep closer.

“I thought you wouldn’t betray your kin?” I snapped, drawing a stare from Redeye.

Keeping us alive, more like, you fool.

Serisi was right. Irritatingly right.

“Take out their wizards!” I barked between spells. I had to duck as a fireball flew over our heads and struck the branch above. Burning wood and leaves fell in chunks upon shields and armoured shoulders.

“Their what?” Pel yelled back at me.

“Their sorcers! Those throwing the fire! It’s a distraction so the others can get closer!” As I spoke, demons could be seen surging towards the bloodwood. Navik streamed around their masters like writhing cloaks. Once again they came as pincers. Though arrows and slingstones formed a constant downpour, and navik corpses formed hills for the fires to consume, it did little to halt the demons. I saw some continuing to charge though they bristled with arrows. Some carried thick shields of hewn wood or studded metal.

Eztaral had heard me. She immediately began bellowing to the big bows. I felt the hammering run through my heels as each of them took aim through the mess of ash and magic and loosed their triggers.

Whether it was the haze of battle, the fork of lightning that cut the sky at the same moment, or the shake in the archers’ hands, only one of those giant arrows found its mark. A single demon wizard was halfway through a spell when the arrow skewered him against a tree and extinguished his fire. Only one, but it was all that Shal Gara needed to push back the fear creeping in like a poison.

“See for yourselves how the monsters not only bleed, but die!” shouted Eztaral. “Show them how welcome they are in our Swathe, Shal Gara!”

A mighty cheer ran through the ranks and battlements. Even the demons hesitated, staring at their fallen kin in outrage. I felt Serisi squirm in my head.

As the replying roar of their horde punished our ears, Pel pushed his way to the nearest big bow. The warriors tending it had no choice but to be barged aside. “Reload!” I heard Eztaral yelling. Pel was already working the ropes to get it aimed. As soon as the huge arrow was in place, he seized the lever, stared into the canopy as if showing off, and loosed.

Another demon crumpled to the dust with a ghost’s shriek, this time impaled through the head. Two demons in as many moments pulled Shal Gara together in a frenzy. The drums pounded with renewed vigour. Magic filled the air as sorcers joined and weaved their spells together. One by one, the other big bows made their first kills. The demons that came too close felt the power of the sorcers standing at the lowest branches. They were blasted with waves of rippling dirt. Whirlwinds battled them. Steam joined smoke as the demons were doused with water. By their roars, they seemed to hate that order of magic the most.

Watch out, Tarko! Serisi deafened me. A smile was creeping across my lips when a black arrow thudded into the battlement beside me. It threw off my concentration just enough for my spell to miss an encroaching fireball. Redeye reached to catch it, but he couldn’t stop the next from colliding with our branch. It struck far too close. The platform juddered as the force sent planks flying. Fire exploded, singeing feathers from helmets. Others were consumed and ran screeching until buckets or spells could drown them. A nearby warrior was unfortunate enough to be struck in the face with a splinter the size of my arm. Another piece of wreckage clattered against me, knocking me off-balance. My arms windmilled desperately, but my weight had already shifted too far, and I saw the battlement slide past beneath me.

Curse you! I heard Serisi scream. My own shriek was a silent croak as I grasped for anything to stop my fall. But it was useless to fight. The loam called for me, and I tumbled from the battlements to Redeye’s muffled shouting.

I didn’t have as long as I expected to contemplate my death. The rope around my ankle that I had utterly forgotten snapped taut and dangled me beneath the battlements upside down. My helmet was not so saved. I watched it tumble through the chaos until it bounced from a branch.

The battle was no less terrifying from that angle. Arrows flitted past me as the demons bent their iron bows. I looked up at Shal Gara with eyes bulging from the blood rushing to them. Green lightning danced gleefully above the patchwork of leaves, as if it were a god relishing every moment of this nightmare. Lancewings in tight formations shot between the branches. My neck craned to watch them dart across the flaming battlefield and vex the demons. Not a lick of flame could touch the birds.

As I swung up to reach my ankles, I caught sight of a fireball rising to roast me, or at the very least burn through my rope and finish the job.

Tarko…!

“I know, I see it!” I yelled, starting to swing myself back and forth. Another arrow shot past me and ricocheted from the bark of the branch. I must have looked like fun sport to the demon bastards below. With gritted teeth and frantic motions, I kept swinging as the fire raced towards me.

Tarko!

“I bloody know!” I clawed at anything I could use for a spell. I was out of reach of the barrels and upside down; concentration was difficult with a pounding head. What little dust I could drag together was enough to form a shield and that was it. With a yell, I forced it against the fireball with all the hope in the Swathe.

The fireball glanced past me at the apex of my swing. The heat scorched me, but my meagre spell held true enough to save me.

A jerk in the rope almost coaxed my full bladder to empty. Redeye and Atalawe had appeared and were hauling at the rope. I held tight, and as soon as I was close, I swung up to grab the platform. I hauled myself onto the wood and almost kissed it and the rope in relief.

A roar of wings dragged me upright. Haidak’s golden lancewing circled the platform. Haidak jabbed his glaive past the Branch of the Seasons.

“Eztaral! Pelikai! You’re needed below! Take more sorcers with you. Those demon swine are getting far too close for my liking!”

The eagleborn gave us no time to argue. His lancewing spiralled downwards as if to lead us.

“You heard him!” Eztaral bellowed. “Get moving and don’t you dare dally!”

What is swine?

“Like a quillhog,” I uttered. “A beast.”

I see now why you dislike him. I should like to feed that man to such beasts.

“I’m sure you would.”

Our race down the branches was breathless. Eztaral led the Scions and a handful of painted one sorcers onto the nearest skyriser. I’d never seen one move so fast. The ropes squealed through the giant pulleys. We dropped like a stone as fireballs and flaming arrows ploughed through the air around us. One of the painted sorcers caught an arrow in her stomach. The iron punched through the leafleather as if it were cloth. Flame still sputtered as she faded away, much to the yelling of her fellow sorcers.

A dozen feet above a platform in the Neathering, something scythed through the stout ropes. The corner of the skyriser collapsed, forcing us all into a sliding tumble.

“I hadn’t expected a battle to be so much running and dashing about!” I said breathlessly to Atalawe as we hurtled on through crews of workers with buckets and bags of dirt. Citizens hurtled from burning buildings. Water weavers plied their magic to the biggest fires.

“Shall I get you a seat instead, Tarko, so you can be comfortable while you fight?” Atalawe laughed.

“That would be nice!”

The battle was fiercer in the Neathering. The ranks stood thick on the fortifications, shielded by great barriers of woven leafleather and wood. They were already thick with iron arrows and burn-marks. Even from the Neathering, there was still a quarter-mile to the loam, but it was closer to the demons’ reach, their bows, and their magic.

The magic turned the air thick. Spells poured from the eastern side of the Neathering. A thick cloud of dirt roiled like a storm. Fire pounded the shield from all sides, and yet it refused to fade. Between the mudmages, water and air sorcers threw their spells down on the demons and navik that came uncomfortably close.

“Work your magic, Redeye! Tarko! And Pel, I’m looking at you,” Eztaral ordered as she was whisked into the fray. “And you there! Get those stones falling and get the heavy weapons ready to drop!”

I outpaced the other Scions to reach the scorched battlements. I replaced a man being hauled away with burns across his face and stared down at the scores of burning faces giving chase. They were just beyond the churn of the roots.

A voice yelled in my ear. It was a paragon of the air order with a face smeared in soot. “Out of the way, Elevate! This is no time for amateurs!”

Pel grabbed the sorcer and moved him aside. “He’s with us.”

“And who in the Six Hells are you?” demanded the man, staring at the jāgu that sauntered past with a growl.

Pel took one look at the demons, took aim with his bow, and shot a navik clean through the eye. Redeye shouldered past the man, stretched a single hand to a nearby and almost empty barrel, and made a shield so perfectly formed, two arrows became lodged in it.

The paragon had the gall to spend precious moments staring at me, as if the others had passed his test and I had yet to impress.

Serisi laughed in my skull. Educate this fool, Tarko.

“With pleasure.”

I turned my attention to the battlefield below. I grasped for the very loam that Shal Gara marched through and claimed it for myself. With arms shaking and my veins becoming too hot to bear, I formed two spinning towers of dirt and sent them crashing down on the chasing hordes. Navik were flattened in droves. I even half-smothered a demon before I ran out of breath.

The paragon kept his wide and blinking eyes affixed on the battlefield. “Keep fighting!” he bellowed.

Over and over, Redeye and I forced the earth to obey us. With water growing scarce and sorcers few, our mudmage magic could reach further and had no chance of running out of earth. Other reavers stacked beside us to heave the wall of magic further against the demons.

A chilling cry rang out from further along the fortifications. “They’ve breached the Rootfort!”

Atalawe and Pel were already sprinting for the nearest stairwell.

“You stay here!” Pel ordered, but I had already disobeyed him before the words left his mouth.

“Curse you, Terelta!” he snapped as I ran at his heels.

Like an old clay pot, my buoyed confidence showed signs of cracking. “How could they have breached the bloodwood already?”

Atalawe ran with her staff raised like a throwing spear. “I have no idea!”

I told you, Tarko. You underestimate demonkind and overestimate yourselves. Many warriors and worlds have made the same mistake before.

“Not now!” I snarled in panic, drawing more attention from Atalawe than I wanted. Our feet clattered on stair after stair or pounded down ramps as we tore through the warren of the Neathering.

As we burst onto the top level of the Rootfort, we found Eztaral standing with her sword drawn, and there I saw exactly how the demons had breached the bloodwood: pure, ill-fated luck.

A tree that collided with Shal Gara had fallen against the trunk and become fouled in the very lowest fortifications. It was as if a ramp had been lowered, and it gave the navik a chance to swarm past the roots and onto the bloodwood. Demons had done the same, scorching the bark and branches with their charcoal claws as they climbed.

Ringing the lowest section of the bloodwood’s trunk, the Rootfort was one of the oldest features of the city. It was an ancient fort said to be Shal Gara’s first settlement, when the Swathe’s peoples left the loam behind. Shaped like a beehive with a broad-brimmed hat, the Rootfort had three levels, and the navik had filled the very bottom with blood and screams. I saw warriors fighting tooth and nail against iron and claw in a breathless press of bodies. They fought bravely, but the navik were too many. The warriors were trampled by a sea of dun flesh and iron blades.

The navik surged towards us with their jaws open and black throats gaping. As Inwar, Atalawe, and Eztaral raced into the fray without a trace of hesitation, I threw everything I could grasp over their heads.

Shards of wood and barrel staves peppered the detestable beasts. Atalawe swept her staff in arcs as wide as the fortifications allowed. The spiked ironpith broke bones and shredded grey flesh. Eztaral and her metal sword were a whirlwind that sprayed black blood in all directions. I didn’t see her limbs stop moving for a second. The blade moved like a whip of leafleather through anything that ventured close.

There were too many to hold back alone. Navik began to climb around the Scions and along the bark towards me and Redeye, who stood propped up against a wall as the last line of defence.

With one hand drawing earth to me, I wielded it like a hammer on a chain, swinging it back and forth and clubbing at anything else with wild lunges of my loaded sling.

Redeye, meanwhile, was clad in an armour of earth, boxing with fists and lances of dirt. Nothing could get close to him. Dropping my sling, I clung to my magic with both hands as Redeye did and trusted utterly in its strength.

In that first moment, a sword narrowly missed hacking my arm off, and I nearly faltered there and then. My reflexes saved me, and I lashed out with a column of dirt that snapped the navik’s neck.

Another navik was broken, and the next, and the next, until it became a breathless dance where any wrong move meant danger or death. I did not know the steps nor when it would end, but I danced all the same. It took all of my concentration and strength to keep up the spells. I could feel the magic draining me, and yet I felt its flow grow stronger and stronger. My spells were not pretty, not as refined as Redeye’s, but I was one with my magic, and the navik piled around my feet as we eradicated them from the Rootfort.

“Stop that demon!” ordered Eztaral, as she and Atalawe escaped the fray to stand beside us. “I won’t let it set one foot on this bloodwood!”

Upon the fallen tree marched a huge, flaming demon wielding a poleaxe twice my height. Pel put an arrow its shoulder, but the beast just snapped the shaft from its hide and grinned wider.

“Pel!” shouted Redeye. “We need your magic, curse it. Otherwise we’re all doomed! Dūnekar’s orders be damned!”

“No, we don’t!” Pel replied, eyes locked on me. “We trust in Tarko!”

I was not inclined to argue. Or pay any attention, for that matter. I was lost in the magic, wielding ever-larger spirals of dirt with every step the demon took. I felt the heat growing under my skin as I met its flaming eyes.

With a yell of effort, I heaved the loam straight up from beneath Shal Gara. A torrent of it slammed into the tree and threw dozens of navik tumbling. Once, twice more, I had to strike it. Redeye and the others kept the navik at bay while I threw my strength into a fourth attempt. With the sonorous crack of branches and construction, the tree tumbled away from the bloodwood. The demon made a terrifying lunge for the Rootfort as a last-ditch effort, but its claws missed Shal Gara by less than a foot. Flame trailed in its wake as it plummeted.

With thunder, the tree crashed below, entangling the rest of the horde. Their bridge destroyed, the demons’ charge faltered and, to our stunned surprise, halted. One last volley of fire, desperate and chased by furious roars, fell upon Shal Gara. One hit the Rootfort, burning only the dead navik. The stink was abysmal.

As the last spell fell, far above us, the drums ceased their pounding.

“Have we… Did we win?” Atalawe cautiously ventured.

Serisi snorted. Impossible.

I longed for Atalawe to be right, if only to silence the muttering in my head.

With held breaths, we moved to the fort’s edge and peered below. Even the navik had stopped chasing us. They stood heaving with exertion, faces darkened by the wildfire at their backs. Demons stood still in their hundreds. Their flames shone bright as they raised their weapons and claws to point at Shal Gara. Their silence was haunting. Only the roar of the wildfire filled the air. Serisi spoke to me in a voice that was suspiciously flat, neither elated nor enraged.

The war is young and made of many battles, Tarko. The crucible must grow hotter before the blade is forged.

“They’ll be back,” I said to the others.

Eztaral wiped the grey blood from her sword with her cloak. “Of course they will! They’ve tasted their prize and tested our defences. They will try again for sure. But for now, we’ve proven how stubborn Shal Gara can be, and that we will not be defeated so easily.”

With a demon growling in my head, we left the dead and gasping navik behind us in half-graves of dirt and delved back into the Neathering with weary footsteps. Warriors found us quickly, and after seeing the massacre behind us, and how few survivors we carried, they pressed themselves to the walls of the corridors to clear our path. One warrior beat his chest in a slow rhythm. Another followed with a stamp of her boots, and another, until a clomping beat followed us out into the brighter lights of a broad branch. Ranks of warriors and workers stood about us, breathing hard, wiping brows, and sagging to the wood in exhaustion. The rhythm spread between them until it sounded as if the whole Neathering and the Midern joined in. I was busy counting the fires above us when Atalawe pushed me ahead of the other Scions as the beat increased in speed. Applause started to rustle through the ranks. Feet pounded.

“What’s going on?” I asked, still twitchy from battle.

“It’s you they’re clapping for, lad!” Atalawe cried over the noise.

Cheers broke out through the battle-forged. Warriors came to touch our shoulders, and others latched onto them. It was moments before I was hoisted aloft onto a shield. I looked around to see the others given the same treatment. Atalawe grinned like a mad person. Eztaral remained the stoic leader, while Pel and Redeye looked wholly uncomfortable, and yet, even in behind their grimaces, I saw vindication. No matter how brief, not matter how small, and no matter the outcome of this war, we all clung unspoken to a sense of victory. And as I looked around at every face yelling for us and for Shal Gara, it seemed we were the face of that victory.

Through it all, Serisi remained silent.

23

Pride of the Bloodwood

Don’t believe the lies! Demons? What nonsense is this? It is mere excuse, I say! An excuse to cover up the massacre of Sheertown and the loss of our sons and daughters. Where is the proof of demons, I ask you? Struggling to find any? There is none, that’s why! Even the deserters have been jailed for their lies. I saw them marched to the Burrows with my own eyes! Demons? You cannot and will not drape the mosscloth over my eyes!

FROM A SPEECH MADE BY A KNOWN OUTSPOKEN HEIR TO THE POLT FAMILY, ONE OF THE CASUALTIES OF THE FIRST DEMON ATTACK

Eztaral was a woman of her word. The clay vat of ticabo wine came rolling into the alehouse with a rumble so loud I thought the battle had started again.

The most demons had rightly fallen to Pel and his arrows, and though I most certainly contemplated drinking the whole thing myself, I announced that it would be shared. I had meant the Scions and my family gathered around the table, but the packed alehouse got the impression I meant everyone else, too. Warriors thumped the tabletops so hard bark cups flew into the air. Ale rained. Cheers put a ringing in my ear. I was barely able to raise my cup for all the hands shaking me.

Another half dozen hands gripped or patted my shoulder as the crowds shifted behind me. I looked up to more grins and avid nods. I raised my cup to each of them, too afraid to miss a single one in case this spell of celebration was somehow smothered.

Not all in the alehouse were second-born, but citizens of every tribe. The battle had demanded all of Shal Gara, from workers to healers. The glory was a cup all could drink from. And, even if you had spent the entire battle pissing yourself in a hollow somewhere, then there was always the relief of being alive. That was always worth cheering. It was a shame it had taken a demon horde to remind Shal Gara of that.

“To Elevate Terelta!” Pel yelled once more, and the whole tavern shouted my name. It was a feeling I wanted to get used to.

Wine slopped on my arm as Eztaral dipped our cups in the vat. “Drink up before it’s all gone. This crowd’s drinking like it hasn’t seen a drop of liquid in a whole season. And rightly so, I say. This is a fifty-season vintage I will have you know, and that’s the kind of vintage that you have to use all of the matriarch’s blessing to get.” Eztaral beamed broadly. I almost dropped my wine when I realised that was the first time I had seen her smile.

“Smell that?” Pel asked of me. He was holding his cup beneath his nose. Something sharp had cut a line across his face.

Atalawe chuckled. “Oh, here we go.”

Pel looked shocked. There was a deeper shade of purple to his cobalt lips tonight. “What?”

“We don’t all have your blind man’s nose, Pel. You can scent better than a barkwolf. Isn’t fair.”

With a wave of his hand, the beggar raised his cup to mine. “Try, Tarko.”

The air in my nose smelled of nothing but sweat, char, and the tang of spilled and forgotten ale. I took a deep breath. The sharp needle of spirits stung me first, then ticabo, and then right back to sweat again.

“Nothing but berries, to tell the truth, Pel.”

Atalawe laughed. “See?”

Pel took a breath so deep I thought he was going to snort the wine. “I can smell the rain on the vines, the earth of the clay, and—”

“And a ripe pile of shit,” Mother said with a smirk. “You have this wonderful trick, yet how come you never smelled how few baths you took all these seasons, then?”

Atalawe banged her fist on the table. “Ha!”

My sister had been staring over the brim of her cup at each of us as we spoke. Tesq had always been a watcher, not a talker. Either the battle or the wine had loosened her tongue. “Did you know we would survive today?”

“Without question,” replied Eztaral with a harsh snort. She kicked out a spare stool and thumped her boots onto it.

“I thought we were all doomed. Still do,” Redeye grumbled before getting whacked by Atalawe.

“Tarko?” Mother asked me. “What about you?"

Conscious we had an audience of eager ears beyond our table, I contemplated lying for more than one moment. I faltered when I remembered I was little good at it. “When I first saw them emerge from the wildfire, I thought we were done for.”

The low of hum of a collective murmur told me I hadn’t been alone.

“But what choice did we have?” I said, spurred on. “I’ve been given a gift. To curl up and cower would have got more than myself killed.”

Eztaral raised her voice. “Only a fool says she isn’t afraid of battle. I’ve seen plenty more than I should have, and my hands still shake around my sword before I fight. And none of those battles had been against demonkind. A battle is a fight against fear just as much as iron and fire. Fear is what kills you, and today we proved we are no longer afraid.”

A thumping of cups and feet sounded as Atalawe raised her cup to the raftered ceiling. “To Eagleborn Kraid!”

The cheer was more deafening than the last. A drizzle of wine splashed on the table as cups met in mid-air. I had to laugh at the abandon of it all.

Redeye was sourer than a lemon this evening. His scarlet eyes once more kept sneaking to me. “We proved we can muddle through, is all.”

“Are you forgetting what we just did, brother?” Atalawe hushed the sorcer.

“I can’t remember anything apart from the sounds and the snarling faces. It was all one horrible blur.”

Pel was still nose-deep in his cup. “Vivid as vinelight during the fight but a muddle of fog afterwards. It’s often the way, almost as if your mind doesn’t want the memories.”

Mother nodded. “That’s what Teyak used to say.”

Like leaves pattered by rain, the Scions nodded. Only I kept my eyes off the table and touring the crowd.

The alehouse was no ordinary alehouse. It had a name. Not only did it sit awkwardly in a crook of two upper branches, but at some point in its past, scaffolding had been built around it and never taken down, giving it the look of a nest. The scaffolding had only grown with the building over the seasons, sprouting new sections and wrapping further around the branches. As such, the alehouse had earned the moniker The Raven’s Thievery.

From the many peeks I had taken through the doorway, it was the sort of place that drew more nobles than common citizens. On any other night but tonight, I’d heard it wasn’t uncommon to see the highest ranks tasting the finer brews and ferments of Shal Gara. Noble heirs of the oldest families. Painted and braided sorcers. Eagle and ravenborn. Even a sage, once or twice a season.

I knew this well, and yet my insides still came taut like a noose around a neck when I saw Sage Kol Baran standing near the Thievery’s doorway. It was an old reaction, engrained in my core.

Two of his own private warders flanked Baran’s back. Masks of rusted stone, expressionless and blank, covered their faces. Haidak stood beside his father, but about as close as you might hold a bowl of rotten food. His mouth was working away, but the words couldn’t reach me over the clamour of the alehouse. I’d heard of godseers who could read lips from afar, but all I managed to discern was utter nonsense. And all the while, Sage Baran did not once look at his son. Only at me.

Mother had followed my gaze. “It’s been a long time since I saw that man’s face,” she hissed.

Tesq swallowed her drink whole and held her cup out for more. “What is he doing here?”

Pel doled out the wine, mostly for himself. “I would say he’s doing the same thing we are, celebrating a victory. Though I wager he saw most of the battle through his mansion’s windows.”

“If he’s celebrating, somebody should tell his face about it,” I said.

“Congratulating his son and our new friend Haidak perhaps.”

“Doesn’t look it to me,” I muttered. It was then I found my father’s name waiting on my lips. To the scrape of my stool and the inconvenience of several others behind me, I got to standing. Cheers were already mounting at the mere fact I was upright. Without hesitating, I raised my cup and my voice as one and stared right at Kol Baran.

“To Teyak Terelta! Who saw this day coming many seasons ago!” I announced.

I doubted whether the warriors knew or cared what I was shouting for as long as it wasn’t “to demonkind!” If any knew of my father or his legacy, they cheered all the same. The roar was the loudest yet, as if they competed with each raise of their cups.

Mother skewered me with her eyes. Her expression ran through a field of different emotions before she smiled softly. She drank but said nothing. It must have been difficult for her to dismantle so many seasons of reinforced blame and resentment. Tesq looked less unwilling, more convinced, yet no cheer came from her.

“I don’t know how long it has been since his name was cheered like that,” Pel said softly, still with cup half-raised.

“I don’t care,” I replied. “It’s time Baran learned he was wrong, just like Haidak has.”

“The lad helps win one battle and he’s got the balls of a tharantos!” Atalawe laughed. “That’s more like it. A bloodwood’s height away from the worker that complained all the way to Sheertown.”

The compliment passed me by like a drifting leaf. Like Mother and Tesq, I was too busy watching Kol Baran pull his feathered collar high and march from the Thievery. My smile was nothing short of triumphant.

“One battle,” said Redeye, barely audible.

“What?”

Redeye shook his head. “One battle, he said,” he repeated.

Eztaral was not impressed. “What’s the matter with you, sorcer? There’s more doom and gloom in you than usual.”

Redeye struggled upright. He was short at his best, but hunching over on his splintered crutch made him look like a shadow at our table. “This,” he said with a broad gesture to everyone. “All of this isn’t right. We win one battle and we crack vats like we’ve driven a spear through every last demon.”

Pel tried to intervene but the sorcer would not be silenced. “Keep your voice down, Redeye. This is no time for your complaints.”

“We should be keeping watch, getting ready for the battle we know is coming. They left us be today, Eztaral. We didn’t drive them back; they choose to fall behind. Why by the bleeding trees you’re letting this happen while the enemy is right out there is beyond me!”

Eztaral stabbed her finger into the table as if it were a dagger. “And that is precisely why we celebrate, Redeye. Most of these people expected to die today, and the fact they didn’t is worth celebrating, not diminishing with doubts. Why cow them now and send them back to the battlements thinking they barely scraped through – that they were lucky – when we can put victory in their very hands? How do we fight fear with more fear? If there’s some secret you’ve been keeping back all these seasons and staying one step from a coward keeps you alive, then please do let us know. If not, then allow me to firmly remind you exactly who sits at the top of our order.”

Redeye’s splayed hands clenched one of his nectra vials, but only for a heartbeat. The sorcer pulled down the brim of his hat and barged through the raucous crowds.

Atalawe rolled her eyes and wearily got to her feet. “Brothers, right?” she said with a nudge to Tesq’s arm. Ordering Inwar to stay beside the table with a ruffle of the jāgu’s ears, Atalawe followed Redeye out of the Thievery.

I found myself on my feet again.

“Leave him, Tarko,” Pel warned me.

“I’m not going after him,” I said. “I have other… business.”

“Again?” Mother tutted at me.

“Yes, again,” I said, shoving my chair under the table. Since spending the whole battle with a bladder fit to bursting, I had spent a painful half an hour in a privy emptying it. It had gotten to the point that I wasn’t sure if I would ever stop pissing. Even hours later, my bladder seemed ever changed, as if it would take every chance it got to be emptied. I had visited the privy three times since.

Those who had already drunk themselves into a stupor lined the walls of the privy. Curtains divided up the latrines. Some fluttered madly with sounds of a different kind of celebration. I found a trough that wasn’t too filthy, and while I emptied my urgent bladder, I stared at a shadow of myself in the polished stone plate. The stone’s reflection was warped, with a crack running through one side. It gave my sorcer’s mark and new brands a strange lean. The wine had worked its warm magic on my stomach, and already my reflection moved more than it should have. Puffing hair out of the way, I met my own eyes as I spoke.

“Serisi.”

The demon had not spoken to me since the battle. The defeat had silenced her.

“Serisi.”

Nothing. Not a mutter sounded even at the very depths of my mind.

“Come on now,” I said to myself in the mirror. Privacy was the only divider that kept me from looking mad. “Are you sulking because we proved you wrong?”

As I moved my head and let the warmth ripple across my face, I saw my mouth hooked and studded with fangs. A forest flamed behind me. I recoiled, spraying my hands, and cursed the demon in a growl.

A clay bowl of water sat beside the mirror. A spout trickled water into it, and I reached my red-dyed hands towards it.

The pain seared up my right arm. In the gloom of the privy, I saw blue light moving in my dark veins. I shoved my sleeve up my arm, wincing at the burning pain that ran through my bicep. The darkness had spread further into my flesh, now reaching past my elbow. Threads beneath my skin that had once been blue were grey, turning black. The envoy had been right: it was spreading, but to what end was a mystery.

I hurriedly unrolled my sleeve and hid my arm away. One last splash of the water confirmed the pain had not been a trick of my tired muscles. My scars seethed.

In the journey back to the table, I was thoroughly thumped and patted by anyone and everyone. Even workers I swore I knew from past callings such as the weavers and smiths. Their encouragement hit me like slingstones.

“You did us proud.”

“With you in our side, ain’t no demon touching Shal Gara.”

“Gods’ gift, I say!”

“Drink this ūlana grog with us!”

“How do you it?” one sorcer asked me, seizing my right arm. I flinched away instinctively. “How do you cast without nectra?”

“Just a gift I suppose,” I muttered.

“Can you teach it? Come on, you can teach it to me.”

“No, I can’t,” I replied brusquely as I escaped to the table. Eztaral stared at the onlookers until they melded back into the crowd.

“Better get used to that, Tarko,” said Tesq.

I accepted another cup of wine and decided to drain it. When I came up for breath, I laid the cup in front of Pel.

“You made a promise, old man,” said I.

The shock in his expression was almost comical.

“You promised me a story. Why it is that Pelikai Maladaq was disgraced from the sorcers?” I asked.

Eztaral was the only one who reacted, chuckling quietly into her drink and shaking her head.

“I did… didn’t I?” Pel murmured. Blue teeth pulled at purple lips. His blind eyes looked around. No doubt nectra flowed through them. Pel was never without his urka.

“All right then. You shall have my story.”

My mother got comfortable, elbows on tabletop. “I never did hear the whole story.”

Pel swilled his wine. “You’ve heard of the Scorchwars, however, just like we all have. A hundred battles and skirmishes they say we fought over those seasons, and many times that of marauders dead. They kept coming; we kept cutting them down with magic and obsidian. You remember, Eztaral.”

Eztaral nodded. “Far too well. Poor bastards driven on by mad warlords. The lancewing squadrons speared them as if they were target practice.”

“They got what they deserved, some say. Others would tell you it was glorious battle, and in some ways we all thought it was. But as in all battles, atrocities worse than the simple matter of driving an arrow or blade into another were wrought. The stories have been forgotten much like the stories of demons, but much of Firstwatch was rebuilt by enslaved marauders and Scorchfolk. Villagers that had no place in the war, nor had raised a hand except to defend themselves when we struck back. We forced them to work and called it penance. It was one of Shal Gara’s darker moments. And so it was I met Felixal.”

Pel finished his wine. Eztaral had another waiting. The conspiratorial feel to the table grew as we bent closer. Pel was a loam-fisher of a storyteller, and we were fruit on his hook and line.

“She was the mother of two children lost to the war. Slain by wranglers and barkwolves, but that’s another story that Atalawe is more fit to tell than I. Felixal was a fierce soul, quiet and hateful to all that wore Shal Gara colours. Rebellious. One morning, halfway up a leafroad amidst planks and nails, she stopped working. The foremen kept whipping at her, but she took every strike without a blink. Sixteen lashes had ripped her back to shreds before I managed to stop them. She broke one’s arm in the process. I told them she had been punished enough, but the headmen and a certain Dūnekar saw fit to throw her in a burrow. Felixal was trouble. She did not fit their idea of order, you see,” Pel said with a sigh.

The ache in my jaw caught me off-guard. I hadn’t realised I had been gritting my teeth so hard.

“A week went by before I got the chance to reach her burrow cell. I went to apologise, to tell the truth. It was for my own guilt over what we did in the Scorch, I know that now. She was the face and voice of all the dead I’d sent to the Hells in the wars and one I could beg forgiveness from. I’ll never forget how stupid I sounded. Felixal thanked me by spitting on my armour, but to my foolishness I went back other times. Night by night, she, well… I wouldn’t say she warmed to me, but perhaps didn’t hate me as much as the others. I would tell stories. She would mock me, telling me of the wonders of the Scorch and all the ways it was better than the strangle of the forest. I brought her food, though it was never cooked enough for her. We spoke of her children, and she was not alone in shedding a tear. Guilt is a rope around your waist pulling you along its path. As powerful and sturdy a rope as love, rage, or revenge, so when she asked me to free her, I did not deny her. It took another week to plan it. I would clear the path, and she would escape from the Loamsedge into the Scorch. Another week to wait for a day of fog,” said Pel, hesitating. He stared at nothing but the table beneath his hands.

“It wasn’t until after her cell bars had swung open that I knew my mistake. Felixal had spent her incarceration scraping sawdust from the inside of her cell. Her nails had been driven almost bloody to do so, but it was with that handful of dust she escaped me. She threw it in my eyes, kicked my legs from under me once I was blinded, and sprinted away. But instead of heading for the Scorch, Felixal made straight for Dūnekar. The stake of wood she’d fashioned almost took his life that night. I heard from the warders after that she had pounced from a branch and stabbed him twice in the back before the blades and spells caught her. Because of me, Felixal died right there in Firstwatch. And for my crimes of letting a prisoner escape, endangering my fellow sorcers, and almost getting Dūnekar killed, I was banned from the sorcer tribe. Dūnekar and I still both wear the scars from that day. His healed, but the dust that Felixal filled my eyes with left its mark. The blindness struck me a season after, almost to the day. If I had only left her in the burrow, we might all be alive. Everything would be different. That is why I do not deserve to wield nectra any longer. It has been so many seasons I don’t know if I can.”

“And chasing the possibilities of the past is a leafroad to nowhere but insanity, old friend,” said Eztaral. “Trust me.”

With a slap of his hands on the table. Pel switched his mood as if pulling back a hood. He grinned blue teeth. “I know that better than most.”

“Three Gods,” I said. “I’m sorry I made you tell that story.”

“A bet’s a bet, young Terelta!” Pel proclaimed. “Besides, it would not have stopped the demons from arriving. All roads lead to inevitability. It was a young Teyak who convinced Dūnekar not to have me hanged, and that’s why I owe him my life.”

Eztaral cleared her throat. “Teyak saved me also. He kept me sane in the ranks day after day, not to mention stabbed a brute of a marauder just as he was about to finish me off. I was nothing but a wilder at the start of that war.”

“Enough of this mire speech, I say,” announced my mother. “Eztaral is right.”

Surprise broke Eztaral’s practised metal exterior. “I am? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say such a thing.”

Mother nodded. “You likely haven’t. Maybe the wine has loosened my tongue.”

Tesq tried to thump her hand on the table and missed. “Precisely,” she said. I had to smile at my sister.

“Though maybe not too much more for you, daughter,” said Mother, and Tesq puckered her face.

Mother looked about, catching the eyes of fellow warders and warriors. With her fist, she began to strike the table. “I know you remember the songs, Pel. And you, Eztaral. I heard you and my husband singing them many a time.” She cleared her throat and, unabashed, uttered words I had only ever heard belted from the barracks of second-born.

To me, singing was the quickest route to the familiar and much-avoided town of embarrassment. The only way I would ever sing was in the company of others who were louder and even more tone-deaf than I am. Even when the song was taken up by the crowds, I faked it, mouthing words I half-knew. Mother was as I had never seen her, singing at the top of her lungs. It was the second-born in her showing its colours, and it was a fine thing to see. Pel closed his eyes as he spoke the lyrics as a poem. Eztaral banged her cup and joined the roar.

The crowd swayed back and forth to the flow, and I smiled as I saw others acting the words, grabbing at neighbours to sing as loud as possible into each other’s faces.

Not all joined the deafening chorus, however. As the warriors shifted like the trees in a gale, others could be spied. Their mouths were shut, their eyes keen, and their sips measured. They looked no different. They wore no lizard masks and brandished no copper knives, just warriors and workers and plain others, but for whatever reason, the frivolity didn’t touch them. Many, I realised, were staring at me.

The attention was a kind I didn’t enjoy, and I found my stare longing for the door. It was then that I saw Ralish beyond the Thievery. The glimpse was so brief I wasn’t sure it was her, but I jolted from the table.

“Everything all right, Tarko?” Mother asked of me instantly, yelling over the crowd.

“I thought I saw an old friend. Might get some fresher air,” I said, though such a thing was hard to come by with the constant smoke lacing the air.

“None of us should be alone,” warned Mother.

“Your mother is right,” Eztaral said.

Pel began to rise. “I’ll go.”

“No, old man. You and I need to talk about your magic,” ordered Eztaral. “Inwar will go with you.”

“He… what?” I objected. “I can’t control this thing.”

But Inwar was already trotting for the door as if the jāgu knew better. The fearsome beast cleared quite the path even in that packed alehouse.

Eztaral chuckled. “Don’t worry, he’ll control you.”

It most definitely seemed that way. With pats raining on my shoulders, I followed the beast from the door and found him on his haunches, tail swishing as if I was slowing him down. He yowled at me between his crisscrossed fangs, but as I peered through the crowds for Ralish, he followed me sure enough.

The song had spread to those who couldn’t squeeze into the Thievery. The circular platform around the branch and trunk was full of stamping feet. Two lancers were duelling with their swords in a thick circle of onlookers, accompanied by cheers and laughter. Amongst that crowd, I found Ralish with crossed arms and a half-smile fixed on her face in admiration of the show. Her workers’ threads were burned black all along one side. Not severely enough to wound, though, and I got the feeling Ralish wore the char with some pride. As I pulled at the folds of my Scion’s leafleather – and quietly thanked the gods I wasn’t wearing the armour she had mocked – I made my way towards her.

I was barely feet away when a gap-toothed third-born barged in front of me. His eyes searched my face as if it were covered in glyphs.

“It’s you, ain’t it?” he said, extending his hands to grab mine. “The lad they’re saying won the battle for us.”

I tried to avoid him but the chap was persistent. “I helped, is all.”

“Nonsense, my brother’s a mudmage of twenty seasons, and he said he can’t cast half as well as you. He saw the whole thing, and—bleeding trees!” he yelled upon seeing Inwar stalk up to my side. His shout drew looks from all around, including the attention of Ralish. I stood taller for some reason.

“That bloody thing should have a muzzle on like the barkwolves do,” he said, wiping sweat from his forehead.

“You’d lose your hand before you got anywhere near him,” I said loudly, echoing what I remember of Atalawe’s warning on the Emerald Causeway, the day this had all started. I inwardly tensed as I reached to pat the jāgu between his tufted ears. Sat on his backside, Inwar almost reached my shoulders. I saw the ripple run through the ridge of hair along his spine, but otherwise he tolerated my touch.

The man bobbed his head in thanks and quickly rethought his urge to speak to me. Others gave us a wide berth, but still the thanks came in raised fists or nods. Either news travelled swiftly, or I had made quite the impression.

Ralish was staring at me. The smile had flattened. The fact a jāgu sat beside me licking at its sickle claws didn’t seem to draw a single blink from her.

“If it isn’t Tarkosi Terelta,” Ralish said, her tone the fake and painful kind of cheery. “I’m surprised you could find a little time away from celebrating and toasting your own success to come idly wander the branches with us worker folk. Too busy making a real difference, I suppose.”

“I wanted to apologise about that,” I blurted.

“You did, did you?” Ralish said, moving away from the fight and through the crowds to look at the fortifications burning with vinelight and fireworm and torches. Ash mottled her hair. “And what exactly would you be apologising for?”

“For not explaining myself better,” I began, hoping that was the right reason. “I didn’t mean what I said outside the nests when I saw you last. I couldn’t tell you for risk of sounding utterly mad, but now you see what I was involved in.”

Ralish chewed at her lip in brooding suspicion. “Demons and magic, or so it seems. They’ve made you a sorcer, I see.”

I looked at my hands, having once more forgotten their new hue. “That they have. Sage Dūnekar made me an elevate an hour before battle.”

Ralish didn’t comment. She instead turned her face to the glow of the ever-present inferno at our backs. She left the talking to me, and I stammered for something to say. Serisi might have been ignoring me, but I could still feel her silent, judgmental glare.

“I… erm,” I began, a wonderfully strong start.

“Nobody’s worrying about lice now,” said Ralish. “I can tell you that. Soon as Shal Gara started to move, they bolted. Now I’m part of the fire crews. No different really: it’s tough work that nobody pays attention to despite us saving their arses.”

I winced.

“I hear I should be thanking you, judging by the gossip running up and down the city. They’re calling you some kind of saviour.”

My smile pounced before I could drag it back. “What have you heard?”

Her laugh was harsh. “If you think for a moment I’m massaging your ego or thanking you for anything, Tarko, you’re more of an idiot loamer than I thought you were.”

I swore Inwar laughed at me. He certainly snuffled and panted in a way that sounded like laughter. Wrinkling my nose, I followed Ralish’s gaze to the fires and hoped silence would be better at speaking than I was. While I waited for a good idea, I heard a cheer erupt from The Raven’s Thievery.

“Tarko!”

Mother came bustling through the throngs with my sister in tow. She pretended as if Ralish weren’t there. “Take your sister home. She may have inherited your father’s penchant for drink but not his resilience to it.”

Tesq grinned at me lopsided as if she had forgotten I had existed for a moment. If I wasn’t mistaken, there was a small fleck of vomit on her chin. I winced.

“And who is this?” Mother asked of Ralish by my side at last.

“Overseer Ralish Lahni.” She bowed her head low. “I believe you knew my father.”

“I believe I did. Malam Lahni. A fine warrior in his time, Three Gods keep him. And how did you two meet?”

Ralish smiled broadly. “Tarko spent a day in the louse-mines before… whatever happened to him.”

Mother’s gaze switched between us while my sister hiccupped loudly. “Louse-mines. I thought you were working the nests.”

“Oh, he was fired,” Ralish explained.

“Will you look at the hour,” I said. “Let’s get you back to the Den, Tesq.”

“You be careful,” Mother told me with a wry look. “There’s more than demons to worry about.”

“Yes, Mother.”

My sister was quite content to let me do most of her walking for her. I turned to Ralish before I left. “I’m sorry again for what I said.”

Ralish did nothing but fix me with her sky-blue stare. With Tesq under one arm and Inwar by my side, I made my way downwards to the Den.

With the skyrisers being repaired, I was sentenced to a slow and meandering walk through busy workers, wandering revellers, and warriors in tired-looking ranks, waiting their turn at the ales and wines.

Tesq seemed happy enough to stumble about and hum off-key lines of the song. I kept my wits about me and quietly battled with the wobble the wine had put in my own balance. The lights had a halo of thick smoke about them. Ash drifted on the parching breeze.

With the celebration in the high reaches, the Midern was muted. The battlements were full of murmuring ranks of waiting warriors, but the platforms and roads around the trunk were emptier.

“I’m not jealous, you know,” Tesq slurred in my ear as we passed through a darkened tunnel between two branches. “Life’s changed for us all.”

I chuckled at that. At least one person had forgiven me that night. “That it has, sister.”

One branch before the Den, we gained some company. Footfalls, both loud and catching up echoed against the buildings. I saw Inwar’s ears flatten to his skull.

The footsteps clattered over each other, proving there was more than one person behind me. I heard the faint rustle of whispers.

Fireborn. It must have been. I felt a prickling heat run across my brow. My heart faltered in its rush to beat faster. I knew Tesq still had her new sword at her hip; I swore the blasted thing was slowly wearing a hole in my coat.

It was only when another figure stepped out to block my path that I stopped. Inwar hunkered into a crouch and growled deeply. I turned around to see five more behind me. They wore mosscloth masks over their mouths, as many did against the smoke. No snarling jade. No copper lingered in their gloved hands. Instead, they carried long clubs, and several of them had the faint glow of nectra in their eyes.

“I don’t suppose you’re here to ask me directions,” I said. Eztaral’s words about fear echoed in my head, and I unclenched my fists to find the calm inside me. My new sling was still at my belt. I had taken to keeping it loaded since the Night of the Copper Knives.

A ringleader emerged, a burly man with heavy breath and a waft of roast meat and wine about him. “You’re the one they call Tarkosi Terelta,” he accused me. “Aren’t you?”

“Depends what you want with him.”

“We’re here to tell him he’s a freak,” blurted another in a reedy voice. “A perversion of nature that shouldn’t be tolerated, let alone be part of the sorcer tribe.”

I shrugged. “In that case, you have me mistaken for somebody else.”

The second man smacked his palm with his club. “He’s got a mouth on him, Forda,” he snarled.

They were sorcers, not Fireborn; they were my new tribe turned against me in fear and jealousy. That maddened me. “I dare to help Shal Gara survive,” I snapped back. “What nonsense is this that you want to fight me when the real enemy is out there? I’m one of you.”

My shaming only riled them. The hate came spewing.

“You’re not one of us. You’ve no idea what it takes to be a sorcer.”

“How dare you wield magic like you’re one of us. You’re a freak! You ain’t natural, I say.”

“That’s right. We don’t know what you’re capable of.”

“For all we know, you’ve made a pact with those demons!” hissed the ringleader. “That’s where you’ve got your magic from.”

“Lowly mudmagic, too,” growled another.

Their idiocy was astounding.

“Don’t suppose you’re in any state to fight, are you, sister?” I whispered to Tesq.

Tesq’s head rolled around her shoulders. “You want a fight?” she slurred.

With slow and scraping steps, I edged to the railing and leaned Tesq against it.

“If you don’t want to get hurt,” I told them in my finest impression of Eztaral, “I suggest you walk away.”

Inwar reiterated my point with a snarl.

One of the idiots nudged the ringleader. “You didn’t say he’d have a beast with him.”

“Doesn’t matter!” he growled. “We’ll teach him a lesson all the same.”

And with no more luxury of conversation, the sorcers approached.

Inwar almost put a stop to them right there and then in one swift move. He pounced on the ringleader and promptly ripped his cloak and back to shreds. The man’s howls were piercing.

In the moment of distraction, I swung my sling at the nearest man’s head. I fumbled the blow, the stone glancing off his jaw, but I put him on the floor just the same. Inwar was fending off a frantic beating from the others with wild lashings from his claws. I hit them with as much magic as I could muster in an instant. With my outstretched hand, I clouded one sorcer with dust and ash before she could summon her magic and swung for the next: the fellow with the reedy voice.

He was a crafty one, bending under my aim and whacking me in the ribs. The Scion’s uniform and the demon’s strength running through me halved the pain I should have felt. I moved not in thought but through Eztaral’s training. I clasped the club under my elbow and thwacked the sling across the man’s face. He fell away bleeding, but as I swung for him again, he clawed a hand. An abrupt wind battered me backwards.

I raised a dart spell against him, but not a speck of dust reached the bastard. Instead, I rolled away in the direction of the wind blast and saw one of the sorcers poised over my sister with a club. Tesq was berating him for something, pushing her hands in his face and doing a surprisingly fine job of keeping him at bay. I reached him in three great strides, and with protective ferocity powering me, I jumped to drive both my feet into his chest. There came a cry of pain, a loud crack as the railing behind him snapped, and then an even louder, more harrowing scream as he hurtled downwards.

Tesq managed to help me up before almost tumbling into the smoky void herself.

“Rude,” she muttered, trying to draw her sword.

Wind battered me from both sides once more, holding me in one place. I heard Inwar roar as another sorcer managed to draw blood from his side with a sandglass dagger. It did nothing to stop the jāgu. In fact, quite the opposite: it drove him into a murderous fit. The sorcer did her best to run before Inwar broke her neck between his sabre jaws.

With Tesq battling to stay upright and my inability to put another foot forwards, I reached out with my hands. The ash was a blizzard around us, and as the air carvers kept their focus on me, I built my spells behind their backs. A simple column of ash and dust was all I could raise under such onslaught, and just before they ripped the air from around me, I clobbered them with as much force as I could.

As the sorcer to my left immediately crumpled to the wood, I was blasted to the side. The other had somehow fended off my spell. The miss enraged me. I assailed him with every flake of ash my magic could seize. Splinters of bark even tore from the trunk beside us. The sorcer’s spell became a ragged wall of detritus.

A cry was about to tear from my throat when the wall of air dissolved. The sorcer was there, cross-eyed and clutching at his head. It took him a moment or two to topple into a heap. Ralish stood behind him with a now broken and distorted fireworm lantern. The fluttering insects within scattered across the wood like cinders.

Ralish stared at me, one eye narrowed. “I see you’re still struggling to make friends wherever you go.”

Before I could reply, a limp weight fell against my shoulder. It was Tesq. She squinted at Ralish and then regarded me with a very serious but unavoidably glazed look. “Who’s this one?”

I couldn’t help but grin.

24

Shifted Winds

Let them sing the praises of Kalabasqa’s Brew. Let them toast with the sourness of vinewine. Let them swill what they please, for once Beshō’s fortified ticabo wine, matured for twenty seasons in the deepest of cave shadow, touches their tongue, there is no equal.

FROM A POSTER SMEARED ACROSS KALABASQA’S FERMENTING HOUSE

Ralish did not seem overly impressed with the Den nor what I told her of the Scions. She stayed mostly silent, nodding occasionally, and otherwise studying everything.

I blamed the evening’s end. Violence tends to put a dampener on most things.

Once we had subdued the groaning sorcers, it wasn’t long before warders, warriors, and all manner of others came running. Far too late to be of any use but mainly gawping and asking me questions, but at least they kept the binds off me. They likely feared demons, but they were no less outraged to find traitors attacking one of their own. In a time of war, no less.

“On the eve of our first victory! How dare you?” one lancer yelled as he bound a sorcer’s hand. “It’ll be the Burrows for the lot of you loamers, I bet!” he cried. “Just you wait until the matriarch gets to see you kneeling before her.”

As somebody who had experienced that firsthand, it was exactly what they deserved. Although they had come away beaten and bloody, I was still bruised on the inside. I had expected to be hated by the demons, not my fellow citizens. Never mind sorcers.

Though it was said Eztaral and Pel were being fetched, I did not want to wait. By Inwar’s pacing, he felt the same. Tesq was getting heavier. As I had made my exit, Ralish looped Tesq’s other arm about her shoulder and walked with me without a word, even when I thanked her.

So it was that Ralish stood in the centre of the Den, staring in circles at its walls and listening to the faint snore coming from Tesq’s hollow. Between the dim glowing paint spread around the walls and the lanterns that refused to wake up no matter how I shook them, the Den was dark. The falling ash had drawn a grey circle at the Den’s centre. Inwar sat nearby in the shadows, licking the blood from his claws.

While I struggled to find anything resembling a beverage, Ralish drew patterns with her foot. “Out with it then, Tarkosi,” she asked me so abruptly I banged my head on a wooden overhang. “I’ve heard the blabbing tongues like the rest of ’em. They say there’s a sorcer who doesn’t need nectra,” she added after a short while. “I guess that would be you.”

I nodded.

“How is that even possible?”

“It happened during the Sheertown massacre,” I said, showing her the scars on my right hand as if the answer was written in my palm. I made sure to keep the rest of the dark veins under my sleeve. “Something happened when I came face-to-face with a demon. All I remember was wanting to be anywhere else and having no other choice but to take my chance drinking some stolen nectra.”

“Stolen nectra? Didn’t have you pegged for a thief, Tarko. A layabout, maybe. Useless perhaps.”

“You thought so little of me?”

Ralish smirked. “I did.”

“Borrowed would be more accurate. Maybe it was some magic in me, maybe some magic of the demon’s, but whatever happened put nectra in my veins and kept me alive. I woke up under the rubble and escaped into the forest.”

There was a long pause before Ralish snorted. “And why’d the Three in all their almighty wisdom see fit to give you, a barely passable worker, such a gift?”

I tried to ignore the jibe. Counting Serisi as a gift was difficult yet undeniable. I shrugged. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing, but I’m not going to question it. There’s far too much danger around us to waste it.”

Ralish said nothing to that. At last, I found some of the matriarch’s finest wine in a crate and filled two cups. I handed her one and stood within the light of the open ceiling above us.

Ralish sniffed the wine deeply as Pel had done. “And so why would those sorcers attack you if you’re the oh so very noble saviour Shal Gara needs? You didn’t answer the lancer’s questions, but I’d sure like to know.”

“In truth I don’t know. I’d say they were scared. Or jealous, though they had a funny way of showing it.”

“You think a lot of yourself these days, don’t you?” Ralish accused.

“Not me. They were the ones who called me a freak of nature. A perversion. Dangerous.”

Ralish looked at me as if she was still trying to work that out for herself. A nearby bench took the weight of my tired legs. Ralish watched the ash streak across the canopy. Once every so often, a wildfire spark would drift through the grey flakes to chase the bloodwood. I confess, I watched her more than the crimson false sky.

“Dangerous. In the mines you could barely look at a louse, let alone wrangle it,” she chuckled.

“A lot changed quickly. Far too quickly for my liking. First being kidnapped, then surviving the war-party and Sheertown, then the Scions and the training, and now war. Perhaps I am dangerous,” I replied, trying my hardest to keep the smile from my face. “But then again so are you, after what you did tonight.”

“That loamer should have watched his back.”

“And after what you told me in the mines.”

Ralish looked at me sideways. “Which was?”

“That you killed a man.”

“Ha,” she snorted. “That.”

“So it was a lie?”

“How dare you, Tarko. It’s true enough. How many have you killed now, though? Maybe a demon or two even?”

“No, you don’t get away with it that easily.” I smirked. “What happened? You never did tell me.”

Ralish waggled her wine in my face. “Because you never turned up for another day.” She huffed before readjusting herself.

“I would have, had somebody not kidnapped me and taken me east,” I admitted. “I thought I had found my calling. A headwoman who didn’t treat me like orokan shit, and an overseer who actually understood me. Maybe not agreed with me, but understood.”

“Is that so?” Ralish said between noisy sips. “I used to agree, I suppose. I was all angst and rebellion when I was the rank of a hand, too. I realised early that not everybody who had a higher rank deserved it. You could thank my first overseer for teaching me that, when I worked the highfield harvest. He was the kind who is given a pinch of power and thinks he’s a sage because of it. You probably met a few yourself. Some people just enjoy power, don’t they?”

I nodded, knowing the feeling all too well.

“Some belittle and punish others not only because they can, but it’s the only way they can feel better about their own miserable lives, I guess. Others were treated like shit, and so they act the same when they get a rank. This overseer – Axabar was his name – was a different type of scum altogether. He got enjoyment out of the way he treated us hands. He carried a switch with him constantly, and every time he drew blood with it, I saw him lickin’ his lips. Even the headwoman couldn’t curb his cruelty. She tried once and was replaced the very next day. Turned out Axabar was of a noble family that were all as atrocious as he was. Weeks go by, and each day he steps a little further from cruel to simply evil.” Ralish lifted the sleeve of her burned tunic and showed me long welts across her upper arm, seasons healed.

“The more he beat us, the angrier I got, until one mornin’ a greenhand worker barely fourteen seasons got a beating so bad Axabar blinded him in one eye. When the boy was in such pain he couldn’t work, Axabar kept hitting him until his switch broke and he used his fists. We all just watched out of fear. Not one of us moved out of fear. Poor greenhand was never seen again in the highfields. Heard he was beaten so bad he never talked or saw right again. The week after, I heard Axabar making a joke about the boy, and all my anger came to the boil. I’d had enough of Axabar, the highfields, even the whole bloodwood. I punched him square in the nose. I didn’t stop there. I just kept hitting him until all too quickly we were at the edge of the highfields, and Axabar was crashing through the railings, screeching like a quillhog as he fell.”

“So it was an accident?”

“Six Hells, no,” Ralish scoffed. “I knew what I was doing. When the other overseers and headmen came runnin’, not a soul said a word of blame. An accident, they called it, and an accident it stayed. My fellow hands might have saved me from the Burrows or from hanging, but they still dismissed me to the gloomfarms as punishment. Such is the way of the Bloodlaws. And surprise: the overseers were no different in the gloom. Only when I worked up to the louse-mines did I find a headwoman that didn’t deserve strangling, and by then I’d made my peace with my place in the bloodwood. There’s no fighting it. No changing it, or so I thought.”

Ralish met my eyes then. “Then you came along. I thought you were all talk, but here you are. A worker who defied order to become a sorcer. A worker who stands side by side with sages and envoys. A worker who fights demons. You’ve changed it all.”

I made a face, feeling the need for modesty. “It’s all a mistake.”

“What?”

“It was an accident. Surviving Sheertown, the nectra, my magic? All the luck of the gods. The demons changed the Swathe, not me.”

“Funny. I thought I heard the bloodwood shouting your name.” Ralish smirked. “Perhaps I should be thanking them, instead.”

“I thought you said you had no intention of thanking me.”

“And I don’t.”

It was then that Ralish leaned forwards to bring her lips to mine. She must have heard my heart thudding against her own chest, but she did not pull back. My hand clutched at her raven hair before she broke away. Swilling the last of her wine, she stood and made for the doorway.

“Whatever’s got into you, Tarko, don’t let go of it,” Ralish said, flashing me an enticing look.

I watched her go with my teeth tapping together, feeling guilt mix with the thrill in my gut.

If only she knew the truth, came the faintest whisper in my head, and I snarled as I pushed myself up and towards my bed.

��

This nightmare did not strand me in a forest gripped in inferno. It did not drown me in fire as it had before. It began in a blizzard of ash.

The worn wood of Shal Gara’s walkways were thick with it. Bare feet scuffed deep prints. My hands reached for railings and bark walls that constantly avoided my touch. Not a soul trod the darkness with me. Shal Gara was bare as picked bones. Shadows scuttled away from me on insect legs.

A dim light was all I followed. A lantern burning deep in the charcoal haze. It grew with every silent step I took.

When at last my feet found an edge to the deck, and a railing nudged me in my stomach, I looked down on a black and crippled forest. Every tree was a skeleton of its former self. The bloodwood beneath me snapped them to ash in its merciless march.

It was not a lantern that hung before me, but the glow of fire. It stormed from the south like an arm reaching a mighty blow. Inexorably, it came for Shal Gara. My home. Demons and navik charged unchecked, riding a rising wave of flame. Leading them with two swords raised to smite me was the demon king Faraganthar.

No matter how I tried to run, my feet betrayed me. No magic came from my hands. The heat scorched the skin and meat from my bones before I could wake.

��

My piteous yell was cut short to a muffled yelp by the wood hitting me in the face. With bleary eyes I slowly made out the floor I was pressed against.

I had fallen out of bed face-first with my legs still trapped in mosscloth. Very elegant and impressive indeed, for one warriors and sorcers had been toasting all night.

The mere thought of wine simultaneously brought a dire thirst to my mouth and a pounding headache waltzing into my head. I groaned and cursed all things fermented.

Clothes were dragged from different directions, but before I could dress myself, I couldn’t help but notice the dust spread across the floor. Fine ash dust, the same as was on my feet. The nightmare reared its head in the daylight for a brief moment, but it was easier to blame the constant ash spread across the Den than let the dream creep further into reality. They were already much more vivid than they had begun. But my flesh was still attached to my bones. There wasn’t a burn or scratch other than what I’d earned in battle or the fight with the sorcers. Just a few on my shoulder and neck that I didn’t remember receiving in the blur that was the end of the night. By the pounding of my head, the wine was my only true injury.

The Den was quiet. A table stood off-centre. Pel perched on a stool and had his feet up on a sack. He was busy carving a clubfoot mushroom just like he had as a beggar outside my cottage. Tesq sat at the table by his side. She was smoking the stone pipe I had seen Pel smoke on occasion after heavier nights on the urka seeds.

“Good morning, Tarkosi,” Pel said, bending an ear towards me. “I assume that was you that fell out of your bed.”

“Correct as usual,” I said in a slight rasp.

“And how was your evening, little brother?” Tesq studied me over the coiled smoke of the pipe.

“First time I’ve been that drunk, I can tell you that,” I breathed, wincing at the light.

Pel pushed a clay bowl of water towards me, along with a few bearing dried fruits and seeds. Others with thick maize and rice porridges with sliced frog meat or roast vegetables. Compelled by a ravenous stomach, I practically dove for the latter.

“And what of our visitor that you brought so willingly into the Scions’ Den?”

“Her name is Ralish,” I muttered. “An overseer from the louse-mines.”

“Fun night, was it?” Tesq smirked at me.

I responded with a scowl and a flick of a seed across the table. I vowed you were never too old or too important to throw food and objects at a sibling. “Nothing like that. Ralish is a friend, I think. Maybe. I can’t figure it out. All I know is my fight with the sorcers might have soured my chances of anything more.”

Tesq almost dropped the pipe. “The sorcers. I thought I’d dreamed that.”

Pel tutted as he rescued his pipe from my sister. His voice was twice as deep with the smoke he inhaled. “Oh no, Tesq. Three dead sorcers would disagree with you, if they could.”

“Three dead?” I asked.

“Nobody that didn’t need hurting,” Pel reminded me.

Tesq turned paler. “Did I… kill anyone?”

“You handled yourself pretty well for a person that could barely walk,” I said.

Tesq couldn’t decide between a grin and a grimace.

“News got soon back to The Raven’s Thievery, and Eztaral and I have been up since before firstglow seeing to the sorcers that attacked you. The Envoy Okarin didn’t wait for her mother’s order, she had the three survivors locked in the Burrows within several hours of the attack,” Pel informed me. “But it goes to show we now have to fight stupidity as well as purposeful treachery. Don’t be surprised to find some extra warriors outside the Den keeping watch.”

“I’m not going to lie, I had expected more of a scolding. I hadn’t much of a choice but to fight them, but I—”

“You and Tesq are alive. You proved yourself well. Any anger is for ourselves for letting you go with only Inwar for protection.”

“Where are the others? Is Mother here?” I asked.

“She’s sleeping. As is Atalawe. The ticabo vat was deeper than we expected.”

I had to smile. My mother deserved to sleep for more than the usual hour or two she was used to. “And what happened to Redeye?” I said around a mouthful of porridge with a complete abandonment of manners.

Pel shrugged. “Hasn’t surfaced yet, but I’m sure he will. Atalawe didn’t speak much of it.”

“Could he…” I stopped myself. “I mean… How long have you known him?”

“About twice as long as you have been alive, Tarko. Atalawe’s mother was a Scion who trained me in the art of the bow. The half part of the half-sibling has never mattered much to either of them. They are too alike. So if you’re about to ask whether we should be worried about Redeye’s loyalty to the Scions, I would think very carefully before you go accusing people I’ve known since their birth.”

I had got my scolding at last. Pel smoked in silence.

The eating proceeded in silence until I felt compelled to tell the old man. My own nonsense or not, I couldn’t take the chance. “I had another one of those nightmares.”

“Dreamwalking again?” Pel’s brows climbed up his forehead. I thought that would be the end of it, but he seemed curious. “And what was it this time, Tarko?”

“Something I can’t get out of my head. A wave of demons attacking from the south, reaching out and around Shal Gara like a sickle knife.”

“A concentrated attack on one flank.”

I waved my spoon in a circle before nodding. “I suppose you could put it like that, why not.”

Pel’s fingers found the dried fruits, and he chewed as he watched me carefully, despite his stare pointing past my shoulder. “From the south, you say?”

“This was the most vivid nightmare yet. I could have sworn I was standing on the south side of a leafroad staring right at them. I could feel the heat burning the skin from my hands as I held them up.” The shiver that convulsed me shut me up.

“When?”

“I don’t know. It was dark in the nightmare, that was all. Not night, but a day shrouded in ash.”

“Just like today,” Tesq whispered, her eyes glued on the hole in the Den’s roof. Half the colour of the canopy had been muted by ash.

Pel rapped his knuckles on the table before getting up. He was already bustling to the racks of weapons. “You had best get your armour on, Scion, because if my old nose and ears aren’t right, the winds have already changed. Eztaral and Haidak should hear of this as soon as possible.”

“You believe in these nightmares?”

“At this point, I’ll believe in anything if it keeps this bloodwood standing.”

Before I could follow Pel’s orders, Tesq bounced a seed off my head. “Tarko.”

We stared at each other for a moment before she blinked. “Thank you for saving my life, no doubt,” she said.

I could count the number of times my sister had ever thanked me for anything on one finger. And while I became incredibly aware of the porridge still clinging to my face, I smiled back at her. “You stay alive, now.”

“And you, not-so-little brother.”

��

Misfit helped me in no way. The shrewbat stared at me as I attempted to don my Scion’s armour. I had got the boots and kilt on, but I had paused somewhat with my torso bare and an itch in my mind.

“Serisi,” I muttered to the emptiness of my room.

For a moment, there came no answer. When it did, it came in the form of a hissing squeak from Misfit, camped in a small nook of moss I’d made him. He was quite happy in his new surroundings.

“Fine. Suit yourself.”

As I raised up my breastplate, I saw the shadow across my upper arm. The black veins had continued to spread across my bicep. Some were already creeping onto my shoulder. I checked in the polished slab of stone in the corner and saw threads of darkness reaching for my neck like a miniature tree branch. I would need a scarf to keep them from prying eyes.

My heart clenched harder and faster as I poked at my poisoned veins. No pain came, even when I pressed the bruises from the fight. They were dimmer than they had any right to be. Instead, I felt a buzzing strength running through me.

It was a shame I didn’t feel any sharper when it came to my intelligence. Whatever the wine had done to me, it took me twice as many mistakes as usual to put on my armour. When I emerged from my hollow, Pel was gone. As was Tesq, but I heard a vague sound of vomiting coming from the closed doors of the hollows. With leafleather creaking, I made my way from the Den and was surprised to find not Pel but Juraxi hovering near the entrance. The burns across one side of his face had healed some more, but the scars looked like they would never fade.

“Juraxi?

“Young Tarko. There you are. Pel has gone ahead and asked you to catch up,” he said without any explanation. He wasn’t the only warrior lingering about: a good number of lancers and sorcers stood guard on the branch. They didn’t look the most polished warriors I had ever seen, but every one of them looked as if they had no qualms cutting throats.

“And what, without trying to sound rude at all, are you doing here?” I asked.

“No offence taken. Eagleborn Kraid wanted trustworthy souls standing watch. These are all old friends from the Scorchwars, or so they tell me. As for me? You, Atalawe, and your mother saw fit to help me. I’ll do the same for you if I can.”

“Then in that case I’m glad you’re here.”

Juraxi’s lopsided smile broadened. “As am I.”

With a mouth empty of words, I gave him an awkward nod, but before I pressed on, he caught me by the arm.

“Say,” Juraxi spoke in a quiet voice, “I didn’t want to mention it to anyone else, but I found you wandering in a circle last night in the Den. You were walking in your sleep, Tarko. That’s a normal thing for you, right?”

My immediate reaction was to laugh, even though a twitch of dread stabbed me. “Ha! Yes. Yes, it is. I haven’t done it in seasons. Guess I should blame the ticabo wine,” I lied.

Juraxi chuckled. “Had me worried me for a moment there last night, I tell you. Well, Tarko, make sure you stay alive now. We’re counting on you.”

“And you, Juraxi.” I held my wavering grin as long as I could before turning away to bite my lip. I had never sleepwalked in my life. In our old cottage of hatches and ladders, if you walked in your sleep, you fell in your sleep. I appreciated Juraxi’s silence and the explanation for ash on my feet, but the horror of stumbling around the Den in my sleep, doing gods knew what, disturbed me. I wholeheartedly blamed the wine. It was turning out to be a crucial scapegoat today.

“Serisi,” I whispered once again, but the demon stayed mulishly silent.

The day was bleak and far too similar to my nightmare for my liking. Pel was right: the wind had shifted. A scorched smell had come with it. The wildfire chasing us glowed behind the thick smoke.

Ash had to be constantly cleared from every deck and platform by crews of workers. Warders at intersections shook themselves like birds shivering in the rain. Three Gods, did I miss birdsong and the croak of frogs and lizards. They had long fled the bloodwood. I hadn’t realised until that moment and tutted at myself for ever cursing their firstglow songs dragging me to work. The barkwolves and orokan hard at work alongside their masters were the only animals left in Shal Gara and most likely the forest for miles around. It was a measure of life already sucked from the tree, and today, draped in ash and charred by demonfire, Shal Gara looked half-dead, and it knuckled my gut.

I made a purposeful detour to try to find Ralish at the louse-mines. They were shuttered, of course, but I knew of no other place but her home branch. Even there, I saw nothing of her, just the grey smear of smoke and dirt that covered every inch of the bloodwood.

At least Shal Gara’s citizens were not so ashen.

If I had expected the branches to be full of sullen and hungover citizens, I would have been deeply mistaken. The tribes shone in all their separate facets that day. Warriors ran drills over and over across the branches. Workers of every calling hauled supplies and materials back and forth side by side. Healers spread themselves across the branches, showing each other the tricks of soothing burns. All separate but still obstinately together.

“Serisi!” I breathed. “You had better speak to me, demon.”

No voice rang in my head but my thoughts.

“Are you going to ignore me forever? I have questions, curse you.”

The demon’s silence lasted just long enough for me to wonder if I had somehow silenced her, perhaps even rid myself of her…

Good morning, Tarko.

“What game have you been playing, staying so silent?”

I have been busy thinking, Serisi replied. She sounded subdued.

“Really? About what?”

About this tree of yours. The demon sighed. About you, Tarko of the Swathe. You continue to surprise me. I… Here she growled for some time. Worm kind is not so despicable after all. Not so worthy of crushing to dust as I had expected it would be.

She must have seen me blinking like an owl studying a puzzle. “Is that so? What changed your mind?”

I have been asking myself the same question. She took a moment. It is your spirit. It is somewhat… formidable. A different kind of fire exists not just in you but most of these creatures around us. Even in the imbeciles that dared challenge you last night. You fight not to take or survive but to protect what you believe in, stupid as it may be. My father’s mind is set on chaos, and yours on order. Maybe neither can win, and we will destroy ourselves trying to decide.

Shal Gara had changed her mind, precisely as I had hoped but not expected. The first battle must have shown her the bloodwood’s might, and it had rattled her. I tried not to push my luck and picked my words as if finding the good fruit amongst the rotten. “Does… does this mean you intend to help us at last?”

I was content to endure you until my father brought this tree to its knees, but that seems less likely now. I will not sit and watch my kin slaughtered, and while I loathe myself to admit it, I do not wish to see this tree burn, either. Perhaps the two of us can force my father’s hand into a truce. A pact, like between you and I.

Suffice it to say, I was shocked. The Three Gods and their spirits must have been smiling broadly somewhere behind the rain and smear of ash. “These nightmares of mine, is that you trying to help? I see the wildfires and your father almost every night. But this time was different. It felt real, as if I watched it happen, but it clearly hasn’t.”

It was real, just not yet. Call it a vision, if you must. The magic that binds us has let you glimpse my mind when you dream. It is how you have seen the Starless Plains and the Last Clan. My father’s will is powerful and far-reaching. It keeps the horde as one and controls the navik. With you and I growing stronger each day, you must have glimpsed his intentions through me. I saw what he planned and so did you. It is not betrayal.

I ignored the demon’s excuses. “Do you think Faraganthar sees me? Sees us?”

Impossible. Dreams are human, not of demonkind.

I clenched my teeth, trying to trust her. “And what of me walking in my sleep, then? Was that your doing?”

Serisi snorted. I have no such power over you, Tarko. Nor do I want to move your feeble body about. I am your prisoner, remember?

“Fine,” I replied, “Maybe it was the ticabo wine.” Last night was certainly hazy enough. All except Ralish’s lips.

I feel its poison pounding in my head like it does yours. Why do you humans do such things? And what exactly were you doing with that other worm? With your lips? I felt an unusual stirring within you as if you were hungry—

“That’s none of your business,” I told the demon firmly and swiftly. I decided to test the nightmare and walk south instead of down towards Pel.

“It’s that sorcer Terelta!” came a yell. A wilder stood at a barracks built into the bark and waved. I had supposed the smog and distraction of war would stop people from recognising me, but this wilder had keen eyes. It didn’t take long for a few others to point at me and cheer. Another passerby clapped me heartily on the back, jolting the breakfast in my stomach. A grey-haired and crooked woman approached me with a smile and a wreath of flowered vines. I bowed my head, not quite sure what to do but clutch them and keep moving

You are enjoying this, aren’t you?

The demon knew me well. “Wouldn’t you?” I muttered through my teeth.

Wind gusted through the crowded streets momentarily, and in the flurry of ash around me I saw the faintest grin. Wide of eye in case Serisi be seen, I hurried on, still heading downwards but to a southern platform.

As in the dream, I found a railing and pressed myself to it. My heart was beating unnaturally. I stared into the smoke and ash and sure enough saw nothing at all. No glint like lantern-glow. No fire in the blizzard of ash. “I don’t see anything.”

What use is a warning when it comes too late? My father will lash out at you with all his ferocity. Here, where your fortifications and warriors are lesser, and where you have little time to build more. If you can defeat him again, he will think twice about a third battle.

“You have been paying attention, I see,” I said.

You forget I am a creature of war, Tarko. All demonkind are. Our horde has fought more battles than you have eaten meals.

“That’s enough bragging out of you, Serisi.” The sheer effort of counting such a number unsettled me. “Now all I have to do is get Eztaral to believe us.”

Good luck with that.

I scowled into the ash. “Thank you.”

The Rootfort called to me from deep below with a distant clatter. I stared down at the skirt of the Neathering, its wood painted patchwork amid the green glow of huge mushrooms that normally only shone at night. It was a disquieting omen. My mind wandered to the same cold light that had lit the Burrows. I would have shivered at the thought of the cells had it not been the realisation of who now occupied their pitch-dark hollows.

The Rootfort could wait for a few moments more. There was something I had to do first.

��

The shrill cry almost shook the magic from me. An obsidian-studded club waggled in my face. At the other end of it was a boy who appeared to be half my age and a good foot shorter than me, and he alone barred the Burrows tunnel.

“Stay right there!” he yelled again for good measure.

Strike the wretch down like you did those sorcers, Tarko, Serisi growled within. How dare this worm stand in our way.

“Calm down,” I told both the demon and the boy.

“Leave ’im alone, Inis, don’t you know who this is?” barked a portly warder shuffling down the Burrows tunnel towards us. “Never mind that he’s passed two warders already, curse it!”

Inis looked as though he hadn’t a clue but was eager to go along with it.

“Course. Sorry,” said the boy as he lowered his obsidian-studded club. He was promptly shooed away.

“They’re sending me bloody children now. And thanks to you, all of them think they’re here to fight demons.” The older warder bowed as low as his ale-ripened belly would allow. It was the same chap who had seen to the Scions during our short stay in the Burrows, and either he had a terrible memory for faces or he pretended not to remember he had once locked me behind bars.

“Warder Casqal is the name, and what can we be helping you with, Elevate Terelta?”

I was still so unused to the title coming from strangers’ mouths, I almost looked behind me. I managed to dodge that embarrassment with a swift bow of my own. “I’d like to speak to the sorcers Envoy Okarin had locked up.”

Casqal winked at me at the same time as wiping his sweaty bald brow. “The ones that were beaten senseless last night by your very hands, if I ’eard right. Would those be the same sorcers?”

“They may just be.” I smirked only to copy the warder’s enthusiasm.

“Should have sent more of them to the Hells, the traitorous loamers,” Casqal opined.

I agree.

Casqal leaned to look down the mushroom-lit corridor and then tapped his bulbous nose with a chuckle. “Eagleborn Kraid swore me to no visitors, but I guess you don’t count as a visitor, being one of them Sylons as well, right? Tarko? Can I call you Tarko?”

“If you please, and it’s Scions,” I corrected him, making sure to smile.

Casqal matched my smile and doubled it. “Them’s the ones. Come with me.”

As the warder led me deeper into the Burrows, he cupped his hands around his greasy mouth and yelled, “Batshit!”

“What?” screeched a haggish voice. I saw a familiar crone-like shape emerge into the mushroom glow halfway down the tunnel: a snaggletoothed woman whacking a club repeatedly into her palm. Her lank hair stretched halfway to the floor.

“Keep an eye on our new idiot boy Inis.”

“Bah!” was all she said in reply.

We moved on, and I had to ask. “Batshit? Is that her name?”

“Aye, ’tis. We call her that because, well… she is quite mental.”

A short walk took us to a familiar tunnel. More than familiar. It was burned into my memories. Before me, the dark eyes of the cells spread into the gloom, some half-closed, others wide open, and some squeezed shut. Casqal yammered in my ear.

“Here they are, the pathetic bastards. Attacking you weren’t just stupid, it was downright treacherous, if you ask me. You’re the best hope we’ve got. They’ll rot for putting us all in danger. I’ll be dead before I see these loosed, I tell you. Two are awake and only just stopped hollering. Don’t have much hopes for the third. You bashed his skull in all the wrong places. And if you want them out of the cells for a moment or two, I won’t say no to you teaching them another lesson.”

It was tempting, I will admit that. I might have been Shal Gara’s best hope, but I was still human. “I’ll just take some privacy, if that’s fine with you, warder,” I replied.

Casqal looked a fraction disappointed. “As you wish.”

I could already see fingers clutching at bars. Noses and faces poking into the faint light at the sound of voices. These were the sorcers, not yet hoarse from shouting or driven mad by the creeping of the cell.

Are you going to kill them? Finish the job you started? You and I become more alike each day.

“No,” I muttered.

“Please, we’ve learned our lesson!” one of the three sorcers yelled. The two air carvers were awake. The man I thought I had killed with my sling was currently unconscious and twitching sporadically.

“So quickly?” I asked the others.

They fell quiet as they recognised me. The other inhabitants of these Burrows were equally unhappy to see me. They were the survivors of Sheertown. The very same souls that decided to sacrifice me and lie for their own freedom. The Burrows had not treated them well. I could see how drawn their faces had become. One of them crooked a finger at me.

“You.”

“Me.” And I said no more than that. I simply let them look at me standing beyond their bars, in my armour and my freedom. I saw their eyes crawl to my crimson hands and the two new lines across my right cheek.

One of the sorcers couldn’t help himself. Ralish hadn’t hit him hard enough, apparently. “You’re still a freak.”

Even though I heard Serisi snarl in my head, I managed to stay calm.

“Maybe I am, and yet you’re the one who’s too stupid to realise this freak might be the only person keeping you alive. When I leave here, I go to fight to keep you from burning in demonfire. Think about that when you stew in your jealousy and grand ideas of what is natural and not.”

Is that it? Not a single drop of blood spilled in revenge?

I shook my head, not caring how mad I sounded. “I get the best revenge of all. They’re the bloodwood’s now, and before it claims them, they’ll have plenty of time to torture themselves with regret.”

It was all that was needed to send the sorcers into a panicked rage. The other prisoners either whimpered or stared at me vacantly, all sense gone from their eyes.

It was a strangled whisper that stopped me from leaving so soon. I looked down on a cell whose bars were caked with filth. No hands gripped them, and no face was pressed into the light. I peered into the gloom within the cell and saw a single eye staring back at me. A gurgle turned into a retching sound. A face mottled black with bruises and sores appeared. I barely recognised the man.

“Hatlu Ko,” I muttered. The man was somehow still alive, if that was the right word to use. The grimspore had changed him drastically. What looked like a yellow mould spread across the man’s forehead and neck. Scabs and sores covered his lips. Swellings in his neck and arms protruded thick as thumbs.

His head cracked to the side as I spoke his name, but that was all the sense I could get from him. With bloody spit dripping from his mouth, he receded back into the gloom.

“Warder! What is this man still doing here?”

Casqal appeared much too quickly. At first I thought he must have been eavesdropping, but he acted as if I hadn’t called him at all. He looked sweatier than usual. “Elevate, I—”

“What is it?”

“There’s something happening in the Neathering.” Casqal pointed. “The warriors look like they’re getting ready to fight again.”

My father approaches, as I warned you.

An urgent shiver ran through me. I imagined being late for a battle could be somewhat advantageous if you were more of a cowardly nature, but I had no luxury. Not now.

I put the warder and the Burrows behind me without a second thought. “Have that man put out of his misery, curse it,” I shouted over my shoulder to Casqal shortly before accidentally barging Inis into a wall.

“Get out of his way, you useless boy!” Casqal yelled, and then in a higher, more desperate pitch to the beat of my swaggering footsteps: “We believe in you, Tarko!”

25

The Rootfort

No enemy has ever breached the Rootfort. No creature, no spirit, no marauder has passed these doors.

INSCRIBED ON THE ENTRANCEWAY OF THE ROOTFORT

“Another dream?"

I didn’t need to see Eztaral’s face to know she narrowed her eyes and tucked one corner of her lips in. So it was that I turned away from staring at the churn of dirt and rock below the fort and crossed my arms.

“Yes, another dream,” I insisted. The damnable woman still had a few inches on me, especially with the plume of her helmet. Her mismatched eyes searched mine. I stared solely at the scarlet eye of her noble blood. “Clear as day.”

“You say they’re supposed to be coming from the south?”

“That’s what Tarko said,” Pel replied.

Pel and the other Scions stood spread around the railing of the Rootfort’s highest level. Even Redeye had shown his face again. He stood lopsided and leaning on a walking stick beside his half-sister. He looked everywhere but us, but his face still twitched with intrigue.

“Redeye? What do the lancewing scouts say? Speak up,” Eztaral ordered.

“No difference in the wildfires behind us. The horde still chases us, wreathed in their flame.”

Atalawe nodded. “If Tarko’s right, it leaves our flank lacking protection.”

“And what if Tarko’s wrong, and they attack like last time, or worse, from the north when we have all our warriors on the southern defences?” Eztaral thumbed the edges of her sword, gauntlets grating on the obsidian. I felt Serisi hiss within me in impatience while we waited.

Eztaral spat over the side of the fort into the dirt below. “I won’t put my hopes in a dream—”

“Eztaral,” I interrupted.

“Did I say I was finished, Elevate?” she snapped. “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, I won’t put my hopes in a dream, but I’m not that much of an idiot that I will ignore one, either.”

Pel looked confused. “You’ve never been one for signs, Eztaral.”

“There’s a lot I’ve never been, Pelikai. For example, I’ve never been one for standing around talking with our fingers in our arses while there is much to be done. Ravenborn Gaakaran!”

The ravenborn was close by. He ceased his badgering of workers and swaggered over to us.

“Prepare for an attack from the south,” Eztaral ordered him.

The warrior looked confused. “The south? Haidak said there wasn’t anything to the south.”

“Did I misspeak? South!”

“Aye, Eagleborn!”

“This world used to make sense,” Eztaral snarled before doling out our orders. “The Rootfort is where we’ll make our stand. It’s the only part of our battlements that completely encircles the bloodwood. Now the demons know they can’t burn us out or stop us from moving, the Rootfort is the most vital line of defence against whatever those charcoal-eating bastards choose to throw at us this time. All of us will be here, along with several hundred of the best warriors and sorcers.”

I couldn’t help but look around to see if any scowled or gave me the sour eye. Barely any looked our way, and if they did, it was with curt nods or bows.

“And not a single one of us will leave this platform unless it’s on fire or you’re being carried to the Six Hells in the very palms of the gods themselves. Do you hear me? Not a single demon will get past us.”

Redeye cast his usual shadow on the speech. “And what if they do?”

“Well, Redeye, if we all die horrible deaths and the demons trample our bodies, you’ll be too dead to worry, won’t you?”

While Redeye wrinkled his nose, Atalawe chortled. “The tangle of Neathering will slow them down at least. Who thought the Neathering would ever be so useful.”

Pel shuffled in his armour. “I was born here, I’ll have you know.” His scornful face soon broke into a smile. “And you’re absolutely right.”

“And you, Pelikai. Will you be drinking any nectra anytime soon? No?” Eztaral asked.

“I told you. Dūnekar forbids it.”

Eztaral poked him in the breastplate. “Excuses, old friend. You aren’t that blind. And as for you, Tarko!” She gave me a lasting look before leaving to bellow at another unlucky subordinate. “You better be right about this. We already put too much faith in you as it is.”

I waited until my back was turned to let out a thin breath of whisper. “I hope you heard that, demon.”

I caught Pel looking at me askew, as anyone would catching another talking to themselves. I kept my mouth shut, grabbed the battlement that looked south, and tried to ignore the trembling in my hands.

Atalawe stood so close we nudged elbows. “Inwar had fun last night, it seemed. He was still licking the blood from his lips at firstglow.”

I smiled at the jāgu squatting not far away. A warrior was trying to roll a barrel of dirt past the beast, but Inwar refused to move. “I’m not surprised,” I said. “I probably would have come off a lot worse without him.”

Atalawe blew ash from her nose. “I think you would have been just fine,” she mused, before pointing at my neck. I had torn a scrap of red cloth from a Den blanket and wrapped it around my collar.

“New scarf, I see?”

“My neck was… this armour chafes. And I was cold.”

“You’re a shit liar, Tarko. Many weak arguments don’t make a strong one,” Atalawe said. Before I could pull away, she shifted the scarf aside and saw the veins on my neck.

Atalawe said nothing. She turned and settled her arms back onto the railing. “It has grown as you’ve grown, day by day.”

I scowled. “Does that mean you still think I’m dying?”

“No. You show no signs of it, but a part of you has already died.” Atalawe smirked to put me at ease. “You’re not the same Tarko you were when you came bursting out of that basket on the Emerald Causeway. You walked cowed and never looked at us straight.”

“I’m glad.”

“As am I, but at some point you won’t be able to hide it anymore.”

Is this witch talking about me? asked Serisi.

I flinched. “What?”

Atalawe pointed to my neck. “I’ll keep quiet for you. Pel and Eztaral don’t need another worry on their minds.”

��

As I had come to realise, the problem with a battle is in the waiting for it to begin. Time was a viscous honey that the tree plodded through. The forest inched past us. Even down in the Rootfort, where the roar of the walking roots below was constant, all I heard was a silence longing to be filled with a single shout. Demons to the south. Yet for hours, all of Shal Gara, without noise or barely a breath, waited on me to be right. No wonder every muscle in my body was clenched.

A warrior down the battlements cleared his throat, drawing every one of our eyes.

“Sorry,” he rasped and proceed to cough into his hands.

“You’d best be right about this,” I muttered beneath my breath.

If I lied, then you die today. And me with you. Serisi’s reply was short, her voice harsh. I shook my head. What was I thinking, trusting a demon? An enemy?

“Pel. What if I’m wrong…,” I began to say. The old sorcer’s head turned around so quickly I feared for his spine.

“Demons!” came the distant cry.

I hadn’t look away from the blizzard of ash in so long, my vision was full of its morbid snow. Rubbing my eyes with a thumb, I craned my neck to stare up at the arse of the Neathering and the fortifications far above. All remained silent.

“Where did that come from?” Redeye hissed.

Pel raised his bow. “From above. From the Midern.”

Eztaral’s boots pounded the wooden deck. She hollered over my shoulder and half-deafened me.

“Where are they, gods curse it?”

The wait was excruciating. Every one of us peered into the ash. I bit my lip, and I swore I tasted blood before the reply came hammering down the tree.

“From the south!”

Serisi cackled. You doubt me now, Tarko?

I was too busy trying to stay upright under the deluge of relief to give her any satisfaction.

Atalawe clapped me on the shoulder. “There!”

In the bleak, monochrome wash of the Swathe, almost dead to the south, colour burned. It was almost a mirage at first. Like gazing at a star, I saw it brighter in my peripheries than staring right at it: a splash of amber against the grey.

Eztaral’s orders filled the air as before. “Load the big bows! Sorcers, get that nectra flowing! I want lancewings in the air!”

Shal Gara came alive in moments. Silence turned to cacophony. Drums sputtered into life. Cranks and pulleys whirled. Thousands of feet pounded against every branch. Dozens of lancewings roared past the Neathering in blurs of pirouetting colour. All I could do was wrap another rope around my leg.

The demons came at the bloodwood just as I had dreamed, like a burning fist of fire crashing its way towards Shal Gara.

“How have they come so close without us noticing?” Pel cursed.

Serisi told me alone. We dampen our fires, starve ourselves of meat and breath. My father has run them through the night. It will make my kin fiercer for the battle.

I held my tongue on the matter and simply watched the demons swarm nearer. Trees shook as the forest was punished. The demons’ sulphur stink washed on the hot wind. Smoke choked us.

This battle was not like the last. There was no theatre in the demons’ approach. No testing of our mettle with war-cries and waves of fire. They came at Shal Gara with all the unflinching and singular purpose of an arrow loosed from a string. I could have been wrong, but I felt a deeper rumble running through the tree. And though Shal Gara rode high on yesterday’s victory, I saw that confidence cracking.

It made me grit my teeth all the harder. I defied their weakness. I banned fear from my heart. All that filled my mind was the calm I had trained to exhaustion to learn and the grinning jaws of a demon. Around me, I saw sorcers tilting vials to their lips, grimacing until the blue light rose in their eyes. With bared teeth, I did nothing but clench my right fist. The same shine escaped my fingers as my veins were set aflame. Ash recoiled as a wave of magic reached for the barrels of earth.

“Stay strong!” yelled Eztaral as she walked the battlements, checking this rope and that bow, shaking one quivering warrior after the next. “Aim for their burning hearts! Watch for the navik beasts! Don’t let them get a foothold!”

Spheres of fire soared from the grey forest. Magic pummelled my limbs as I raised my hands to greet them. It fought me, dirt jostling me until I fought it into a raging tendril spell that almost collided with Redeye’s magic. Where most sorcers shot dart spells, I swatted the first flames from the sky with a whip of dirt.

“Don’t use up all your tricks so early, Elevate,” Redeye scoffed at me.

I scowled between the spells pouring around my hands as Eztaral raised her sword over the ranks.

“Ready!”

Trees barely more than an arrow’s reach burst into fire as the demons came into view. With their flames streaming behind them like pennants, they charged headlong in tight formation. Navik clung closer to them, half-trampled, and to a slavering bellow amongst the fire, they outran their demon masters like shadows fleeing firstglow.

“Loose!”

The battle was joined with the roar of slaughter. I didn’t know what I aimed at, but I hurled my darts of packed earth into the fray in mad hope. Between Shal Gara’s giant roots and the veritable rain of arrows and slingstones and spells that poured from the Rootfort and every branch above us, hundreds must have died in mere seconds. I didn’t dwell for a moment: demons came close behind.

Dwarfed as they were by our height, the sheer mass of them spreading towards the south of Shal Gara more than compensated. The fire spells came in fierce and fast. Their wizards didn’t assault the bloodwood from every angle but concentrated solely on lucky us. Reavers stood side by side as they held their fort spells. Redeye and I stood beside each other on the highest battlement, savaging any demon that dared show its ugly face with dart spells. Air carvers put their wind behind our attacks. All the while, the elite water sorcers wielded artistry within our ranks. It was brutally efficient.

Eztaral and Pel were aiming a big bow when a flaming iron arrow the length of a spear punched through the contraption in a hail of splinters. Moments later, another skimmed the railing and pinned a warrior to a wall through his stomach. His howls cut through the ranks. Confusion was quickly sown. Arrow after arrow slammed into the Rootfort and the Neathering. I clenched my spells as tightly as I could, but the effort was draining and the iron arrows too forceful.

“Shields! Archers and spears, return fire! Crank those bows like you were born to a crank, curse you!”

Plates of thick ironpith were dragged from under the battlements and slid into place. I was halfway through manhandling mine when blood sprayed into my face. A woman beside me was reduced to pieces as a demon arrow struck her in the face. I staggered momentarily as I wiped my lips. I could taste her blood in my mouth. Worst of all, Serisi seemed to savour it.

Atalawe shook me. She, too, had found a bow and yelled at me while she chased Pel’s arrows with her own. “Don’t lose yourself now, Tarko! Eztaral has her own tricks.”

From somewhere unsettlingly close by, a horn blasted. The air was filled with the roar of rapid wings. I darted above the shields to see two squadrons of lancewings pincering the demon charge from east and west. Haidak led them with his obsidian glaive held like a banner. However loathsome I still found him, I had to cheer alongside the rest of Shal Gara.

The demons bayed as the huge birds and their riders peppered them with spears and spells. Flaming arrows spewed into the sky. Fire spells lit the forest brighter than any sun. I even saw navik hurled into the air to swing their bladed limbs, and yet not a single lancewing could be touched. They were too nimble, too clever. Riders liked to brag that nothing could touch a lancewing. Scholars said the birds saw time differently than us. Some were fabled to even tread time’s river backwards if they needed to.

And yet, there were simply not enough of them. Haidak’s lancewings did a fine job infuriating and stalling the demons, but the charge was invincible.

Do you see them, Tarko? My kin lie in wait ahead.

I had never given much thought to demons climbing trees before. It seemed as bizarre to me as a worm taking flight, and though my eyes stung with blood and smoke, they did not lie. Ahead of us, poised in branches that were set to collide with Shal Gara, demons waited.

“Pel! Eztaral!” I bellowed. I was already dashing through the ranks, pointing madly. I heard the clanking of the big bows pointing downwards, ready to shoot the fetid fruit from the trees.

From behind a shield, I strove to pull dirt to me. One by one, I formed my dart spells with clenched fingers. Pel was beside me, muttering encouragement I couldn’t hear and didn’t want. Knuckles popped as I kept pressing and pressing. I wanted rock, not dirt, and I squeezed until I couldn’t bear to anymore. As the first of the trees smashed against the bloodwood and the first demon leaped for the flanks of Shal Gara, my spells were waiting.

The first dart missed, but the second tore a hole through a demon’s midriff. With a desolate screech, the demon bloomed with flame and began a disappointed tumble down the trunk to the crushing roots.

Spell after spell left my fingers. Branches snapped and iron hides bled magma as I rained down on them. The other sorcers around me joined the barrage with wild abandon.

When I couldn’t summon any more dirt, I reached for the loam itself and brought it rushing upwards to knock navik and demon down. My finesse was lacking, I was sure, but I was not thinking of finesse, only violence. I had a reputation to uphold, and the weight of a whole bloodwood’s hopes crushing my shoulders. I roared then and there to relieve the fire in my veins.

For an hour, the Rootfort never once let up, but the constant hail of weapons and spells from both sides started to take a toll on our numbers. Even though reinforcements and supplies flooded down from the Neathering, one gap was all the demons needed, and they soon got it.

A hefty iron arrow hammered into the foundations further down the battlements. This one was not wreathed in fire but trailed a thick rope. It came taut within a moment of striking, and with it, a whole line of archers was thrown aside. While warriors hacked at the rope, it parted the ranks like a knife dividing flour.

Redeye saw to the arrow with a blast of a spell that sent it twirling from battlements. The line it dragged was already heavy with navik, and they tumbled to the roots with stomach-curdling screams.

I was not alone in my rush back to the edge. Below the Rootfort, I saw we had failed.

For the first time, demon claws clutched the bark of Shal Gara. One, then two, then three demons latched on, and began their climb towards the Rootfort. I and every other body on those battlements hammered at them in a frenzy. The cunning creatures wore thick helmets and pauldrons of black iron. The sound of slingstones and arrows clanging against them joined the battle noise.

Even with the fervour rising like a pot boiling over, Eztaral marched through the onslaught as if she were enduring nothing but a rainstorm. She paused to seize a spear from a fellow warrior and hurl it down the trunk before drumming her breastplate.

“I do think it’s time to ready our little welcome treat!” bellowed the eagleborn.

Those not gripped in concentration or the mist of battle or shitting themselves in fear, cheered.

“What is it?” I yelled to the clunking of ironpith chains. Tall diagonal struts that I thought were part of the Rootfort’s structure began to loosen. Somewhere above us, I heard the rhythmic shouts of workers heaving on something.

I nearly threw myself over the battlements to see the demons shockingly close on the trunk below. It was then my eyes caught the marks painted on the wood under the demons’ claws.

With the shrieking of hinges and spirals of ash, the struts above swung downwards with the lazy attitude that huge and heavy things fall with. I watched with an open mouth as I saw the array of spikes and blades at their ends. Hinged at one end, they fell in a satisfying arc before colliding against Shal Gara’s trunk – and anything in their way. The deadfalls tumbled on all sides of the Rootfort, and below me, one of the demons exploded in flame as it was smeared against the bloodwood. The rest were dislodged and fell to the roots. Stout chains wasted no time in hauling the deadfalls back upright and ready to fall again.

A mighty cheer pounded through the Rootfort, and to the hammering of the deadfalls, sorcers and warriors alike regrouped. The dead were dragged aside by workers. Water and loam doused spots of fire trying to take hold on the bark. Barrels of earth and water came rolling to our sides.

Pel and Eztaral were leading a combined effort with the remaining air sorcers that fought below. All of them were flailing their hands around in one giant circle. I snuck a peek between the shields to see a whirlwind of detritus starting to blow around the bloodwood.

“Earth reavers, feed their spells!” Eztaral bayed at us.

Hands clawing for the sky, I hauled the whole contents of a barrel and let it stream into the growing vortex of air spells. Within moments, a spinning halo of dirt and gravel raced around Shal Gara’s trunk. Navik were peeled from the bark and thrown down like hail. The demons that had clung on to ropes or angles of bark roared as they were pummelled. The bastards were strong, I had to give them that. Only half a dozen fell. The rest climbed on grimly, flames and black smoke streaming from their glowing bodies. I stared down into their wide jaws and did my best to wrest darts of earth from the vortex. It felt like I was throwing berries at a charging barkwolf.

A mishmash of shouts and orders drew my attention behind me, where I saw a second rank of archers and big bows taking shape. Before I could ponder why Eztaral was so prepared for falling back, Redeye shoved me.

“Focus, boy! You’ll get us killed!”

To iterate his point, a fire spell fell upon the bottom levels of the Rootfort. Obsidian smoke billowed with the screams of those aflame or falling. It took painstakingly long for the smoke to clear, and in its wake all we saw were flames and broken battlements and navik beginning to reach the Rootfort.

“Seal that level off!”

There wasn’t a soul that didn’t hear Eztaral’s shout. The slight lull in the Rootfort’s battle was proof of that.

“There are still fighters trapped in there, Eztaral!” Ravenborn Gaakaran yelled.

“I’ll give them moments only!”

Your Eztaral fights like demonkind. Many make sacrifices in battle for the victory of the horde.

Serisi’s words spurred me. I fought as hard as I could. Not for those below, I guiltily confess, but for the selfishness of not becoming a sacrifice like them.

My dart spells hammered at the trunk below me. It was nothing but brute force. It was enough to break navik bones but not to stem their tide. I pressed beyond the battlements, and through the strange mix of outrage and fear in my occupied mind, I clawed a huge dart together. I didn’t hear my roar over the battle, not even in my own ears. The rush of nectra deafened me.

With hooked finger, I didn’t let my dart fly as I had before but dragged it through the encroaching navik and demons like a rock on an unseen chain. Back and forth, I dragged it, until my arms ached from the magic’s strain. My head pounded, but I did not let up. With every strike, I felt the depth of the spell grow. Smoke and raining dirt drew inwards to feed it. It wasn’t about fighting angrier, or pushing harder again the magic, but finding its own force and letting it free.

Cries rang out as a blazing demon’s claw emerged through the smoke and reached the bottom battlements. I levelled my two boulders of earth against it. Flesh ruptured fire as it receded. In its wake, more navik swarmed, and I wrought havoc amongst them with a constant barrage of earth.

I felt the fever pitch to the battle. The archers at my side were a blur of effort. Sorcers’ eyes blazed with strain. Spears stabbed as fast as rainfall. I also felt the battle edging closer, and Shal Gara’s grip slipping like sweating hands on a rope.

For each navik that fell, another managed another foot higher. Arrows still peppered the shields. The deadfalls couldn’t be retracted and loosed fast enough, and the last one to fall came up with navik swarming it like giant ants. As they poised to leap into the Rootfort’s ranks with wild shrieks, I heard Eztaral’s chilling order.

“Prepare for close quarters!”

Five steps backwards put a wall of shields at my spine. Redeye was with me, letting warriors advance. Atalawe spun her ironpith staff in sharp circles. Inwar unleashed a bloodcurdling snarl. Pel appeared at my side, two arrows nocked on his bowstring. He said nothing, but his blue eyes fixed me with a stare.

As the rising surge of navik flooded over the battlements like a grey wave, Serisi’s roar deafened me. Fight for our lives, Tarko!

The warriors didn’t need to aim their blades; everywhere they swung, there was flesh. They hacked at the navik like gardeners at a hedge. Black blood poured along the deck. Bodies slipped and wrestled to the death on the wood. Jaws snapped short screams. And still they came.

“Fall back! Sorcers ready!” came the order. A flurry of arrows whipped past my head to stall the navik long enough for spells to rip them asunder. Their wriggling limbs soared into space as we hit them with everything we had. I drove waves of dirt before me, nearly breaking the shields from the battlements.

For a moment, we repelled them back and beyond the fort. But then came the burning claws, hooked and wreathed in flame, already studded with the burned shafts of arrows. The demons had reached Shal Gara at last.

The demon’s climb was unstoppable. Twisted horns like garbled roots sat above a face grinning to see us. The demon dragged itself over the shields even while slingstones and arrows pelted it. Twelve feet or more it stood over us. The iron sword on its back made it halfway from its sheath before Eztaral bellowed above the screams.

“Welcome to Shal Gara!”

Two big bows either side of the eagleborn unloaded on the demon. One spear-like arrow ran it through the stomach. The second punctured its throat and drove it toppling from the walls.

We were given no time for cheers. Two more demons had risen above the battlements. The big bows missed these targets, and within seconds I saw warriors flying in all directions. Blood fountained. One demon scourged the ranks with a whip or iron chain. The other used nothing but his sickle claws.

Fear permeated the ranks like the demons’ stink. The warriors of Shal Gara did not run or falter but died far too quickly, too easily. And now a third demon was rising up before me. It was larger than the others, a brute of swollen, scarred charcoal skin wielding a mace that burned with an inner fire.

Kadakaron. I know this kin. Aim for his eyes, Tarko. Blind him. He is ancient and old of sight.

Magic flooded my body, overriding the stone weight to my arms. Two nearby barrels split as I summoned all the earth I could feel around me. The shockwave almost felled me, but as this Kadakaron raised his mace of iron and flame, I formed fists of earth beside me and strode forwards to greet him. Every inch of sanity within me screamed to run, but I had no choice.

“Tarko!” Atalawe yelled after me.

Kadakaron greeted my challenge with a fiery grin. Sweeping a dark trail of smoke behind him, he swung his mace for my head. I sprinted forwards like I had for that cursed bucket in the nests and slid beneath the weapon across the blood-slick deck. I felt the heat of the weapon against my cheek as it passed overhead. I spared not a second to marvel but instead brought my spell up underneath Kadakaron’s chin. The impact rocked the demon on his heels. Pressed against the wood with the weight of the magic, I smothered the fiend’s eyes with a mask of dirt until he choked on ash. Two arrows appeared to sprout from his neck; Pel’s doing. While fire dribbled from Kadakaron’s wounds, a piercing cry came as Atalawe bounded over my head to bring the full weight of her staff against the demon’s knee. A dart spell from Redeye dealt the toppling blow. Kadakaron wailed all the way to the roots.

Watch out, Tarko!

I ducked just in time for an iron whip to miss me. The tip of Atalawe’s staff broke clean off under the blade that ended the chain. She was lucky. Several warriors beside us were decapitated immediately, along with several navik bounding into the Rootfort.

Move, worm!

Serisi’s voice hauled me to my feet and to the left just as the whip came crashing back through the ranks.

“Raskaa asha!” I heard the second demon speak as it strode towards us. Its whip was a whirlwind of iron.

He calls you a dead man.

“We’ll see about that!” I yelled.

I did not know if the others followed me. I didn’t care. Scooping my hands through the air, I dashed great waves of dirt on the demon until he and his whip were mired in a pile of muck. Warriors rushed in to spear him.

Before I could swing a final blow, a navik pounced on my shoulder and drove me to the deck. Blood smeared my face as black jaws snapped dangerously close. I had my hands on both halves of its mouth when an arrow filled its throat.

“Gods bless that blind old bastard! Where was your advice then, Serisi?” I snarled, fighting upright.

Duck.

A pair of demon claws that aimed to crush me slapped together above my head. Fire scorched me, and I dove like a frog for a broken spear. Falling short of it, I seized the dirt beneath it and sent it hurtling behind me.

My aim was true, striking the demon high in the chest. The creature roared in pain, but it did not stop his sickle claws reaching me.

Scion armour was forged to withstand two things, or so Pel had told me: fire and demon claws, and that day it fulfilled its purpose. The demon’s claws scored three deep gashes in my breastplate, but no armour is truly an impenetrable shield, and one lucky claw managed to graze the inside of my left arm. I felt the warmth running through my armour at once, but the demon gave me no time. I swung punch after punch to force it back, dart spells following my every move to batter the demon from side to side.

You are wasting strength, Tarko! You need—

“To kill it? I know!” I shouted.

You need water.

“Water, curse it! We need water!”

My cries were answered mercifully quickly. Steam billowed in a great white cloud as a lone surviving water weaver stabbed the demon with a spear of water. The sorcer was overwhelmed by navik within moments, torn apart in a way I knew I would never forget, but he bought me time enough to drive the demon to the Rootfort’s shattered edges, where it collided with the third. Both of them toppled from the bloodwood.

Atalawe was at my back once more, trying to drag me away, but my magic spun around me too fiercely. She was yelling to Eztaral. “We need to clear the Rootfort!”

“We give them this foothold, they’re free to set what fires they wish and bring Shal Gara crashing down! Sound the horn for the lancewings again, Gaakaran. They should be here!”

I heard Pel’s voice. “Flood it, Eztaral! It’s the only weapon we have that works!”

“Get out of there, Tarko! We’re going to flood the fort!” Atalawe called to me.

“Redeye!” I yelled, ignoring her. The sorcer was retreating slowly. He and I were two of a score of surviving sorcers. Behind us, the warriors regrouped at the bark, where a thick buttress of a building led up to the Neathering.

“What is it, boy?”

“They call us mudmages, right?”

“What in the Hells are you talking about now?”

“You’ve seen the effect water has! We might not have water sorcers left, but if we combine dirt and water like you did in my cottage, we have a chance! Time to show them what mudmages can do!”

I stood fast, letting the others retreat while I clung to my idea. Arrows and stones still flew over my head. Four demons arose amidst the crowds of navik.

“He’s gone mad!” Redeye yelled. “It’s too difficult for somebody of his training!”

Eztaral didn’t hesitate. She gave a signal to quaking workers poised on spiderthread ropes, and a hundred barrels of water spilled upon the wooden battlefield from above. The surge was so strong it almost took me with it. Gutters designed to channel the deluge broke over the heads of the demons. Steam swallowed a whole segment of the fort.

Half-blind, I heaved at the dirt beneath the flowing water, already churned to mud in the wash. It almost broke my arms, it was so heavy. I felt Redeye’s magic clashing with mine, and I walked with the flood’s flow. I had only managed tendril spells a few times before, and never in battle, but there was no time for hesitation. Tentacles of mud flitted about me. Darts of thick, soaked earth knocked navik after navik to the deck. Every blow I landed on not only hit the demons with force but scorched them with water. Steam billowed alongside smoke. With Serisi’s roars filling my ears, I let loose on my foes.

It was only when I slumped to my knees, surrounded by dead and broken navik, not a demon in sight, that I realised we had survived. The cacophony of lancewings flitting past the fort sounded the demons’ second defeat.

The pain chose then to set in. Anywhere the water touched my body prickled and stung. I bared my teeth as I struggled to my feet. It felt as though I pushed myself up from a bed of pine needles. A persistent heat burned where the demon claw still hung around my neck beneath the armour. Not wounding but impossible to ignore.

I made it halfway to standing before I took a knee. I raised my left arm and found my hand red not only with dye but with blood. Atalawe and Redeye hauled me up.

“You’re wounded,”

“One clawed me, I think.” I gasped as my right hand fell in the water. The world was turning somewhat sideways, I could have sworn.

“Tarko!” yelled a sorcer, badly burned across one arm but punching the air all the same. I was about to ask what he wanted when he shouted my name again. A wilder slammed her axe into the deck and joined the call.

“Tarko!”

Despite the shadow hovering around the edges of my vision and the weakness in my legs, I managed to stand for a brief moment. The chant built and built until the retreating demons must have heard my name. And all for me.

“Tarko! Tarko! Tarko!”

Eztaral and Pel took me from the others to prop me up against the bark.

Pel almost throttled me in relief. “You’re alive, Tarko! Kī Raxa reborn!”

“And here I was thinking Redeye and Pel were the finest sorcers around,” Eztaral yelled in my ear. My eyes felt like they were made of hot stone.

You fought well, Tarko of the Swathe. Almost impressive.

“Together, Serisi, we seem to be unstoppable,” I muttered under my admittedly weary grin. It was then that my knees fell out from under me. The pain became too much. Eztaral caught my head from lolling, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. The Rootfort faded into shadow, and all that remained was Serisi’s deep and victorious laughter.

26

Dreamwalker

The bloodwoods are united only by similarity, leafroads, trade, and the Bloodlaws. In all other respects, they are separate. Though some warriors are often dispatched to other cities, more due to punishment than reward, or scholars may travel for research, the bloodwoods keep themselves to themselves. Only a handful of events bring the cities together. The ascension of a new matriarch and a council called by the Allmother are the most common, alongside the rarer Tournament of Sorcers or Dorla Sel’s Grand Harvest.

“ON THE NATURE OF BLOODWOODS” BY TEMACH LILO, 1807

Violence filled my mind. The dreams did not come as they did before, but in shreds and tatters, as if I ran through a hall of ripped black curtains. Any glimpse of the sky showed a shattered moon and streaks of fire arcing onto a bloodwood made of black obsidian. Scrabbling, arachnid shapes of navik sailed through the sky between them, bereft of wings but flying all the same.

The shadows lashed at me with claws that raked my skin. Obsidian smoke filled my eyes. Fire chased me until I could run through this apocalypse no longer, and it burned the flesh from my heels.

��

I escaped the nightmare not to find peace and quiet, but with a start and to stern company.

Envoy Okarin stood above me, strings of beads clasped in her hands as usual, counting slowly. Mother and Atalawe were sat close by my side. All of their faces were of deep concern.

“Well, this is quite an unusual way to wake up. What did I do? What happened to the Rootfort?”

Okarin ignored my questions. “When were you going to tell us, Tarko?”

Panic gripped every one of my muscles. Serisi was awake and full of worry.

By the Void, do they know? They know. They know about me.

“I don’t know,” I replied to Serisi without thinking. “Tell you what?”

Okarin’s eyes snuck to my side. Not the one bandaged from the battle, but the side bare and blackened.

Since the morning of battle, the dark veins had spread onto my shoulder like searching roots. I couldn’t see past my collarbone, but my skin was riddled with them. Clenching my hand and stretching my arm, I felt no pain, only strength. It was my injured and bandaged side that ached with a throb that matched my urgent heartbeat. The touch of the water had not wounded me but left a soreness that looked conveniently like a burn.

“There is nothing to worry about,” I said irritably, sitting upright and pawing about for a shirt. There was none.

“You looked plagued, Tarko,” Mother hissed at me. Her tone might have been her sharp, but her sable eyes were wide with worry.

“It’s only the nectra,” I offered.

“Only?” Atalawe spluttered. “How many times do you need to be told it’s a wonder you’re still alive with that in your blood.”

“How do you feel, Tarko?” asked Okarin. I couldn’t stand the slow and careful voices they spoke in.

“I feel even stronger than I did the last time this subject came up. Both in body and magic. I think that’s evident from the battle yesterday, don’t you?”

Okarin’s eyebrow climbed. “Quite,” she said. “Show me your magic, Tarko. Reach for the dust beyond your door.”

Don’t do it. She picks at a scab of suspicion.

“Why?”

“Because I am your envoy, and because I ordered you to.”

That was something I couldn’t deny. I reached, and immediately the blue light flickered from my palm up my shoulder, tracing every dark vein beneath my now clammy skin.

Okarin counted several of the beads clutched in her hand. “You have grown a great deal in a short time, Tarko, but so has this affliction. I would say it’s evident the two are intertwined, wouldn’t you?”

Affliction? How rude.

“It’s not an affliction!” I countered, with more volume than I intended. “Whatever it is, it’s helping us win this war.”

Mother and Atalawe watched Okarin. We were in the presence of a matriarch’s daughter, after all. Something I appeared to have forgotten.

“You need not worry,” I added in haste, “but it is appreciated, Envoy.”

Okarin rattled her beads before marching from my hollow. “Then it is your choice, and I have said my piece. If you will not heed my warnings, then so be it. Temach Atalawe, see to it Elevate Terelta stays fit enough to fight, so long as this affliction allows him to live.”

Atalawe bowed her head low. “As you wish, Envoy.”

Injured or not, Mother slapped me across the back of my head as soon as Okarin was out of sight. She chided me without care for Atalawe’s presence. “What’s gotten into you? That’s the envoy you’re speaking to, curse it. You’re acting like a noble brat.”

“Ow,” was all I said during my quest for clothing. Serisi winced as well.

“Why aren’t you worried by this, Tarko?” Atalawe asked of me.

I hid my so-called affliction beneath a shirt of mosscloth. “Because I know how I feel, and because I don’t dare question what’s happening to me for fear it will either diminish or disappear entirely. Not now when I’m so needed. Is that answer enough?”

Atalawe thumbed her nose. “Even if it kills you? This is bound to spread the more you use your magic.”

“This is superficial. I’ll be fine.”

Mother shook her head at me. “Teyak was just as stubborn and look where it got him.”

“Father didn’t have to fight a war against demons. Shal Gara depends on me. You should have heard them shouting my name.”

“I see.” Mother nodded as if she had figured me out. “You are still my son, Tarko, and I won’t have you die, not even as the hero I can see you’re so proud to be. I’d honestly rather you live longer as a coward.”

I stared at my mother. The honesty shocked me silent, but everything within me, demon included, railed against her. I clenched my dyed fist to run the blue light through my skin once more. “I am what I was born to be. Whether you believe in me or not, I have thousands more who do,” I growled before turning to Atalawe. “What of the demons? What of the battle?”

Atalawe blew a nervous whistle, clearly unwilling to cross Axera Terelta. She didn’t have to: Mother stormed from her stool and went the direction of the envoy.

“Cold, Tarko,” said Atalawe.

Must be the demon in you.

“What of the demons, Atalawe?”

“The battle was won, but the demons remain close. Eztaral thinks another battle is brewing. Did you dream anything useful?”

“No. Just nonsense and darkness.”

“Like what?”

“A sky streaked with fire, and navik flying through the air into the tree.”

Atalawe stared at me blankly, her scarred lip threatening a smile.

“Don’t mock me. That’s all I saw,” I muttered. “How long did I sleep? Is it tomorrow?”

“You only slept a few hours. It’s evening,” Atalawe answered. “Your mother is merely concerned, you know.”

“Unnecessarily so. And what about you?”

Atalawe threw a clutch of vials and mosscloth pouches on my bedding. “All the tinctures and powders I know for fighting poisons and venoms, including nectra in the blood,” she said. “And you might want to consider that it’s not only your mother who cares about you. The Scions are a family on their own. I can’t understand what’s in your head and the pressure you have on you, but you don’t need to rush towards death in the name of Shal Gara.”

“That’s just it, Atalawe: you think I’m determined on being some kind of martyr. I don’t intend on dying anytime soon.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Atalawe said. Her eyes had the quality of Inwar’s.

No sooner had the door folded shut than I shook my head of their warnings and began to piece together my armour. Somebody had cleaned it, but the demon’s claw-marks were still there. I muttered to myself, uttering words I should have said to Mother and Okarin had my mind not been so addled by sleep. With a vambrace in each hand, I found myself still and staring at the floor.

I had always known the demon and I could not remain together, but I had allowed myself to forget. And I had become used to her. It was becoming difficult to remember the silence of my own mind.

“You’re not killing me, Serisi. You wouldn’t dare risk it, would you?” I asked my demon.

Perhaps your queen-girl is right. Perhaps I do not have a choice. It might not my doing, but a matter of our entwined blood.

I huffed at her, reaching for the shrewbat camped in the rafters of my hollow. Misfit had gone back to his old tricks of flitting away from me as if I was indeed plagued. “You don’t fill me with the utmost confidence.”

It is not as though I have been stuck in the mind of a worm before. I am not as clueless as you, clearly, but I have no answers, and I feel your strength as you do. We do not rot. Look how they sang your name. We only grow.

“That’s more like it.” If I closed my eyes, I could still hear the echo of the chanting. I couldn’t help the smile that stretched across my face. “You enjoy it as well, don’t you?”

I will admit, I do not hate you as I did. I would even say I can stomach you.

That was as fine a compliment as I could expect from a demon. I took one last glance at the medicines that Atalawe had left on my bed, and with a scornful look, I threw my sheet over them and marched from the room.

“Well if it isn’t our resident sorcer and dreamwalker,” crowed Eztaral, as I shuffled into the lighter core of the Den. She was hunched over a table, elbows on knees, and covered in blood both black and dried crimson. Her sword was between her hands, and she spun its tip in the dust. Atalawe was testing a new ironpith staff against a wooden target and not looking one bit happy with it.

“I can’t tell if you’re mocking me or serious,” I replied, “but I was right about the demons.”

Thanks to me, muttered Serisi.

“Maybe you were, Tarko, maybe you were. Except that Atalawe tells me you haven’t dreamed anything else of use except for a sky full of fire and apparently – what was it again – flying navik? Since when did navik have wings? Did you get lucky with your previous dream, I wonder?”

“They didn’t have wings. They were just…” I poked my hand through the air, blade-like. “Soaring. Like a bird.”

Eztaral scowled at me. “I heard another interesting story. One of you trying to sleepwalk while Axera and Atalawe watched over you. You were halfway out of the Den before they stopped you.”

“Fast asleep, you were,” added Atalawe, “muttering something so hoarse they couldn’t make it out. I caught the word ‘navik’ and that was it.”

“That is an interesting story, Eztaral,” was all I could think to say, “but I’m fine.”

“Told you he’d say that,” said Atalawe before knocking the head from the target. It sailed to a thumping halt near my feet.

“Eztaral—” I began, but the eagleborn shook her head.

“Pel called you Kī Raxa reborn. Now, I pride myself on being bereft of a single idiotic bone in my body, and as such I’m not about to ignore that old loamer’s words. Through our founder Kī Raxa we won before, and with you, I’m starting to believe we might just have a chance of doing the same.”

“Why are you so complimentary all of a sudden?” I asked her, taken aback.

The eagleborn looked at me as if I were a demon she might smite at any moment. “Proof, Tarko. Nobody else saw the demons coming from the south. Nobody else held them back as you did. It is not a compliment; it is a tactical and highly obvious fact.”

I still took it as a compliment.

“Don’t look so proud. We weren’t without our losses, and the Rootfort is half-wrecked. We lost a thousand souls to demon claws and blades, and a good number of those were much-needed sorcers. And that isn’t all.”

“No?” I was still figuring out how a victory could sound so much like a defeat.

“The Fireborn,” Eztaral spat. “They played their hand when we were occupied by the battle. Worker crews in remote branches were found slaughtered, and fires in the Midern branches were allowed to burn without contest. We lost fifty buildings before a certain Sage Dūnekar came to help.”

The panic set in for the second time that morning. I thought of Ralish. “Which crews?”

“I have no idea, and before you go worrying about friends and more than friends, it was a distraction, if you ask me. A distraction from what really matters, and that is the fact we’re still not safe even behind our battlements. The Fireborn seek to ruin us even after they’ve seen what their supposed gods want for Shal Gara, the accursed idiots. You can mark my words: I will be ripped limb from limb by the demon horde before I allow them to do so.”

I preferred to stay intact and win just the same. “Why is it whenever the Fireborn are mentioned, Kol Baran is the first face in my mind?”

Eztaral laughed coldly. “That’s your father’s ghost talking.”

“Even if it is, does that make him wrong? You always suspected him of my father’s murder, and he openly opposed us in the Crimson Crown. He still does. You should have seen him in The Raven’s Thievery.”

“I did, as it happens,” Eztaral answered, “and it is because of your suspicion that I don’t march to the Baran mansion right now and drag him out on his arse. It would not only create a rift in the council of sages but between us and Haidak, and that is precisely what the Fireborn would want: Shal Gara’s leadership in tatters just when we need to stick together.”

I nodded, but I’d stopped listening. As soon as I had a moment from my duties, I vowed to find Ralish.

“Is my mother still here? My sister?”

Eztaral thunked her sword against the floor and stood. “They’ve gone to the ranks with Pel and Redeye for protection. The demons look ready to pounce again, and if we can take anything from your dreams, perhaps we are in for a barrage of their fire spells. And apparently flying navik. I’ll have to get the sharp-eyed archers ready, just in case you haven’t dreamed up some nonsense. Are you fit enough to fight?”

Atalawe was not impressed. “Eztaral. He’s injured and exhausted, gods curse it. Not to mention the poison creeping across his skin. Are you going to doubt a seedwitch?”

“Tarko has a job to do,” Eztaral replied with red and green eyes affixed on me. “And I trust him to do it if he says he is capable.”

I stretched my left arm. It was already feeling looser than before, though a fire camped in my ribs. “I’m ready.”

Eztaral smiled then. It was the most genuine expression I had seen cross her face yet, but it was quickly stamped out. I felt not a subordinate but an equal for the briefest of moments. I drank every detail of the moment in.

“Well? What are you bloody waiting for? A wreath around your neck and another crowd chanting your name? Get moving, Elevate! You’re wanted outside.”

“I am?”

��

The awkwardness I had hoped to avoid was waiting for me beyond the Scions’ Den in a grey evening of vinelight, smoke, and drifting ash. The injured sun was still nowhere to be seen, and I found myself pining for the goddess’ clean rays. Juraxi patted my shoulder with a grin as I stepped from the sanctuary.

It was the envoy. Okarin hadn’t departed for her Crimson Crown as I had expected but remained ensconced in a crowd of highwarders. Sage Dūnekar and the Jade Wolf were beside her, along with a sweaty Sage Maku and who else but Sage Baran. Though his wormsilk robes shone alongside his silver jewellery, his lips looked chewed upon and bloody in the creases. His hair was lank and his frown a deep furrow.

Envoy Okarin had to call my name to drag our stares apart. It was then I noticed the brazier by Dūnekar’s side. It looked very familiar.

“It took much convincing for Sage Dūnekar to commit this ceremony beyond the circle of the Sorcer’s Temple,” the envoy announced, “but time is short and circumstances are far from usual. It is important for more than your Scions to see what you are.”

I felt a jab of guilt add to the pain in my side. The envoy had come bearing gifts, and I had spurned them in my pride and irritability.

Dūnekar regarded me with his usual impassive features. He held the brand’s handle like a sheathed sword. In my peripheral vision, I saw Sage Baran angling to watch. He was not the only one. I felt the presence of Eztaral and Atalawe behind me. The highwarders were mingled with workers, warriors, and sorcers watching carefully. Most beamed, though a handful were narrow-eyed.

I bowed as low as my armour would allow. The razor brand sizzled as it was taken from the coals and held unwavering before me. For an old man, Dūnekar held not a tremble in his hands.

“For your prowess in battle and honour to your bloodwood, your matriarch, and your family name,” he announced, “I brand you with the rank of maven. Of the sorcer tribe and of the earth reavers. Bring honour to your bloodwood, your matriarch, and your family name.”

He promptly scarred my right cheek beside my other two brands. The sting of the hot metal felt cold. No pain came. Only the satisfied hiss of a demon once again. I had to fight the grin back.

“Through might and magic,” the sage intoned.

I yelled back at the top of my voice, “Through might and magic!”

The applause of stamping feet had barely started before it was drowned out by passing squadrons of lancewings. For a moment, I thought they were saluting me, but it was for the envoy. Shouts interrupted the cheers of my name. Eyes looked past me and the Den to the burning forest ever at our backs. It appeared my moment was over.

Fire spells filled the canopy. They rose up like fireworms escaping a lantern. There were dozens of them, and as they reached their apex, another volley sprang from the wildfires.

“The demons are playing cowards today, warriors!” Eztaral thundered. “To your ranks! All eyes on this ashen sky of ours!”

We are no cowards. We are smart. Your eagle woman would be wise to remember that.

Despite Serisi’s caution, the responding cheer was deafening and the orders followed immediately. The crowd dispersed at a sprint for the nearest battlements. Eztaral’s voice chased them as efficiently as a whip. That included the sages. Envoy Okarin remained and beckoned a sharp finger at me. I heeled like a barkwolf pup.

“I had wanted to speak of your dreamwalking, Tarko, but it appears you are needed elsewhere,” she said quietly. Her eyes were piercing. No matter where I looked, they dragged me straight back.

“You heard about that?” I stood taller. “Do you believe me now?”

“Eztaral is loyal and keeps no secrets from me.” Her chiding was thinly veiled. “The sages were not pleased Eztaral took a gamble on your dream, but either you were lucky or you accidentally dreamwalked better than any godseer. Time will tell which, I suppose. Seeing as you didn’t heed my previous warning about the nectra’s poison, I’m inclined to think you won’t heed this one, but you should know dreamwalking is a treacherous skill. Some dreams are not your own. Remember that, Maven Terelta.”

It was hard to pay attention with a demon tutting in my head, but I remembered my place. “Thank you, Envoy,” I said with a bowed head.

“Continue to make me proud,” Okarin bade me before walking away.

I don’t know why I cared, but I did. “Are you not already?”

Okarin looked me up and down before turning again. “The war is not over.”

To the drums beginning to pound on lower levels, I shook my head and muttered to myself. “No, it is not.”

“Tarko! Hurry it up!”

��

We quite literally fought our way down the branches. The demon wizards hurled their fire without target or care for what they hit. Fire spells stuck fortification and foundation and building alike. Atalawe and I kept our eyes on the sky while Eztaral marched back and forth, directing groups of workers to different patches of fire and gutters of water. Crowds of them had to be battled through just to keep moving. Whenever I could snatch a moment, I looked desperately for Ralish.

“Get those barrels shifted! You’re blocking this thoroughfare here. Shutter that tunnel, curse it! Fire can’t afford to burn anywhere but the bark, hear me? Move those supplies to the battlements, curse it, unless you want my foot up your unwashed and puckered arseholes!”

Atalawe ducked as a fire spell crashed through the foliage above us. I pushed out with my magic, knocking the falling wood into the night.

“For Tarko!” came a cry from an overseer. It seemed I, not Eztaral’s threats of boots and arseholes, was what spurred the workers on. And everywhere we fought, I looked for Ralish.

“I see a sky full of fire, but no navik, thank the Three Gods. Can’t imagine those little shitters sprouting wings.” Atalawe laughed as she brushed cinders from her pauldrons.

“I almost hope I’m wrong,” I said.

We are not wrong, Tarko. My father has fought more battles than any. He has many tactics stowed in his mind.

She poked at me with the ironpith staff. “Almost. But that’s no grand story for the hero of Shal Gara now, is it?”

“Six Hells, no.”

On we ran, darting in a disjointed rhythm of staring upwards, waiting for fireballs to pass by or crowds of warriors to clear. There was no single attack to repel, and Eztaral had us rushing from one branch to the next to battle the barrage of fire. As soon as the demons felt their fire defended, they attacked another part of the bloodwood. And it was not merely with fire alone, but with the heavy iron arrows that streaked through the air, white with fire. One came perilously close to me, clanging from my vambrace before burrowing into a merchant stall. I kept an almost constant shield of dirt at my side from then on.

Only the big bows could return the demons’ fire, but all they could aim at was shadows within incessant flame. For two hours or more, we fought this running battle, until I was heaving myself up the stairs by the railings.

“They’re tiring us for a reason, I tell you!” Redeye was in the middle of yelling to Eztaral.

“Don’t you think I know that? Pipe down unless you’ve got something useful to say!”

A horn blasted in urgency nearby, half-blown, half-screamed through. A fireball was arcing straight for us, camped on a leafroad on a branch not too far from the Den. I heaved myself upright and used my magic to knock it from the sky. Redeye was too distracted doubting everything to help. I scowled nonetheless and stayed standing, ignoring my burning legs. While the bickering continued, I stared out from the battlements, knuckling my eyes free of dust and tiredness. The shouts were spreading from branch to branch. The demons were at last advancing from their wildfire. They marched through the charred skeletons of the burning trees, hauling navik by their side. The little scourges seemed to be either vociferously complaining or uncontrollably excited. It was then that I saw the ropes trailing from neck to demon claw. The first demons pulled theirs taut. The navik were dragged across the dirt with shrieks and pulled aloft. Around and around in circles they were swung. Several even collided where demons stood too close.

“Navik!” I yelled.

“Where?”

All I could do was point at the demons as they released their ropes, and wriggling navik joined the fire and arrows filling the skies.

“Erm… flying!”

Eztaral and Redeye ceased their arguing as their eyes raced from the loam to the black and orange night.

“Curse you for being right again, but may the gods bless you all the same,” Eztaral barked. “Archers! Slingers! Now!”

The eagleborn’s shout brought the bloodwood’s ranks together as if they had been stalling all this time. Archers and slingers unleashed a barrage of our own that cut the navik down like swatted flies.

As with the fire spells, there was no aim to the navik. Most were shot out of the sky before they landed, but here and there, the navik escaped the storm of arrows, slingstones, and spells, and a dozen fell across the Midern and Neathering. Some broke their necks against the bark or decking. The ones who survived immediately began to attack anything within slashing or pouncing distance. Unarmed workers and healers were set upon mercilessly. Horror ran through the tree at the sounds of the screaming. Pandemonium creeped through Shal Gara’s ranks. The stench of the creatures joined the pall of smoke and copper blood.

I found Pel behind me, firing an arrow for every other heartbeat that pounded through me. I felt so exhausted I needed to vomit, but the promise of an iron blade or jaws to my throat was ever so stimulating. My hands almost matched Pel’s for speed as I dragged dart after dart of earth from the stores around us. Stores that were running dangerously thin by the looks of it.

I was proved almost immediately correct. Nothing came to my hands when I pulled for it. I seized at everything, but my last spell was meagre. I slammed myself against a shield in frustration and cast around for any sign of supplies. A slinger beside me had been struck with an arrow, and trying my hardest to avoid looking at his crushed and puckered face, I seized the stones from his dead grasp. Earth I might have run out of, but troughs and wicker baskets of stones lined the walls just the same as arrows.

Holding my sling in my blackened right fist, I began to spin my weapon just like the demons and their navik.

“Tarko! We’re moving downwards!”

I ignored them just long enough to take aim on a navik soaring towards us with all six limbs splayed open, a crude dagger in each paw. My slingstone carved half its face off before it landed on the deck between me and Eztaral. Atalawe put its writhing to a halt and sprayed us with black blood in the process.

A fine kill! boomed Serisi.

“The gift that keeps on giving!” the eagleborn brayed as she practically threw me down the nearest stairs.

Everywhere I went there came cheers. Warriors nudged others, looking relieved as if I were an entire war-party come to help. And help I did. With Redeye once more at my side, the battlements shook with our spells. Water sorcers joined us to bend the flow of makeshift pipes and gutters above. Navik continued to rain, and the few that scraped through the frenzy of arrowhead and stone were dispatched with blades and raw fury.

I had taken a knee from the strain of constant magic when the demons finally started to aim their barrages. They didn’t concentrate on the shield walls, nor on the bark, nor the harried packs of third- and fifth-born trying to stay alive. Instead, they focused on me.

It became quickly evident by the fire spells curving through the air in crowded ranks, aimed directly at my position on Daqa Branch, not far from where my father was murdered.

Shield walls were blasted apart under the onslaught. Warriors and sorcers flew through the air like the navik. Some were not lucky enough to strike the deck and fell much further with howls of dismay. Redeye and I stood shoulder by shoulder as we held a wall of blood-smeared dirt as high and firm as we could. My heels slid across the wood as the pressure forced us back. Splinters blasted as the fortifications broke apart underneath our feet. Hands at my collar hauled me backwards from the fray. I didn’t feel the heat, but Redeye seemed to be clutching his face as he ran. Flames exploded behind us, and I felt a great and forceful hand lift me up and flip me over. I crashed into a heap against Atalawe fifty feet down the branch.

“Curse it all! They’ve noticed you now, Tarko. You’ve made yourself a threat as well as a hero,” Atalawe snarled as she plucked a splinter the length of an arrow from a hole in her thigh. With bloody hands, she picked from her belt a vial of akiga juice that had survived the fall and swigged it down. “Bleeding trees, if that isn’t disgusting.”

“Atalawe’s bloody right!” Eztaral yelled in our faces.

“As always,” the wrangler shouted back, somehow finding time for quips in the middle of battle.

“We need to keep moving!”

More fire spells were incoming, and I crawled and fell across the deck in my urge to get clear of this accursed branch. Flames burst behind us as we switched positions. No sooner had I used my spells to fend off the wizards’ spells than they refocused on me.

Three times this happened before it became noticed by more than the Scions. The warriors soon cleared aside wherever I appeared. No matter how I fought back the fire, the cheers of Tarko! Tarko! faded far too quickly.

By the fourth concentrated onslaught, Eztaral was more frustrated than I was. Pel and Atalawe had to drag her back from the battlements. She looked ready to cleave the fire spells from the air with her bare hands. “This is hopeless!” she was yelling.

With frustration eating at me and Serisi yelling in my head, I threw all I had left at the falling spells. The flash of flame was so bright it looked as though a new sun almost burst into life before Shal Gara. Crystals of molten earth fell across the deck.

As my spell collapsed, so did I. In the moment before the next wave of spells, I heaved with breath and stared up at the burning canopy.

“What can we do?” I yelled to Serisi.

Before she could reply, Eztaral hauled me up. My left arm was warm as if yesterday’s wound had opened up.

“We need to make you scarce, Tarko!”

“No, I need to fight! I am all that stands between us and them.”

“Even if the demons weren’t singling you out like the thorn in their side you have become, Tarko, you can barely stand.” Eztaral seized me, both hands pressed to the side of my head. It was then I realised my scarf was long gone. Something on my neck drew her attention more than the incoming spells.

“You need to retire from battle, and that isn’t a request, boy, but an inarguable order!”

Eztaral must have seen the fight in me. She shoved me back before I could complain. Atalawe and Pel helped me along. Although I hated every backwards step I took, feeling every eye upon me, my exhausted legs were almost powerless. I shrugged away from the Scions.

“Eztaral’s right, Tarko—”

“I know she is, curse it!” I snapped at Pel. “But what am I supposed to do, sleep through this battle?”

Pel’s face was sharp and full of a fire of its own. “Yes, you will.”

Atalawe thrust another vial at me. Some dark, sap-like liquid. She also stared at my neck as she spoke. “Drink this and don’t argue.”

They are right, Tarko. I cannot see my father’s plans through your waking eyes.

“Bah!” I yelled, storming away from them on shaky legs. They followed all the same, scuttling between warriors and patches of smoking wood.

When we reached the Den, we found Juraxi looked concerned, half his face fallen at the sight of me returning.

“Are we all right, Tarko?” he asked.

“Just fine, Juraxi,” I snarled as I pushed past the other warders steadfastly guarding the Den.

“We had some navik fall close, but all’s well here now,” I heard the man explain to Atalawe.

The door to my hollow slammed with me behind it. If they wanted me to sleep and dreamwalk, then fine, I would excel at that as I did magic. It didn’t feel like fighting a war, but I was so incensed I was past the point of doubt.

I stood on my bed, got to my knees, and growled to the gloom. Misfit chattered at me.

“You heard the woman, Serisi,” I told my demon. “We need to dream.”

I already felt her unfurling in my mind like wind catching a black pennant. I saw her shape shift in the shadows of my room.

“You give yourself willingly?” she asked.

I did not hesitate in throwing back the vial. “I do. I have to.”

Her voice slithered around me. “So be it.”

27

Hatlu Ko

Ain’t nothing like a tree slowly crushing you to death to change one’s mind.

COMMENT MADE BY REFORMED HERETIC YĀLISH THE GREEN, 919

Broken spears of wood clawed at me as I walked through a world of charcoal grey. The streets of Shal Gara were deserted but for bunched shadows kicking at dust. They turned milky eyes on me when I stared at them, or vacant eye sockets. Faces marred with burns grimaced through mouths melted shut. When I glanced past my shoulder, I saw the ones that followed me. Every step I took, they took two. They muttered my name, over and over.

Winding down the spiral stairs, I tried my hardest to escape them. My heart was a war-drum that overrode the roar of flames that surrounded the bloodwood. The branches of the city flashed past me. I did not walk but fell feet-first to the depths of Shal Gara, until I stood before the mouth of a cave. It yawned wider, welcoming me into darkness. No matter where I turned, the cave came to swallow me. Mushrooms cowered before me, their glow dying wherever I walked. Dust swirled about me, agitated. Shadows pounced and gnashed at me, yet still my feet slid onwards, inexorable. I had no power in this dream, same as the others, but I had never felt powerless before. I tried to wake up and felt a pressure holding me back.

I saw the burrows in the caves of blood-red wood. Skeletal hands reached from them to pick at the threads of my own shadow. Burning eyes watched me. Tongues licked at ironpith bars. I heard the muddled echoes of shouts deep in a distance unseen.

One cell took my dream’s interest, one unshuttered by wood and containing a darkness so thick I could feel it against my fingers as I reached for the bars. Jaws of mould and rotten flesh snapped at me. My eyes burned as I stared, unable to look away. I tried to stop myself, terrified of what lay within, of what stared back at me with malice oozing from every poisoned pore. I struggled against the dream, but it held me fast as if I slept beneath a blanket of iron.

I felt the bars give way and swing open with a piercing whine. They became a gate as they pressed against me, metal-cold and intractable. A growl rolled through my dream like thunder. The creature of the cell stared at me through the ironpith once more before it convulsed its way into the velvet dark of the tunnel.

The walls of the bloodwood shook as I fought to wake from this nightmare. The earthquake brought me to my knees. It took all my focus to slam my head against the bars in a vain effort to shock myself awake.

As the walls turned themselves to slivers and splinters, I saw the shape of Serisi filling the cave. She wore no grin, but her eyes burned fiercely enough to see her satisfaction. Their light followed me into the empty black.

��

I awoke to a jarring yelling in the Den. My eyes felt open, but not a colour or shape took form. Shouts reached my ears, muffled.

“Warders! Warders!”

Whatever this ruckus was, I needed to tell Eztaral of the demons’ plan. Of sabotage from within and Hatlu Ko. I had dreamed of his escape and of Fireborn sabotage. I could only hope Casqal did as I ordered and had Hatlu disposed of.

I reached to drag my covers from me and found nothing by my Scion’s threads and sweaty skin. Beneath my fingers was no touch of a bed but raw wood and sawdust instead. The faint light of green mushrooms slowly reached my eyes, and the realisation came to me like a sandglass window shattering over my head.

I was not in the Den, but the very Burrows I had dreamed of. And there, to my left, was the open and unpleasantly unoccupied cell of Hatlu Ko.

My body seized up. This was clearly still a dream. It had to be. I couldn’t face any alternative. I scrabbled away from the burrow and found hands pulling at my hair from another cell. Gaunt faces pressed at worn bars, yelling and pointing at me and calling for warders.

“What happened here?” I demanded of them in a shrill tone I hadn’t heard come from my mouth since Sheertown.

“You let that grimspore monster free, curse you!” cried the shrill woman from the forest.

“You’re a liar!” I shook my head resolutely. “I wouldn’t do that!”

“Help!” One of the sorcers that had attacked me tried to spit through his bars. “Traitor!”

“How long have I been unconscious?” I demanded.

“What do you care!”

“How long?” I bellowed, but they refused to answer me.

“Serisi!” I yelled over them. “Serisi, what have you done? Answer me, curse you!”

The demon had no reply for me, and I had no time to press her.

I scarpered down the tunnel, tripping over a body that was slumped in the half-carved hollow of a wall. The corpse was a young lad, the same waif that had threatened me the day before. Dirt and sawdust clogged his mouth. His wide, dead eyes caught the eerie mushroom glow in a way that made me want to run even faster. The earth magic was telltale, and the dread dealt me a blow that knocked me to the side of the tunnel. Had I done this? Had I killed this lad? The evidence sickened me.

It didn’t take me long to realise why the warders were not coming to the prisoners’ calls. They, too, were dead. Two more bodies crossed the path before me. These had dirt on their clothes and faces, but something else had… interfered with them.

Warders Batshit and Casqal had been ripped apart. Casqal’s lower jaw was missing. A black and sticky mould covered what was left of his face. The old woman was lying in a contorted position that told me her spine had been snapped in half. Dark wounds covered her neck and torso as if a jāgu had attacked and dined on her. The same black ichor covered her broken arms.

This was not my work. There was nothing but sawdust on my hands. Blood pooled beneath Batshit in an unavoidable puddle. My boots trod frantic prints from the tunnel as I followed the screams from beyond the Burrows. They were wordless, pure terror and pain.

I had almost escaped the tunnel when I heard the retching. I stopped dead in my tracks. My gaze inched past my shoulder until it rested on the corpse of Batshit. Not a sound or movement came from her. It must have been my fearful imagination, I told myself, but as another scream rang out, one of her arms twitched. Inch by inch, her bloody fingers reached for me. To the wet crunch of broken bone, her head snapped around to face me. There was no life in those dead eyes, but they still stared at me with a malice that put a shake in me. I would have preferred a dozen demons in that tunnel than this… thing.

Batshit wasn’t alone. Casqal convulsed, making a strangled noise through his missing throat that proved some horrific magic was at work. Hatlu Ko’s grimspore poison had spread. I recoiled as Batshit’s broken limbs began to push and drag her upright. In the limping scuttle of a wounded insect, she started to give chase.

Run, Tarko, Serisi ordered me.

I didn’t need the demon’s encouragement; I was already diving out of the Burrows entrance and scrabbling across the deck of a dark Neathering. Vinelight bulbs lay scattered and squashed across the narrow street. The screams were coming from above me, where a trail of bodies lay bleeding and huddled across the stairs. Some were workers, others warders and warriors. Just to reach the stairs, I had to climb over the body of an heir whose eyes had been gouged out.

“You better start explaining what it is you’ve done to me, Serisi!” I snarled.

An inhuman bark told me Batshit was catching up to me. Switching between an all-fours crawl and running on bent legs in spurts, she came for my blood.

Heart in my mouth, I kicked the heir’s corpse to knock Batshit back. It bought me seconds only. A spear poked me in the side, and I drove it into her convulsing shoulder to keep her at bay. The obsidian blade slowly worked its way through her flesh so that her grasping claws came closer. Black liquid dribbled from her lips. With my magic, I reached out for any scrap of earth I could find. Splinters collided with the creature’s face. A clod of dirt struck her sideways, and I kept pummelling her until her screeching was smothered. In my terror, I kept pushing, using the dirt to crush inwards until her face was no more. Fighting back vomit and a stream of sweat stinging my eyes, I ran on into this waking nightmare, still praying I could wake up at any moment.

Though the corpses mounted, the beast that was once Hatlu Ko had not gotten far. He was a slathering hulk of black and twisted flesh. Protrusions and twisted growths sprouted from his back. Several arrows, too. The putrid yellow swelling around his face had enveloped and sagged around his neck.

Painted with blood, Hatlu was a tornado of rage. He never stayed still, even when he was ravaging his victims. With every movement, he spewed black ichor as far as he could spit. Those that had been soiled by it and weren’t lucky enough to die were beginning to convulse like the Burrows warders.

Second-born were trying in vain to keep Hatlu at bay. Citizens ran screaming from his ring of slaughter. Even several warriors did the same. The panic bred only more panic as several of the injured arched their backs and screeched. The warning drums and horns had yet to sound.

“Kill it!” a lancer screamed at the top of her lungs. “Kill them all!”

Two of the fallen had climbed to their feet. Stick-legged, they charged for the warriors. A third, a scholar with bloodied parchment still clutched in one hand, spotted me and began to crawl on broken legs. His face had already turned grey from the grimspore poison that claimed him.

“Back away!” I yelled, knowing it would do no good whatsoever. The earth around me was scarce, but enough for me to mash the creature’s face into the deck. Half a dozen others were already coming awake, and Hatlu Ko was beginning to climb the bark in his search for more victims and more flesh to turn.

I heaved at every speck of dust I could find. A storm of earth and detritus was soon in my grasp. I threw one of the grimspore creatures into the spears and blades of the warders. Another I wrapped in dirt and slowly crushed until it had not a bone to stand on. I couldn’t kill the poison, but I could kill the bodies it had stolen. Over and over, to keep the guilt from breaking me, I told myself these people were already lost.

Despite my spells, Hatlu Ko was still escaping. I saw him pounce from the bark to a fleeing woman on a stair above. Over corpses and through panicked bodies, I chased him to the broad sprawl of decking above the Neathering’s branches. A few brave ones followed me, yelling constantly for help.

The screams had caused a stir above. Second-born had swarmed, likely thinking it was a demon attack. The sight of Hatlu Ko immediately had them forming shield walls. Some were caught off-guard and overpowered by Hatlu’s girth and the mad strength of the grimspore. Armour did little to stop his prying fingers. Throats and faces were ripped away and filled with black ichor.

As the fallen below us began to overpower the warders left behind, the panic spread. I didn’t have to be asleep to see how this nightmare ended. Shal Gara would fall, and not to the demons that waited for it to do so.

I had moments only to change it. Magic shone through my skin as I formed my spells. Darts of earth broke necks and limbs, and where I missed, I chased up with tendrils that seized the creatures in place. The last I grabbed was Hatlu Ko, whose distended jaws were half a foot from an elderly man’s face. I jerked him back to save the fellow from being drowned in black poison, but it had the opposite reaction I’d hoped. Hatlu Ko came at me with all the ferocity the grimspore had imbued in him. I yelled out loud as the magic strained to hold him and his spawn back. The distorted life in them fought me as if they knew I sought to destroy. Every scrap of magic was matched by their strength, and I pushed harder.

“Curse you, demon!” I yelled at Serisi. “You got me into this mess, you’ll get me out of it!”

The whirlwind became rigid. I felt every neck and skull and bone beneath my hands and snapped them betwixt my fingers as effortlessly as twigs. The grimspore creatures collapsed as one. A faint and sickly mist curled from their mouths to waft away on the wildfire’s winds.

I had expected those surrounding me to be staring at the corpses of the dead as I was, watching for the faintest twitch. Heaving with breath and magic still burning, I looked up to find the crowd staring at me instead. The dim vinelight was all that was needed to cast my shadow, and it realised it was not my own.

I looked up to find Serisi’s shape towering over me, once more made of dust and smoke and ash. No matter what I did to suppress my magic, she did not fade.

No secrets anymore, Tarko, came the voice of the accursed demon in my head.

Serisi was right. There was no hiding. No explaining. My mouth hung open, choked on a useless excuse half-formed. My gaze shifted from gawping warrior to muttering worker. There in the crowd stood those I recognised. Juraxi lingered beside my mother. Eztaral stood with eyes burning and lips moving. Atalawe and Redeye looked more dumbfounded than I felt. By the look on Pel’s face, not even his blind eyes saved me from his dismay. And finally, I found Ralish in the crowds, her face a mask of disgust and horror.

“That is no construct spell,” I heard Redeye whispering, before the thrumming of lancewings brought a brisk wind across the Neathering. Serisi’s form was chased away in the gust.

“Arrest him!” came Haidak Baran’s braying order. The thunk of his boots shot through the decking as he jumped from his golden lancewing. He levelled his glaive as he marched on me. There was fury in his voice but a broad grin on his face. “Arrest him now before he has the chance to betray us further!”

I found my voice at last. “I was helping!”

“Lies! All these eyes upon you and you still attempt to lie? You have betrayed our trust, Tarko Terelta, for that was no earth magic. That was a demon! How is this possible? Tell us now before I strike you down!” Haidak seethed. The anger in me ached to knock it from his grasp, but that would only prove him right.

“It was an accident! I… she’s how we’re all still alive, curse you!” My explanations were muddled, saturated in a flood of emotions. “Mother! Pel, you know me!”

With his blade against my neck, Haidak pushed me down onto my knees. The black veins must have been evident on my neck. The cold stone threatened to cut them.

“Then explain this darkness in your veins, Terelta. Evil if I have ever seen it. Look for yourself, all of you!”

I flinched away and Haidak menaced me again. He spoke between his snarls.

“To think we trusted you. What pleasure it gives me to know I was right about you all along.”

As the lancers came forwards to roughly bind my wrists, I looked to my mother. Juraxi was holding her back. Eztaral barred Pel and Atalawe with her arms and shook her head at me resolutely.

“You know me!” I yelled again as they came at me with a mosscloth hood.

“Were you aware of this, you Scions?” Haidak demanded as he circled me. “Did you know what this scum was hiding?”

Eztaral spat on the deck. The disappointment in her eyes was a stake to my heart. “We are as clueless as you, Baran. Enough theatre. Take him away and out of sight so we can burn these bodies.”

Haidak shoved me. “With pleasure, Eagleborn Kraid! Keep a blade on this traitor. You saw what he possesses inside him. What evil runs through him.”

The hood was at least merciful. It saved me from the pain of seeing my failure in the faces of those I held dearest. And it saved them from seeing the tears on my blood- and dust-stained face. I was even glad when a heavy fist came down over the hood, knocking me dizzy. Another drove into my gut and made me retch.

I was glad. I deserved every blow.

28

The Blades of Betrayal

A grimspore is an evil thankfully not often seen in today’s Swathe. Stuck somewhere between a beast and a fungus, the spore disguises itself as a seed or fruit, fooling animals and humans into close proximity. Once close enough, the grimspore injects its poison into its prey. Within days, the grimspore will take over the mind and body of its host, and drive them insane. A grimspore has one goal, and that is to replicate itself. The hosts are known to attack others of their own kind in ravenous and terrifying fashion to spread the spore. If no prey is available, the host will be consumed, decay, and spread the spore to lie in wait and start the cycle again. The only solution for a grimspore is fire, and plenty of it.

FROM “MUSINGS FROM THE MULCH”

A stench awoke me. It was the overwhelming gag of rotten ūlana fruit mixed with a delightful tang of orokan shit. Every breath I took seemed to concentrate the stench, not lessen it.

My first thought was that Tesq was cooking something. I could even hear the clattering of pots and clay bowls. By the heat of my breath on my face, I could feel the sheets wrapping my head. The relief rushed through me in a deep and shuddering sigh. It had all been a nightmare. A horrid, wonderful nightmare.

It was then I tried to move, and the ropes cut deeper into my already numb wrists.

Needles stabbed my stagnant muscles as I struggled. There were no bedsheets around my head but the stinking sack of mosscloth instead. No bed beneath my head but a floor of cold, varnished, and indifferent wood. I was on my side with hands tied behind my back and rope around my ankles, too. The darkness was not total. Behind the threads of the sack, a sliver of yellow light showed me the crack under a door.

The panic ruled me. I thrashed about like a captured moth in an effort to get free. The ropes hampered me exactly as they were designed to do, and it took me until I was breathless, seething, and sweating to get onto my knees. The exhaustion was the only thing that kept me from fighting on.

“You betrayed me!” I spat into the mosscloth. Scraping my head along the slick wood was useless, but I managed to pinch the sack between my knees and pull it free. I sat up and bellowed my frustration to this dark room until my throat was sore and sweat poured. “Serisi! You hateful creature! Speak to me!”

The demon held on to her silence. I set about thumping my fists onto the wood in frustration.

When my hands ached, I turned my attention to where I had been put. My prison cell was small. A box of a room by the echoes of my shouts, all made of varnished wood. Not a mote of dust or dirt was around me; a smart decision for this traitor’s cell.

The events of the Neathering were a jumbled mess in my mind, fraught with confusion. I tried to piece them together one by one, to see where exactly I had gone wrong, what I longed to change and could not. My thinking led me nowhere except Serisi.

As if I were back in the loam beyond Sheertown, fighting back sobs, I took stock. “I trusted you. I trusted you, and you betrayed me. You forced me to kill my own people. And now everybody has seen you. Everyone I trusted and cared for, and everyone that trusted and cared for me. You’ve ruined me, Serisi! You’ve made me no better than your kin out there, and now they’ll probably see me hanged or drowned for it. You’ve ruined us both, in fact, and I hope it was worth it.”

The demon took a while to speak. I could feel her presence shifting around me in the pitch dark. Her voice was stone, emotionless. Disturbingly cold for a being of fire. I did nothing but what I promised you. I told you that I would not betray my kin. You should have known better than to trust a demon.

“Well… your little ploy failed. Shal Gara still stands.”

Hatlu Ko was not my ploy, Tarko. It was a distraction and a trap to gain the Fireborn’s attention and return to my father. And they will not kill us yet. I made you this city’s hero before I tore you down.

“How?” I growled despite my raw throat. “How did you do it?”

Do you not see? I told you our minds were becoming one. I warned you, in a way. When you started dreaming, I felt my father’s mind searching for me. The more you dreamed, the clearer I saw him, and the more he saw me. He ordered me to be patient, to watch this tree and spy from within. And so I did.

The night of the wine, you were weaker and your mind distracted. It was then I learned how I could use not just your dreams, but your body. My father commanded me to earn your trust. I kept you alive to do my bidding, showed you what Faraganthar wanted you to see, and had the entire tree hanging on your words. When you put your trust in me completely, you gave me control, and I wrought your doom.

I swayed, dizzy. I refused to believe I had been so completely conned. “And everything you said about Shal Gara and the Swathe? About balance and a truce? That was all part of your lie?”

Not all I said was a lie, Tarko, but I cannot deny my father.

Footsteps stamped out any more of our conversation. No fewer than six locks were unbolted and unfastened before the door was cranked open, lifting straight up. The light, though it was poor vinelight, blinded me.

Mother stood before me. At her back were highwarders with helmets and polished masks. She stepped forwards in a slow and measured step. The light made shadow of her face, but I could still see the red-rimmed eyes and the white of her knuckles.

“I know what I saw. I’ve heard what they have to say about you, but I need to hear it from my son’s mouth to believe it. And that is not because I want to believe,” she said in a voice hoarse and strained at the same time. “Is it true what they say, Tarkosi? That a demon has taken you?”

I bowed my head, feeling the sweat run along the bridge of my nose. “It is. And this changes nothing, I am still your son. Her name is Serisi, daughter of the demons’ king, and ever since Sheertown I’ve had her trapped in my head.”

My mother at first retreated, as if my admission were a butt of a spear to her stomach.

“I thought it was witnessing that massacre that changed you. I told myself that’s why you were different, harsher of mood and tongue than I’d ever seen you. Then I blamed the magic in you. The stress of your mantle of hero, perhaps.” She took a sharp breath. “I never thought all this time you could be hiding one of them… in you.”

I was speechless. I hated the way my mother looked at me, as if I were a stranger.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Tarko? I am your mother.”

“I thought you would do exactly this. Lock us… me up.”

“My own son?” Mother curled her lip. “How dare you. I have spent all morning arguing for them to spare your life. The Barans are in uproar. So are half the sorcers.” She moved further into the cell, waving back the warders as they followed. “How did this happen?”

“Magic.” I sighed, dejected. “That’s all I know. An accident of nectra and demon blood. It bound us together, two minds in one body.”

Mother looked around the dark as if Serisi hid in the corners. I could feel her weight behind my eyes, watching my mother intently.

“And is it listening now?” Mother asked.

“Yes, she is,” I answered. “She hears and sees everything I do.”

“And what does it want, besides the murder of innocent warders and workers?”

The indignant anger flushed through me. “To ruin me, it seems, just like the rest of them. I made the mistake of trusting her as an ally, and she betrayed me,” I growled.

Mother’s lip quivered until she pursed her mouth. “Doesn’t change that it happened, Tarko. Not one bit. You lied to us all. Me included.”

“What are they going to do with me now that they know?” I asked, already fearing the answer. Before Mother could answer, there came a voice from somebody unseen.

“Axera. That’s enough.”

Eztaral appeared between the warders. Her face was a thunderstorm. Envoy Okarin had also come to stare at me, and the curl of disgust on her lip was crushing.

Axera nodded, allowing a sullen Pel to guide her away. Eztaral and Okarin blocked the light to stand fearlessly over me. Eztaral put herself protectively between me and the envoy. She seized me by the side of my head and glared into my eyes, then at the side of my neck.

Excuses came pouring from my mouth. “I didn’t want to keep this from you forever, Eztaral, Envoy. I promise. When I used the nectra in Sheertown, a spell trapped us together. It saved my life, gave me this power, but it trapped Serisi inside my head. I thought you or the matriarch would hang me because of it, and the more days that passed, the more you trusted me and the more important I became. Then came the dreams, and it grew impossible to tell you. You have to believe me. I didn’t know what else to do but hide the demon and use her to save Shal Gara.”

Okarin’s fingers were still upon her beads, unmoving. “That is just one of your betrayals, Tarkosi Terelta. Why don’t you first tell us what happened in the Burrows?”

A lump had formed in my throat. Sweat dripped. “You know what happened. That creature Hatlu Ko escaped, and I stopped him.”

Eztaral shot her questions at me like sharp spears. “And why was it you were already in the Neathering? Why is it bloody footprints led from you back to the Burrows? And why, pray tell, was a young lad found choked on dust and ash as if killed by an earth reaver?”

They were damning questions. “I…” I got no further. My hesitation told Eztaral and Okarin everything they needed to hear without a single word spoken.

“Three Gods,” Eztaral breathed. She let go of me and checked her hand as if it carried some plague.

Okarin had no qualms meeting my raw eyes. Her scarlet gaze looked like a pyre fit to burn me. “A murderer as well as a liar.”

“She – the demon – is the murderer, not me. Serisi was behind what happened in the Burrows!”

“Yet your hands, not hers, committed these crimes.”

“I wasn’t in control! You have to believe me!” I spluttered, growing desperate. “Before last night, Serisi was helping us fight the demon horde. She’s been telling me her father’s tactics in dreams. She’s told me everything of the demons. Of course I trusted her! That is my only crime: trusting in somebody I thought I could trust. She used that trust to take control of me and betray me with my own hands.”

“Don’t!” Eztaral snapped. “Don’t you dare tell us you have no part of this. I don’t want to hear another explanation, excuse, or lie from you. You’re the one who let the enemy behind our battlements, and we have suffered for it. Those are the facts, and to believe anything else would make me a liar also.”

“Keep your words for the matriarch, and pray my mother understands you better than I do,” added Okarin. “All I see is a disappointment.”

This princess gets it.

“Shut up!” I snarled to the darkness.

“And there we have it. Even now the demon whispers to you, doesn’t she?” Eztaral looked fit to strike me, she was so disgusted. Instead, she shepherded the envoy towards the highwarders before turning back to me.

“I should have seen it,” she growled. “The talking to yourself. The magical aptitude that half the sorcers can hope to attain. The dreamwalking. It was all too good to be true, yet I believed it all. You blinded us with hope and made a fool out of this bloodwood.”

“Eztaral! Wait, I—!”

With the harsh squeak of her heel on the wood and a nod to the warders, the darkness came to crush me again. The dull thud of the door ran through my bones. My objections were curtailed by the thickness of the wood. No matter how loudly I shouted, how desperate my words became.

In the heaving increments of my frantic breaths, I lowered my forehead to the floor and let the tears scorch my cheeks.

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In my timeless prison, with the unwavering vinelight my only illumination, the shadows were a canvas for my thoughts. Spots of light wandered in my peripheries, causing me to constantly twitch back and forth. I saw shining eyes between imaginary tree trunks that had no end. At one point I swore a two-headed snake curled around me.

In my delirium of torment, I muttered streams of garbled threats at Serisi as she had at me in the early days of our accursed bonding. I must have spent an hour or two wallowing in such hatred and regret before I fell into a fitful sleep again, utterly exhausted. Every time I caught my eyelids falling, Serisi’s eyes glowed from the darkness, half-imagined. I snatched myself away and cursed the demon afresh.

“You’re not invading my body again, foul bitch,” I told her. “Never again.”

I don’t have to, came her only reply. My work is done.

The thunderous drone of drums awoke me from a sleep that might have lasted one hour or ten, I didn’t know. The demons were attacking with another barrage that sent faint shivers through the mighty bloodwood.

It took me far too much effort and far too many abrasions from the varnished floor, but I managed to worm my way forwards so I could kick at the door. “I can help!” I yelled as loudly as my scorched throat would allow. “Let me help!”

Not a soul came to answer my cries. I was left panting in the darkness. I was left to imagine and wonder at the chaos and death below me and how badly they needed my help. I could even hear the screams from nearer branches. Death occupied my mind. I saw the dead faces of warriors and workers in my darkness, falling and dying in my imagination. A boy that looked half my age stared at me. Dirt dribbled from his mouth. I shut my eyes and dug nails into my palms. Black veins of my shoulder glowed blue, faint as clouded stars. I stayed that way until I felt the noise of war fade away.

It was then the laughter bubbled up from within me. The kind of laughter that was unabashed. Mad, even. Perhaps I had indeed gone mad after all. Perhaps there was no demon in my head, but I had come back from Sheertown broken in the mind. It made more sense than that I had trusted a demon. I grinned at the darkness.

“You think you’ve won, don’t you? You think you’ve beaten me. I bet you think this war is already over.”

And what makes you think it isn’t?

“Because you’re still trapped. Here in my mind and in this cell. And if they see fit to hang us, we’ll both die.”

We shall see about that.

As if to make the demon’s point, the door’s locks thudded as if somebody fumbled with them. With a stumble and a clatter, the locks were undone one by one, and light spilled as the door opened.

No wall of highwarders stood before me framed in vinelight. Only a dozen figures in warder’s armour. It took me a moment to recognise the shape of the man who stood closest. The light caught the welts of his half-scarred face.

“Juraxi? That you?” I croaked. My voice was so spent I sound like I gargled pebbles.

“The very same,” Juraxi told me. His voice was quiet, lacking in some of his usual exuberance.

“What are you doing here?”

“Eztaral sent me to fetch you. Something about a familiar face and being inconspicuous, I suppose. We’re to take you where you’re supposed to be.”

It was the time to find out my fate, I guessed. “Matriarch wants to see me, does she?”

Juraxi nodded dutifully. Though he seemed uncomfortable, he had no trouble looking at me, just like all the rest of those who had dared to call me friend. “It appears she does, Tarko. Come now, up you get.”

With much difficulty and with a lot of Juraxi’s help, I made it to my feet. “What are they saying about me out there?”

He puffed his jowls in a sigh. “That you killed the Burrows warders. That you’ve got a demon in you. Is it true?”

“True as the wood beneath our feet, much as I hate to admit it.”

Juraxi held a stone knife in his hands, and he paused with the blade facing me. He was looking between my eyes. I saw the other warders looking on. Their masks couldn’t hide their curious, wary gazes. “I can’t see it in you,” Juraxi said.

I’m not sure what Juraxi was expecting, such as a label that said, “demon inside.” With knives, he and another warder slit my ankle ropes and let me walk freely, still with hands bound behind my back. The ropes had been tight, and I stumbled twice before my legs woke up.

I noticed no highwarders present but didn’t question it as Juraxi led me forth into the night. As it turned out, my prison had been an empty grain store on a high branch, with most of Shal Gara beneath me. Only the canopy and Crimson Crown lay above. Below me, I saw the remnants of fires burning in different places across the bloodwood. One of the highfields had been razed. The tiny shapes of workers battled to keep its sparks from spreading further.

“What of the demons?” I asked.

“Fortunately, they were too slow to attack us after the Burrows. They could have pounced on us, but they missed their chance. If you ask me, they’re waiting for something else.”

“Hear that, Serisi? Failure,” I breathed.

Serisi’s laughter echoed coldly in my head while Juraxi replaced the hood over my head. I was glad for it, to be honest. I didn’t want to see anyone, let alone be recognised.

The branch was skinny for a bloodwood, winding back and forth. I could see faint lights through the mosscloth, but nothing of detail. I did, however, notice that we descended instead of rose up to the Crimson Crown.

“Where is the matriarch?” I asked.

Juraxi was quick to reply. “She is beneath, inspecting our fortifications and the Burrows after your… accident.”

“I like that word better than betrayal,” I sighed, chest shuddering.

Branch after branch fell away beneath my tired and sore feet. I tried to count the steps and branches, but my mind hadn’t the concentration for numbers. Those keeping watch or working their shifts of war crowded the branches and thoroughfares with us. I felt the other warders close in around me.

“Who’s that prisoner there?” somebody hollered to us. A man with a thick voice born of a penchant for smoking moss. I couldn’t see his face, but he sounded sour as a rotten apple.

“None of your business, that’s who!” Juraxi yelled back.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to him.

“Don’t you worry,” he hissed. “People always want their own justice, is all. I’m under orders not to let that happen. Word of you and your demon has spread through every branch and tribe. You’re as famous as Kī Raxa or Suluz the Strong now, Tarko.”

Famous. And for all the wrong reasons.

With my breathing loud and hot against my face, I stayed quiet and listened as best I could. The muted chatter I could hear all around me, punctuated with shouts, was too muddled to make out, and yet I feared every word was about me and my treachery. I feared what lay before me: the matriarch’s stare of disappointment, the sneer of the Barans. And the shame I would have to endure. Never mind my sentence. Hanging was the fate the matriarch was fondest of. I had seen my fair share of criminals dropped from the high branches and heard the snap of plenty of necks. Failing the noose, I was destined for a permanent stay in the Burrows.

The sound of rushing water grew louder, along with the scent of blood mixed with ash. The faint light beyond my hood died away. The lack of voices felt unusual, as if the matriarch and her entourage waited with bated breath. I wondered whether they were afraid of me.

The pressure of the hands around me eased. The ones on my shoulders and neck vanished. Even Juraxi withdrew.

“What’s happening?” Despite the hood I still looked around. I felt a cold blade press against my wrists and feared the worst for a horrid moment before the rope came free. They were quickly retied in front of me instead. A strange process, but I imagined I had a lot of grovelling to do to save my life.

“Matriarch?” I called out.

“Not too long ago, I wore a hood the same as this,” answered Juraxi, standing at my side. He circled me as he spoke. I could barely hear him over the water noise.

“Where is the matriarch? What is this?” I demanded.

Hands forced me to my knees.

“I never told you my whole story, did I, Tarko? Before Firstwatch burned, I was to be executed for a murder I had no part in. They said I killed my wife and her lover, when in fact it was all him, and all I did was slit his throat in the name of justice,” Juraxi told me. “I knelt there like you did, hands bound and awaiting the end when the omen came. Much to my surprise and glee, the sword never fell on my neck, and when I dragged my hood off…”

Juraxi did the same to me, showing me his warped and smiling face. A dark Rootfort lay behind him, populated by a ring of hooded individuals wearing jade lizard masks. Others worked away at some machinery further down the broken battlements.

“You? You’re Fireborn?” I hissed. “Curse you to the Six Hells!”

Juraxi reclaimed my attention with a flash of a copper knife in my face. “When I dragged my hood off, my executioners were gone and I saw the sun goddess eaten by darkness. The demons’ coming saved my life, and as such I serve their glory. I was spared, blessed, and anointed in their fire, and so will you be.”

“You… you utter filth, Juraxi,” I told the bastard, wishing I had the saliva to spit. “To think we trusted you and took you in, and this is how you repay us?”

Juraxi tapped me on my head with his blade. “Your confidence was your mistake.”

At last, Serisi said.

“I didn’t think you had this in you, Juraxi. And by that I mean the intelligence to lead the Fireborn,” I goaded. “Call me surprised.”

We were interrupted by a rattle of ironpith chains and the squeak of ropes. I saw the buckets used to gather earth being hauled over the side and into the darkness. They came taut, making the decking complain with dire creaking.

Juraxi shook his head as if I were a child asking a ridiculous question. “Lead? Me? No, I am just a messenger. And tonight, I’m also a courier of sorts.”

I did not like the sound of that. I flexed my hands, searching for anything I could bend my magic to. Juraxi was prepared: he kept the knife close to my throat and leaned close enough for me to smell the rot of his teeth.

“We’ve been looking for you for a long time, Tarko: the one who stole away the king’s daughter on the eve of the first battle. That is an insult the demon king cannot forgive, and he’s been dying to meet you,” Juraxi said, examining my eyes as if trying to see the demon within. “To think it was you all along. How did we not see it before you slipped? I’m almost impressed.”

My skin grew hot and prickly. “Perhaps because you have nothing between your ears but shit? Our binding was an accident, curse you. I wanted none of this.”

Juraxi grinned and sketched a deep bow. “All will be made right shortly, don’t you worry, Your Highness,” he said, addressing Serisi instead of me. “It is a true honour to meet you.”

I struggled as they led me forwards. “Let me go! You can’t do this to your own people!”

There were too many hands on me and too many knives now pointing in my face. The Fireborn began to chant words from the shade of their hoods and jade masks.

“And why not?” Juraxi cackled. “Stop us, if you can. Or defy us, and let’s see whether the hero of Shal Gara is ready to die for his bloodwood.”

To my shame, I knew that no, I was not.

Shoving me towards the edge of the Rootfort and the bucket chains, the Fireborn tied another rope to my bonds, one that had a thick ironpith hook attached to the end.

“What by the loam are you doing?” I writhed as they attached it to the chains trailing behind the bloodwood. They bucked and jolted as the buckets skipped over the uneven trail of Shal Gara.

“I told you!” Juraxi laughed. “You have an audience with the king.”

“No, you can’t be serious!” I bellowed. My desire to stay as far away from the king of demons as possible ran as strong as ever. I thrashed against my captors. “Get off me! Help! Traitors!”

Dust swirled around us in a faint cloud before half a dozen copper blades menaced me. Several nicked my throat. I felt blood, and still I fought.

“Nobody can hear you,” Juraxi told me. “And even if they could, nobody would listen to you. You will simply have escaped, murdered your warders to be free, and be forever remembered as a traitor. Well, as long as Shal Gara stands before it is purified by fire.”

Juraxi thumped me solidly in the stomach. It quietened me long enough for them to kick me from the shattered railings, and to my dread, I fell from Shal Gara.

29

Faraganthar’s Flames

We are nothing but ash. We are nothing but cinders on the wind. This battle is already lost.

FOUND CARVED INTO BARK NEAR THE CRIMSON CROWN, 2310

My shoulders and wrists popped in pain as I came to a merciful yet painful stop. For a moment I thought I might tear free, plummet after all and leave my arms dangling from the chain. The agony was intense enough to make Serisi snarl over my cries of outrage.

In juddering fashion, the hook ran down the sharply angled chains with me chasing it, my teeth chattering from the vibration and eyes feeling abruptly loose in their sockets.

I fell so fast I might as well have ridden a lancewing to the loam. The colossal churn of roots below me came perilously close at one point. I didn’t dare struggle too much unless I fell the rest of the way. When I could catch a breath, I shouted at the top of my lungs for help. The lights of Shal Gara were ablaze behind me. I heard no replies. No horns. No drums, only the clatter of the chain as it whisked me away from my home. Twice now I had left the bloodwood, and both times had been against my will. There was no freedom after all.

As the chain swung low across the loam, my feet dragged so much I almost flipped over myself. For a moment, the hook left the chain, but as it rejoined solid ironpith, I slammed against the bucket at the end of the line.

Dirt showered me, trapping me against the edge of the bucket. Though I had a very high chance of being smothered, I refused to let go of the last handhold I had on Shal Gara.

The Fireborn had other ideas.

The traitors had followed me down, far more controlled and in less of a rage than I. All except for one fellow. His knots failed him, and he fell squealing to his death amidst the roots. “Good,” I hissed to myself.

Boots dislodged me. Before I could so much as think about magic, I was lying in the churned earth, my vision spinning. I seized one handful of dirt for a spell before two blades were tucked under the soft parts of my jaw. Juraxi warned me with a third, holding it an inch from my eyeball.

“As much as I’d like you to witness the speechless glory that is the king of chaos,” warned Juraxi, “I will have no qualms about blinding you for your remainin’ hours. Understand me?”

The trenches left by the roots were deep crevices of milled earth. The kind that was soft underfoot and tried its best to hold on to you with each step. The vibration of Shal Gara made the dirt flow like grain from a vat. Worms thick as my legs wriggled between our steps. Crows harassed us with sharp insults. It was tough going, and excruciating to have such earth so close to me but have knives hovering even closer. Juraxi’s hand lay on my shoulder as others drove me ahead. Every look back to Shal Gara was met with a shove. I was forced to stare ahead at the wildfire while my home outran me. My eyes grew hot and itchy, and I blinked profusely in the light. The heat grew with every shaky footfall.

The pace slowed from a scrabble to a plodding across firmer earth. Nobody seemed to inform my heartbeat. I was too fixated on my terror over the prospect of the demon king.

When impending doom seems likely, you tend to rebel in any way you can. With my hands bound and blades itching to stab me, all I was left with was my mouth.

“I thought you said the demons killed your parents, Juraxi?” I asked. “How could you possibly worship and follow the ones that committed such murder against you? It makes absolutely no sense.”

Juraxi shook his head. His eyes were wide, unblinking mirrors for the firelight. “They were purified, just like everyone and everything the demonfire touches.”

“Did it feel like purification when the demons melted your face? Made you so ugly?”

“The demons saw fit to spare me. They marked me as theirs, and I’m honoured by it.”

“If it were my parents that my masters burned alive, it would torture me being able to imagine just how much they must have suffered.”

Juraxi curled his good lip and shoved me. “Goad me all you like. That sharp tongue of yours will burn with the rest of you. The demons are unstoppable, Tarko, and you’ll come to understand that soon enough. It’s useless to deny chaos.”

“History proves you wrong already. Kī Raxa beat them before and we can do it again. But I see what motivates you. You switched sides without a fight, you and all the rest, lay down with your belly up at the first spark of flame just to save your skins. That proves, quite frankly, that you are nothing but a collection of cowardly worms.”

The Fireborn did not hiss or curse but chuckled amongst themselves. I scowled at them, trying to make out the other traitors, but their hoods and masks were too obscuring.

“Oh, Tarko. This is all so futile. We’re the only minds in this Swathe that see sense.”

“You’ve been lying since the loam, I take it?”

“That I have, and you sucked down every lie I fed you, didn’t you? When the demons spared me, anointed me with their demonfire, I was given the task of taking their commands to Shal Gara and finding the loyal disciples lying in wait like seeds waiting for the one true god to arrive. You survivors led me every step of the way, and when you freed us from the matriarch, it was you who saved my skin. And that copper knife you found in the loam? It was the symbol the demons ordered me to look for and follow. It was you who reunited me with the others. The Fireborn rose again thanks to you, Tarko.”

“Snakes, more than seeds.” My ropes creaked as I tensed in frustration. This rebellion of mine was not going so well. “If only I had known, I would have ripped you limb from limb with my spells. I still might get that chance, you know, and I’ll take it in an instant.”

“But you didn’t know.” Juraxi’s laughter mocked me. “You were too busy playing sorcer, weren’t you? Playing the hero of Shal Gara. It was so difficult keeping a straight and friendly face whenever I saw you strutting about, a worker dressed as a noble warrior. You remind me of the people who saw fit to sentence me to death without a second thought. The Swathe has become corrupted by order, and through demonfire it will be cleansed. You and all the others. You will see the power of the one god firsthand.”

I fixed my eyes on the man with every scrap of hatred I could summon. I couldn’t fathom the bleakness of a soul that would see such murder and chaos and call it friend, never mind worship it as a god.

“Not only does your idiocy astounds me,” I said, “but your lies disgust and bore me.”

I spoke no more. My opinions had as much effect as pissing on the wildfire, but at least I had said my piece before I died.

“I bet you’re happy, aren’t you, Serisi?” I muttered under the roar of the wildfires. “To be carted back to your father in the hands of madmen and hypocrites?”

The others had to shield their face from the heat and smoke. I stood with eyes stinging and rebellious. Even now, I refused to accept I had been so resoundingly outdone.

Precisely, replied Serisi, cold as could be. My father has ordered it, and so it shall be. I have no choice.

“I don’t believe you,” I retorted. My hope sounded ridiculous aloud, but I pressed on to avoid the alternative anguish. “You and I came to understand each other. Perhaps even cared what happened to each other. I know I changed your mind about the Swathe. You said yourself that not all of it was lies. You can’t be that cruel. Not you.”

Can I not? I am no human. Your rules do not apply to me, Serisi told me at last, in the wintry and brooding voice she had first used when we were lost in the loam. It broke me, and the Fireborn had to haul me up.

I am a demon, and we worship chaos above all.

Before us, the forest roared with the crackling of burned wood and walls of fire. The trees that hadn’t yet burned were already stained black by the smoke and heat. Crisp leaves scattered around us. Trees heavy with sap exploded in sections deep within the flames. The primal human in me ached to run from the flames. The demon in me reached open-armed to feel their heat.

The wildfire was impassable and yet still the Fireborn shoved me on towards it.

“What do you intend to do, purify all of us in fire right now, you fool?” I struggled, pushing back against the knives. “That’s suicide.”

“You have a demon within you – a glorious gift – and you’re still afraid of fire?” Juraxi mocked me.

“I’m still flesh and bone, just like you.”

Juraxi raised his copper knife. The metal held every glint of the fire, looking liquid. For a moment, it looked as though the man had control over the wildfire. As he levelled his blade, the fire’s face split down the middle. A path appeared through the inferno. A path of cinders and smoking ash, but a path all the same.

The heat was next to unbearable, even for me. Several of the Fireborn around me began to smoke gently on their shoulders and elbows. Even despite the pain they must have been feeling, they raised their hands to feel the heat. Some burned their hands willingly.

The wildfire, I realised, was hollow. The fire that we saw was naught but the walls of a circular fortress, burning through the forest just as Shal Gara moved. The patch of ground within was full of crippled, blackened stumps of trees, the sky one of black smoke and lapping flame, and its inhabitants a swarm of demons and navik.

It seemed as if the demons had made camp. I saw moving buildings of charcoal and iron on log wheels. Teams of demons and navik waited in iron reins waiting to pull them on. Fires roasted meats of various forest creatures, mostly slow orokan. The meat looked burned to ash, and yet the demons still turned the spits.

Like the fire, the horde divided for us like a spear through black flesh. It was a narrower path than the previous. The navik gnashed at us constantly. Some leaped for us but were pulled back on invisible leashes or collided with unseen walls. I didn’t know why, but each time, a pain flared in my head. No since Sheertown had I felt a headache like it. It was as if Serisi pushed against the confines of my skull.

Ahead of us lay a pavilion made out of broken trees. It looked like a pyre waiting to be burned, and on its peak sat the grandest demon of all.

Faraganthar sat hunched forwards as if deep in thought. Over the templed claws he stared at us with eyes of blinding white flame. Smoke surrounded him as a gown. His uneven horns, half of one missing, reached tall despite their crooked, root-like angles. A sword of star-iron, notched yet gleaming sharp with the recent touch of a grindstone, stood point-down in the wood. Its hiltless handle hovered at the king’s elbow.

Once in the empty circle around the demon king’s pyre, the Fireborn prostrated themselves on the ground like the grubs they were. As it turned out, we were not alone in our human company. Two other hooded individuals stood either side of me. They waited as I was made to kneel, faced towards the king. They did not turn to greet me, but I saw red, stone masks covering their features. One was entirely covered, without holes for eyes or mouth. The other showed the lower half of his face. Familiar black-gloved hands rested behind their backs amidst folded robes of scarlet. I assumed they were the ringleaders of their repugnant band.

Faraganthar stared at each of his worshippers before he found me. Under his gaze, as spine-shivering as it was, I refused to bow. If there was an expression to be glimpsed on his face, it was one of intrigue, no doubt hiding a fierce and terrifying temper. The navik at my back yowled. I wondered how much earth I could throw at the king and the Fireborn in one last defiant stand before the knives or navik sliced me to pieces. I decided not enough, and I called myself a coward.

Show your respect, Tarko, Serisi told me, and my father may spare you yet. If I can have you kept alive, I will speak for you.

“Lies. That’s all I hear,” I muttered at her. My teeth chattered together.

Faraganthar waited for an age before he spoke, and I confess I jumped when he did. The demon’s voice was like the grumble of Shal Gara’s roots. His fangs clacked together like sparkstones being struck. Fire curled from his mouth alongside his words.

“Where is my Serisianathiel? Speak, messenger!”

Still on his knees and elbows, Juraxi spoke into the ash. “She is here, Majesty. This is the body in which she’s been trapped, in the sorcer they call Tarkosi Terelta. We’ve brought her back to you as you ordered.”

“As we promised,” added one of the standing Fireborn to my left.

Faraganthar eyed me. My face grew hot under his gaze. “Can you speak, daughter?”

I spoke for myself, trying my best to stay standing even though my limbs trembled. “She can’t, but I can.”

Faraganthar blew smoke around his long claws. As it wafted over me, the shape of Serisi was revealed kneeling in the same patch of earth as I did. Her shape was gossamer spiderthread, but I saw her details.

“Well done, daughter. You followed my instructions to the letter. From within, you have crippled the worms. I am pleased with you, for you have secured the Iron Icon’s victory.”

Serisi’s whisper was a rustle of ash about my knees. Father.

I took solace in the tone of her voice, in how subdued it sounded.

“And you: the thief who stole my spawn from her horde. The very hero of Shal Gara himself. I should have expected it would be you who took the power of demonkind.”

His formality shocked me out of my despair. I had expected a barbarian. A beast with traits not of calm but impatience and cruelty.

“I stole nothing from you. This was an accident of magic that I had no part in.”

Faraganthar took his sword from beside him and stabbed it into the pyre. Logs tumbled to the ash. “You speak the truth, worm, and that pleases me.”

I tilted my head, shocked. “I… You don’t seem surprised.”

“Why should I be?” Faraganthar boomed. “For I was there long ago, when another thief like you existed.”

“Did you know this?” I asked of Serisi.

I did not.

Faraganthar stood, and with each word he took a step down the pyre. Fire sprouted wherever he trod. “When last we came to your world, there was another worm of your ilk. I was but a prince at the time. A fresh warrior already a dozen times anointed in battle in your forest. One battle, our king vanished not to be seen again. I claimed the crown to see our war finished, but the worm who called herself Kī Raxa stood before the Last Clan, rebellious.”

“Kī Raxa?” I breathed.

“She had stolen the king’s soul just as you have Serisianathiel’s, and with it she turned his might against us.”

Even with the threat of death looming, I still kept no leash on my tongue. “And cut your horn from your head before banishing you, or so I’ve heard.”

Faraganthar stepped onto the charred dirt between us. Even without his pyre, he still towered over me like a sapling, ten feet tall to be critical. His arms, cracked with veins of fire, swayed back and forth as he approached me.

“That is correct. I have worn the crown since that day, and to my horde I have sworn vengeance on your world and its insults. And behold, while victory lingers in my grasp once more, the past is repeated,” Faraganthar said. Reeking, sulphurous black smoke wafted around me as he came to a halt just out of reach of his claws. My neck clicked as I looked up at his burning face. My shuddering grew.

“Father,” I blurted unbidden. I clamped my mouth shut. There was magic here not of my understanding. It poured from the demon king. The claw around my neck, already hot with demonfire, began to shake.

“Which piece of her remains?” Faraganthar demanded, almost deafening me. His sword, taller than I was, dug into the earth beside me and spat sparks on my neck.

I bared my teeth. My own magic creeped into my veins, but at the first and faintest sign of blue in my bound hands, Faraganthar wielded his blade, thwacking me with the flat of it.

It was likely a light tap for the demon king. For me, it was akin to being struck by a boulder. I somersaulted so violently, my legs landed before I did. I wheezed in the dirt. The blow had spurred my headache to blinding intensity. I blinked black spots from my eyes.

“You feel his pain, daughter, I know. But brace yourself, for there is much pain to come.” Faraganthar raised a fist, and with a clench of his long, claw-tipped fingers, red fire bloomed around me. “For both of you.”

“No!” I cried. “You’ll kill us both!”

With unspoken orders, demons came forth with chains. They whipped them around my arms and legs and splayed me in all directions. I yelled as my joints felt close to ripping apart. I felt the wound on my left side opening up once more. A wet warmth spread along my ribs.

Faraganthar stood close. The charcoal and black bone of his face cracked as he smiled at me. His jagged jaws spread so wide his smile reached almost to his horns. I retched at the stink of sulphur.

“Did you know, worm, that the magic of your world is almost as ancient as our own? Puny in comparison, naturally. You spend your short lives trying to wield what you do not understand, but they are siblings to a force greater than all else.”

Chaos, Serisi spoke. I echoed her aloud.

“I see my daughter has educated you.” Faraganthar growled as if I had told the punchline of a joke early. His sword was thrust between my legs. “And though the spell of bonding is a mystery, I know it is neither wholly our magic nor yours, but a bastard child of both. Now, which piece of her remains?”

I kept my lips tight as a sprung trap.

“Remove its clothes,” the king ordered, holding out his huge hand. Another demon raked at the leafleather around my collar until my whole coat was ripped free. Serisi’s surviving claw was revealed around my neck and snatched away. Wounds were cut across my chest, and as blood leaked down my bare stomach, Serisi’s claw was placed in Faraganthar’s palm.

“By bone,” the king uttered.

My body went immediately rigid. Pain lanced along my limbs. In the crowd of demons and Fireborn that now surrounded me, a wriggling navik was passed through the ranks. It scrabbled on all fours before its king. Faraganthar didn’t give the beast a single glance before he seized it, snapped its neck, and rammed its face into his standing sword blade. Blood sprayed my face as Faraganthar held the dead navik over me and squeezed, as if I was some blessing to his dark god.

“By blood,” he snarled, and after tossing the corpse aside, he lowered his fist to my face. Fire sputtered along his claws. The heat was unbearable. Spreadeagled as I was, I could move nothing but my neck. I cried out as the burning spread across my tattooed cheek. I swore I could feel skin blistering.

I didn’t want to die. It was not a thought but an impulse of my body’s own doing. Instinct, ancient and immutable. I could not speak, I could not fight the chains, but I did have my magic. It simply refused to obey me. No spells formed, but the power rushed through me no less. Pressure built in my head as Serisi’s scream joined mine. Dust rose around me against the demonfire. As my dark veins shone blue, Faraganthar’s flames burned through a spectrum of orange and yellow until flashing white.

“And by fire, I release you, daughter!”

My body bucked against the chains so violently I swore I was torn from at least two of my limbs. White light filled every inch of my vision, so hot even the demons recoiled.

I would have considered myself dead had it not been for the earth sticking into my spine, and pain plucking at every fibre of my being. I felt empty. Though my ears rang with the thunder of the spell and roaring wildfire, there was a silence in me. A shake returned to my hands. Not just of mortal fear but of weakness.

Prising open my eyes, I saw the gnarled, clawed hoofs of a demon before me. My gaze wandered upright to ribs of black iron, burning from within, to shoulders of twisted roots, to a face of fire mere feet from mine. Though the shape of her jaws gave her a demon’s grin, I saw a perplexed expression in Serisi’s eyes.

She flexed her claws, now whole again, and stretched from her crouch to her full height. Her horns jangled with adornments of iron splinters and pendants. Smoke curled about her like wind-blown hair or frayed robes.

Faraganthar stood over her. “My daughter.”

“My king.”

I had not been expecting a tender moment between father and daughter, and I didn’t quite witness one. There was a moment of staring, a shared tilt of the head until horns clashed once, and then Faraganthar turned his flaming stare at me.

“You did well, Serisianathiel, and served your clan and god with honour. What you showed me through this worm’s mind will be invaluable. We will feast on flesh in your honour when the battle is over. And now, worm they call hero, you will know the punishment for the imprisonment of my kin.”

“I told you, it was an accident!”

A fist of a Fireborn struck me in the face. There was something oddly familiar about that moment. I looked up but saw nothing but red stone and shadowed pits for eyes.

“Your time for speaking out of turn is over, Tarkosi,” a man hissed at me. The voice was muffled, but its owner clearly knew me. I stared at him, believing it to be Kol Baran but hating that it was still left unproven.

Faraganthar boomed my sentence. “You stole power that does not belong and plied it against this horde. You have taken the lives of Voidborn and demonkind. You, like Kī Raxa, have been a splinter in our eyes, but no more. You will pay for your refusal to bow before the God of Chaos. Stake him to the ground, and let him see what demonfire truly feels like. Let it purify him, and let the Iron Icon toy with his ash and bones.”

While the demons roared and the Fireborn looked on with what I assumed were great smiles, Serisi looked above to the sky of smoke and the sun goddess almost completely consumed by darkness. I studied her mighty, clenching jaws until the demon turned to fix me with a glare. We stared at each other to the noise of the horde, each trying to figure the other’s mind in a silence we weren’t used to. I hoped she saw the hate in mine.

“My king,” she spoke up, quiet of voice. My eyes went wide. With held breath and pounding chest, I watched the demon reveal her doubts and felt a reckless hope flood me.

Faraganthar played as though he hadn’t heard. He spread his arms and claws wide and let the voices of his horde fuel his flames. The king blazed.

“Father!” Serisi said again, louder.

The huge demon whirled. “What is this interruption? You wish to have words with your former prison, daughter? Bathe in his blood before battle?”

“No—”

“You have an objection, Serisianathiel?”

Silence fell across the horde. Now, I saw Faraganthar’s composure slip to anger. It was as if a cage door had swung open, and the real beast was finally unleashed. The time for pleasantries was over. Now he delighted in his rage, and it looked like he had been waiting for Serisi to protest.

“Let the despicable worm live,” said Serisi. “Let him live to see his defeat.”

Faraganthar tapped his fangs together. “No. He will die here by my fire.”

“Then I will take him as a slave. Torture him slowly as long as his pitiful life allows.”

“You will do no such thing!” Faraganthar roared, coming close enough to entangle his horns in hers. “I see now you have spent too long in their company. You have grown soft and weak. You are tainted, daughter! But we will have the human filth cleansed from your mind in the glorious fire of victory. You will stand by my side as their tree falls from beneath them, and once we have shown them our true power, we will consume their precious nectra until their sun turns black forever, and we can bring the Iron Icon to this world. He awaits us as we speak.” To the cheer of demons, the king lifted Serisi’s chin to show his daughter the sky and the pale sliver of a sun goddess almost completely consumed by darkness.

Serisi seemed dazed, as if she had awoken from one of my nightmares. “The Iron Icon comes here?” she asked.

The demon horde cheered in answer. Serisi stood straighter, and the king laughed in a cruel fashion.

“Of course! There is no going back, daughter, do you not understand? You yourself showed me the core within this tree. This Shal Gara. With that much of their nectra, we can open a door large enough for all our clan and the Iron Icon. We are not here to save the Starless Plains. Instead we shall claim a new world for ourselves, and what better than one that deserves my vengeance? All will turn to ash when the God of Chaos himself arrives, and once we consume these lands, we will have the power to find new doors to other worlds, and the chaotic glory of the Iron Icon will rule over all.”

Serisi clenched her fists. “You would kill this world as we did ours?” she argued.

Faraganthar licked his teeth with a molten tongue. “What did you expect, daughter?”

“Have you not learned from how we ravaged our Starless Plains? We destroyed ourselves, and yet you would do it again and again, my king? Willingly? These worms may be our enemy but I have seen how they live with their world, not against it. They do not consume in the name of sacrifice to the Iron Icon, but learn to live with the chaos around them. There is another way to keep demonkind alive.”

“You dare to speak of order and harmony?” Faraganthar boomed. He looked utterly disgusted. “You would betray the glorious God of Chaos?”

“Not order, but balance! Mastery, Father—”

“How dare you be so bold to speak of anything but conquest? What have they done to you, daughter? What lies did this worm feed you?”

The king brought a flaming fist towards my head. I felt a single, searing claw scrape a line across my skull.

“None. I saw with my own eyes, and no other here has seen what I have!” Serisi replied, smiling at my torture.

“I have seen it, spawn! You do not understand the task I have been given, daughter, nor the fate that awaits the Last Clan if I should turn back.” Faraganthar shook his head, and for a moment I thought I saw worry in those white eyes. “The Iron Icon has given me this task and I will not fail him! I cannot! Such is a fate worse than death.”

“You’re afraid of your god, aren’t you?” I hissed. “I’ve known enough fear to see it in your eyes.”

Faraganthar looked as if he would disembowel me right there, but his raised claws grabbed an iron spike from a diminutive demon and thrust it at Serisi. “Stake this worm to the earth so that he may burn!”

With pursed jaws, Serisi took up the spike and turned to me. She needed no hammer. Her fist drove it into the earth between the links of my chain.

“So this is what it’s come to?” I muttered to her. Her sulphurous smoke washed over me.

“I have no choice.” Serisi answered me with another stake to the left chain. “I tried.”

That she had. “You kept your word after all,” I breathed.

When Serisi tried to rise, she found the sword blade above her neck. The king held it there and forced her to stay crouched. Serisi did not look at me, but I saw the colour of her eyes change from white to yellow as she forced herself to calm.

“Do you betray me, daughter?” boomed Faraganthar.

Serisi withered into a bow with arms spread. I had heard her scared before, and I heard it now.

“How could I, King?” she replied. “Yours is the will of the Iron Icon.”

Faraganthar scraped the sword against Serisi’s shoulder. His voice was dangerously low, like roots cracking. “And yet you already have,” he growled.

Another chain slapped across the ash. More demons appeared to wrap it around Serisi’s arms.

“Father!” Serisi yelled as she struggled.

Faraganthar’s roar half-deafened me. “Do not lie to me, spawn! I felt your mind in mine. I felt your doubt. The creeping heresy.” He seized the iron chains and wrapped them around Serisi’s neck, layer on layer until he pulled tight.

Serisi strained against her father’s strength. “No, Father! It was all to gain the worm’s trust!” she seethed. I could feel the heat coming from her.

“You not have not only forsaken your kin but your king and father! You are sick, Serisianathiel! Plagued by ideas beyond our own. A demon that betrays chaos is no demon, and as such you deserve no place in this horde any longer,” Faraganthar roared. “Seize her! Stake her down beside the worm that has poisoned her mind!”

Demons swarmed. Serisi fought them off with her claws, but length after length of iron was wrapped around her until she was littered with chains, horns to feet. Stakes were hammered into the ground through the links, and within moments of roaring and clanking, we were not one prisoner, but two.

Faraganthar presided over it all. “Let her watch while her precious pet is consumed by our righteous fire. Let her ponder her treachery while the iron of the Starless Plains melts to her very soul.”

I was not jealous of that death whatsoever. “You would do that to your own daughter?” I yelled, gawping, confusion trumping fear momentarily. Demons these creatures might have been, and yet I still hadn’t expected that level of abject cruelty. Serisi had shown me more than that.

Faraganthar’s scorn was pure callousness. He looked at us both as if we were insects cowering beneath a boot. “She is no spawn of mine any longer. The moment she doubted me, she ceased to be Voidborn and became dust upon the wind. Those are the matters of chaos and my right as king. Our god of gods will now judge her in the Void. And soon shall he arrive!”

The demons saw no injustice in the king’s decision. Quite the opposite. They hammered their fists against their chests and raised their voices to the sky. The wildfire around us reached ever higher, and just sneaking above the crown of bright flames, I saw the morning sun for the first time in days. It explained the gloom more than the smoke, for the sun goddess’ face was almost completely swallowed by chaos’ darkness. A thin sliver of her remained like a cut fingernail on a grey sheet. That revived the terror in me.

“A fine day for vengeance and paying what is owed! To glory and chaos!”

Faraganthar said no more on the matter of sentencing his daughter to her death. Shouldering his sword, he kicked me aside with a vicious foot and put us behind him. I stretched to watch him between the streams of charred bodies and navik, but not once did the demon king look back. His attention was devoted to the silhouette of Shal Gara beyond the flames and smoke. His daughter was as good as dead to him.

The Fireborn, however, hung back. Juraxi watched me with an impassive face, the faintest hint of glory in his expression. He stood like a crony behind the two masked ringleaders. One moved with the demons, eager to escape the fire, but the other – the one who had seen fit to strike me – shrugged away to watch a little longer. I knew a grin hid behind that obscured face. A Baran’s grin, if my suspicions held true.

“You will pay for your lies, Fireborn! You are a fool if you think you are on the winning side! I know it’s you behind that coward’s mask, Kol Baran!”

Serisi was also currently roaring at the top of her lungs – if she had such things. Her beast-like noises became more desperate and enraged the more of the horde marched past us. Some spat fire as they looked upon us. I received more than few burns in the process.

“Father! See sense!” Serisi beseeched, but no amount of shouting changed our fate, and we were left to the clamour of marching claws. The stragglers grinned at us before they loped on to war.

I was as shocked as Serisi was, and not merely because of Faraganthar’s cruelty, but for what she had done for me. “Hard to please, your father.”

“Shut that hole in your face, worm. This is all your fault. I wish I had left you for the fire and kept my mouth shut.”

“Funny,” I snarled back, “I was thinking the same."

Serisi lashed at her chains, but they were too tightly wound and their stakes too deep in the solid ground. Again and again she shouted, until she had worn herself to a seething, flaming heap.

“Why did you speak out for me, Serisi?” I asked.

She gnashed her jaws. “What does that change now?”

“I need to know. Was it guilt?”

“No, you despicable creature,” Serisi replied. “I do not… care for you.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“Gah! I told you before, it is this place! This world of yours that I have come to care for. I had not thought it possible, but it has infected me. I struggled to think of its fall before, but now my father seeks to destroy both this world and my kin all in the name of the Iron Icon, I cannot stand back and watch. I saw the fire of chaos in my father’s eyes. The will of the Iron Icon rules him. He will not – cannot – turn back now, and that means he will stop at nothing to conquer Shal Gara. If he reaches the nectra I saw through your eyes, my father will make good on that promise. He will summon not just the rest of the Last Clan but the God of Chaos himself to tread your lands, and once that happens, all will be lost. There is no being that can stand before the Iron Icon and live. Your Swathe will become another starless plain of dust and ash, and the horde will suffer once more. I have not been lied to. I have not been swayed by you worms. But what I have seen is the truth.” Fire flashed from Serisi’s eyes. She struggled again. “I can’t believe I am speaking these words, but my father cannot be allowed to win. I won’t let him.”

I stared into that fire. “I am glad for it, Serisi. Not because I was right, but because you are.”

“You…,” the demon grunted, pausing her efforts for one moment to bow her head. “You spoke for me too.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I didn’t thank you.”

“We make a strange pair, but if it’s the only hope Shal Gara and the Swathe’s got, then they’ll have to take it.” I gritted my teeth and extended my black-veined fist to the demon. She looked me up and down, and although she barely hid the curl of her charred lips, she put her claws to my skin. I swore I heard the hiss as she scorched me.

Bones crunched and wounds protested as I arched my head. The Fireborn and demon horde had all but disappeared through the veil of flame. And with its departure, the ring of wildfire around us had begun to creep forwards. The circle was closing in fast. The sweat stung my eyes as I flexed my fingers. “I guess it’s time I got us out of this mess then.”

Serisi was heaving at one stake over and over. “And how exactly do you propose to do that?” she squinted at me.

“Magic, of course,” I snapped. My hands clawed at the air, seeking the weight of the baked dirt around me. Yet however I grasped at it, both dirt and magic escaped me. I felt a perturbing emptiness in my limbs.

“What in the Six Hells?” I yelped.

“Tarko—”

“Wait!” I tried again, heaving harder on the earth as I exhaled slowly and willed my heart to calm. The soil must have been so compacted and dry that it was close to rock. I hauled on the drifts of ash and dust instead. Barely a swirl obeyed my will. Only pain answered my call, lancing up my arm to my skull. I twitched, it was so powerful. A wave of nausea drowned me. I felt… normal.

“What’s happening to me?”

The realisation struck Serisi sooner than it did me.

“It is me, Tarko!” she snarled at me. “Or rather, the lack of me. My father told you that you stole Voidborn power. Without my magic in you…” Her words trailed off.

“You mean to tell me it’s been you all along? My abilities? My spells?” I was horrified. “Was there any part of me in us?”

Her silence gutted me. “Then you better have another idea, Serisi, because I’m not burning to death here!” I yelled, losing all calm.

The wildfire was accelerating towards us. The curtain of roaring flame filled my eyes. I tried once more to reach my magic, but the lack of nectra held me as much a prisoner as my chains. I strained until I was left gasping for breath and slumped in the dirt. The scorching wind dragged tears of effort from my eyes. A tree collapsed as its bones were turned to ash.

“Your kind control fire, right?”

Serisi did not answer. She was too busy hacking at the ground with what little movement she had. Her breathing had become a snorting of flame. Smoke whirled around us.

“Serisi!”

“All demons can, but not for long. I am no wizard. And not while these chains melt through my skin!”

A hundred feet and less away, the wildfire now stood. I could feel Faraganthar’s will bending it. Fingers of it spread across the dirt. Sparks from burning detritus shot at us like slingstones. A strange smell of charred meat filled the air as cooking fires were consumed. I felt the burning in my face already. The iron chains were growing unbearably hot. And onwards, foot by foot, my doom approached me.

I tried my best to shuffle to the very limits of my chains. I kicked at the stakes, but they were as firm as trees. As long as my withering strength held out, I pushed myself as far as my chains allowed. “Serisi, I swear to my gods and yours, I’ll fight your father myself if you get me out of here!” I shouted.

“I am trying, curse you!”

Whatever progress she was making, I didn’t see much of it. Instead I yelled to the fire-filled air, howling at the gods and spirits for help while the pain of burning set into my toes and soles of my feet. A constant stream of noise came from my mouth, part scream, part cursing.

Out of my clouded peripheries, I saw a spar of metal launched into the sky in a shower of soil. My chains hadn’t relaxed in the slightest, but Serisi had one arm free and was furiously shedding chain.

“Agh!” I cried out as the flames touched me. Serisi flung out her hand, driving a wedge into the fire. Shadow, not wildfire, fell over me. A great weight pinned me down. I felt no air in my lungs, only char and heat. The inferno consumed us, but in the face of Serisi’s demon magic, a vital pocket was carved in the flames. With her mind and free hand on the rest of my chains, it was diminishing rapidly. I heard her roar over the flames.

With my body starved of air, I began to choke. I barely felt the claws seize me or the scrape of earth beyond my feet. I knew only the pounding in my head and the heat burning every part of me.

It took an age for me to realise I wasn’t roasting alive. I kept waiting to burst into flame while I writhed, but it never came. When at last air found my lungs again, I head Serisi’s deep voice speak very close to me.

“You can open your eyes, Tarko. It is over.”

I didn’t want to. Not least because I could feel the demon’s breath on my cheek.

“You are whole. Singed but whole.”

I cracked open one eye to see Serisi crouched over me. Her pitted, jagged face of grey, copper, and black studied me just as closely. The roaring behind me told me the inferno was close. The wildfire had passed over us as a wave in its loyalty to the horde and its wizards. Its great sloping wall of it pressed on west, ever hungry. A destroyed forest stood around us, burned to ash and no fuel left to give the fires. What flames still shone were kept back by the demon’s reach.

I patted myself down, feeling raw patches of skin and burned leafleather. Some of my long hair had become crisped and curled. Whole indeed.

Serisi was free of the chains save one arm. A coil of molten iron remained on her hand. It had bitten into her thick skin. I saw the pain in her face alongside the relief.

“Thank you,” I said through a series of torturous breaths. “You saved me.”

Serisi tilted her horned head at me. Her jewellery had melted into her bones. “You owe me your life now, Tarko. A dangerous situation to be in with a demon.”

My jaw was beginning to drop in concern when she cracked a ferocious smile. “As much as this is still all your fault, and though I promised to rip you to shreds and feast on you and roast your bones—”

“Your point?” I wheezed.

“Perhaps you should live a little longer.”

It was a demon’s version of a compliment. “See? You do care.” I pushed myself to my hands and knees.

She poked a tongue like a glowing ingot at me. “Call it a tactical choice, like Eztaral once said. Doing this alone will be more difficult.”

I stared at my ashen palms. “I don’t know what good I will be without my magic.”

Serisi pulled a thread of fire to her and seemed to drink it into her body with a shuddering sigh. “You have your other uses, worm.”

“Let’s hope so,” I said, as the east drew my eyes. There was not much distance to speak of with the constant haze and polluted clouds, but I could look along the broad road Shal Gara and the wildfire had cut. Behind the smoke, filling the rare glimpses of sky, a darkness lurked. It could not be night; the sun was still climbing, and yet it filled every corner of the east. “Because we have a demon king to stop.”

Serisi clenched her injured fist to make the veins of hardened metal creak in her hand. “Fear not, Tarko. There is not a faster demon in the horde than I.”

I liked to think I knew the demon well by now, but that was the first time I heard doubt infect her voice.

30

Unravelled

None of my fellow fourth-born will admit the bloodwoods are a dying breed. All the saplings are known and named. Gora Kara in the far west. Scree in the mountain slopes. And young Firstwatch guarding the east. They came from seeds cracked half a thousand seasons ago, and not a seed has taken root since then.

“ON THE NATURE OF BLOODWOODS” BY TEMACH LILO, 1807

Across the hellish landscape and between fallen trees at an angle to the wildfire, we hauled ourselves. It took us a good distance north and, as such, forced us to run faster than my scorched feet and aching bladder could tolerate. Never mind the weakness in my bones as if the fire had dried up every scrap of strength in me. I kept one eye on the ground that sought to trip or burn me and one on Shal Gara. My home was already drenched in smoke. Over the ceaseless wildfire, I could hear the roar of the bloodwood’s drums.

“I have to stop or I’ll piss my trews,” I blurted, when another dose of nausea struck me. My chest ached from breathing so hard.

“We have not the time, Tarko.”

“Then you go ahead!”

The demon snarled, and by the way she leaned on a log, an exhaustion plagued her too. “Do your business. At least I do not have to witness it firsthand anymore.”

“That pleases me to no end, believe me.”

I scrambled between logs to relieve myself in frantic fashion and barely stayed upright as I did so. A river of thoughts ran through my head, and its current threatened to drown me if I listened to it. I knew my life still hung in the balance, that Shal Gara itself teetered on destruction, and my magic was gone. Taking stock did not help me now, only action. Once again I found myself staring east to the empty road of destruction. Everyone has a coward in them, I believe, it all depends on how much attention you pay yours, and mine was currently screaming to run.

I ignored it completely. A world waited on me.

When at last I had one less thing to worry about, I dashed after the demon, almost immediately falling onto a knee with a curse.

“I will not carry you,” she muttered.

I glanced at Serisi’s long and lithe arms. I was still getting used to see a demon up close. Her form was still alien to me. “I don’t need to be carried, thank you.”

I fell and rolled once more, and as I came up, I knocked against Serisi’s jagged hip. I winced as more pain racked me.

“Who is that?” growled Serisi.

“Are you mad? Who is—oh.”

Standing in the char between Shal Gara and us stood a lone Fireborn, hooded in scarlet and masked in a matching face of stone. A long sword of metal stretched out from his hands, point low and swishing back and forth. Fifty feet lay between us.

“I would wager,” I said, brushing my hands of ash, “that is Sage Kol Baran come to finish what he started. He killed the father, now he wants the son.”

The voice was still masked. “Tarkosi Terelta! Still alive as I expected. How did I know Faraganthar’s sentence would not be the death of you?”

“What can I say? Luck walks with me.”

The sword came to point at me. “No more. That ends today.”

“There’s no point in hiding now! Show your face, Kol Baran. I know who you are.”

The Fireborn tilted his head. “Do you, indeed? Your confidence is your downfall as ever.”

First came the hood, pulled back by black-gloved hands. Scarlet hair flew in the wind. He was right: my confidence did falter. It crumbled.

From beneath the red cloak came the finest leafleather and copper armour, and as the mask was loosed and dropped to the cinders, the face of Haidak Baran glowered back at me. Hatred lay upon it. “Surprised?” he taunted me.

I gave him my best shrug of the purest nonchalance, even though within I cursed myself for being duped. Not least by the fact he was my old nemesis, but because I had come to trust him, and for a sliver of a moment, I realised how Shal Gara felt when they looked at me.

“Not in the slightest!” I lied while my mind became not a river but a burst dam. “Who else but a Baran could be behind such treachery?”

Haidak laughed heartily. “Kol Baran is past his time and weak of mind in his long seasons. He has no part in this. I gave my father a chance, and he turned me down. Called me a doomsayer! Saw fit to ignore and disown me, would you believe it? At least he had the intelligence to keep his mouth shut, unlike you, Tarko. No, I was the one – through sheer boredom – who found the scrolls and copper knives of seasons past, left to me by ancestors dead. It was I who sought out the remnants of the demon’s cult and learned of the glorious purification that waited to revisit the Swathe. And though I gazed into the sacred fires and I heard the demon’s whispers, I didn’t truly believe until I saw them with my own eyes. And wouldn’t you know it? I was right. It was all true, and when Juraxi appeared to me with Faraganthar’s message—”

“Lo and behold, you saw an opportunity to be even more of a poisonous little shit than you always have been.”

With a grimace, Haidak began his walk towards me, his sword held straight. “I promised them our nectra and saw my chance to end the relentless and tedious cycle of this accursed forest. Born, live, die, become dirt for the trees. Not a soul spares a thought for a scrap of dirt beyond the borders of our forest. We were raised as warriors when the last wars are already fought and done. What is there to do but become a sage, to stare upon the cycle from further above? The monotony is nothing but punishing.”

I continued to be surprised. “You’re telling me this is all due to… boredom? Every battle? The Sheertown massacre? The night you murdered scores of your own people? All of this for your own amusement?”

Haidak spread his arms wide. “And why not? All of this is below me. Let Juraxi and the other Fireborn worship and pray to the demons as gods, I say. I believe in their chaos and chaos only.” He laughed. “And Sheertown? Necessity, Tarko! That’s what moves the world. Shal Gara’s forces were too strong and had too much hope. They swallowed up my lies of marauders far too easily, just as you did with every word out of my mouth. Hah! You should have seen the pride in your face when I thanked you for saving my life.”

“You unimaginable bastard.”

“Hardly, Terelta! I will be the one that leads us to a new age, free of the dusty matriarchs and doting sages watching the seasons turn around on themselves. I am meant for more, and Faraganthar has promised it.”

His arguments were painfully close to mine. Had I not said the same to Ralish, or the envoy? Had I not railed against the Bloodlaws in the same way and craved different? Yes, but my methods, however, were so very different. That is what set a rift between us: I wasn’t a murderous idiot.

“My father promises nothing but death, worm!” Serisi growled at the man. She had paced sideways, making us harder to attack as one. “Victory will only bring the Iron Icon to this world, and he will tease your flesh from your bones for his amusement.”

“Lies!” Haidak laughed, his red eyes wide with bloodlust. “He will make a king of me once Shal Gara falls.”

“You’ll have nothing to rule over, you dolt! Faraganthar’s unleashing a force that will turn the entire Swathe to this.” I stamped my foot and looked around us, surreptitiously casting about for a weapon that was more than a rock or a burned branch. Serisi was my only weapon. My dry tongue rasped around my equally dry mouth.

“You know, I’m glad I came back to see what was left of you,” Haidak yelled at me, now twenty feet away at most. His sword tip danced a figure of eight. “It was disappointing handing you to Faraganthar’s judgement, I must say. But now? This way I get to carve you up as I have ached to do, ever since you came crawling back to Shal Gara.”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but I have a demon at my side.”

“A demon that betrays chaos is no demon. You’re a traitor as much as I am,” Haidak snorted. He seemed genuinely unperturbed by the demon’s outstretched claws.

“Then let us fight,” Serisi growled.

The demon performed some magic of her own, holding up her uninjured hand to grasp at thin air. With a narrowing of her eyes and a muttering in a tongue I did not understand, a sword of fire coalesced above my head. It was a curve of pure flame, burning red at its core and yellow on its blade. It must have been easily six feet long.

Now I saw the bead of sweat on Haidak’s forehead. I raised my hands in habit as if my own magic would obey me. All that came was pain, and I picked up a rock instead.

“What by the loam?” I muttered as Serisi snatched the flaming sword from the air and held it above her. Like the warrior she always claimed to be, she marched out to confront Haidak.

“Yah!” he barked, breaking into a run with his sword in both hands.

Serisi was quick, I gave her that, but for her size. Haidak ducked her swing and kept running, able to hack at her ribs and legs. The sword was sharp, and despite the demon’s tough hide, cracks of orange light appeared where Haidak struck.

The bastard spun around with Serisi’s sword chasing him. Time and again he parried her thrusts. The metal blade grew black with soot, but the fire could not reach him. Serisi turned to magic again, sweeping her blade through his guard. With me watching on and wishing all kinds of harm, Haidak proved himself the warrior I was not, over and over.

Overconfidence, however, was Haidak’s flaw. As he snuck past Serisi every time to land slice after jab, I saw her guarding her arm, not wounded, but waiting. While I watched, she chose her moment.

The sound of the sword blade against Serisi’s arm was a shriek of metal striking metal. The demon’s arm kept swinging, driving Haidak’s sword against his face and batting him to the ash. I was striding to him with a rock in my hand.

The roar of the wildfire soared for a moment, enough to drag mine and Serisi’s attention away from Haidak. My memory of the nests jogged me just in time. It was not fire but the arrival of Haidak’s lancewing. The giant bird was aimed to stab at Serisi’s chest with its needle-pointed beak and would have succeeded had Serisi not heard my shout.

The demon rolled to the side to let the bird spear the ground. The bird’s wings beat ash into the air in a dense cloud as it reversed. One wing thwacked Serisi in the face. She reeled, swinging her sword madly. The bird moved effortlessly out of the way.

Haidak came at me with a grin. I withdrew, still searching for a weapon. And there, in the dirt, was a blackened lump of star-iron that looked like a broken dagger. It had barely survived the fire, it had no edge, and it had curled in the heat, but it was better than the rock I had in my other hand.

“Where’s your magic, Tarko?” Haidak brayed. “Your precious magic you were so quick to lord over me. You might have conned all of Shal Gara, but I watched you. Juraxi was sure Faraganthar’s daughter was hidden elsewhere, but all this time I knew. All I had to do was stoke the fires of war and wait!”

He hacked at me, but I bounded free. My body still had fight in it.

“You speak of boredom, but you sound jealous, Haidak,” I shot back at him. “Are you sure you have your story straight?”

“Jealous of what? Look at you now, a pretend sorcer!” Haidak spat. “Where is your magic? Fight me, curse you! Or are you nothing without your demon?”

It was a bad time to throw the rock. It was a bad aim, too. Haidak swatted it away with his sword, and I stood unaccompanied and empty-handed.

“My, my.” There came the curl of his lip. “What has happened to you? Where is the hero of Shal Gara, Maven Terelta, wielding earth like few others can? To have progressed so far only to have fallen right back to nothing. Well, well! Perhaps I should just leave you in this dirt like the worm they call you!”

Haidak lunged at me, and I tried to remember every piece of advice Eztaral or Atalawe had ever given me. I dodged left and heard the blade whistle past my ears. I turned to avoid him chopping back at me and brought the star-iron lump down onto his arm. His armour did its job, and I was left far too close to Haidak. An elbow caught me in the collarbone before I reeled away. He came at me with his blade slicing in diagonals. While I quietly and fervently wished I had a sling, I resorted to throwing another rock. Haidak missed it this time, and the rock cut a line in his forehead, as red as his eyes and hair. The injury sent him into a rage. I saw the fervour he had in the nests, the delight in the blood he was about to spill. The man was a maniac. I thought I had been hiding something in me, when all this time it had been Haidak who had lived a deeper double life.

My pondering cost me. Haidak cut against the leafleather cloak and sliced into the muscle of my left arm. I cried out, swatted him away with the steel, and got another cut to my thigh that sent me staggering. I found a hard and uncomfortably warm wall behind me and turned to find Serisi at my back.

Haidak and his bird circled us, waiting for the kill. I hated every moment of it, flinching back and forth. I nudged the demon.

“Any ideas?”

“Some. Most you will not like,” Serisi snapped at me.

Somehow, after everything, I had never trusted the demon more. “Do it.”

With gritted jaws and much straining, Serisi stretched out her claws and fire-sword. The flames around us obeyed instantly, drawing inwards to make Haidak and the lancewing scurry. In the gap we were given before the spell died, I threw everything I could find at Haidak, and in that brief moment I almost felt a sorcer again. But Haidak was encased in the finest armour gems and an eagleborn could buy. I was mischief to him and that was it, and he came at me with the intent to put an end to me. Behind me, Serisi was grappling with the lancewing’s beak, trying desperately not to get stabbed as she lurched back and forth across the ash.

“Tell me, Haidak Baran. Tell me before you put an end to me,” I said, playing to Haidak’s ego. “What did your Fireborn friends think of you cutting them down on the Night of the Copper Knives? Or your father, sending cronies to kill him? Is that why I saw him stare at you like orokan filth on his shoe?”

Haidak scoffed at me. “My Fireborn are highly devoted and highly obedient, Tarko. Unlike you so-called Scions, they know the meaning of sacrifice for the greater good. The finer ruse. And as for my father, if you must know before you die, he was not happy about it but is too attached to his life, it seems, to whisper truth in the matriarch’s ear.”

“So if Kol Baran isn’t one of you, who was the other Fireborn too cowardly to reveal his mask?”

Haidak had enough of my stalling. “Hah! You will die wondering, Tarko!”

I performed my last hope and the dirtiest trick of all: I scooped up a handful of dirt and threw it in his face. It was enough to make Haidak cry out.

“You bastard mudmage!”

I didn’t waste any time and lunged forwards to smack Haidak right in the jaw. The same place he had struck me in the nests all those days of darkness ago.

“By the Three Gods, did that feel good.” I laughed.

Haidak’s cry seemed to draw the lancewing’s attention. I dove for cover as it came at me instead in a protective swoop. I arose to find Haidak’s sword slashing across my chest. The pain was slow in coming. I stared down at the blood oozing from the long cut in the leafleather.

“Tarko!”

With Serisi charging forwards, Haidak aimed a stab at me. In a moment of madness, I lunged for him, not giving him room to move his sword. My assault wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t refined. It was a mad pummelling of Haidak that caught him off-guard and drove him back into the claws of his lancewing. I managed to dig the star-iron into his shoulder before the bird seized him and tried to haul him aloft. The movement was so quick I had no time to let go. I saw Serisi diving, and just before Haidak and I left the ground, she slammed her claws into Haidak’s thigh and clung on with such tightness the man squealed as demon and two humans were hauled aloft.

It was my turn to be pummelled. Haidak, even in mid-air and with the wind screaming past us, thumped me over and over in an effort to dislodge me.

“Die, Terelta! Give up and die like the useless worker shit you are! It’s time you learned your rightful place in the loam.”

Those were the words I needed to hear. All the sorrow of my lost magic, all the fear for Shal Gara, it paled in the face of all the rage pent up over seasons. I remembered Haidak’s grinning face every time he had cast me from a job, or mocked me, or wounded me.

With energy I didn’t know I had left, I seized his neck with my spare hand and squeezed. Haidak did the same to me, black Fireborn gloves around my throat, and locked us tighter as the lancewing zipped through the trees at breakneck pace. Blurred forest and blinding fire rushed beneath us. Serisi howled as if this was far too unnatural for her. I was surprised Haidak’s leg hadn’t been torn off from the demon’s weight. I thanked the gods the lancewing had a tight and dutiful grip on her master.

Our strange chain of odd links dangled in a heart-seizing ride until I saw Shal Gara looming. The bloodwood came at us far too fast. The lancewing tried her hardest to shake us free, even swinging Serisi through the city’s foliage despite Haidak’s strangled cries. Stars were beginning to cloud my eyes by the time the lancewing released us over a crowded branch. I fell to the cries of confused archers taking aim.

The impact ripped us apart. I felt the breath vacate me as I struck the deck. Wood scraped every edge of me as I rolled over and over until I landed at somebody’s boots. A bewildered woman in lancer’s armour hurriedly pointed her obsidian spear at me. Rapid glances told me we had landed in a circle of warriors on the Branch of the Seasons. Even with my deafened ears, I swore I heard the familiar voice of Eztaral keeping the warriors in place. I barely had time to make sense of my surroundings before I heard the cry of “Demon!” fill the air.

Serisi roared as itchy archers loosed their bows. My demon shielded herself as the arrows thudded into her carapace. They stuck as spines from her back.

“She means no harm!” I bellowed. “Leave her alone!”

The nemesis was yelling over me. “Seize them!” Haidak spluttered, voice hoarse from his crushed throat. He dragged the steel from his shoulder and threw it to the deck while the golden lancewing blasted us with its wings from above. “Seize them both, I say!”

I found myself on my feet, struggling against the wind and ignoring the spear that poked me. I was beyond feeling pain. “Haidak is the traitor!”

Eztaral’s voice brought everybody to a standstill. “Everybody stand right where they are, or I’ll have you all killed in an instant with no questions asked!”

I found a smile on my face. Though she was as likely to strike me down as save me, and it had only been half a day since I had fallen from Shal Gara, the sound of Eztaral’s voice warmed my soul. She burst from the wall of shields and armour to glare at the scene before her, from a demon, to the prince of Shal Gara, to the foulest traitor the city had ever seen: me.

31

The Battle For Shal Gara

There exist in the forest seeds that do not take root unless scorched by fire.

OLD SWATHE PROVERB

“What in the Six Hells do I see before me?” Eztaral thundered. The eagleborn snatched a second sword from a nearby warrior. She pointed her blades at Serisi and me, not Haidak. “And what could you possibly be grinning at, Tarkosi? How did you get out of your cell?”

“I caught him fleeing in the loam, Eztaral. With this demon of his!” Haidak bellowed, trying to claim the stage as quickly as possible.

“Haidak is Fireborn!” I blurted over him. “His disciples threw me from Shal Gara, took me in front of the demon king, and Haidak stood right beside him the entire time.”

Haidak was a practised liar, I could see that now. He spluttered expertly as he struggled to his feet. He showed just the right amount of injured defiance. Blood leaked down his front and from his thigh. With hands empty and innocent, he surveyed his audience. I saw now that the Envoy Okarin stood behind Eztaral, deep in a thicket of highwarders and with an entourage of sages staring over their shoulders.

“That is preposterous!” Haidak countered. “How could that be? Those Fireborn wretches attacked me right alongside you, Eztaral. They attacked my own father, curse it!”

“All orchestrated by you!” I yelled.

“Silence!” Eztaral shouted. “Will somebody please, for the love of all the gods, explain why there is a demon standing on my branch!”

“That is Serisi. My demon.”

“I am not your demon, Tarko,” she hissed, startling the crowd. The rest looked ready to get busy with their spears.

Eztaral looked between us. “Your demon. But she’s—”

“Not within me, thanks to the demon king’s magic. And if you can think up a better explanation, I’m ready to hear it. Faraganthar sentenced us both to death in the wildfire, and when we escaped, Haidak here tried to finish the job.”

“He is a fine liar, isn’t he just?” yelled Haidak. “Where is your proof, traitor?”

“You’re still wearing your Fireborn gloves, for a start.”

Everybody’s eyes, including Haidak’s, moved to his wormsilk gloves of midnight black. They were not the usual apparel of an eagleborn, but instead something we had seen on Fireborn hands far too many times. The crowd might not have understood, but it was all the proof Eztaral needed.

Serisi grinned wide.

Stowing a sword point-first in the wooden deck, Eztaral seized Haidak’s wrist. “I have seen these before.”

Haidak tried to appeal to his father, still swallowed by the sidelines alongside the envoy. “Father! Sage! Tell them the truth. Tell them I am no traitor like this Terelta.”

Kol Baran pushed between the highwarders to come stare at his son. I saw the quiver on the man’s lip. The beads of sweat on the sage’s forehead shone as brightly as the scarlet gems lining his coat. The villain I had seen in him had died, and all the hatred I’d held for him was bequeathed to his son.

The sage shook his head. “You are no son of mine.”

Haidak moved quickly, striking Eztaral across the face and giving himself space to raise his fists.

“Seize Haidak Baran!” came the orders, but Haidak was already running for the edge of the branch with Serisi close on his tail.

“You idiots!” he screamed in wild laughter. “You’re all dead and ash and have yet to realise it! We will meet again, and when we do, you will be kneeling in the dust with my victorious foot on your necks!”

“Shoot him, curse you!”

The traitorous Baran whistled to his lancewing in the same breath as his hateful words. The great bird sent warriors flying as it once again came to the aid of its master. Serisi’s claws came within inches of Haidak’s neck before he was dragged into the sky. Hesitant arrows chased him, but none came close.

The crowd was full of shock and confusion. Handfuls of lancers pulled off their helmets and slammed them on the wood in anger. The spirit of Shal Gara wavered in the face of yet more treachery. I could smell the stink of fear as clearly as the encroaching sulphur.

“SILENCE! All of you!” Eztaral’s attention had turned back to me. She studied me head to toe before meeting my weary gaze. There was a smear of blood beneath her nose.

“I—”

Eztaral put a sword in my face to remind me I wasn’t off the hook. “If you dare say I told you so, I will gut you right here in front of all these people, and not one of them will ever bat an eyelid for fear of me doing it to them also.”

“I’m sorry,” I said instead, and raised my voice so all could hear. “I’m sorry I betrayed your trust. What I did was all for the good of Shal Gara. We can argue about it all you want later, but for now, I need to tell you Faraganthar is coming.”

“The demon king is already here, boy! If you’ve come to warn us, you’re far too late.”

“We have come to kill him,” added Serisi.

Eztaral was still having a hard time avoiding staring at her. “And why should I believe a single word that comes out of those jaws? You, of all… beasts.”

“Not least because it’s the truth, but because if we fail, the entire Swathe will fall, not just Shal Gara,” I answered. “I don’t care about making up for what I’ve done. I don’t care about forgiveness, I only care about our survival.”

Serisi grunted in agreement. “Once my father has his claws on the nectra in this tree, he will have all the power he needs to summon our god to your world. All of you, from beast to child, will know chaos. The Iron Icon will not rest until everything is destroyed as our world was.”

“I believe Tarko,” Pel called out. He, too, emerged from the warriors. The old man looked haggard, and Atalawe held him up by his arm, but the shine in his eyes was stronger than ever.

“Stand aside!”

The shout came from behind us. Shrugging aside the muscle of her highwarders, the Envoy Okarin emerged into our circle. Without a word, she came to examine Serisi. The demon was half her height taller. I could feel the heat emanating from her, but Okarin was fearless. She stood close to Serisi, neck craned, hands clasped before her.

“I have seen you in my dreams, but I thought you an enemy until now,” Okarin said.

Smoke curled from the edges of Serisi’s jaws. “Perhaps I still am, but enemies may be united against common struggle. I will not allow my father to let your world die as he did the Starless Plains. This forest has shown me different.”

“As have I, not that she will admit it,” I muttered.

“Nor should she.” The envoy turned to me. With her strings of beads tight around her hands, she approached me. “And you, Tarkosi Terelta, what is different about you?”

Eztaral spat blood on the deck before I could answer. “We have little time for this, Envoy! We should prepare for battle,” she growled. “All of you! Get moving! Second-born and sorcers to your branches and ranks!”

“We will need more than that to win,” Serisi snarled to me. I nodded, recognising the same fire in her eyes as built within me.

“It was thinking the very same,” I agreed. “Envoy, Eztaral, Sages, listen to me. If we have a hope of stopping the demon king, everybody needs to fight. Not just warrior or sorcer tribes, but all of us. Every tribe, everybody that can hold a spear or pull a bowstring. Workers, scholars, healers, heirs. All of us.”

“Those are not the rules of the Bloodlaws!” Sage Wasaqa was the first to complain. Maku shrilly agreed. Sage Dūnekar folded his arms and stared at me. His blue hands twitched as if he was pondering smiting me.

“To the Six Hells with the Bloodlaws!” I yelled to them all. It was a moment I had dreamed of in my hovel at night, staring up at the Crimson Crown through dark foliage. I was given no time to drink it in.

“Maven Terelta!” barked Dūnekar. “You have no right. No authority! Your crimes are still to be judged!”

Serisi took a step towards the gaggle of sages that made the highwarders raise a small copse of spears. “Then listen to me.”

Sage Maku spluttered. “You are of them. Demonkind! Why should we listen to a beast like you?”

“Because she knows what’s coming,” I shouted. “And none of us do. I’ve only seen it in dreams, and even that chilled me to my core. The demon king is mad with vengeance and rage. He sentenced his own daughter to death for daring to oppose him and speak sense.”

Serisi agreed. “He has sworn an oath to chaos itself. I see that now. He will stop at nothing to do what he was commanded by the Iron Icon. If he were to return empty-handed, it would be to a fate worse than death.”

“Which means we shouldn’t hold back, either,” I added. “The Bloodlaws don’t unite us in order, they divide us. They keep us apart. We need to be united if we have even a hope of winning. All of our victories have been down to luck so far.”

“And you, Tarko.” Atalawe stood close. Her face was as serious as I’d ever seen it. She was already trying to examine my wounds.

Okarin shook her head, somehow already aware of my loss of magic. “And yet Tarko is no longer the same Tarko,” she breathed.

“No,” I seethed. “It has been Serisi this entire time, not me. She was the power within me.”

Dūnekar’s impassive face cracked then, of all times. A rare smirk hovered near the corner of his hoggish snout. “It all becomes clear.”

I scowled. “I’m still a sorcer. Give me some nectra and it’ll be much clearer for you, Sage.”

“No, Tarko.” Atalawe pointed to the black veins across my neck and now left shoulder. “If Serisi’s presence was giving you power, the seedwitch in me thinks she was also keeping the nectra’s poison at bay. You drink nectra, lad, and you might kill yourself right there on the spot.”

“I need my magic. We need my magic. I don’t have a choice.”

Atalawe gripped me sternly by the shoulder and I winced. The pain creeped through my chest. It was impossible to ignore: I did feel poisoned. It wasn’t merely the scalds from the wildfire but something deeper.

“Yes, you do,” she said. “Otherwise you’ll be zero use to us.”

I could see the hesitation in their faces; especially the look Eztaral swapped with Okarin and the Jade Wolf. Even the highwarders looked me up and down.

“In that case,” I yelled, loud and brashly to hide my own worry, “get me a bloody sling and some stones, curse it!” I looked into the envoy’s red eyes and silently begged her to believe me. “Unite the tribes, Envoy.”

Okarin took barely any time to ponder. It seemed her mind was already made. “You heard him,” she announced, giving me trust I did not deserve. “Put a weapon in any hand that can hold one. Those that can’t fight will help others who can. Those are my decrees and so it shall be!”

“Envoy, the matriarch will not allow—”

“The matriarch is my mother, and as such my will is hers! And she will likely thank me if she should see another day, Sage Wasaqa.” While Okarin spoke, she seized a sword from Eztaral and thrust it into the sage’s hands. “You had better get to the battlements!”

Wasaqa and the others had no choice. Okarin wasted no time in pushing them onwards up the bloodwood.

I let out the shuddering breath I had been holding within, relieved. To the echo of shouts spreading the decree up and down the bloodwood and across its branches, I turned to the Scions at my side. Only Pel wore what could be considered a smile, and even that was chased away by Eztaral’s growling. The eagleborn was thumbing the edge of her sword.

“I don’t like any of this. Not a demon in my tree. Not thousands of untrained bodies in the middle of battle. Not your lies nor the lack of your magic, Tarko, but war is rarely ever fair. I will take what I can get,” said Eztaral. “You. Demon.”

“I am Serisi,” she replied.

“I don’t care what your name is. You even think about betraying me, and I will have your fiery guts for candlevines.”

“You can relax, worm. I am here for my father.”

“Worm?” Eztaral hissed.

“You get used to being called that,” I said, before taking a moment to sigh. “I truly am sorry, Eztaral. I’m sorry to you all. I’m sorry for the doubt I’ve caused you and for letting down the Scions.”

“So you should be, and stow the apologies. You and your demon get us through today, and I’ll begin to think about forgiving you.”

“Fair enough,” I whispered. To my side, Pel’s impassive face betrayed a wink.

Eztaral pinched the bridge of her nose. She began to speak, almost a whisper at first until we Scions recognised the words. Pel’s voice joined her. Then Atalawe’s. Even Redeye, sour of face and so far silent, recited them with us. I lent my voice to the chorus until we Scions practically shouted the words.

“What is darker than night may never grasp the light. When Swathe’s days grow dire, we will stand against the fire. Where others will fall, the Scions refuse to falter. To Kī Raxa, the Three, and the spirits, we make and keep this vow!”

“Never before have those words rung so true,” Eztaral uttered. “Don’t you dare disappoint me today of all days, Scions!”

Our fists met in the middle of our circle. Serisi, not knowing what to do, followed our gesture. Her hand of charcoal hide and iron knocked against ours. Eztaral stared at her, and Serisi right back.

“Three Gods, save us,” the eagleborn muttered before sweeping away into the maelstrom of people.

Serisi and I were left together for a brief moment. She shrugged at me. “That went well, all things considered.”

I found myself laughing with a manic and nervous abandon as I ran after the Scions.

Shal Gara knew chaos without the demons touching a claw to our bark. The abandoning of the Bloodlaws, however temporary, sowed confusion and fear across the ranks at first. The prospect of being a warrior divided the citizens of Shal Gara. Workers young and old leaped forwards to claim their weapons from the piles and armouries. Scholars and healers were more reticent. They took their spears and swords with shaking hands, very aware the only thing they had ever fought was either dust or foot-rot. Fighting demons was a giant step up.

Serisi led her own trail of panic. No matter how many warriors surrounded us in our march to the lower branches and battle, the sight of the demon in our midst still brought shouts and cries. Pel and Atalawe quelled those who had anger to work out on demon-hide, constantly shouting for people to get back. Serisi leered at them all, jaws wide and eyes burning, fierce in her pride. Here was a creature who knew what she was and did not know the meaning of shame or insult.

As for me, without my magic, I did not feel the hero I was once. The fear beat in me ferociously. I hadn’t felt such a novice since my first battle. Even the sling in my hand and the barrel of stones next to me did nothing to reassure me. I distracted myself by trying to find my mother, sister, or Ralish in the crowds.

I didn’t know if Serisi’s mind was still linked to mine, but she looked at me as if she still heard my thoughts. “You are more than simply a wizard, Tarko. If I have learned one truth about you, it is that.”

The demon’s encouragement steeled me enough for me to spin my sling, take aim, and unleash. I didn’t see where it landed, but the effort was enough to help me put aside the worry. She was right: I was more than a sorcer or a worker. I was a liar and a traitor in some eyes, but ever since I could remember, I had been a fighter. I had never given up, and I refused to do so today.

When we came to the battlements of a branch close to the Neathering, we stared out across the horde that swarmed towards the tree. The veritable sea of grey-skinned navik, each holding a flaming torch, punctuated by pyres of demonkind, would have shamed the stars Shal Gara missed so dearly.

The defences were already letting loose wave after wave of arrows and stones and spears, but the horde kept coming at us. The fierce outrage of the demon king drove them almost senselessly onwards. Even when the big bows bucked on their mounts, laying low demons here and there, the horde did not flinch. Their war-cries were constant and unabated in their approach. I looked from east to west and saw the fire filling every inch of my vision.

“Three Gods,” I breathed.

“Your gods will not help you now,” Serisi growled.

Like everybody apart from me, Eztaral still kept a wary distance from Serisi. “You, demon! What can you tell us?”

“To fight.”

“How helpful. No tactics or anything useful?”

“I could only see my father’s intentions in Tarko’s dreams. He is not the only one who lost a power when we were separated.”

Eztaral worked her jaws, likely sifting the curses from her chosen words. “How very convenient. Wonderful.”

Serisi grasped the wooden battlements and left char beneath her fingers. “My father will come as a flood of fire. He will sacrifice all and any to fulfil his promise to chaos. Your water slows us, but it will not stop us. Least of all the navik that are slave to my father’s mind.”

“To further complicate our defences, Shal Gara has slowed down,” Atalawe said. “We caught Fireborn dragging chains and anchors from the Rootfort.”

I nodded. “They were the same Fireborn that threw me to the loam. Juraxi led them.”

“Juraxi?” Atalawe blurted. “That useless lump from the forest?”

“The same one I stationed at the Den?”

“The very same,” I told Eztaral.

“Three Gods and all their spirits!” she barked. “If I ever see Juraxi or Haidak again, I’ll skin them alive.”

“You’ll have to get in line,” came my snarl of a reply.

A wailing emerged from the branches beside and below us. “Fire!”

Fire spells arose from the demon’s horde. I lifted my hands in habit once more, and for a blessed moment I thought my magic had returned until I realised it was Redeye next to me. He spared a brief glance for me before I reloaded my sling.

Faraganthar’s horde came faster than before. Whether it was due to the slowing of Shal Gara or my imagination, they broke like a wave on the roots. Navik died by the hundreds under the crush. The demons’ tactics were wiser; they pincered around the trunk while their wizards kept us occupied. For an hour, we fought them back and kept them at bay, but one by one, inexorably, demons and navik climbed over their corpses to lay hand on the bloodwood. Big bows and spears rained slaughter on those that took hold. My own slingstones knocked navik after navik from the city’s roots.

I thought we had the upper hand until Pel put down his bow to seize me by the shoulder. He pushed a sword against me and tied its scabbard to my belt.

“For your protection,” was all he said, and no sooner had he spoken than the drums above took on a more frantic beat. A concerted barrage of fire spells took every sorcer’s focus to repel, and even then, a dozen fell upon Shal Gara. Serisi saved a whole stretch of ranks by catching one with her claws intertwined. The fire spread around her, foiling the spell’s explosion but not the heat. I crouched alongside the Scions as we shielded ourselves. Atalawe caught a burn across her face before the fire died. As Serisi glowed with whatever power she’d absorbed from the flames, I couldn’t help but stare at Redeye’s vials of nectra hanging across his body.

“Don’t even think about it!” was all he could say amid the effort of his spells. “You heard my sister’s warning.”

Serisi took the sorcer’s side. “I didn’t risk my skin for you to go ahead and kill yourself, Tarko.”

Another wave of fire fell, and I watched a whole section of branch above me explode as their sorcers failed to hold back the onslaught.

Eztaral now wore a shield on her left arm and stood tall on an abutment of branch that rose above the fortifications, baying her orders at higher ranks. Two flaming arrows sought to end her, but she caught them both on her shield without so much as a blink. She hacked them to stumps with the blade of her sword. “Hold true!” came her resounding cry.

I darted above the battlement to unleash another stone, and as I did, I saw a spearhead of navik pressing towards the tree. They carted chains with them, ones with grapples and hooks.

“Eztaral!” I called. “They’re up to something down there!”

My warning was overridden by Ravenborn Gaakaran yelling to us. “Kraid! They’re breaching the Rootfort! They’re firing ropes and chains above the roots from too many angles to hold them off. The sorcers are too few and being overwhelmed. We need the boy and that demon down there!”

The blistering heat ran through my face. Sparing a glance for me, Eztaral’s order was immediate, and we obeyed just as swiftly. “Scions, with me!”

Our mad dash down the final branches to the Neathering was punctuated by falling debris and flames trying to take root on Shal Gara. The workers and now scarce water sorcers worked frantically to keep the fires under control. Smoke became intolerably thick. Blinding arrows streaked overhead. Here and there, navik fell like rotten fruit.

Eztaral sliced the head from one that landed in a half-dead heap between us. Serisi went one further and threw the creature’s corpse back over the nearest parapet.

“Never liked these foul beasts!” she snarled.

The Rootfort barricade dripped with every barrel of water Shal Gara still had to offer. The ancient fort had been carved up and nailed shut. Where the path had once led down into the fort, a solid wall now stood alone between Shal Gara and the demons.

Within the Neathering, as flames fell outside its walls and warrenous walkways, the finest sorcers and warriors – and the bravest and maddest of the other tribes – stood in a thick press. It was impressive how the tightly packed crowd somehow found room to let the demon through. Once again, Pel and Eztaral had to call for calm.

Every soul fell silent and pensive. Bows, spears, slingstones, and spells were trained on the thick barricade that now shook constantly. The rumbling of Shal Gara’s roots was already loud enough, but this was a different clamour, growing noisier by the moment. One of claws and flames and jaws gnawing to get to us. Smoke eked through the seams of the reinforced wood.

Eztaral was calling encouragement over the gathered heads. She needed no threats to inspire the fighters. Everybody had already figured this battle was one to the death. “This is it, Shal Gara! This is where we make our stand. Fight for your lives and those of your bloodwood! There are no tribes that separate us today. We are all human fighting against one enemy. We stand for the Swathe! Show these demons the true meaning of hell!”

The hammering grew ever louder and bestial until the splinters showed. The tips of black blades emerged from cracks. Something repeatedly thundered against the door in measured slams.

Serisi stepped beyond the semicircle of weapons and summoned another blade of fire to her hands.

“Get back, demon!” came the order, but Serisi ignored Eztaral. She simply held her sword tall and ready in both hands.

The door burst asunder moments later, carved into three pieces by a flat and snarling face wrought from iron. It was a hammer, broader than I was wide and tall, and it sent pieces of door crashing into the ranks. A splinter cut my forehead open before I ducked.

Serisi stood fast. As the debris streamed around her, she fixed her eyes on the first demon to emerge: a brute with the giant hammer in his swollen hands. With an ululating roar, he charged. Serisi let his hammer fall at her feet before she used the handle for a step and jumped onto the demon’s shoulders. Her blade pieced his face, and without a sound, the brute toppled. The deck broke beneath his back.

“Loose!”

A storm of arrows kept the demons and their navik in the doorway of the barricade. Dead, smoking flesh began to pile up as a second blockade. Sorcers weighed in with a whirlwind of spells.

My sling never stopped spinning. Skulls cracked and bones broke before my efforts. I counted a dozen dead before the fire filled the barricade. Serisi had hacked ceaselessly at her kin with her sword. Even she had to fall back, jaws bared in the flames.

“Sorcers!” yelled Eztaral. “And Pel! It’s now or never!”

As burning with jealousy as I was, in the maelstrom of bodies, I watched Redeye slap nectra into Pel’s hand.

“It’s time, Pel!” The old man took a heartbeat to stare blindly at the vial before Redeye thumped him on the back. I watched as the old sorcer cast his doubts to the wind and threw the shining liquid back. The magic arched his spine, and when he opened his eyes, they shone a brighter blue than any sorcer around us.

Water and dirt exploded from their stores as two concentrated columns of magic ploughed into the demons. Steam exploded with their roars. Dust billowed before Redeye refocused it back into the fray. A terrible shaking rattled the deck from beneath my feet. Even Serisi fell back, jaws gaping like a blast furnace. The two opposing spells grew in size and intensity until warriors were forced to retreat. The Neathering shuddered like a creature in its death-throes around us.

Pel and Redeye’s mouths were open in shouts of effort I couldn’t hear though they stood a dozen feet from me. Pel’s hands flowed with the magic. The water swirling around him shaped into tendrils that stabbed into the door. I watched, in awe at the old man’s power over his spells. Other sorcers formed a bulwark of magic around them.

They fought three steps before the barricade broke wider. All the sorcers’ strength and the elements they had at their disposal still failed in the face of fire. Jets of flame shot in all directions to blast holes in the Neathering. Steam blinded and scalded those who were caught too close.

And through it all, I wondered if I would have made a difference. The way that Serisi and I and a dozen warriors were thrown back into the pressed ranks, I doubted it.

To the screams of a man beside me who had fallen on a spear, I scrabbled to get upright. Serisi’s claws grazed my back again. I felt myself dropped on my feet and pushed along by a current I couldn’t fight.

Demons burst through the barricade, laying waste to those that couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. Our dense numbers became our undoing as the demons hacked at anything that moved, even their own navik. Slaughter reigned in the Neathering.

As I hauled myself and anyone else I could out of the maelstrom of bodies and blood, the barricade fell to pieces. The shockwave knocked everything upright flat, myself included. I looked around in the confusion to see I was sprawled alongside my demon.

“My father himself has arrived!” Serisi roared.

At last, Faraganthar lay foot on Shal Gara. The very presence of the demon king seemed to turn the tide. The way he towered over his kin, or the two swords flaming in his hands, or the crown of flames that burned in his wake, was enough to stutter the hearts of every uninitiated. Dozens turned tail and ran for higher levels. They were not alone: I scrabbled backwards until I found my feet. But I did not run. Neither did Serisi. She and her father had locked eyes. The fire between his black jaws and streaming from his shoulders turned a fierce white-gold in surprise and rage.

“Serisianathiel!” he bellowed. “You live?”

To the lightning flashes of wizards’ spells, I watched Faraganthar sow destruction left, right, and centre. His warriors swarmed behind him, and within moments they had forged a foothold on Shal Gara I could see was impossible to dislodge. Fire followed in his wake. Black smoke billowed in thick clouds from the inside of the Neathering. Even the doused wood of the decks caught flame under the heat of the wildfire.

I heard the pain in Eztaral’s voice as she gave her orders to fall back. At first I thought her injured, but it was only her pride. Still within slingshot of the encroaching demons and navik, we fought a running battle to the top of the Neathering. The overcomplicated thoroughfares of the Neathering kept the demons cramped and easy to pour vengeance on. With the extra power of swarms of citizens raising arrows and spears against the fiery invaders, the slog of a battle remained a stalemate for a short time. Lancers stood their ground in clumps, cutting at demon legs while lancewings ran diving attacks to knock demon after demon from the branches.

Before long, Faraganthar and his wizards’ fire broke the barricades, and flames burned paths higher into the Neathering. Between the flames, Faraganthar pointed at his daughter as if she was his prize, not Shal Gara’s nectra.

I was working my sling furiously in an attempt to break the king’s jaw when I felt hands on my shoulders. Atalawe pulled me after her.

“Serisi! Fall back,” I yelled to the demon, refusing to let her succumb to her kin.

With some coaxing, Serisi followed us until we had extricated ourselves from the front ranks and stood in the brief calm between falling navik and bloody battle.

“What’s the plan, Eztaral?” I asked breathlessly of the circle of Scions. All except Pel, they looked haunted by doubt.

“We keep fighting,” she growled, but I saw the flicker in her eyes.

“My father will not stop until he or I am dead. If I challenge him, I can hold him back long enough for you to set a trap, or leave this tree to save yourselves.”

“We aren’t leaving, I can tell you that right now, demon,” Eztaral said with adamance. “There’s no safe way to do so long as Shal Gara is moving.”

“Tarko!”

It is a strange skill of the mind to always hear a mother’s voice, no matter the clatter of noise, even if it was death and battle. Pushing between the Scions, I saw my mother, Tesq, and Ralish barging through the crowds in their effort to reach me. A navik fell between us at that exact moment. Sweeping the sword from my belt, I closed the distance to the grotesque, snarling beast and cut an arm. I found Mother and Tesq hacking at the navik from its other side. With a squeal, it collapsed to the deck. The Tereltas stared at each other.

“There’s a family activity I didn’t think we’d be engaging in,” Tesq said as she wiped grey blood from her face.

“There’s a lot I need to explain to you,” I gasped, looking between them all, “but there’s no time to explain it. All you have to believe is that I never meant any harm.”

“I believe you. I raised a good son, and to believe anything else is an insult to me,” Mother scoffed. She was intently watching the demon behind me. “So, this is the Serisi that stole my son and turned him against his own kind.”

The demon bowed as we humans do. “More like the other way around, Axera Terelta.”

Ralish wore a furrowed brow. “How were you separated?”

“Her father did it,” I explained, gesturing to Serisi.

Mother grabbed me by the shoulders. “I don’t pretend to understand any of it, and although I’m glad you’re yourself again…” She touched my neck gingerly. “You look like a gloomsprite, Tarko. Sicker than I’ve ever seen you.”

“I think your mother means to say you look like shit,” Ralish said. “I’m inclined to agree.”

I told myself Ralish was covering her concern. I shook my head. “I’m fine. Lacking the power of a demon in my veins, is all,” I replied.

“Your magic?” asked Tesq.

“Gone, and Atalawe tells me any more nectra will kill me, if I don’t succumb to its poison first. Doomed either way.”

Mother cuffed me around the head. “Don’t you dare. You haven’t come this far to give up now.”

“No, I have not,” I told her firmly, before looking to my sister and Ralish. “I haven’t given up fighting yet, and I don’t intend to. I’m a Terelta, aren’t I? It’s not in our nature.”

“You might not have given up, but I believe your tree has,” Serisi growled from behind me.

“What?” Eztaral and I echoed each other.

I was already moving to the nearest edge. The others raced me there, and beyond the wooden battlements, we saw the demons’ sabotage.

Chains and ropes fouled Shal Gara’s roots. For every one the bloodwood shrugged off, two more pierced her bark. Stakes twice the length of me worked as anchors against the bloodwood’s momentum. Flames bombarded the roots until the bark ignited. With an awful groaning and a shudder that shook half of the city to its knees, Shal Gara began to grind to a halt.

“Six Hells!” Eztaral cursed.

“You have your chance at escape after all,” said Serisi before glancing at me, “and I will have my chance to challenge my father.”

“He’ll kill you!” I blurted

“You underestimate me, Tarko.”

“No, you underestimate us,” I told her. “We’ll fight alongside you.”

The demon blew smoke from her nostrils. “That is not the demon way.”

I seized her claw before she could turn, not caring how it burned me. “You’re fighting on the side of the worms now, remember? We might not share a body anymore but you’re still not alone.”

Serisi stared down at me for a long time before bowing her head. “What do you propose?”

Eztaral took charge. “A trap. With you as the bait.”

“With both of us as the bait,” I interjected.

“Tarko, without your—” Mother began but I didn’t want to hear it.

“We draw Faraganthar where we want him,” I said. “Separated from his horde long enough to spring a trap and kill him.”

Eztaral twirled her sword. “Will that keep your horde at bay?”

“It may,” Serisi said, shining with flame.

It was the first time in a while I had seen Atalawe grin so broadly. “Then it looks like we’re in agreement. We’ll be the subject of songs and stories for seasons to come.”

“Just as long as we don’t all die in the process,” muttered Redeye, true to form.

Serisi and I held each other’s gazes. Doomed either way, I heard the words echo in my head. Not the demon’s, but my own voice, so long drowned out I had almost forgotten it. I did not know if I could fight inevitability, but I would rather die trying than die succumbing to it. By the glower in the demon’s eyes, Serisi seemed to hear my thoughts. As did my mother. She looked at me as if she read my mind.

“I want you out of the way, Mother. All three of you,” I told her.

She pulled a haughty face. “Giving me orders now, Maven Terelta?”

I pulled a face. “Yes, I am. I won’t have you dying for the bloodwood. Get to the western side of the city and away from the battle.”

“Then you keep your word. I want to see you alive and whole when all this is done. You hear me, Tarko? And you, demon?”

Serisi bowed again in silence.

Eztaral forced the rest of us on as fire rained along the branch we sheltered on. Ralish and I were left with a moment amongst the maelstrom. I was transfixed by her eyes, one half-shut in shrewd analysis of me, especially the dark veins along my neck.

“I thought you were somebody different.”

“Ralish—”

“And I was right. I scoffed when you complained about the Bloodlaws, yet here I am with a sword in my hand. You might have been a fool and a liar, maybe even a traitor, but you aren’t ordinary, Tarko.”

“I’ll try to take that as a compliment.”

“You should,” Ralish said before prodding me sharply in the chest. “Listen to your mother, Tarko. If you should live, then I’ll be waiting for you,”

The impulse drove me. I didn’t promise her anything, but even as the weakness racked my body, I put my hand to her neck, pulled her in, and kissed her until the racket of war ripped us apart.

Eztaral’s voice filled our silence. “Tarko! Get your arse over here!”

Treading backwards, I watched my mother, Tesq, and Ralish escape into the crowds pressing upwards in panic, and I wondered without answer whether it would be the last time I saw them.

“Tarko!” Pel yelled at me now.

“Coming, curse you!”

��

Every branch became a barricade as we lost battleground after battleground to the demons. The ranks cycled, with others holding desperate shield lines as the exhausted and wounded were dragged backwards to form more defences.

Where obsidian and spells couldn’t keep the demons at bay, lancers fought losing but brave battles toe-to-toe with the flaming enemy. Lancewings continued to bombard the demons. Rocks and barrels of water spewed from branches above in a torrent, but the more demon claws that swarmed up the face of Shal Gara, the more they outflanked us. Every foot of decking they claimed and scorched spurred them on to further bloodlust.

Our plan was executed by the thinnest and most brittle hair. The warriors Eztaral had dragged with us barely kept ahead of the battle. Half the big bows and other machines of war could not be moved fast enough and were turned to splinters as the demons overran them.

Serisi and I dared to stay as close to danger as we could to keep the demons’ outrage burning for us. Faraganthar took his murderous pleasure and time climbing Shal Gara. While his vanguard pushed, he set about wielding his fire against the bloodwood. Even then, he still called for his daughter and death upon her traitorous horns. The fact our lure was working was the only encouragement we had.

“You can do this, right, Serisi? You can fight him?”

“I must.”

“Not what I asked.”

“I have a better chance than any of you.”

“Comforting!” I snapped back, before stumbling.

It was then I felt the change in the war-drums that Eztaral had promised us as a signal. Serisi and I began to run as fast as we could up the remaining branches, past the smoking, fire-riddled Midern, and fighting stray navik as we climbed.

A wall of snarling orokan and barkwolves greeted us as we passed the centre of the bloodwood and collapsed on the sprawling Branch of the Matriarchs. The beasts howled and snuffled at Serisi in a great din of noise, while their wranglers strained to guide them backwards. Above us, lancewings and their lancer riders ran spirals around the tree while they waited to pounce.

I stared across the rest of the sprawling plaza. Atalawe stood above her fellow wranglers with Inwar at her side and greeted me with a conspicuous wave. The rest of the fighters were withdrawing back along the branch and deck to leave a broad space for the demon king and his ilk. I saw tribes of all kinds standing beside each other, warriors alongside scholars, workers rubbing shoulders with heirs. Pel stood manning a big bow, while Redeye was already standing on a hillock of dirt with every sorcer Shal Gara had left.

A pain ran through me as I moved to join them, still guided by habit and longing. Instead, I stood alongside Serisi. The demon was breathing in deeper heaves than my confidence would have liked. Even so, the fire beneath her hide burned brightly. Serisi raised her fist of metal and flexed the claws she could. I patted the pocket of stones at my hip and slid one into my sling. I clutched it until my knuckles turned pale. We shared one silent glance as the warriors drew back, and the remaining air sorcers made veils from the smoke.

In the vacuum of our trap, the demons climbed branch after branch, destroying whatever buildings took their fancy. As I stared below to the horde now spread beneath the tree, I saw market stalls and wagons hurled into the air. Smoke swirled up the branches, closely followed by the bright shapes of demons thirsty for carnage. Warriors and citizens fled before them. They choked and they cried out as they sprinted past us. The demons were forced into double file by the narrow stairs and leafroad, and as the charge encountered us on the broad and largely empty plaza, they halted for a moment at the sight of Serisi. The demon flushed with fire as she roared.

“The betrayer!” one rasped, readying an axe of glowing iron.

As the demons bunched together, ready to strike, Serisi raised her voice. “Challenge! I challenge Faraganthar!”

The demons bellowed as one, scattering apart like a seam ripped. Several navik tumbled off the leafroad in the haste to make way for the king. The thunder of Faraganthar’s feet preceded him. Flame billowed as he appeared. His claws raked across the bark of the bloodwood as he approached us.

“Challenge, you demand? You forget, Serisianathiel, you may have survived my fire, but you are no longer Voidborn enough to challenge me. And to involve the worm is an insult to the very ash of the Starless Plains!” Faraganthar uttered with abject hatred in his voice. His fiery eyes switched back and forth between the demon and me.

“And you, Father, are too blinded by greed to be king of this horde!” replied Serisi.

“You know nothing of what you speak. You know nothing of the true face of chaos. Of the great mantle I have been given by our god, nor of the glory we will wreak here today!” Faraganthar boomed. He took a step towards us, and the wood sparked beneath his claws. His gaze drew to the giant doors sitting at the base of the Branch of the Matriarchs that guarded Shal Gara’s core. “How fitting you make your pathetic stand here, where your nectra lies. I can smell it even now, calling to me.”

If I had honed any skill throughout my life, it was the ability to antagonise everyone I met. I decided to needle him further. Distraction was the name of our game. “Why is it you sound afraid? Are we too much of a threat to you?”

Faranganthar slammed his star-iron sword into the decking. The shock alone almost knocked me back. “Challenge, you say?” he roared. Smoke expanded from him like the wings of a colossal bat. “Your wish of death shall be granted!”

For the demon’s size, Faranganthar moved as quick as a lancewing. Serisi was even faster. She ducked a slice from the sword that would have felled a tree in one blow. I was not so swift. It took me all my dwindling strength to leap from the backswing that Faraganthar levelled at me. I rolled nimbly, knocking pain into my head and shoulders, but came up running. The cowardly part of me screamed for me to keep running, but instead I turned and took aim. The flailing limbs of the demons, daughter and father, kept me from loosing my stone.

Serisi looked as though she had the upper hand already. She evaded every strike, weaved around every brutal thrust, all the while leading Faraganthar deeper into the plaza and even away from the doors of the bloodwood’s core. The demons of the horde formed a wall of their own behind their king that creeped across the wood like a mould.

A cheer burst from me as Serisi landed the first blow. Her sword clipped Faraganthar’s shoulder. Fire dribbled like blood from the wound. It was far from fatal, but it was enough to draw a haunting screeching from the crowded demons and navik.

Faraganthar ceased whatever game he had been playing. He feigned with his next cut, catching Serisi in a trap that saw his fist strike her square in the jaw. Claws left glowing lines on her cheek like my own rankings.

The demon king hit her again, and I heard bone or horn crack. Serisi tumbled into a crouch, almost squashing me beneath her. As Faraganthar raised his sword to stab, I took aim once more. The king paused to scorn me and my weapon.

“Your feeble stones will not save you,” he cackled, drawing roars from his demons.

“No, perhaps they won’t,” I replied, “but they hurt like all Six Hells in one.”

No sooner had the words left me than I poured all my effort into my throw and let loose my slingshot over Serisi’s shoulders.

The stone made a sound that was heard easily over the fire of battle. Faraganthar’s head snapped to the side, his confident smirk now wiped away. The growl that emanated from him I could feel through the deck. Slowly, he turned and showed us where the stone had struck. Red fire leaked from the hole in his face.

I couldn’t reload fast enough. Faraganthar pounced, reaching to smite me, but Serisi bought me moments. She sprang into a tackle, seizing her father around the waist while she savaged him with her claws. I slung stone after stone, striking the demon king in the chest twice more before he twisted Serisi aside and sliced his sword across her back. Faraganthar now stood between us. Fire swirled in his empty claws.

“You will burn for your insolence!” he promised me as he grinned and took a step towards me.

I hit him with one more stone before he closed the gap. Like the worm I was, I threw myself to the ground between his trunk-like legs. Crawling like a navik to get up, I felt the heat on my back as Faraganthar turned. I felt the wind rush past my head.

Clang!

I looked up to find Serisi’s sword crossed beneath the demon king’s. Her fist of metal came swinging and struck Faraganthar square in the face. Once, twice, she hit her father, until he was forced away. It was then, sprawled as I was on the wood, that I saw the demon was now in the centre of the plaza.

“Now!”

My shout was twinned with the combined roar of the Scions. A stab of thunder sounded as Pel loosed his big bow somewhere behind the smoke. In another battle, in another world, it would have pierced the king through the spine. But Faraganthar’s reactions were far too honed, and the huge arrow struck him in the shoulder instead, momentarily driving him to the deck. A score of arrows followed Pel’s shot, turning the demon into a quillhog. Those that missed landed perilously close to my feet. One hit Serisi in the leg as she rose up.

The demons at our back were all too eager to break the rules of the challenge as we had, and as I hauled myself up, they charged. The citizens of Shal Gara came bounding from their hiding places to meet them. Barkwolves leaped past me with roars of their own. Orokan, stoked into their rare and indignant frenzies, threw their huge weight and sword-like claws into the fray. Magic streamed overhead in the form of dart and tendril spells. Like two of the fabled storm-waves of the south seas, the battle clashed again. I swung my borrowed sword at anything that didn’t bleed red, ears and eyes full of madness.

In the frenzy, Serisi and I were separated from Faraganthar. The king was still bent over his injury, bristling with arrows. Several of his brutish demons stood around him, cutting down flesh as if it were maize. Fire began to billow as wizards plied their spells against ours. Between the flames, I saw the demon king rise once more and, with a single hand, pull the spear from his shoulder. Instead of throwing it away, he used it like a staff, batting warriors and beasts from the plaza.

All around me, I saw the last chance of Shal Gara fading. I felt the deck falling beneath my feet, inch by inch, then yard by yard. The carnage around us reached fever pitch. Serisi and I were the rocks the demons and navik crashed against. Only magic and a tight barrier of spears kept them at bay.

It was then that Faraganthar unleashed his own spells. The shockwave of ash, smoke, and heat broke the last of our formations. Beasts scarpered with flames on their backs. With his star-iron sword in one hand and fire in the other, the king made his way to the doors of the core of Shal Gara.

“He’s going for the nectra!” came the spine-chilling yell from behind me.

The Scions stood with me. Eztaral’s armour was covered in blood and char. Redeye and Pel’s eyes glowed. Atalawe’s face was a mask of blood and gore, but her teeth still shone white. Inwar still had a navik arm in his knife-like jaws.

“It’s down to us!” I yelled to them.

Without words, in motion of silent agreement and pure dedication, the Scions of the Sixth-Born waded into battle. It had the effect of stirring the survivors to a last stand. Not an order came from Eztaral, but we each knew it was win or die in this moment.

As Faraganthar hammered on the doors with his sword, carving chunks from the faces of the ancestors and gods, Redeye and Pel forged us a path towards him. Powerful tendrils of water and dirt pounded against the demon forces. Steam and smoke and dust masked us as we sowed death. Eztaral and her sword sliced ribbons from anything that moved. Atalawe was a dervish of ironpith and blades. Inwar was a streak of green fur and claws. Even the smaller demons seemed to run from him.

The smoke now streamed from the door as Faraganthar’s fire began to eat at the stout wood. The doors were thick, but not thick enough to withstand the intent of a demon.

We gained his attention when Pel drove his magic into Faraganthar’s back. The king roared, but he did not cower. The only success was turning him from the doors. He turned as another barrage hit him in the face. I glanced at Pel, realising he was not to thank. My head swivelled backwards to see Sage Dūnekar and the Jade Wolf had joined us. The warrior sage was a blur of green blade and blood. Dūnekar’s magic, witnessed at last, put a ringing in my ears. He weaved patterns with his hands so intricate I had no idea what kind of spells he cast. Even then, his face was devoid of emotion, only strain. Pel joined with the sages to hammer at the demon king while Atalawe and Eztaral slew the remaining demons.

“Finish it, Eztaral!” Dūnekar bellowed as he turned to keep the rest of the demons at bay.

We Scions pressed Faraganthar, spreading into a sickle that cornered the now solitary demon against the doors. Serisi advanced, sword in hand. Sparks ignited as her blade clashed with her father’s. The star-iron notched her blade, but she didn’t let up. Spell after spell rained.

Faraganthar only laughed as he fought back. Even wounded and beset from all sides, he was a force beyond any of us.

Atalawe was knocked aside with the flat of Faraganthar’s sword. Inwar, bravely going for the demon’s neck, was torn loose and thrown against the wall. Earth filled Faraganthar’s face before he ripped a corpse from the piles around us and hurled it at Redeye. The sorcer was flattened senseless. In the same movement, Faraganthar lunged for Eztaral and Pel. They lasted only a fraction longer against the king than the others. Pel was pushed back by a fist of fire that scorched the remaining hairs from his head until navik swarmed him. Eztaral had set about carving into the demon’s legs and ribs when Faraganthar caught her sword and broke it in his fist. The eagleborn was dealt a blow that bent her double and sent her flying across the blood-washed plaza.

With a tremor of fear that brought a shake to my hands, I abruptly realised Serisi and I stood alone with Faraganthar. The realisation had not escaped my demon. She assailed her father with everything she had left to give. Faraganthar was battered in the face, even cut across his chest with a wound that would have halved a human. I had almost dared to hope for victory when Faraganthar twirled his sword in practised fashion and drove it deep into Serisi’s midriff.

I watched, shouting without sound as Serisi curled over the blade.

“You are defeated, once-daughter of mine. May your fire die with whatever honour you have left,” her father snarled to her before putting his foot on her chest and driving her from his blade. Serisi stumbled back to crumple beside me. She stared at me with eyes now coloured a darkening amber.

I threw every stone I had until my sling was empty. Faraganthar raised his hands to fend off my attacks with a mocking laughter. I knew it was hopeless, but I had no sense in me, only emotion. Only rage. I heard the shouts of those dragging themselves to survival behind me, perhaps my own mother’s voice, but it didn’t stop me. I held my sword up before my face as I advanced upon Faraganthar and he at me, still laughing.

“Your time in this puny world is over, worm,” he told me.

I swung for the demon, grazing his arm before he moved to backhanded me like swatting a gobfly. A swift duck saved me, and I even managed to slice into the demon’s leg before his claws raked me. His other hand sent me rocketing across the deck. I landed hard, feeling splinters carve skin from me before I came to a stop. I felt a tooth in the middle of my mouth, and I spat it out along with the wash of blood.

With a callous laugh, Faraganthar turned back to the door, and with his claws, he ripped at its seam. Copper and bronze plates were prised apart like petals forced to unfurl.

“Let them watch!” he roared of us. “Let them watch their undoing before they die!”

I could feel the blood seeping across me, warm and oozing. The world kept tipping from one side to the other no matter how I tilted my head. A hundred places across my body burned. In the dull echo of the battle, I saw warriors making last stands, lancewings fleeing through the burning canopy, and citizens fleeing. Not a Scion moved.

It was then my eyes came across the vial of nectra lying escaped from Redeye’s hand. It was cracked and slowly leaking, but half the liquid remained. My heart stuttered in hope. Fighting dizziness, I tried to reach for it. My hands fell painfully short, and so I began to crawl. Behind me, the booming sounds of Faraganthar’s efforts filled the air.

When crawling became too painful, I stretched to my limits, but even with the clicking in my shoulder, the vial remained out of reach.

While I cursed in a rasping tone, a huge hand of warped metal and grey skin reached past me and seized the vial. The glass chimed against the demon’s claws.

I angled my head to see Serisi next to me. Her eyes were now a russet red. “Use it.”

“We’ll both die.”

“We are both already dying. But there is another way,” she gasped. “Use it as we did in Sheertown.”

I didn’t need to ask her. I knew she was sure from the shine in her eyes, the weak nod. It was as if I could feel death grasping for me. Its fingers surrounded my throat as I reached for the nectra. My heart faltered in my chest.

“We were always stronger together,” she said. “I would not admit it before, but it is the truth. And if it fails, then it will fail with us.”

“Just like in Sheertown, then,” I agreed with her, feeling the slick, sap-like liquid against my fingers. “Exactly the same.”

With her breath close on my face, I held the nectra in my open palm, the same hand that bore the scars of our first accident. I was breathless I was so afraid, but Eztaral’s words drove me on.

A cry ripped from Serisi’s throat as she cleaved a claw from her own hand and stabbed it into my arm. Her eyes and mine locked, I refused to blink while she slammed her fist against my palm. The smash of nectra seemed so loud I thought the very sky had shattered above us. Both fire and nectra flooded my veins. I thought we had failed until a white light shone from the demon’s eyes. It spread from her veins until mine, scarred black, took on the same glow. Pain racked every inch of my body, enough to make my cry out for the release of death. Pearlescent fire swirled around us until I was blinded. With a whip-crack of snapping wood, I was left sprawling on the deck, clothes half-burned, now alone and bereft of demon. Serisi had disappeared.

“Sacrilege!” came a booming voice.

The white light had brought Faraganthar’s attention crashing down on me. He had turned from the ruined door, his face a carving of holy outrage. His thunderous strides closed the distance between us far too quickly.

“Serisi!” I bellowed.

The voice filled every inch of my body. Fight, Tarko!

I had never been so happy to hear the demon’s voice.

Without hesitation, I reached for the demon king. The decking beneath me exploded as wood was torn asunder by the dirt that obeyed my clawing hands. Faraganthar recoiled as a clump of dirt smashed into him. And another. The magic flowed from me as if I was nothing but a gutter for its power. Even the demon king’s fire swirled under my onslaught, spinning around my hands as if it obeyed my will. Its heat scorched me, but I did not wilt.

I felt the wood beneath my knee, then my foot. Before I knew it, I was standing and pushing every muscle that would obey into the spell. The air screeched around me as the earth built and built. Faraganthar hacked at the whirlwind to no avail. There was no finesse to my magic, only brutal, pure power. All of my training coalesced into one spell that ached to be free.

Show him, Tarko.

With a force that threw me to my knees, I released my spell. A column of earth smashed against the demon king, tossing him from his claws and backwards to the door. I aimed true: Faraganthar flew into an end of his own making. Where his own efforts had pried the metal surface from the door, he had left a blade of bronze curled outwards. With an impact that rocked the branch, Faraganthar was impaled against it.

I collapsed from the strain, utterly spent. Even lifting my head was a battle, but one I fought to see the demon king die.

Faraganthar clutched at the metal protruding from his gnarled stomach. I knew not what went on inside the bodies of demons, but he was fatally wounded. Glowing blood dribbled from both corners of his mouth. His face was a strange mix of surprise and hatred as I approached. His demons were cowed, confused, and recoiling. I felt a shuffling presence behind me, and saw Atalawe and Pel hefting themselves upright

“Are you in there, daughter?” Faraganthar hissed at me, breath sounding short.

“That she is, demon king, and she smiles at your death,” I said. “The challenge is done. The battle is over. You have lost.”

Faraganthar found some strength to laugh. “Have I, worm?”

“Your Iron Icon has no place here. Your horde stands leaderless. What else is there to win?”

A shudder of the bloodwood answered me. I dragged my eyes away from the demons to stare at the quivering branches. A horrendous groan sounded far beneath us.

Faraganthar cackled once more. “Your tree falls, little worm, and you with it. My wildfire has won the day for me. I may have failed my task, but so shall you.”

“He’s right, Tarko,” Pel breathed. “By the Three Gods and their spirits, he’s right! Shal Gara is falling!”

The terror gripped every survivor. Crowds fled for every avenue of escape. Only I remained, staring at the dying demon king with Serisi’s intent. I felt her will belaying my feet until Faraganthar’s last smile forced me away.

Shal Gara was burning from the roots up. Fire now streamed around the lower branches. The bark already bubbled and hissed with leaking sapwater. I couldn’t ignore the sorrow in my heart to see my home so destroyed, but I could not stop to watch. I could already feel Shal Gara leaning precariously to one side. Every part of the bloodwood trembled.

My escape began with me stumbling my way across the deck. I may have had Serisi fuelling my body, but I was still wounded. It took Eztaral and Atalawe to keep me upright.

“I need to find my mother!” I yelled. “Tesq, Ralish!”

“They’ll be safe by now, Tarko!”

“Shut your mouths and move! MOVE!” screamed the eagleborn.

I ran as fast as my body would allow, and by the time we reached the western side of the tree, I saw the Neathering almost entirely engulfed in flames. From the battlements and broken leafroads, survivors fled any way they could. Their shouts deafened me. Ropes, ladders, and vines draped from the bloodwood, and those who could scrambled down them with alacrity. It pained my heart to see a pitiful few descending ropes too close to the flames, screaming as they were engulfed. Other, weaker survivors were unable hold on and plummeted to the loam below. Those who were trapped or unable to climb waved their hands for lancewings to save them. The birds darted in and out of the inferno, snatching citizens in their claws one by one. A maddening few knelt and raised their hands to the gods for help as if that would save us.

Ropes shot from big bows were our only escape. Body after body slid down them while thick crowds pressed from behind. Here and there, citizens were pushed from the branch by panic behind them.

As ever, Eztaral was there to bring order to chaos. With a few slaps to silence the terrified, she had the crowd in control within moments. The ropes and big bows groaned under the strain of the constant stream of people. With every agonising second that passed, the bloodwood leaned ever further.

Our turn came not a moment too soon. The smoke had become debilitating. The heat might not have bothered my demon-bound body, but I could see others passing out left and right. Unconscious Redeye was lashed to the rope. Inwar, limping and half-carried by Atalawe, went next. Then, with much forcing, Eztaral. Finally Pel and I stared at each other, his blind gaze meeting the eyes that burned in my skull.

“After you, old man.”

Pel gripped me by the shoulders and tied the rope about me instead. “You’ve done us proud. You and your demon.”

Go, Tarko, Serisi urged me.

With a kick from the branch, I fell backwards and let the rope catch me. With a horrid lurch, I began to slide. Although the inferno sought to reach me from below, I turned my head to the shivering canopy of my home and watched the pirouetting of the falling copper leaves, and the glitter of the lancewings playing saviour.

A sound akin to the sky tearing apart stabbed my ears, and I whirled around to see the burning roots of Shal Gara giving way. The wildfires had won, as Faraganthar promised. Sparks and splinters shot into the upper branches as the bloodwood began to topple. My stomach lurched as the rope sagged. I was falling with the bloodwood.

“Pel!” I bellowed, but I could not see the old man behind me. I tried to grab the rope to stop myself, but it burned my palm. I was powerless to do anything but watch the mighty Shal Gara fall and pray I beat it to the loam.

I crashed into churned earth. A pain in my left arm took the breath from me. Screams filled my ears as citizens fled in every direction to escape Shal Gara’s shadow. I stared back at the bloodwood, neck craning and jaw dropping at the sight of Shal Gara filling the sky. The giant was aiming for me in its fall. Buildings toppled and crashed through the branches. The mess of war slid from leafroads and fell as hail upon the fleeing crowds.

“Pel!” I called out. There wasn’t a sign of him on the rope. “Where are you, curse it!”

We need to keep moving, Tarko! Serisi deafened me. If you die now after all we’ve fought for, I swear—

“Gah!” I roared, helpless. I did as I was told, throwing myself across the earth in a mad dash. Through the smoke, I glimpsed Eztaral far ahead and waving her arms frantically at me. Crates and wagons smashed around me as I sprinted for her. Again and again, I tumbled, breaking my arm twice over. And still I couldn’t escape the fall of Shal Gara.

“Tarko!” was the last I heard before the thunder of the bloodwood filled the air and the darkness swallowed me. The tip of a branch met the earth a dozen paces ahead, and the noise of it snapping under its own weight drove the air from my lungs. I watched a mansion reduced to splinters before I hurtled into a shallow furrow.

Breathless, I ran a sprinted, zigzag path for the only daylight I could see. I couldn’t bear to look behind me unless I saw my doom; I could only run with hands raised over my head. Dirt formed around me, and in the chaos, I saw my demon fleeing with me, fending off what debris she could.

My heart felt close to bursting when something crashed to the ground at my heels. The shockwave threw me into the air, and I landed in a pit of earth that Shal Gara had dug with her roots. With splinters and planks showering me, like a newborn, I curled in on myself, shut my eyes, and roared with the bloodwood until the world was choked in darkness and silence.

It took a demon’s whisper to tell me I was still alive.

Tarko? Are we dead?

Before I could answer, rough hands seized me by the neck. I opened my eyes to find a shroud of earth around me, and I spat dirt as I was hauled up. Smoky daylight greeted me, alongside the mismatched and watering eyes of Eztaral Kraid. The other Scions stood behind her in a wasteland of fallen bloodwood leaves and burned earth. Ash stained their bloody faces grey.

“Pelikai?” Eztaral rasped at me.

I looked behind us, finding the sharp roof of a lancewing nest buried mere feet from where I had fallen. Beyond, Shal Gara’s crown lay broken. The bloodwood’s surviving branches reached hundreds of feet into the air, hidden in their own smoke. I did not recognise the corpse of my home.

As the tears began to stream from my burning eyes, I looked to Eztaral and shook my head. The eagleborn did nothing but seize me in an embrace and hold me against her. I did not fight her.

32

Ashes

You would be forgiven for thinking the sixth-born were the lowest of the Swathe’s rungs. Quite the contrary. We are freer than first-born. The task of keeping track of the Swathe’s ever-changing borders is merely a calling. Our gift is that we alone know the Swathe in its fullest, and that’s why we have a saying: you can see the whole world from one tree.

FROM THE ONLY SURVIVING COPY OF “KĪ RAXA’S MUSINGS”

No longer did I need to be asleep to walk through a nightmare.

Even after a day, the fires of Shal Gara refused to die. The mighty bloodwood existed now as a broken and charred edifice. The handful of sorcers that survived the war and Shal Gara’s fall toiled as dogged creatures, covered in soot, working across the husk of its bark to put out the flames. Workers toiled in crews, still trying to save upturned cottages from burning while twigs popped and giant leaves curled all around them.

The crown of the bloodwood had fallen the hardest. Height had been the nobles’ undoing. The Crimson Crown lay in shatter amongst the rubble of painted mansions. At the roots, Shal Gara was barely more than charcoal. What remained of the Neathering still burned. The Midern was wrecked. Broken branches, their wounds red as blood, stuck out from the mess like the ribs of some desiccated animal.

Those who had survived Shal Gara stood in their paltry thousands between the receding wildfires and the dead bloodwood. Tears flowed freely. Other survivors prostrated themselves on the ground. The stink of destruction and ash hung thick between them and heavy as hearts. The Swathe was muted in the wake of the battle. Only the mourning squawk of crows and chattering kanalat snakes disturbed the awkward hush.

The demons that had not perished alongside us in the fall had retreated with their flames. Hundreds still remained, but without their leader or their prize, the war in them was extinguished. The Last Clan had lost, and without nectra, the Iron Icon would remain in the Starless Plains where he no doubt belonged, and the Swathe would be spared his terrors.

Though the Swathe and Shal Gara still burned enough to choke our lungs and bring a rain of ash, the smoke was beginning to clear. In glimpses within the smog, we saw the sun goddess restored at last. Her golden disk, whole once more, stared down at our dismal scene. I raised my hands, stared past the black veins beneath my skin, and held the sun’s face between my fingers.

“Victory,” Eztaral whispered in my ear, “often comes at a great cost.”

I hadn’t heard her approach. Nor the others. Mother and Tesq came to hug me again, a habit they had developed since the last battle and one that Serisi seemed rather disturbed by. Ralish, though she had said little to me and her eyes were full of intrigue over the demon once again within me, took my hand. Only Redeye stayed distant, staring at me from the corners of his eyes as if he blamed me personally for Shal Gara’s death. I knew he was not alone. I had seen the blame that I carried in plenty of ashen faces amongst the survivors. One woman had gone as far as to spit on me.

“No sign of Pel yet?” I asked.

“Atalawe and Inwar are taking their turn looking for him. There are a lot of people still trapped between the branches. A lot of injured for the healers to see to. But we will find him, mark my words. I won’t see this day any darker.”

I shook my head and felt the pain thump in my head. Rejoining with the demon was not without its downfalls, but already I was feeling Serisi’s strength coursing through me. “Barely feels like a victory at all. Look at what we’re left with. I failed to protect Shal Gara and my home. That was what I promised you all, and I couldn’t do it. Even Pel…,” I croaked with a throat scored by smoke and my emotions. “I let him down most of all. I should have made him jump first.”

“Oh, but you didn’t fail, Tarko. The Swathe is our home, not just Shal Gara, and you protected it from a worse fate. A demon king lies dead and his horde scattered because of you.” Eztaral took a moment to breathe. “And that, if I have to speak honestly, makes me proud.”

The words brought a smile back to my face, but Eztaral avoided my eyes.

“Pel would be proud too,” Mother told me, her hand on my shoulder. She had saved Misfit before the last battle, and the shrewbat was currently perched around her neck. Misfit raised a hesitant paw, still untrusting of me, and decided to stick where he was. I didn’t blame him: he knew what hid within me.

“Without you,” Mother said, “Shal Gara would have truly perished, and through it all, that old toad Pel kept his promise to keep you safe. Somewhat safe, at least. Fear shapes a future, they say, and I suppose I let mine get to me.”

“There’s no question about it.” Ralish nodded. “Not to mention dismantling the Bloodlaws. It’s no longer a hope now as it was in the mines. And here I was thinking you were either useless or all talk.”

“Does that mean you’re proud of me as well?” I asked.

Ralish narrowed her eyes. “Pleasantly surprised, thank you very much.”

I bent my hand to the earth, and Serisi’s shape swirled around me in dust. Ralish quickly stepped away as the demon’s face came close to hers. It would take her time, just like it took me. Or at least that’s what I hoped.

Serisi’s voice was a whisper. “We saved us,” she corrected us all. “I won’t have Tarko taking all the credit.”

Eztaral watched the demon closely. “I never thought I’d be talking to a demon, never mind thanking one, but here I stand.”

Serisi spread her jaws wide in what Eztaral took a few moments deciding was a grin.

“Let’s be truly honest,” I said, sighing. “It was Pel that saved the Swathe. Without him keeping the Scions alive, without him kidnapping me, none of us would be here. The demons and the Fireborn would have won.”

“Tarko! Eztaral!” came a cry from the wreckage of the bloodwood. There, amongst the leaves and broken branches, I spied Atalawe waving her arms and heard the yowl of Inwar at her side. Behind her, a dozen healers were trying to drag something out of the foliage.

With my injuries afire, I ran as fast as I could manage. Eztaral and my mother were right alongside me, but it was hobbling Redeye who outpaced us.

Atalawe was on her knees, pressing her hands to the chest of what I assumed to be a corpse. It was Pel, white as narin fronds and soaked in blood. A bone protruded from his arm, and a spar of wood ran straight through his side. I felt a stab in my heart as I collapsed at his side.

“Give him space, Tarko!” Atalawe cried at me with tears on her cheeks. “Let him breathe.”

“Breathe? He’s alive?” I blurted.

“Of course he’s alive! You think something as simple as a falling tree could kill the Scourge of the Scorchroad? Three Gods, no.”

I seized Pel’s hand and felt the faintest strength grip me back. It seemed to wake him slightly. One eye fluttered. Dried blood cracked as his mouth parted.

“Is it over?” he hissed.

Eztaral knelt in the mud and cradled Pel’s head. “For now, old friend.”

Pel let out a ragged breath. “You mean to say I can die contented now?”

“Don’t you dare,” grunted my mother.

Atalawe got to work seeing to a stretcher. With our help, Pel was soon being carried across the dead earth. It was then, with the Scions gathered together, that the survivors began to stamp their feet or bang their fists on their armour. It was a solemn, steady beat, and it grew until the crowd thundered in place of Shal Gara’s drums. Even with Serisi’s dusty form standing beside me, they cheered.

“Are you going to ask them, Tarko?” the demon mused. “I can feel the question on your mind.”

“Ask them what?” Mother said at my side.

I leaned closer to Pel. “Does this mean I’m a Scion yet?”

Pel croaked with a faint chuckling. “Yes, Tarko, I suppose it does.”

��

When the sun goddess fell from the sky and evening came, the survivors of Shal Gara lit no torches and sought no vinelight. The wildfires and the burning bloodwood gave us all the light we needed for the matriarch’s court.

Through her envoy’s orders and the bravery of several rapid lancewings, Danaxt and half her sages had survived Shal Gara’s fall. Sages Wasaqa, Maku, and Tok had perished in battle. Kol Baran had yet to be found. The last anyone had seen of him, he was escaping into the loam and refusing to look back. Shame over his son’s betrayal, the whispers said. Dūnekar and Saronash the Jade Wolf had both been gravely injured and stood supporting each other at Envoy Okarin’s side. There were no crystal seats or thrones for them to perch on now, just the same loam as the rest of us. Only Danaxt took a seat, sat upon the carapace of her trained beetle, and by the crook of her back and her hooded brow, she was not immune from the sorrow of the day. Truthfully, she looked physically injured by it.

Alone and apart from the crowds, the Scions of the Sixth-Born stood awaiting the matriarch’s words. I didn’t know whether they would be of congratulations or of punishment, and the waiting was making me sweat.

Whatever they were destined to be, the words never came.

Whether the smoke had poisoned her throat or she couldn’t bring herself to speak, the matriarch sat in silence for an age until she beckoned instead for her daughter. Okarin bent her ear to the matriarch before striding out into the empty circle.

“First, my mother Matriarch Danaxt wishes to thank all of you for what you’ve done for us. The Scions of the Sixth-Born will forever be remembered by all tribes and welcomed in the court of Shal Gara for your bravery, skill, and magic. Without you all, we would be naught but ash on the breeze, and the Swathe would be doomed to fall. Even you, the demon called Serisi, are counted as a hero of Shal Gara. Songs will be sung of you for seasons to come.”

Scattered cheers rang out for us. Half the crowd stayed expressionless and unblinking, staring at the dusty shape of Serisi standing beside me. The other Scions nodded and bowed their thanks. Pel, propped up and swaddled in bandages, could only nod, and yet he did that with pride. I should have felt as pleased as they were, but there was a crease in Okarin’s brow I did not like the look of. Her gaze was now fixed on me.

“Step forwards, Maven Terelta.”

Serisi stepped with me, loping a dozen paces from the circle. I stood as tall as my aching body would allow.

The envoy whispered to her mother again and turned back to us with a sigh. The beads in her hand shifted rapidly. “Maven Terelta. Though your deeds were vital in defeating the demons, and we will not deny your sacrifice, Matriarch Danaxt…” Okarin took a breath and paused so long her mother had to nudge her to continue. “Matriarch Danaxt cannot forget your lies, your betrayal, and that you were the cause of many deaths. And neither can this council of sages.”

“Envoy!” Eztaral shouted, accompanied by a gasp that ran through the onlookers. She and the others were immediately at my side. Mother placed her hands protectively on my shoulders.

I shook my head to Serisi’s confused growling. “What does this mean, Tarko?”

“Are you going to hang us, Envoy? Throw us in what’s left of the Burrows?” I yelled back.

Okarin stared at me with her crimson eyes while she waited for quiet. “My mother has ordered no such thing. Instead, balancing your crimes and your deeds, she has decreed you and you alone be exiled from Shal Gara.”

“This is preposterous!” Pel wheezed.

“The matriarch also orders the immediate reinstatement of the Bloodlaws and their order. As such you may keep your rank and tribe, but you shall not belong to this bloodwood. This is the matriarch’s decree, and she has spoken,” the envoy said. I could almost hear her grinding her teeth. She looked as frustrated as I felt. She alone looked dissatisfied. Dūnekar and Saronash were impassive, the Jade Wolf’s head bowed and fists clenched. A rustle spread through the lower ranks of the survivors.

Ralish surprised me with her vehemence. “Getting rid of the Bloodlaws was the smartest thing you did!” she yelled at my side. “It saved us all!”

Serisi’s shape grew taller. Her claws spread. “They would betray us, for all we did?”

Danaxt broke her silence to answer the demon. “The war you brought upon us is over. It took everything from us. Order is all we have left, and it must be restored,” she said in a croaking voice barely above a whisper. “These are our commands.”

I held out my hands for quiet, parting the Scions so I could be seen and heard. By all rights a rage should have burned with me, but I merely smiled instead.

“I thought this war had changed us for the better, but I see now it hasn’t. I should have expected this, seeing as the Bloodlaws have always trampled those who sweat and toil and die for the good of those who keep them. I accept your sentence, Matriarch, Sages. Envoy. I gladly accept it, even, because now I know my home is truly gone and perished.”

“Tarko!” Okarin called to me as I turned my back, but the matriarch hissed something that kept the envoy firmly at her side. I shook my head at her and continued to walk while my family and fellow Scions followed. When I reached the crowd, with Serisi at my side, the ranks parted without a word. Some of the survivors touched my shoulders. Others stared, unmoving. Some even curled their lip, but I did not care. I knew what I was and all that I had done in the name of survival. I knew I had saved them, and their gratitude or lack thereof mattered nothing to me.

“Tarko!” came another shout. It was my mother, running after me. Tesq and Ralish chased her.

“Where do you think you’re going?” mother chided me.

I was momentarily confused. “Did you not hear the matriarch?”

“I mean alone, you fool. What? Do you think for one moment I’m going to watch you be exiled and not come with you? I am your mother, curse you. What would your father say?”

Tesq slapped me on the arm and the broken bone protested. “Somebody has to make sure you don’t get into more trouble.”

I looked to Ralish. “And you?”

Ralish sniffed at the night air. “There’s nothing left for me here, and I refuse to return to a worker’s life. Besides, you’re far too unreliable to leave unattended. Either of you,” she said, stare sneaking to the demon. “Somebody’s got to keep you in check.”

I caught the sly smile she offered me and returned it twofold.

Eztaral waded into our huddle. “We better get moving, unless you want to stand around picking at your arses until nightfall.”

“What?” I blurted, partially confused by the delightful imagery.

“You can stow that confusion, Maven.”

Atalawe shrugged. “You’re a Scion now, and that means we stay together.”

In Atalawe’s grip, hunched over his wounds, Pel managed to wag his finger. “Not to mention that Haidak and Juraxi are still missing, and the remaining demons need to be hunted down before they cause any further chaos.”

Inwar agreed with a yowl, and as one, we all turned to Redeye.

The mudmage worked his lips for a moment before throwing up his hands and limping ahead of us towards the deep forest. “Why you fools are so set on dying instead of living a quiet life, I’ll never know,” came his passing mutter.

Atalawe laughed as she and the others followed the sorcer. I couldn’t help but grin at the family I had found. They were all the home I needed.

“You will all be exiled, if you choose to follow him!” came the shrill and distant warning of the matriarch.

Serisi and I stayed back to look a last time on the smouldering Shal Gara and the watchful eyes of its survivors. I held the envoy’s gaze once more. It was then Okarin took a step as if to follow us, but as though an unseen chain was looped about her, Danaxt called her back, and she stayed at her mother’s side.

I patted the pocket where Misfit lay and heard a confirmatory squeak. “Ready, Serisi?”

The demon flexed her claws as her form and my magic faded. Her voice slid into my head.

I am, Tarko. Though for what, I don’t know.

“Neither do I, and for once, I welcome it.”

To the snarl of my demon, I set my feet for the loam that awaited me and did not look back at Shal Gara again. For once, it was my choice, and for the first moment in my life, I felt truly free.

Epilogue

The Loamsedge was ruled by ash and the burning eyes of wandering cinders. What remained of the Swathe’s edge was not worth measuring, beyond calling it a hillock of black and smoking wood. The fires within its husk still smouldered. Here and there lesser roots and stumps burned alike as funeral candles.

No life dared to tread the choking landscape save for one. A red stone mask hung in his hands, looking like molten wax in the firstglow fires. A copper blade ran down his hip.

Juraxi glared at the sun beneath the shield of his hand. The goddess was now as whole and unmarred as the day of his foiled execution. He blinked the spots away and regarded the scorched earth instead. The hems of his robes smouldered and smoked, but Juraxi felt it a blessing. Scattered around his boots were fragments of bones and teeth burned black. Juraxi held no remorse. There had been no waste. They had been sacrificed in glorious fire, sanctified as he had been.

A brisk wind was driven by the roar of a golden lancewing bursting from the smoke-ridden sky. Juraxi hid his face with his mask as a whirlwind of ash sought to blind him. The force of the creature’s wings drove him backwards.

The enormous bird’s claws crunched in the charcoal. Boots thudded beside them as a figure dismounted with its cloak flapping in the draught. A long glaive stabbed the earth in furious rhythm.

“You’re late,” called Juraxi.

Haidak Baran slammed the blade of his obsidian glaive in the charcoal of a root stump disturbingly close to Juraxi’s foot.

“You dare to speak to me as an equal, messenger, and that is not a mistake you want to make. Trust me, Juraxi. Not when my glaive and I thirst for blood!”

“Tarko Terelta’s, I imagine?”

The stump crumbled to ash as Haidak wrenched the weapon free. Haidak’s lancewing made the sound of sparkstones clashing.

“The very same.”

Juraxi stared west. “Did you see King Faraganthar fall?”

“With my own eyes, at the hands of Tarko and his demon, no less.”

“How by chaos did Tarko do it?”

“You give our dear dead demon king too much thought. He is gone. He wasted his chance at claiming Shal Gara’s nectra, and the doors he promised to open remain shut. He matters no more. We can be the chaos the Swathe needs, not him.”

Juraxi showed his teeth behind warped lips. “Faraganthar was our path to the Iron Icon—”

“Faraganthar was weak! He was a means to an end, don’t you see? He failed, and with him lying dead, even with their bloodwood fallen, Shal Gara thinks it won. Tarko thinks he won. I will not stand for that!”

Juraxi shook his head. The demon king had seen fit to spare him for a purpose, and that loyalty refused to die with Faraganthar. “This is about more than Tarko and Shal Gara. We must find the demons…”

The tip of the glaive pressed against Juraxi’s sternum.

“Incorrect, messenger,” warned Haidak. This has everything to do with Tarko. He ruined the war, and with him breathing, he will continue to be a splinter beneath my nails. And last time I checked, Juraxi, it was I who led the Fireborn, not a piece of Loamsedge scum with a melted face like you. Half of you are no better than marauders and Scorchfolk. Your bloodlines are filth. I’m beginning to doubt giving you that stone mask and red cloth.”

Before the noble could exercise more of his anger on Juraxi, charcoal branches snapped in the blackened forest.

“You’re not the only one who’s late, Haidak,” muttered Juraxi, scorned and feeling the sting of sweat on the remaining parts of his face that refused to heal.

Out of the veil of smoke emerged shapes of dark cloth and cowls over faces of jade. First a dozen, then twice that, until at last a hundred figures stood in silence in the ash. The Fireborn had gathered as commanded. Half had failed to make it.

A lone figure did not stop. It approached in measured pace, boots crushing the wasteland without pause. A bright red gown wrapped the individual from head to toe, and a full mask of jade left no apparent gap for eyes or mouth.

Juraxi stared, as he always did, at the stone-carved eyes and wondered hard who hid behind them. Haidak’s second had never taken their mask off. Juraxi had often wondered whether even Haidak knew of their identity, given what trust he put in this fellow.

“The surviving demons are gathering in the north near Sheertown, maybe seventy at the most. They are leaderless, aimless. Lost,” came the inscrutable voice from behind the stone. It was maddeningly hoarse and fair at the same time. Juraxi found himself leaning closer, peering.

Haidak brandished his finger as though he might use it to cut the newcomer’s throat. “I don’t care a speck of ash for the demons except that they do what I tell them from now on. I wager they will have their uses for what’s to come. Juraxi can inform them they have a new king now, and this one won’t choke at the moment of victory. If they wish to see their god again, they will obey.”

“I… can?” Juraxi asked, but he was given little time to ponder the wide variety of problems with such a task.

“Now what of the wretch?” Haidak demanded.

“Tarko has left Shal Gara. He hunts you.”

“Then let him do so, along with Eztaral and her Scions. They will soon see what foolish persistence buys them,” said Haidak with a noble sneer. “And as for you, our good friend.” Here he pointed at their third ringleader. “I have decided you will be responsible for leading him down a path straight to me and my glaive. Unless, of course, you have a problem or concern of conscience with doing so?”

It was a question with a sharpened edge, and they took their time to stare out across the Scorch. “Have I complained of anything yet, Baran?” they spoke confidently. “I have Tarko’s trust. He will come to you.”

“Then it is settled!” Haidak bayed, raising his hands to the sibilant hissing of the hundred Fireborn. His golden lancewing beat its wings like the complaints of a longsun storm as he paraded back and forth in celebration. Juraxi stood in silence, doubting – not for the first time – in the one they called a leader.

“Tarkosi Terelta and the Scions will die in the flames of our revenge!”

Thank you for reading Demon’s Reign. We hope you enjoyed our story and you’ll consider rating and reviewing it on Amazon, Goodreads, or anywhere you talk books. Thousands of books are published around the world every day, all competing to gain attention from you fine readers. If you enjoyed this book and want to read more like it in the future, then reviews are one of the best ways you can support authors and keep us writing.

Regardless of whether you leave a review or not, thank you for taking the time to read Demon’s Reign. Tarko, Serisi, and the Scions will return soon!

David Estes & Ben Galley