He turned back to Sev. “How many?” he asked. They needed to devise a defense strategy, but to do that, Tristan needed more information.
Sev swallowed, blinking slowly. The brief burst of energy the rockwine had given him was already fading away. “Near four hundred, I think. We had two hundred in my regiment, and we met with a second group last night. But those village attacks . . . they must have come from another group of soldiers, traveling somewhere else on the mountain. There’s no way our party could have gotten there in time. So there could be more . . .”
Tristan closed his eyes, nodding, as if merely confirming the number of guests at a dinner party. At least four hundred armed soldiers, coming here? When all their best fighters were gone?
He opened his eyes again. “How do we know you aren’t a part of the diversion?” he asked, considering the boy before him. Elliot’s betrayal had shaken him, and he did not want any more nasty surprises. “You’re a soldier, aren’t you? And you betrayed them. Why should we trust you?”
Sev stared dully at him, but made no answer. Tristan tried to think of what his father would do.
“Get Morra,” he said, twisting to address a guard behind him.
“Already here,” came Morra’s gruff voice as she moved her way to the front of the crowd. The guards made room for her, and she paused before Sev, propping both hands on her crutch as she considered him.
Tristan’s father trusted Morra implicitly. He said she had an uncanny ability to tell truth from lies, a knack for sniffing out information. Tristan had heard Beryk and the others whisper the term “shadowmage,” but of course his father didn’t hold with superstitions. There was no proof or written record that shadowmages were real, but Tristan knew the stories. If even half of them were true, he had no doubt that Morra was one of them.
It made a chill run down his spine. Tristan was honest by nature—possibly to a fault, given the trouble it had gotten him in with his father—but Morra still made him a bit uneasy. It was the secretiveness of her magic that bothered him, not the magic itself. Shadow magic could be used to sniff out lies, but it did so in a deceitful way—snooping and sneaking around. If people were just truthful, there would be no need for such magic—or for people to keep the fact that they had that magic a secret.
Or maybe Tristan was fooling himself. His fear of fire was something he hid from others, and maybe the threat of exposure was what made him dislike the idea of shadow magic.
Still, he couldn’t deny that it came in handy.
“Who have we here . . . ?” Morra murmured, expression thoughtful. “Friend or foe?”
“Friend,” Sev said. His face was clammy with sweat, but he sat up straighter as he continued. “And I was sent by another friend, Ilithya Shadowheart.”
Pheronia was not fit to rule, and the council manipulated her every move. I had to step in.
- CHAPTER 36 -
VERONYKA
VERONYKA TOOK AN UNCONSCIOUS step forward.
She’d been in a daze since she recognized the soldier they’d dragged in, filthy and bloody but unmistakable. The boy who had saved her life outside her cottage, and in turn, whose life she had saved from Val’s wrath. By convincing her sister to stay her hand, Veronyka had allowed this boy to deliver his message and warn them of the impending attack. Her head spun.
His arrival had been shocking enough—not to mention his dire message and Elliot’s betrayal—but nothing thus far had surprised her more than his last two words.
Veronyka thought her heart might have actually stopped.
Ilithya Shadowheart.
It was her maiora’s name. Well, the first half, anyway. When Veronyka was a child, Ilithya was too difficult to say, so she had simply used “grandmother” or “maiora.” Veronyka had never heard her called Shadowheart before, but something about it made a prickling awareness shoot through her.
And she wasn’t the only one to react so strongly.
“How do you know that name?” Morra demanded.
Veronyka stared between the two of them, breathless in anticipation.
“She was a bondservant with the soldiers’ party—working against them from the start. She tried to poison them all . . . to stop the attack, but . . .” He halted, panting, and Veronyka saw more than physical pain on his face. Nothing he had said confirmed this was the same Ilithya she’d been raised by, but nothing had contradicted it either. “I came instead to warn you and to deliver these.” He twitched his good arm, and the bag slid from his shoulder. He opened the flap, revealing that it was packed full of smooth gray stones.
Veronyka inhaled sharply at the familiar sight. It couldn’t be . . .
“Miseriya’s mercy,” Morra muttered under her breath, leaning closer. She turned to Tristan. “Are those . . . ?”
Tristan reached for the bag, hastily examining the contents before closing it again. He didn’t say a word, but his entire body crackled with suppressed energy. The crowd pushed in, but most hadn’t seen what was in Sev’s satchel—and it was plain that Tristan meant to keep it that way. Now was not the time to lose focus. If what the boy said was true, they had a small army coming for them.
Still, a bag full of phoenix eggs—a dozen by Veronyka’s count—was hard to ignore in a place like this.
Her arms tingled with something as bright and glittering as the sun on the River Aurys.
It felt like possibility. It felt like hope for the future . . . if they could survive the night.
Morra turned back to Sev. “Why would Ilithya choose you and not a fellow animage?”
“I am an animage.”
“An animage soldier?” she repeated skeptically, and Veronyka knew she was probing in his mind, using her shadow magic to discern if his words were true or false. She soon nodded, expression apologetic.
“Where is she now?” Morra pressed. “Ilithya?”
Sev opened his mouth to speak before swallowing thickly and shaking his head.
Morra swayed slightly, eyes glazed over—as if she was seeing something the others could not. Something from the soldier’s mind.
“Is she dead?” Veronyka whispered, looking between them. She itched to use her own shadow magic but knew she couldn’t risk it.
Sev nodded, and all the air left Veronyka’s lungs. If it was truly her maiora Ilithya, and she’d been alive all this time . . .
Veronyka thought back to the day Val had told her their grandmother was dead. Veronyka had figured Val had seen it, heard it—knew it—in the way she knew all manner of things Veronyka did not, and like a fool, she had taken her sister’s word as truth. Veronyka should have known better, even then, and was frustrated with herself as much as with Val. She scanned the surrounding faces for her sister, wanting to speak with her that instant, but she was nowhere to be found.
Morra straightened, blinking as she came back to herself. “Everything he says is the truth.”
A ripple of reaction spread through the crowd, as those at the front whispered what she’d said to those behind, while still more questions and concerns bounced back again.
“But how could a number so great move this far up Pyrmont unseen?” one of the guards asked, looking around the group. “A smoke signal should’ve been lit weeks ago, when they first started their climb.”