So Let Them Burn

Book 1: The Divine Traitors

by Kamilah Cole

Genres: YA Epic Fantasy; YA LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

Whip-smart and immersive, this Jamaican-inspired fantasy follows a gods-blessed heroine who’s forced to choose between saving her sister or protecting her homeland—perfect for fans of Iron Widow and The Priory of the Orange Tree. 
 
Faron Vincent can channel the power of the gods. Five years ago, she used her divine magic to liberate her island from its enemies, the dragon-riding Langley Empire. But now, at seventeen, Faron is all powered up with no wars to fight. She’s a legend to her people and a nuisance to her neighbors.
 
When she’s forced to attend an international peace summit, Faron expects that she will perform tricks like a trained pet and then go home. She doesn’t expect her older sister, Elara, forming an unprecedented bond with an enemy dragon—or the gods claiming the only way to break that bond is to kill her sister.
 
As Faron’s desperation to find another solution takes her down a dark path, and Elara discovers the shocking secrets at the heart of the Langley Empire, both must make difficult choices that will shape each other’s lives, as well as the fate of their world.

"By turns hopeful and devastating, So Let Them Burn is a masterful debut with a blazing heart. I was captivated from beginning to end by Cole’s sharp, clever prose and by her protagonists—two remarkable sisters with an unforgettable bond." — Chelsea Abdullah, author of The Stardust Thief

Release date: January 16, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 368

Sample

FARON VINCENT HAD BEEN A LIAR FOR LONGER THAN SHE’D BEEN A saint.

She’d learned from a young age that lies were a form of currency. They could buy freedom and earn forgiveness. They could alter reality faster than any kind of magic. A lie well told was itself magical, and Faron was nothing if not convincing.

She’d told three lies since this morning, and they’d each felt like a spell. She’d told her teacher that she’d try harder to bring up her grades before the end of the year. She’d promised her sister that she would go straight home after classes were over. And she’d sworn that she wouldn’t use summoning to beat Jordan Simmons in this race.

Was it her fault they always believed her?

To be fair, Faron didn’t always know she was lying in the moment. She’d intended to keep at least two of those promises—maybe all three, if she felt like acting particularly respectable. Then someone had spread around the schoolyard that she would be missing class to attend the Summit, and trouble had found her in the form of Jordan Simmons.

While the adults across the island of San Irie considered Faron a holy child, the same could not be said of her schoolmates. Jordan had approached her outside the gates, where she’d been standing in line to buy bag juice. The weather was the kind of hot that made her sorry to even be alive, and rolling up the sleeves of her shirtwaist had offered no relief. Faron had been watching the frost clouds curling from the vendor’s open cart with such longing that she hadn’t noticed Jordan until he was inches away from her.

“Missing school again, Vincent?” he’d sneered, flanked by two other fifth-form boys. Their horselike snickers had been a discordant note in her otherwise harmonious day. To anyone else, this might have signaled danger ahead. Faron, on the other hand, had only been bored. “Being the Empyrean is quite the con, isn’t it?”

“If it were a good con,” Faron had said without turning around, “then I wouldn’t still be smelling the dung that comes out of your mouth.”

She hadn’t bothered to mention the reality of war or the lingering nightmares or the heavy expectations that came with being the Childe Empyrean. Five years ago, when the gods had first given her that title and the unique ability to summon their infinite magic, she had only been thinking of protecting San Irie. She hadn’t realized what she was signing up for—or what she was signing away.

But even if she’d wanted to get into all of that with anyone, Jordan and his gang would have only used it against her. No one wanted to hear that being chosen by the gods to save the world was a curse rather than a blessing. She was a symbol, and symbols didn’t complain.

Instead, Faron had traded a handful of silver coins for a pineapple bag juice. While biting a hole in the corner of the bag to drink from, she’d eyed Jordan’s calculating expression. He was the kind of bully who was too strategic to lose his temper. He thought about the best way to hobble his victims and then he struck to kill. So it had come as no surprise when he’d tried to hit her where it hurt: her pride.

“If you’re so brilliant, then race me after school,” he’d said. “No gods and no magic. The war is over. It’s time to prove you’re no better than any of us.”

And Faron had never met trouble that she didn’t want to get into. She’d extended her free hand with a smirk. “Thirty rayes if I win?”

“It’s a deal.”

With a handshake, Jordan Simmons had sealed his fate. Or so she’d thought then.

Now they were halfway through the agreed-upon track, surrounded by a screaming crowd of neighborhood kids, and Faron was losing.

Loose braids slapped her back and neck where they’d escaped from her head wrap. Palm trees waved in the wind. Her skirts were tied around her waist, allowing her nimble feet to dance over tan dirt and smooth stones. But here she was losing the footrace that would end at the fossilized dragon egg in the town square.

On this stretch of road, there were no shortcuts to take or obstacles to throw in her opponent’s way. There was only a straight sprint to the egg and too much space between her and the boy in first place. Deal or no deal, that was unacceptable.

Faron held what little breath was still in her lungs and called on the gods.

Time slowed to a crawl, a second stretching into an eternity. The world took on a liquid haze, as if she’d plunged into the crystal-clear Ember Sea that surrounded the island. Her soul swelled into a beacon that screamed come to me, come to me, come to me.…

And, like always, it was the gods who answered her call.

Irie appeared in a flash of light, her golden crown piercing the sky like a blade. She wore a hoodless robe, wide sleeved and embroidered with gold thread, over a white high-necked dress that fell to her calves. Her full gold-painted lips twisted into a frown. Even with her pupilless eyes shining amber, the sun goddess Irie, ruler of the daytime and patron goddess of the island, looked as if she should be going to see a play in Port Sol, not making house calls to a seventeen-year-old in the landlocked Iryan town of Deadegg.

But that was her problem. Faron had called. Irie had answered. Five years, and that hadn’t changed.

Lend me your strength.

Faron gasped as she felt Irie’s power flood her body. At first, it was almost too much. Summoners trained for years to hold the magic of just one of their ancestral spirits, known as astrals, without dying. Even the most advanced santi—summoners who had dedicated their lives to the temples—didn’t dare channel more than five astrals at a time. But there wasn’t a single summoner on the island of San Irie who could call upon a god.

Except for her.

Faron felt as if she were on fire for a second, a minute, an hour, a lifetime. Her nerves crawled as if she were being shaken from the inside out, as if Irie were shoving against Faron’s ill-fitting skin in an attempt to make room for more magic than her body could hold. Her vision whited out. Her ears rang. Her heart pounded so fast that she thought it would stop.

Then it was over. Irie was within her, but Faron was in control.

And she had a race to win.

A bead of sweat rolled down Faron’s cheek as she blinked into the present. The riotous jeers of the crowd flowed back in. The dragon egg peeked out from over the top of the corner store in the distance. Jordan was still in front of her.

But not for long.

Faron called on the divine magic now at her fingertips and willed it to push her body beyond its limits. In the five years she’d spent with the gods, she’d found more creative uses for Irie’s powers than roasting breadfruit. The sun was fire, energy, power. She directed that power into her lagging muscles and wheezing lungs, feeling Irie’s magic leak past the goddess’s obvious disapproval.

One minute, Faron was trying not to faint before she crossed the finish line. The next, she was eating up the distance between her and Jordan until she was close enough to count his locs.

He frowned at her. “Hey, Vincent! That’s not fair!”

“Take it up with my patron,” she sang back. “You can find a statue of her in any temple!”

Jordan cursed so colorfully that Faron laughed as she skipped past, leaving him to choke on the cloud of dust her feet kicked up.

The town square yawned open before her, surrounded by squat wooden storefronts too low to block out the sun. Her hand slapped the short brick wall that surrounded the egg a moment later. Technically, this was where the race ended, but adrenaline pulsed through her, twining with her borrowed magic. She jumped the wall and kept running until she hit the egg, then reached up to grab one of the massive scales that made up its sickly gray shell. The wall had been built to keep people from doing exactly what Faron was doing right now, but she wasn’t the first Deadegg teenager to make this climb and she wouldn’t be the last. The egg predated the town, probably predated the island based on the petrified stone that coated the scales, and Faron had come to find it comforting.

Sure, dragons hatched from living eggs this size—eggs of gorgeous color hiding terrifying young monsters within—but this one was a monument. It was part of her home. More than that, it was proof that dragons couldn’t just be born and cruel and dangerous; they could be killed and defeated and forgotten.

Faron had survived the decades-long war against the Langlish Empire, a world power to the east of San Irie that used dragons as fire-breathing weapons to conquer land that was never theirs to own. By now, she knew the monsters’ weaknesses better than almost anyone. But it was nice to have more than memories. More than nightmares.

She perched on top of the egg, her skirts spilling back down to her ankles, and grinned as she waited for Jordan to catch up. The constant scent of brimstone wafted from the base, but Faron ignored it. Magic still hummed under her skin, waiting for further direction, and she didn’t want to let it go yet. She wasn’t ready for the crushing emptiness and dizzying exhaustion that would follow.

This is a poor use of my abilities, Empyrean, a smoky voice grumbled at the back of her mind. Must you always be so childish?

Of the three gods, Irie was always the one most devoted to making Faron feel like a toddler. Obie, the god of the moon and the lord of the night, spoke so rarely that Faron could ignore his disapproval most of the time. Mala, the goddess of the stars and the keeper of the astrals, was the most likely to encourage Faron’s stupidity. But Irie took her role as the supreme goddess very seriously—so seriously that Faron often wondered if she regretted giving their power to Faron in the first place.

Even though it had been five years since Faron had completed her calling as the Childe Empyrean and freed the island from Langlish occupation.

Even though the gods were the ones who had decided, for some reason, to stick around after the empire’s retreat.

Even though she deserved to live her own life now. A peaceful life. With or without Irie’s approval.

Empyrean, Irie snapped when she didn’t answer. Ignoring me does not undo your immaturity.

I’m seventeen, she reminded the goddess. And my name is Faron.

You are the Childe Empyrean. These insipid stunts cannot change the truth.

Faron forced herself not to respond. There was nothing she could say that wouldn’t sound ridiculous anyway. The war was over, Langley’s colonial hold on San Irie shattered and their remaining dragons subdued, but the iconography of the Childe Empyrean was still spread across the island. Santi commanded respect and reverence for devoting their lives to gods that may or may not answer their prayers, but Faron was a thing of legend. A living saint. Tangible proof that the Iryan gods not only existed… but they were listening.

If she entered the corner store that Jordan was currently jogging past, she would see her own face, five years younger, smiling in miniature from hand-carved statues. Every year, people across the island made pilgrimages to her house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, begging her to intercede between them and the gods. Blaming her if their wishes didn’t come true.

Even still, she didn’t hold that against them. The war with the Langlish had taken something from everyone, including those who hadn’t fought. Faron understood better than anyone how bleak helplessness could lead people to ask someone more powerful for help. She just wished she could tell those hopeful crowds that they wouldn’t necessarily like the answer they’d be given.

“Cheater,” Jordan complained as he approached, pulling her from her dark thoughts. “I didn’t use any summoning to win the race.”

“That’s hardly my concern.” Faron lifted her eyebrows in a picture of innocence. “And you didn’t win the race.”

“We said no powers.”

“You said no powers. I don’t remember agreeing with you.”

Jordan scowled. “You always do this.”

“And yet you always make bets with me.”

“I can start ignoring you outright if you prefer. It would certainly make my life easier.”

Faron waved away the comment with a lazy hand. It didn’t matter how many times she lied or cheated. The people’s memories for her heroic actions during the war were long, but those same memories were short when it came to any of her less-than-heroic actions since. Even Jordan was repeating the same things he’d said during their last footrace, and it hadn’t stopped him from challenging her to this one. At this point, there didn’t seem to be anything that Faron could do that would have real consequences.

Or maybe the problem was that she already lived those consequences. Enemies and admirers were the closest that Faron had gotten to having friends since she’d come home alive but haunted, reeking of smoke and ash. She spoke to the gods more than she spoke to people her own age. She had her sister, Elara, but Elara also had Reeve and her sixth-form friends. Faron hated school enough that she already knew she would fail the exam for sixth form, if she didn’t fail this year entirely, and school was the only chance she had to mix with her peers.

Maybe that was the real price she paid for being the patron saint of lies. There was no Faron Vincent. Only the Childe Empyrean.

“Give me my rayes and take the lesson,” said Faron, forcing those thoughts away, too. “If you keep trying to use your track talent against me, expect me to use my powers against you.”

Jordan’s scowl deepened, but he dug through the pockets of his khaki trousers for the money. Faron shifted on the uncomfortable rounded tip of the egg as she waited, surveying the sprawling view she had of the town. Behind the businesses were rows of houses with thatched roofs, yards separated from one another by fences or cacti. Chicken coops pockmarked the grounds, and goats grazed in the open fields. She couldn’t see her own house from here, but she knew which direction it was in; if she squinted, she might be able to spot the splashes of forest greens and cypress browns that made up her father’s garden.

There was none of that right now, though. In fact, the farther she looked, the more the edges of Deadegg seemed to be smudged by fog.

Fog that seemed to be moving.

Within the cloudy puffs, she could see a shape—no, shapes. Shapes that were dark and large and worryingly familiar. Horses. And not just horses, but an entire horse-drawn coach. It was an unusual sight, both because mules and donkeys were more common in rural Deadegg and because she didn’t know anyone in town who could afford a coach of any kind. The longer she stared, the more she was able to make out the ocean blue of the carriage, the grass green of the drawn curtains, the golden detailing catching the sunlight. Her heart stopped, and in that long, silent space between beats, she noticed a flag in all three colors waving from the rooftop. The Iryan flag was the last confirmation she needed.

For the first time all day, Faron felt true fear.

The queen was here.

ELARA VINCENT HAD BEEN A SURVIVOR LONG BEFORE SHE’D GONE to war.

It was a mandatory trait for an eldest daughter, the experimental first child whose personality was a diamond formed under the extreme pressure of her parents’ expectations. Growing up, it had manifested in fervent peacekeeping and anxious respectfulness, especially after her sister was born. Faron, in all her glorious chaos, teased Elara endlessly for being docile. Nonconfrontational. Prewar Elara didn’t believe in going to bed angry or being needlessly impolite—even to old Miss Johnson from down the street, who took the briefest pause as an invitation to tell you how each of her nine kids were doing.

But being gentle on a battlefield was a good way to get killed, and Elara hadn’t survived the war against Langley at thirteen to shed the lessons that had kept her alive.

The first and most important one was simple: It was her or them.

Now eighteen years old, Elara sized up her ex-girlfriend Cherry McKay for a weakness to exploit, confident before they even began that she would win this fight in three moves.

Two, if Cherry made the same mistake.

The gods had blessed Iryans with the ability to summon ancestral spirits, and that gift was wielded in three general ways. For most, it was commonplace, taught in schools and mainly used for communication. For some, it was a religious calling, a talent to be dedicated to the gods at one of the temples across the island. For the rest, it was a weapon to be wielded in service of the nation, a means of protecting the Iryan people from their enemies.

Combat summoning was so heavily associated with the Iryan Military Forces that most civilians didn’t bother learning it, but Elara was not most civilians. Before the war, she’d practiced her forms and tested her limits. During and after the war, she’d built on those skills and perfected them. Combat summoning required discipline: the knowledge of how to call an astral, contain an astral, and safeguard your own strength. The longer she channeled an ancestral spirit, the more her own soul eroded until her body shut down to save what was left—and that was a hard thing to remember with enemies raining down their own magic upon her.

But there had been no margin for error then, and there was no margin for error now. By the end of this week, she might be a soldier. Officially, this time. She just had to defeat Cherry first.

“And,” Aisha Harlow shouted, “summon your astrals!”

Only Elara could see the ancestral spirits who answered her call. They were her relatives, after all, summoned by her to support her in this fight. For most, the astrals who came to them were the spirits of family recently deceased, though she’d heard stories of summoners who could call any dead relative to whom they’d had the strongest emotional connection. Luckily, for Elara, those ancestors were one and the same.

The astrals of her maternal aunts, each one killed during the war, surrounded her now: Vittoria Durand, the youngest, with her hair up in twists and a mischievous smile on her face; Mahalet Durand, the oldest, thick with muscle carved from years of swimming and running track; and Gabourey Durand, the middle sister and the most violent, whose love for the bottle was only equal to her love for the fight. Elara reached for Aunt Vittoria, her skin warming as the extra soul settled beneath it.

On a hot day like today, it felt like torture to summon. But Elara already felt stronger, powerful, more dangerous.

Across the grass, Cherry smirked at her. Elara smirked back.

“Ready?” Aisha’s burgundy braids fluttered as she dived out of the way. “FIGHT!”

Lightning crackled across the field. Cherry’s fingertips sparked white-hot, wielding the electricity her astral helped her conjure like a whip. Elara met her with a simple shield—first move—that swallowed the bolt, enhancing her own magic. The shield shrank to a ball of energy that hovered between her palms. Lightning shot across the surface of it, making it glow almost as bright as the sun.

Sweat gathered on Elara’s skin. Her body felt as if it were on fire.

Finish her, niece, Aunt Vittoria crooned inside her head.

Not yet, Elara replied. If she attacked now, Cherry would just throw up a shield of her own. Her ex had quick instincts, but she was bad at multitasking; she could block an attack, but she’d leave herself open to a counterattack. In that time, Elara could take her down, a fight won in three moves. But she knew she could do it in two. She could do better, and wasn’t that the goal? To be the best?

She wouldn’t get into the Iryan Military Forces—into the aerial branch called the Sky Battalion—if she wasn’t.

Beneath her feet, the ground shook as if an earthquake were hitting Deadegg, but Elara remembered this feeling too well to look away. Cherry had no such focus; she never did. As she’d done every time before, she allowed herself to get distracted by what was happening on the street.

And that was when Elara attacked.

She swung the ball of energy like a cricket bat. Cherry was blasted off her feet. Elara drew on Aunt Vittoria’s magic one last time to soften the ground, saving Cherry from a painful landing. Then she purged the astral from her body and gasped like a drowning man rising above the waves.

Victory in only two moves. She was improving.

“Every time,” Cherry complained as Elara joined everyone in gathering around her. “That one wasn’t even my fault!”

“Nice job, El,” Wayne Pryor said as Aisha helped Cherry sit up. “Did you catch the commotion, though? The queen has arrived.”

Elara had ridden in enough of Queen Aveline’s fancy coaches to know what it sounded like when the horses cantered over the intermittently paved Deadegg streets. It had been impressive the first couple of times, but now she just associated the rumbling sound with at least a full day of her sister, Faron, being in a bad mood.

“Do you guys have to leave?” Aisha asked. Her eyes flicked over Elara’s shoulder to where Reeve Warwick was sitting in the shade of a guinep tree, buried between the pages of his latest book. As if he could sense the sudden attention, he glanced up, but whatever he saw in their expressions apparently wasn’t more interesting than what he was reading.

This field, with its overgrown grass, wilted wooden fence, and fallen barbed wire, had once been part of a farm. But many of the farms in Deadegg had gone under, leaving fields like this as their graveyards. As sad as they looked, these lots were better off than the blackened patches of land that had been ravaged by dragonfire, charred soil that could never again yield new life, livelihoods that had been destroyed in an instant. At least here she could still dream that, in a few more years, this field would transform into something new.

Besides, Elara liked to spar here because it was only about a ten-minute walk from her house, so she could get home quickly when she needed to. Today, she didn’t need to. She may have fought every battle alongside her sister, a soldier in theory though never in rank, but Elara was not the Childe Empyrean. The queen was never in Deadegg for her.

“No,” she answered, and left it at that. “Cherry, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Humiliated, but fine.”

Cherry was on her feet now, her plump lower lip curled into an exaggerated pout. A year ago, Elara would have taken this as an invitation to sway forward and nibble at that lip, to wrap an arm around that narrow waist and pull their bodies together, to press a kiss to the little freckle on Cherry’s throat until she forgot to be upset by her defeat. She didn’t miss Cherry, but she missed that playful closeness. It had been a nice distraction from the doubts forever screaming in her head.

“Let’s take a break,” Elara suggested. “Who wants to go get us some juice?”

One quick hand game of sun moon stars later, Wayne was jumping the fence and jogging down the sidewalk to find a cart. Elara headed over to Reeve, who paused to hold his place in the book with a blade of grass before he set it aside. Her smile widened when he pulled a bottle of water from his bag.

“I love you the most,” she told him after she’d downed half of it.

“We both know that’s not true,” he drawled, “but I’ll take it.”

Reeve was the picture of relaxation here, his back resting against the curved bark and his legs crossed at the ankles. It was a side of him that Elara hadn’t always had access to. She had met him when he’d stumbled into the Iryan war camp at thirteen years old, and even that almost hadn’t happened; the soldiers had been ready to kill him for somehow evading the scouts and the perimeter guard. He’d been shaking then, rolled papers stolen from his father’s war room gathered to his chest as he’d gasped in broken patois, “I need—I need to talk to the queen!”

But he was Langlish, and the son of Commander Gavriel Warwick, the leader of the Langlish Empire. Reeve was now allowed, by royal decree, to live in San Irie, but it was only so he wouldn’t be murdered for treason by his own people. As far as friends went, he had her, and by extension he had her neighbors Aisha, Cherry, and Wayne. As far as family went, he’d been taken in by the otherwise childless Hanlons, and they seemed to treat him well enough.

Everyone else in and out of the town line took one look at Reeve’s silver dragon’s-eye pendant or heard him speak patois with his persistent Langlish accent, and they held him personally responsible for everything the Langlish Empire had done to their island. Elara was glad to see him this loose, this open, this calm, but it made her sad, too.

Reeve had betrayed everything he’d known to be an enemy of two countries.

She dropped down next to him in the shade, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. “It’s hot!”

“Is it?” Reeve asked with faux surprise. “On an island in the middle of the Ember Sea?”

Elara jabbed him with her elbow as the rest of the group made their way over. Instead of juice boxes, they were each holding a different flavor of freeze pop; Elara was handed a pineapple one and Reeve received the last cream soda. Because she was a good friend, she didn’t complain.

“Can you believe that by this time next week at least one of us might be in the Sky Battalion?” Wayne asked, sitting in front of them. He shoved his dark curls away from his forehead, but they immediately tumbled back over his damp skin. Cherry’s head rested on his shoulder, her eyes half-lidded, her skirts lifted to bare her shins to the mild breeze. “Or, even better, we could be chosen to pilot Valor.”

“I can’t believe they commissioned a new drake at all,” said Aisha, using her freeze pop to cool the back of her neck. “It’s been years. Not since—which one was it?”

“Nobility,” Elara answered around a yawn. “The last one built before the war, and the one that now acts as the queen’s personal transport.”

Drakes—the giant flying metal war machines made from a textured material called scalestone—were semisentient; they were built by summoners channeling astrals to mold the scalestone into the size and shape of dragons. Iryan magic could affect any metal as easily as it affected the world around it, but scalestone was impervious to dragonfire, and it amplified Iryan magic until it could rival the war beasts in power. That made it San Irie’s greatest resource, especially since it could only be found in San Irie.

Years of experimentation had revealed that using astrals to build the drakes left a faint trace of their lives behind in the particles of the metal. Those traces made it impossible to predict what the resulting drake would look for in a pilot, and three pilots were needed just to get it off the ground. But no one made the leap from regular soldier to Sky Battalion pilot without there being an open drake to fly.

Thankfully, Queen Aveline had decided to have a fifth one built leading up to the San Irie International Peace Summit, a drake she had named Valor. Political vultures from empires across the continent of Nova—Étolia, Joya del Mar, and, of course, Langley—would be arriving in the Iryan capital of Port Sol in just a few days. The queen wanted to establish San Irie as an independent island nation on an international scale. To force the countries of the closest continent to negotiate with San Irie as an equal, not as a temporarily freed Langlish colony. Though the announcement of the Summit had proven controversial, even with her own parents, Elara had barely registered the enemies who would soon be on their shores.

No pilots had been chosen for Valor yet. Recruitment was tomorrow. And Elara was old enough to enlist. Her dream had been rekindled. Better still, it was actually in reach.

So what if she hadn’t gotten around to telling her family? She was ready.

She didn’t have to be the Childe Empyrean to do something incredible.

As soon as she sucked the first piece of her freeze pop into her mouth, a ball of light swirled into view.

An astral call.

Elara squinted into the light, cool pineapple juice melting on her tongue as the astral resolved itself into her grandfather Winston. Her father’s father looked exactly like his son, except his goatee was fully gray while her father’s was graying and his head was shaved whereas her father had grown locs halfway down his back.

A message for you, said Pa Winston, flickering at the edges.

Elara already felt as if she could sleep for at least three hours, but if she didn’t give her ancestor permission to share her body, then she wouldn’t get the message. And if she ignored her father’s message, then she’d be in for it when she got home.

She sighed. Yes, okay.

Pa Winston settled inside of her, his presence like a thick blanket around her soul. It would have been soothing if it wasn’t so unforgivably hot today. But she breathed around the flare of heat and opened her eyes, allowing him to feel the breeze, to smell the earthy scent of grass and dirt, to hear the quiet conversation her friends were having. To feel alive again.

In return, he spoke in a voice identical to her father’s: Elara, you and Reeve need to come home as soon as possible. Dinn. . .