The Hurricane Wars

Book 1: Hurricane Wars

by Thea Guanzon

Genres: Dragons & Mythical Creatures; Romantic Fantasy; Fantasy Romance

Synopsis

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

"An incredible debut full of rich atmosphere, clever world building, opposing magic, and sizzling romance, The Hurricane Wars is my newest obsession."— KERRI MANISCALCO, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Throne of the Fallen

"I physically could not stop reading! Mark my words: lives will be changed by The Hurricane Wars.”  — ALI HAZELWOOD, New York Times bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis

The fates of two bitter enemies with opposing magical abilities are swept together in The Hurricane Wars, the spellbinding debut in a fantasy romance trilogy set in a Southeast Asia–inspired world ravaged by storms, perfect for fans of Fourth Wing and A Court of Thorns and Roses

The heart is a battlefield.

All Talasyn has ever known is the Hurricane Wars. Growing up an orphan in a nation under siege by the ruthless Night Emperor, she found her family among the soldiers who fight for freedom. But she is hiding a deadly secret: light magic courses through her veins, a blazing power believed to have been wiped out years ago that can cut through the Night Empire’s shadows.

Prince Alaric, the emperor’s only son and heir, has been tasked with obliterating any threats to the Night Empire’s rule with the strength of his armies and mighty shadow magic. He discovers the greatest threat yet in Talasyn: a girl burning brightly on the battlefield with the magic that killed his grandfather, turned his father into a monster, and ignited the Hurricane Wars. He tries to kill her, but in a clash of light and dark, their powers merge and create a force the likes of which has never been seen.

This war can only end with them. But an even greater danger is coming, and the strange magic they can create together could be the only way to overcome it. Talasyn and Alaric must decide… are they fated to join hands, or destroy each other?

An exquisite fantasy brimming with unforgettable characters and sizzling enemies-to-lovers romance set in a richly drawn world, The Hurricane Wars marks the breathtaking debut of an extraordinary new writer.

 “The Hurricane Wars is everything I love—intricate world-building, unique magic, and a gleeful, smoldering romance. I’m obsessed.”— HANNAH WHITTEN, New York Times bestselling author of For the Wolf

“This book made me giddy! Such a gleeful collection of my favorite tropes, all written in a fresh and engaging world, with a deep emotional center. One of my favorite books of this year!” — KATEE ROBERT, New York Times bestselling author of the Dark Olympus series

Release date: October 3, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 480

Sample

Prologue

He heard the girl before he saw her, a high and golden hum that cut through the chaos of battle like the first flare of sunrise.

Sheets of floating ice seesawed and creaked under his boots as he ran across the frozen lake, making his way toward the sound. It beckoned to him amidst the other noises piercing the winter air—the screaming, the rattle of crossbows, the roar of cannons, all from the burning city that lay behind the ancient forest at the water’s edge. The fanned gaps between the longleaf pines offered glimpses of destruction in veins of red-gold embers, their needle-pricked canopy silhouetted against a crown of smoke beneath the seven moons.

There was smoke out here on the ice as well, but it was the smoke of aetherspace, not inferno. Shadow bloomed over frost in shivering rings, trapping everyone trying to escape the city, everyone except him and his legionnaires. With a wave of his gauntleted hand, each dark barrier parted before him, until—finally—

There she was.

Loose strands of bedraggled chestnut hair streamed in the montane wind, escaping her braid to frame an oval face with freckled, olive-skinned features. She was coltish on the bobbing ice, light blazing in her hands against the swirling darkness, the twitching body of one of his men crumpled at her feet. He hurtled forward, a weapon of his own blocking what would have been her killing blow to his erstwhile legionnaire, and as she staggered back, her eyes met his, her magic reflected in shards of gold setting fire to brown irises, and perhaps this, too, was how a war began. In the space between heartbeats. In the room of night.

He lunged at her.

 

Chapter One

Wartime weddings were all the rage in a land where every single day threatened, quite emphatically, to be one’s last, but the skies could rain stones for seven nights without ever hitting an available officiant. Most clerics were at the front lines, singing to Sardovian troops of Mahagir the Saber-Heart’s courage and guiding the souls of dying soldiers to the eternal twilight of Adapa the Harvester’s willow groves. By some rare stroke of good fortune, however, there was one cleric remaining in the mountain city of Frostplum, where Talasyn’s regiment was stationed and where her fellow helmsmen Khaede and Sol had decided to pledge their troth.

Not that it’s any great mystery as to why they left this grandfather behind, Talasyn mused, watching from a dim corner of the thatched longhouse as the stooped, elderly cleric in pale yellow robes struggled to lift a large pewter goblet over the crackling fire that was reflecting off his marble-ball scalp. In reed-thin and quavering tones, he meandered haphazardly through the closing words of the marriage rite while the bride glared at him.

Khaede had a glare that could cut through metalglass. It was a miracle that the frail little man wasn’t sliced into ribbons on the spot. He eventually managed to hold the smoke-warmed goblet to the groom’s lips and then to Khaede’s, so that the couple could drink of the golden lychee wine consecrated to Thonba, goddess of home and hearth.

From where she hung back at the edge of the crowd, Talasyn applauded along with the other soldiers when the cleric tremulously pronounced Khaede and Sol bonded for life. Sol flashed a shy grin, one that Khaede was quick to press her lips against, her ire at the bumbling officiant a thing of the past. The raucous cheers from their comrades echoed off the thick limestone walls.

“Think you might be next, helmsman?”

The jovial quip came from a point over Talasyn’s shoulder and she rolled her eyes. “Nitwit.” As Khaede’s closest friend, she’d been on the receiving end of similar wisecracks all evening and it had left her feeling rather defensive. “Why would that even be on my list of priorities—” Her brain caught up to her tongue as she turned around, and she snapped to attention upon realizing who the jester was. “Respectfully speaking, sir.”

“At ease,” said Darius, an amused smile lurking underneath his bushy beard. When Talasyn joined up five years ago, the coxswain’s hair had been salt-and-pepper; now it was mostly just salt. He lowered his voice so as not to be overheard by the people around them. “The Amirante would like a word.”

Talasyn’s gaze darted to where she’d spotted Ideth Vela in the crowd earlier. The woman who held supreme command over the entirety of Sardovia’s armed forces was now in the process of disappearing into a side room, accompanied by a portly officer sporting a black horseshoe mustache. “General Bieshimma’s back from Nenavar already?”

“Just arrived,” said Darius. “As I understand it, the mission went belly-up and he had to pull out. He and the Amirante need to discuss a crucial matter with you, so—go.”

Talasyn made her way through the crowd. She didn’t hesitate to use her elbows, her sights fixed on the door at the other end of the longhouse behind which Bieshimma and the Amirante had vanished. She was so curious that it burned. And it had only partly to do with the fact that she’d been summoned.

The embittered league of nation-states known as the Sardovian Allfold had sent General Bieshimma southeast of the Continent to the mysterious islands of the Nenavar Dominion, in an attempt to form an alliance. Perhaps even rekindle one, if the old stories were to be believed. The general was a former political adviser who’d swapped his badge of office for sword and shield, and he had been expected to utilize all his diplomatic prowess in convincing the Nenavarene queen to help Sardovia defeat the Night Empire. Things had clearly not gone according to plan, given his swift return, but still—Bieshimma had been to Nenavar.

Talasyn’s stomach fluttered with the blend of intrigue and unease that thoughts of the Nenavar Dominion always, without fail, evoked in her. She’d never been there, had never so much as strayed from Sardovia’s dwindling borders, but the slightest mention of that reclusive archipelago across the Eversea always left some part of her oddly hollow, as though she’d forgotten something very important, and she was desperate to find out what it was.

In all her twenty years, she had yet to tell a soul about the strange connection she felt to Nenavar. It was a secret, too fragile to be spoken out loud. But talking to someone who had just returned from there seemed as good a step in the right direction as any.

Despite her eagerness, Talasyn slowed down when she passed by one of the lance corporals who had escorted General Bieshimma on his diplomatic mission. The boy was pink-cheeked from the cold outside, snowflakes melting on the upright collar of his uniform as he recounted the adventure to a small circle of raptly attentive wedding guests.

Everyone else was in uniform as well, including Talasyn. Wool breeches, thick boots, and padded coats the color of orange peels. There was no time for pretty dresses or an elaborate ceremony. This wedding was a stolen moment in between skirmishes.

“It went as badly as it did when we last sent an envoy to the Nenavar Dominion,” the lance corporal was saying. “Remember, a couple of years back? Although I’ll grant that this time they let us make landfall instead of turning us away at the harbor again, it was only so we could rest and resupply. Their queen, the Zahiya-lachis, still refused to see us. Bieshimma gave the harbor guards the slip and set out for the capital on horseback, but he wasn’t even allowed into the royal palace, apparently. The concerns of outsiders are not the concerns of the Dominion—that’s what the harbor guards told us when we tried to state our case.”

A bowman leaned forward with a conspiratorial twinkle in his eyes. “See any dragons while you were there, then?”

Talasyn stopped walking altogether and other conversations happening nearby petered out as several soldiers craned their necks in interest.

“No,” said the lance corporal. “But I never left the docks, and the skies were overcast.”

“I don’t even think they’re real,” said an infantryman, sniffing. “All we have to go on are rumors. If you ask me, it’s smart what the Nenavarene are doing, letting the rest of Lir believe that their dragons exist. People won’t bother you if you’ve supposedly got an army of giant fire-breathing worms at your disposal.”

“I’d kill for a giant fire-breathing worm,” the bowman said wistfully. “We’d win the war with even just one.”

The group started bickering over whether a dragon could bring down a stormship. Talasyn left them to it.

A surfeit of vague images rushed through her head as she stepped away: from nowhere, so sudden, in the space of only a moment’s breath. She could barely make sense of them before they darted out of reach.

A coil of slick scales undulating in the sunlight, and maybe a crown as sharp as diamond, as clear as ice. Something inside her, awakened by the soldiers’ conversation, tried to fight its way out.

What on earth—

She blinked. And the images were gone.

It was likely an effect of the pine-scented smoke from various firepits suffusing the longhouse, not to mention the sheer heat radiating from so many bodies crammed into one narrow structure. Sol was kind and charming and much loved, and it showed in how nearly a quarter of the regiment had turned up for his wedding.

They were definitely not here for his bride—rude, prickly, caustic Khaede—but Sol adored her enough for a hundred people, anyway.

As she reached the closed door of the side room, Talasyn glanced back at the newlyweds. They were surrounded by effusive well-wishers clutching mugs of hot ale while the regiment’s field band struck up a lively tune on fife, bugle, and goatskin drum. A beaming Sol pressed kisses to the back of Khaede’s hand and she tried to frown in annoyance but failed miserably, the two of them looking as radiant as it was possible to look in helmsmen’s winter uniforms, the garlands of dried flowers around their necks serving as the only nod to their status as bride and groom. Once in a while, Khaede’s free hand would come to rest on her still-flat stomach and Sol’s blue-black eyes would shine like the Eversea on a summer day against his oak-brown skin.

Talasyn had no idea how these two planned on caring for a baby in the midst of a war that had spread throughout the whole Continent, but she was happy for them. And she wasn’t jealous, exactly, but the sight of the newlyweds stirred in her the same old yearning that she’d lived with for twenty years as an orphan. A yearning for somewhere she could belong, and for someone she could belong to.

What would it be like, Talasyn wondered as Sol chuckled at something Khaede said and leaned in to hide his face in the slope of her neck, his arm looped around her waist, to laugh like that with someone? To be touched like that? An ache shivered through her as she let herself imagine it, just a little bit, reaching for a phantom of an embrace.

A nearby drunken soldier stumbled forward, splashing ale all over the floor by Talasyn’s boots. The sour odor assailed her nostrils and she flinched, briefly overcome by childhood memories of caretakers stinking of steeped grains and curdled milk, those men of harsh words and heavy hands.

Years ago, now. 

Long gone. The orphanage in the slums had been destroyed along with the rest of Hornbill’s Head, and all of its vicious caretakers had probably been crushed underneath the rubble. And she couldn’t discuss a crucial matter with her superiors while in the throes of despair over some spilled ale.

Talasyn straightened her spine and steadied her breathing; then she rapped smartly on the door of the side room.

As though in response, the deep, brassy tones of warning gongs pierced through the limestone facade of the building, cutting across the merriment like knives.

All music and chatter ceased. Talasyn and her comrades looked around as the watchtowers continued their urgent hymn. They were stunned at first, disbelieving, but gradually a tidal wave of movement swept through the firelit longhouse as the wedding guests sprang to action.

The Night Empire was attacking.

Talasyn ran into the silver night, adrenaline coursing through her veins, a numbing layer against the freezing cold air that bit at her exposed face. Lights were winking out all across Frostplum, window-squares of cheerful gold fading into blackness. It was a precaution to avoid becoming an easy target for air raids, but it wouldn’t do much good. All seven of Lir’s moons hung in the sky in their various phases of waxing and waning, shedding a stark brilliance over the snowy mountains.

And, if Kesathese troops had brought in a stormship, the whole city might as well be a dandelion puff in a stiff breeze. Its houses were erected from stone and mortar and covered in wooden roof trusses and multilayered thatch, built strong enough to withstand the harsh elements, but nothing could withstand the Night Empire’s lightning cannons.

Due to its remote location, all the way up in the Sardovian Highlands, Frostplum had always been a peaceful settlement, drowsing in evergreen blankets of longleaf pine. Tonight, however, it was plunged into mayhem, fur-clad cityfolk stampeding to the shelters and shouting frantically for one another amidst a whirlwind of military activity. It was finally happening, what everyone had feared, why Talasyn’s regiment had been sent here in the first place.

While bowmen took up their positions on the walls and infantrymen assembled barricades in the streets and helmsmen hurried to the grid, Talasyn squinted up at the starry heavens. There probably wasn’t a stormship, she conceded—she’d have spotted its hulking silhouette by now.

She quickened her pace and joined the scramble toward the grid, dozens of army-issued boots trampling snow into mud. It seemed to take ages before they reached the outskirts of the city, where slender coracles bearing Allfold sails striped orange and red were docked atop platforms of honeycombed steel. Curved at the ends like canoes, the small airships, nicknamed wasps because of their diminutive size and lethal sting, gleamed in the copious moonlight.

In the mad dash to her coracle, Talasyn found herself running alongside Khaede, who was also heading for hers.

“You can’t be serious!” Talasyn yelled over the clamor of warning gongs and officers’ barked instructions. “You’re two months along—”

“Not so loud,” Khaede hissed. The line of her ebony jaw was resolute against the falling snow. “The bean sprout and I will be fine. Worry about

yourself.” She clapped Talasyn on the arm and was gone before the latter could reply, swallowed up by the throng of helmsmen.

Talasyn scanned the grid for Sol, swearing under her breath when she spotted his wasp already in the air. She doubted that he’d signed off on this. Unless Talasyn missed her guess, Khaede and Sol were due for their first fight as a married couple.

But she couldn’t dwell on that now. In the distance, the Night Empire’s own coracles surged over a forested ridge. These vessels were called wolves, vicious things with sharp prows that hunted in packs and were armed to the teeth, so numerous that they blocked out the horizon, their black-and-silver sails streaming in the chill breeze.

Talasyn hopped into the well of her ship, pulling on the pair of brown leather gloves that she’d tucked into her coat pocket, and she yanked at several levers in swift succession with the ease of familiarity. The wasp raised its sails and the crystalline aether hearts embedded in its wooden hull flared a bright emerald, bringing the craft to life as they crackled with the wind magic from the Squallfast dimension that Sardovian Enchanters had distilled into them. Static blared from the transceiver, a box-shaped contraption inlaid with dials and filaments of conductive metals, the aether heart within it glowing white, laden with magic from the Tempestroad, a storm-streaked dimension that produced sound, normally in the form of thunder, but it could be manipulated to carry voices across a distance through what was known as the aetherwave.

Fingers around the spoked wheel, Talasyn took off from the grid, her vessel spitting out fumes of magical green discharge, and she slipped into an arrowhead formation with the other Sardovian airships.

“What’s the plan?” she asked into the mouthpiece of her transceiver, her question echoing through the aetherwave frequency used by her regiment.

From the head of the formation, Sol replied, in that calm and easygoing manner of which only he was capable during combat. His words emerged from a horn atop the transceiver, filling the well of Talasyn’s coracle. “We’re outnumbered ten to one, so standard defensive tactics are our best bet. Try to keep them away from the city walls until the residents are in the shelters.”

“Affirmative,” said Talasyn. She couldn’t risk telling him about Khaede, not with so many of their comrades listening in, not when they needed him to be at his most focused. Still, she couldn’t resist adding, “Congratulations on your marriage, by the way.”

Sol laughed. “Thanks.”

The Sardovian wasps formed a tight swarm around Frostplum’s walls and the Kesathese vessels met them head-on. While a wasp coracle

 couldn’t hold a candle to the multi-stacked repeating crossbows and iron-hurling ribaults of the Night Empire’s wolves, it more than made up for that by virtue of sheer agility—an agility that Talasyn used to full advantage over the next few dizzying minutes. She careened through the night air, dodging one deadly bolt after another and firing off several of her own from the crossbows affixed to her ship’s stern. The enemy coracles lacked maneuverability and her aim was true most of the time, ripping through sailcloth, splintering wooden hulls.

But there were just so many wolves, and it wasn’t long before they broke through the defensive perimeter, roaring closer and closer to Frostplum’s moonlit sprawl of thatched rooftops.

And in the distance . . .

Talasyn’s heart sank into the pit of her stomach when she spotted the monstrous double-masted silhouette of a Kesathese ironclad looming up over a snow-capped peak on whirling clouds of emerald aether. To meet it, two Sardovian frigates—full-rigged and square-sailed, and smaller but just as replete with cannons—rose from the nearby valley where they had been lying in wait for such a vessel to appear.

It was going to be a bloodbath. But at least the Night Empire hadn’t brought in a stormship. As long as there was no stormship, there was still a chance.

Talasyn sailed to where the combat was thickest, hurling her wasp headlong into the fray. She fought and flew as hard as she ever had. Out of the corner of her eye, her comrades’ ships burst into flames or shattered against battlements and treetops around her. Only a little while ago, they had all been safe and carefree in the longhouse, celebrating Khaede and Sol’s wedding.

That had been an illusion. No warm place, no sliver of joyous time, was safe from the Hurricane Wars. Everything that Kesath’s Night Empire touched, it destroyed.

The first faint embers of burning rose within her. It crawled from her core to the very tips of her fingers like white-hot needles, lurking beneath the skin.

Snap out of it, she ordered herself. No one can know.

You promised the Amirante.

Talasyn swallowed the burning back down, quieting the inferno in her soul. Too late, she realized that several wolves had managed to outflank her while she was distracted. Their ribaults’ iron projectiles pummeled her airship from all sides, and soon the world was nothing but free fall as she spiraled to the waiting ground.

 

Chapter Two

In her dream she was fifteen years old again and the city of Hornbill’s Head was all rammed earth and wooden lattice and animal skin, rising up from the straw-colored grass of the Great Steppe like a precariously layered cake nestled within soaring walls of mudbrick and salt. She was running from the watchmen, the pockets of her tattered clothes stuffed with flatbread and dried berries, cursing the shopkeeper’s alertness with her every labored breath.

Hornbill’s Head was—had been—taller than it was wide. Its inhabitants learned from an early age how to go vertical, higher and higher, and Talasyn was no exception. She scrambled up ladders and ledges and sped over rooftops and crossed the rickety bridges that connected one building to the next, all while the watchmen chased after her, puffing on their bird-bone whistles. She ran and ran, climbing ever higher, feeling the familiar ache the city left in her limbs and the rush of fear as the watchmen snapped at her feet. Yet on she went, up and up and air and sky, until she reached the battlements of the west wall. The frigid wind dug hard fingers into her hair and stabbed at her chapped lips as she hoisted herself onto the battlement, the whistles shrill and insistent behind her.

She had planned to skirt around the city walls and then drop back down into the lower slums, where she lived with the other bottom-dwellers, and where it was too much trouble for the watch to continue tracking an orphaned street rat who had stolen a few loaves and some fruit. However, as she straightened, balancing on the mudbrick ledge, the Great Steppe spread out miles below her feet in a vast expanse of tallgrass and rabbitbrush, she saw it.

The stormship.

It loomed on the flat horizon, arthropodous and elliptic, lightning cannons dangling from bow to stern like an array of jointed legs. In Talasyn’s memory it was five hundred meters in length. In her dream, it was as big as worlds.

Fueled by scores of aether hearts that had been imbued with rain and wind and lightning magic by Emperor Gaheris’s cunning Enchanters, pulsating sapphire and emerald and white through the metalglass sheets comprising the translucent hull, the stormship approached Hornbill’s Head with all the grim finality of a tidal wave, dragging black thunderclouds in its wake: the endless sea of burnished grass bowed beneath it, bent by the gales from the Squallfast that its enormous turbines spun under a steadily darkening sky.

Talasyn stood frozen in terror. In her memory she’d run away, heading low, diving into the first shelter she could find, but in this dream her body refused to obey. The stormship drew nearer and nearer and the wind blew through her heart like iron bolts and suddenly—

She woke up.

Her eyes flew open, a gasp escaping her parted lips. Thick smoke rushed into her lungs and she coughed, her throat spasming as it was seared through. The world was lit red, sparkling with shattered metalglass. Her gloved hands fumbled with the buckle at her waist until the harness gave way and she fell onto a bed of snow, shards of her wasp’s sidescuttle raining down all around her.

There was a moment of disorientation as the fog of unconsciousness lifted, the veil between dreams and reality disintegrating into splinters of fire and winter, her heart beating faster than she could count. She wasn’t in Hornbill’s Head, and she wasn’t staring up at a Night Empire stormship as it eclipsed the heavens. Instead, she

was somewhere outside Frostplum, glancing over her shoulder at her wasp, which had crashed on its side, its slender foils bent at odd angles, its striped sails consumed by bright flames from the cracked Firewarren-infused aether heart that powered the lamps, slowly licking their way toward the rest of the vessel.

She drew in one slow breath after another, until time returned to her. Until she was twenty years old, and all trace of civilization on Sardovia’s Great Steppe was long gone. Eradicated by Kesath’s forces as a punishment for refusing to bow to the Night Emperor.

If Sardovia lost tonight’s battle, the same fate would befall its Highlands—to which Frostplum was the gateway.

Coughing out the last of the smoke, Talasyn crawled away from the wreckage. The wolves had sent her damaged wasp spinning over the longleaf-pine forest that bordered Frostplum and all the way to the other side of the glacial mountain lake. Over a distance marked by ice floes and dark water, through the gaps between stout trunks, she could glimpse the ruined buildings, the rushing silhouettes, the burning. There was no sign of the coracles, the Kesathese ironclad, or the Sardovian frigates, which meant that both sides had switched to ground warfare; she must have been unconscious for a while. Eventually her head stopped spinning and her legs remembered how they worked and she was hauling herself up, she was standing, she was scrambling over the lake, navigating a treacherous path from one large chunk of ice to the next.

By the World-Father’s untrimmed beard, it was colder than the Night Emperor’s heart out here. Mists of silvery vapor curled into the air with her every exhalation. Through them, she glimpsed a panicked crowd spilling from the forest on the far shore: Sardovian soldiers and cityfolk alike. Some headed for the caves while others took their chances on the ice. The light of Lir’s seven moons bore down upon them all, casting the surrounding white mountains into harsh relief.

I have to make it across the lake, she thought. I have to make it back to Frostplum. I have to rejoin the fight.

Talasyn had almost reached the forested bank when fumes of darkness unfurled from the trees and drifted over the snow, consuming the ice floes in a creeping wash of inky black.

She skidded to a halt and the darkness encircled her, rippling with aether. It wasn’t the darkness of the night or the smoke from the fighting that had already broken out on the mountain. It was deeper and heavier, more alive. It moved, curling over the frozen lake like tendrils.

She had encountered these shadows before, on many a battlefield. When they formed rings like this, it effectively trapped all those who were caught within. Sardovian regiments had learned the hard way that trying to pass through these barriers resulted in grievous injuries, if not outright dismemberment. It was a favorite tactic of the Shadowforged warriors that made up the Night Empire’s fearsome Legion. If Emperor Gaheris had let them out to play, suddenly the chances of Frostplum fending off this siege seemed considerably slimmer.

As were her own chances of survival.

She stood statue-still, listening to the creak of footsteps on the ice and the cries from people she couldn’t see through the murky black wreathing the air.

“Pick off the stragglers,” a masculine voice, greasy and guttural like an oil slick, instructed from not so far away. Talasyn bit back a curse,

If the Legion was sweeping the lake, that meant there was no further need for them in the city and the Sardovian regiment had scattered. Frostplum was lost. The rest of the Highlands would follow, with its most strategically located settlement now in the clutches of the Night Empire.

Horror and panic tore through her in equal measure, and then ceded ground to a boiling rage. She hadn’t asked for this; the people of Frostplum hadn’t asked for this. No one in Sardovia had. A few hours ago her regiment had been celebrating Khaede and Sol’s future and now they were being mowed down like voles across pack ice. Snuffed out one by one. There was only herself, the night, the black water, and the lurking Shadowforged encircling her like a cage. She would not let it end like this.

With Talasyn’s rage came the spark of an ember in her core. She felt it burn the way it had earlier, but more intensely this time. Sharp, radiant, and demanding justice.

And it hurt. It felt as though her entire being was aflame. She had to let it out before it consumed her.

Don’t let anyone see, the Amirante had warned. You’re not ready yet. They can’t know.

You will be hunted.

Talasyn closed her eyes in an attempt to center herself, swallowing her emotions as if they were bile. No sooner had she succeeded in doing that than the ice shifted beneath her feet and she heard frost crystals crackling under heavy armor. Her nape prickled with the weight of a stare that must be surveying the Sardovian Allfold’s crest—a phoenix, the same one emblazoned on the regiments’ sails—stitched on the back of her coat.

“You lost, little bird?”

It was that oil-slick voice again. Measured steps drew near and the telltale growl of static could be heard as the Shadowgate was opened. The fire in Talasyn rose up as if a dam had finally given way.

There was nowhere left to run.

I’m not going to die. Not here. Not now.

Talasyn whirled around to meet her attacker head-on.

The legionnaire had to be at least seven feet in height, every inch of him covered in obsidian plate, and his gauntleted fists clutched an enormous greatsword crafted from pure darkness, shot through with streaks of silver aether. The edge of the blade crackled as he raised it above her head.

It was the same now as it had been the day Hornbill’s Head was destroyed. It was instinct. It was the body fighting tooth and nail to survive.

The magic spread through her like wings.

Talasyn met the Shadowforged sword with a wave of radiance. The tapestry of aether that bound the dimensions and held all elements appeared in her mind’s eye and she yanked at its strings, opening the way to the Lightweave. It shot out from her splayed fingertips, raw and shapeless and uncontrolled in her alarm, painting the immediate vicinity in hues of brilliant gold.

The last time this happened—when Kesathese troops crept through the ruins of Hornbill’s Head after the stormship had flattened it, searching for survivors to make an example out of—the soldier aiming

his crossbow at Talasyn’s fifteen-year-old self had died instantly, flesh and bone devoured by the Lightweave. This giant legionnaire managed to block, his greatsword transmuting into a dark oblong shield with which the radiance collided in a fiery flash. However, Talasyn was desperate and he’d been taken by surprise, and he screeched as light consumed shadow and he was blasted to the ground in a heap of singed armor.

Sardovian forces had arrived too late to save Hornbill’s Head but in just enough time to rescue those who had withstood the stormship’s wrath. Coxswain Darius had been the one to witness her kill the Kesathese soldier and he’d ushered her away, taking her straight to the Amirante.

Tonight on the Highlands ice, though, no one was going to come for her. She was on her own until she made it back to her regiment in Frostplum.

And she wasn’t going to let anyone stand in her way.

Focus, the Amirante would say over and over during their training sessions. Words to meditate on. Aether is the prime element, the one that binds all the others together and connects each dimension to the next. Every once in a while, an aethermancer is brought into this world—someone who can traverse the aether’s path in specific ways. Rainsingers. Firedancers. Shadowforged. Windcallers. Thunderstruck. Enchanters. And you.

The Lightweave is the thread and you are the spinner. It will do as you command.

So, tell it what you want.

The giant legionnaire was flailing on the ice like a turtle on its back, his bulky armor cracked in several places, blood seeping through. Talasyn narrowed her eyes at him and stretched an arm out to the side, her spread fingers tugging back the veil between this world and others, opening the Lightweave once more. The weapon that appeared in her open palm, summoned from one of several realms of magical energy that existed within aetherspace, resembled the long, wide-bladed daggers that had saved many Sardovian infantrymen’s lives in melee, except that it was fashioned solely from golden light and silver aether. Its serrated edges blazed in the gloom like wisps of sun.

The Shadowforged’s panic was almost tangible, despite his mask. He scrambled backward on his elbows as Talasyn advanced. It looked as though his legs weren’t working, and perhaps, in the time before, a part of her would have quailed at the thought of killing someone so obviously incapacitated and defenseless. But he was one of the Legion and the Hurricane Wars had hardened her, loss after loss whittling away at the child she’d once been until there was nothing left but fury.

And sunlight.

Talasyn plunged the dagger into his chest—or she tried to. In that scant sliver of a second before the tip of the blade met the plate mail encasing his torso, something—

—someone—

—loomed up from

out of the darkness—

—and her dagger slid against the crescent’s edge of a war scythe conjured from the Shadowgate.

With her concentration disrupted, the light-woven dagger fizzled out of existence and Talasyn was left clutching at empty air. It was instinct, too, the thing that made her leap back, narrowly avoiding her new assailant’s next sweeping strike.

The coin-bright rays of the seven moons sketched in mottled hues another legionnaire that, while not as statuesque as the giant that Talasyn had just felled, was tall and broad and imposing nonetheless. Over a long-sleeved chainmail tunic, he wore a belted cuirass of black and crimson leather, with spiked pauldrons and scaled crimson armguards connected to black gauntlets, their tips pointed like claws. The fur-trimmed hood of a winter cloak the color of midnight framed his pale face, the lower portion of which was shrouded by an obsidian half-mask embossed with a design of two rows of wickedly sharp, wolfish teeth, captured in an eternal snarl.

The effect was nightmarish. And, while Talasyn had never encountered this Shadowforged before, she knew who he was. She knew what the silver chimera on the brooch atop his collarbone meant. A lion’s roaring head affixed to the serpentine body of a brocaded eel, rearing up on the hooves of the spindlehorn antelope—Kesath’s imperial seal.

Fear stole the breath from her lungs, as razor-edged as the winter on this mountain.

People always said that Alaric of House Ossinast, Master of the Shadowforged Legion and Gaheris’s only son and heir, had the most piercing gray eyes. Those eyes shone a bright and chilling silver with the glow of his magic under the seven moons, looking directly into hers.

She’d been warned about him. She had known that she would one day have to face him.

That day had come too soon.

Then he was upon her with his flickering scythe of smoke and ink, and doubtless her terror was etched all over her face and across her trembling lips. Acting on pure instinct, she resummoned the Lightweave into the shape of two daggers, one in each of her shaking hands. The scythe clashed against the dagger on the right, sending vibrations all the way up her arm as she raised it overhead. She put all her strength into shoving him away, but he was quick to recover, coming at her again.

Oh, it was on.

Talasyn often sparred with the Sardovian regiments’ Blademaster as part of her training, but no blow from a metal sword could hold a candle to the sheer pulsating magic of the Shadowgate, and practicing with a mentor was a fair wind compared to someone actively trying to kill her. Especially when that someone was nearly twice her size and had reportedly been trained in the ways of the Shadowforged from the moment that he’d learned how to walk.

It was all Talasyn

could do to dodge and to parry as Alaric drove her across the ice floes, his injured subordinate forgotten. Each dark barrier dissipated as they passed through it, as if he were banishing them—but to what end? Perhaps he took some sadistic joy in drawing this out, in playing with her as a cat would play with a mouse. She would never know and she wasn’t about to try to ask him.

Kesath’s crown prince was relentless; he moved like a thunderstorm, powerful and everywhere all at once. Shadow careened into light in a conflagration of aether sparks—once, twice, a million times. The flimsier patches in the sheets of ice cracked under the soles of her snow boots, spatters of lake water splashing at her woolen breeches, painfully cold wherever they landed. His blade easily dwarfed both of hers, and on more than one occasion she tried to shape her desperate will into a shield, tried to achieve what had eluded her ever since she began aethermancing, but she still couldn’t. More than once, she left herself wide open as she failed to conjure a shield, his scythe breaking through the flimsy weapon that she hastily cobbled together at the last minute, and she received sharp and shadow-spun cuts to her arms for all her trouble.

And then there came a moment when Talasyn teetered on the very edge of the ice floe and Alaric swung the war scythe from the side and there was no time for her to turn, to block, and she didn’t know how to make a shield—

She brought her hands together. The two daggers turned into a morningstar flail and she swept the shaft in his direction. The golden chain wound around the scythe’s blade and caught, and she hauled him toward her with all her might.

He shifted his weight and dug his boots into the ice, foiling her attempt to outbalance him. They stood mere inches from each other, both of them one ill-advised movement away from falling into the lake, their weapons tangled together at their sides. Alaric’s hood had slipped off at some point, revealing a tousled halo of wavy black hair. The eyes that Talasyn could see above the fanged snarl of his half-mask were sharp and unnervingly intent. He was tall enough that she had to lift her chin to meet his gaze.

She was breathing heavily from the exertion and he seemed a bit winded as well, his broad chest rising and falling in unsteady beats. But when he spoke, it was in smooth, low tones, so deep that it seemed as though the night grew darker around them.

“I was not aware that Sardovia had a new Lightweaver at their disposal.”

Talasyn’s jaw clenched.

Nineteen years ago, in what was now known as the Cataclysm, two neighboring states in the Sardovian Allfold had gone to war with each other—Sunstead, which had been home to every Lightweaver on the Continent, and the Shadow-ruled kingdom of Kesath. After Lightweavers slew Ozalus Ossinast, his son Gaheris ascended to the throne and led Kesath to victory, forcibly annexing Sunstead; in the same breath, Kesath tore away from the Sardovian Allfold and began styling itself the Night Empire. Gaheris had taken on the mantle of Night Emperor, and he and

his Shadowforged Legion had killed all the Lightweavers and destroyed their shrines, leaving no trace of them on the Continent. Except . . .

“Your murderous tyrant of a father missed one,” Talasyn spat at Alaric, and she surged up on her toes and—

—slammed her forehead into his.

Splinters of white-hot pain exploded across her vision. Amidst them, she saw the Kesathese prince recoil, the inky scythe vanishing from his grasp, his gauntleted hand coming up to nurse what she dearly hoped was a crack in his skull.

But she didn’t stay to find out. She reshaped the morningstar flail back into a dagger and plunged it clean through his shoulder and he let out a grunt. She whirled around, the radiant blade disappearing, and she ran—through her splitting headache, over the ice floes, through the moonlight, toward the trees.

Not once did she look back, afraid of what she might find.

 

Chapter Three

The mournful wail of a horn rang throughout the mountain just as Talasyn plunged into a thicket of longleaf pine and bramble. It was the signal to retreat, and she changed course, heading not for the city proper but the docks. With a bruised and blood-streaked face and cuts on her arms, a padded coat soaked through with sweat, and ears ringing from echoes of adrenaline and injury, she broke past the treeline.

The evening sky was tinted arterial red by the smoldering inferno of Frostplum’s remains. The great wooden carracks of the Sardovian Allfold unfurled their sails in the smoke-ridden breeze before her, their bilges already several feet above the ground while long rope ladders spilled from the sides of the decks. Fleeing soldiers and cityfolk were swarming up them like ants. Talasyn quickened her pace in the direction of the largest of the carracks, ...