This Ends in Embers

by Kamilah Cole

Genres: Epic Fantasy; YA Fantasy; YA Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of Raybearer and Fourth Wing, this astonishing sequel to the bestselling novel So Let Them Burn doesn't hold back. After all, there are no easy endings in war—especially when sisters are forced to fight on opposite sides.
 
Faron Vincent was once the saint of San Irie. Now, she’s done the unthinkable: betrayed her country. Alone, disgraced, and kidnapped, Faron is forced to help Iya grow his bloody empire. With her soul bonded to a ruthless killer, Faron has become an enemy to her people… and she fears they might be right.
 
Elara Vincent—the new Empyrean—must undo the damage her sister has caused. San Irie has been brought back to the brink of war as Iya proclaims no nation will be safe from his brutal invasion. But how can Elara save her sister, her best friend, her country, and her world when she’s already cracking under the pressure?
 
This heart-pounding conclusion to the Divine Traitors duology pushes these unforgettable heroines to their breaking point and beyond. Because when the lines between hero and villain are blurred, deadly sacrifices must be made.

"Both a brilliant sequel and an epic finale, This Ends in Embers is a gut punch of a novel that will stay with you long after its ending. Cole balances breathtakingly high stakes with poignant character moments to craft a narrative so passionate it will burn a path straight to your heart." —Chelsea Abdullah, award-winning author of The Stardust Thief
 

Release date: February 4, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 416

Sample

ELARA VINCENT HAD BEEN A SAINT FOR LONGER THAN SHE’D BEEN a liar.

Even when she’d snuck out of her parents’ house a lifetime ago, it had been a selfless act. She had forged herself into a weapon for her country and a shield for her sister—and, together, she and Faron had destroyed everything. Now, as the Maiden Empyrean, she was a walking fabrication. A living promise to the people of San Irie that this time this Empyrean would be everything they hoped for.

Elara did not know how to lie. Thankfully, her new title lied for her.

Deadegg, a town in the loosest sense of the word, gasped its necrotic breaths beneath the high noon sun. Broken buildings and shattered streets drew her toward the square, where the dirt roads and concrete plaza had been replaced by obsidian dust and cracked rock. That was all that remained of the dragon egg that had given the town its name, and of the squat stone wall that had separated the egg from the wary townsfolk. The sun beat down on charred soil that would never again bear life, on palm trees flattened and cleaved in half, on bodies still trapped beneath rubble that only a talented summoner could remove.

Because of her and her sister, Deadegg was a corpse reduced to bones and viscera and a river of still-flowing blood. Her sister, Faron, had dealt the killing blow to the town. Now, Elara was left to stitch the remains back together, at least long enough to autopsy the mistakes that had led them to where they were.

And she was so very tired.

“Don’t overexert yourself,” said the man to her right, so cautiously that Elara worried her grim thoughts showed on her face. “Can you overexert yourself? I was never quite sure how all that worked.”

Papa’s mouth twitched into a smile that vanished all too quickly. He’d always looked as if a thousand years of sleep wouldn’t be nearly enough, but now he was faded. Like a vague idea of what a human should be, sketched by someone who had only heard sad stories about them: his skin wan, his locs limp, his shoulders slumped. Carver and Nida Vincent had been among the few to remain in Deadegg after the attack, and her father’s lined eyes were hollower than the town.

“I’m fine,” she assured him. “I’ll be fine.”

Elara didn’t give him the chance to point out the waver in her voice or the trembling hands that she clenched at her side. She took a deep breath and called on the gods.

It wasn’t the first time Elara had summoned a god, but it still felt novel to an eighteen-year-old girl who had grown up on nothing but faith. Fighting past her lingering awe, she sank deeper into the divine plane, which appeared to her as a thick forest that was ablaze except where she was standing. But she didn’t feel the heat of the flames or smell the impenetrable smoke that shrouded the greenery; despite the roaring fire, she felt safely cloistered. Her soul swelled into a beacon of light that prayed, Come to me, come to me, come to me.…

And the gods answered her call.

Mala, the goddess of the stars, the keeper of the astrals, the ruler of dawn and dusk, appeared before her in a swirl of rose-petal-pink fabric and twinkling silver light. Like the other two gods, Irie and Obie, Mala was twelve feet tall and had pupilless eyes. Her mahogany skin was smooth and clear, her cheekbones high, her lips full, her hair a river of thick curls that tumbled down her back. She wore a pink beaded bodice with a plunging neckline that exploded at the waist into a waterfall of tulle, making her look as if she were floating above the ground. Silver stars crowned her head, and her eyes glowed with that same color.

If Elara were impious enough to pick a favorite from the pantheon, she would have chosen Mala. The deity was usually all smiles, a playful dance of wind through leaves, as compared with Obie’s enigmatic fog and Irie’s unstoppable hurricane. But there was no smile on her face today, and the coldness in her eyes gave Elara pause.

Maiden Empyrean, Mala said, her voice as cold as her eyes. What can I do for you?

Elara blinked through the phantom smoke. Since choosing her as their new champion, the gods hadn’t asked her what she needed their power for. She knew for a fact they’d never asked Faron, either. Then again, considering what Faron had done with it…

I—was hoping to repair some of the damage to the town. Anxiety prickled her skin, making her words come out sounding uncertain. If that’s all right with you?

Mala didn’t respond.

Elara shifted her weight from foot to foot. Her neck hurt from her staring upward. Time had no meaning in the divine plane, so she could have been waiting for hours or seconds. If Mala refused to share her power, it would be only a minor obstacle. Elara would do with hammers and shovels what she could have done faster with magic. She owed the town that much.

Still, her throat tightened as the time ticked by. It had been a week since she had asked the gods to lend her their power, to allow her to prove herself. It had been a week since she had channeled their magic and changed the tide of what was now called the Battle for Port Sol. It had been a week, and she had done nothing to break their trust since then.

But she didn’t dare say so. After all, who was she to question the gods?

Finally, Mala smiled, and it made her pupilless eyes sparkle like shards of titanium. Of course, Empyrean. Happy to help.

She reached out for Elara, who promptly reached back. The tightness in her stomach loosened as their souls finally merged. Her vision whited out. Her ears rang. Her heart pounded so fast that she thought it would stop.

And then it was over. Mala’s soul was beneath her skin—swelling with immense power that heated her body, her bones, her blood—but Elara was the one in control.

She blinked her way back to the present, where she stood facing the barren land where the town landmark had once been, sandwiched between her father and the Queenshield who had been assigned to her. Neither looked at her strangely, which confirmed that her tense standoff with Mala hadn’t rendered her physical body stationary long enough for the interaction to be noticed. The last of her stress dissipated, leaving her free to focus on the work ahead.

Before she’d summoned Mala, the square had been empty, but now suspicious villagers had begun to emerge from their homes. Many clung to machetes, but they didn’t raise them. The attack had made them wary, but Elara had the power of the gods on her side… for now. The villagers wouldn’t start a fight they knew they couldn’t win—and that moment of hesitation was the chance she needed to show them that they didn’t need to fight at all.

Elara stretched an arm out toward the first destroyed building, holding in her mind a firm idea of what it used to look like. While Elara couldn’t summon the spirits of ancestors who didn’t share her bloodline, Mala’s status as the keeper of the astrals allowed Elara to draw on all their energy to power large spells. Elara showed Mala the image of the corner shop, its blue-and-gold-painted concrete facade and the wooden awnings from which bunches of green bananas had once dangled, and their twined souls threw magic toward the building to knit it back together. It was a little like healing herself after a fight, except she couldn’t restore the shop to what it had been. She could only restore it to what she thought it had been and hope that this was good enough for the owner.

After she’d fixed that one, she moved on to the next building and the next and the next. Slowly, the businesses that surrounded the town square sprouted like flower buds—perhaps a little outdated but whole. A handful had scorched storefronts and caved-in rooftops that Mala’s magic slipped by like water around a boulder; Lightbringer’s flame had destroyed those places, and the damage wrought by dragonfire was one of the few things the gods’ magic could not touch.

Elara released Mala’s soul, stumbling a little as exhaustion careened into her with the force of a tree trunk, and prepared to negotiate with Irie, the patron goddess of the island, to help clear the debris. But before she could sink back into the divine plane, a hand gripped her shoulder.

“That is more than enough for now, Maiden,” said Queen Aveline Renard Castell, the twenty-two-year-old ruler of San Irie. A pearl diadem winked from atop her ink-black spiral curls. It matched the pearl-encrusted bodice of her seafoam gown. There was a pinch between her eyebrows as she studied Elara. “You do not look well.”

“I can—” Elara’s words were cut off by a yawn so wide that her jaw cracked.

Her skin was coated with sweat, and the silken fabric of the dress Aveline had provided clung to her damp body. It was a high-necked button-down in the colors of the Iryan flag—forest green with gold embroidered flowers, and a black ribbon belt to cinch her waist. Summoning raised the body’s temperature, and it was also another unforgivably hot day, so a dress that covered this much of her skin had been a poor choice. She’d wanted to don the clothing of a respected religious figure, comfort be damned, and a respected religious figure did not give up when a job was only half done.

Aveline didn’t release her arm. “Just because your sister did this in a day does not mean you have to undo it in that time.”

Elara swallowed hard, hating to acknowledge that Aveline’s grip was the only thing keeping her upright. Not just because of her fatigue, but also because of the ever-present reminder that she and her sister had done this. In cracking open the egg at the center of the town square, Faron had also opened a doorway to a prison between realms called the Empty. Faron had freed the First Dragon, Lightbringer, and his Rider, who was called the Gray Saint but had been born as Gael Soto. Faron had been claimed as Gael’s co-Rider, her soul fused with his and Lightbringer’s in a celestial bond, and she had accompanied them as they razed a path to the capital in a bid to claim the island as their own.

And she had done it all to save Elara from her own dragon bond.

Around her, the bleak faces of the people watching were rooted in the kind of pain that could come only from betrayal. Once, Faron had been the gods’ avatar in the mortal world, the Childe Empyrean, capable of doing all that Elara had just done. Now Faron was a cautionary tale, a missing war criminal who had chosen to fly away with Lightbringer after their defeat.

Elara still had faith in her sister, though the world and the gods had forsaken her. But she was alone to live with the aftermath. To fix Faron’s mistakes. No matter the cost to herself.

“I can keep going,” she finished, even though her eyelids felt heavy and her back was as slick as a dolphin’s and she was certain that if she tried to take a step, she would collapse. “We need to be able to bury our dead.”

“I hardly think pushing yourself until you are among the aforementioned dead is the correct move,” said Aveline, her voice soft. “This is but one stop on the reconstruction tour, Maiden. I command you to rest.”

Aveline had never before commanded Elara to do anything. She had asked. She had guilted. She had even snapped. But she rarely issued a command without discussion, respecting, as Elara did, that they had once, when Elara was thirteen and Aveline was seventeen, fought a war together—something that made them more than queen and subject.

Elara couldn’t imagine how worn down she looked for Aveline to be doing it now.

“All right,” she said, chancing another look at the crowds. They still held their machetes close, but their grips had loosened. Papa was weaving through the pack, Queenshield trailing in his wake to hand out the relief packages Aveline had created.

Even after the war, even after the recent horrors, Deadegg was still a landlocked small town that wasn’t on most maps drawn of the island. It would have been easy for the queen to forget them, focusing only on the capital and on larger towns like Highfort and Papillon. But Aveline was not a ruler who left the most marginalized of her people behind. She had insisted not only that Deadegg be the first stop on this tour but had also insisted on coming herself.

Elara eyed the mountains of rubble and debris that marked the surrounding area and cast ugly shadows across the otherwise bright day. Then she yawned again and forced herself to turn away.

“I’ll meet you at my house,” she told Aveline, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

Aveline released her at last, a relieved smile on her face. “No, thank you. Take two guards with you, please. For my peace of mind.”

Elara nodded, gesturing for two of the Queenshield to follow her down the unevenly paved roads that would take her to her parents’ house. It was easier than saying what she truly felt: that there would be no peace of mind for any of them until Faron returned.

This was not the longest Elara had gone without seeing her sister. Her unwanted trip to Langley had claimed that honor. But at least then she had left Faron in San Irie, with the queen, with their parents, with Reeve Warwick. Now it had been seven days—seven long but quick days—since Faron had disappeared, and no one even knew where she was. It felt like being out of step with the natural rhythm of the world, forever searching crowds for a face she would never see, forever listening for a voice she would never hear. Where Faron went, Elara had always followed, but not this time. This time, in the aftermath of battle, she filled her days with a flurry of activity that was like a single stitch on a gaping wound.

In the Battle for Port Sol, Lightbringer had fought against three drakes—the giant, dragon-shaped flying machines made from the scalestone metal mined only in San Irie—six dragons who had turned their back on their own kind to help San Irie instead, and the queen herself. Still, Lightbringer had almost won. After the battle ended, Aveline and Elara had each slept for an entire day. Then there had been meetings with the governors and High Santi—the leaders of the temples—who had flown in from across the island to assess all the damage, plan the reconstruction tour with the Queenshield, and run logistics on the remaining drakes to make sure they were still battle ready.

Valor, the newest drake to be built, had been the only one to be destroyed. The wreckage lay beyond the town lines, and Elara couldn’t even look at it, let alone approach it. Two of the pilots had been her neighbors, her friends: Wayne Pryor and Aisha Harlow. They, along with a third pilot from Deadegg, Jordan Simmons, had been killed when Lightbringer blasted Valor out of the air.

Elara knew that Lightbringer hadn’t acted alone. She knew that he and his Firstrider had renamed themselves Iya to emphasize that they acted as a single deity who expected the world to come to heel. But acknowledging the existence of Iya meant acknowledging that Reeve was gone, that Reeve had been taken, that—thanks to the machinations of his power-hungry parents—Reeve was being worn by Iya like a bad costume, and she could not think of Reeve without experiencing an eviscerating pain capable of bringing her to her knees.

Her best friend. Her sister. Loss after loss. Failure after failure.

Elara felt every single one of her eighteen years when she tried to parse the last week and realized it was just a small taste of more danger to come. That was why she didn’t notice the scene at first, at least not until one of the two Queenshield surged ahead to block Elara’s way with one buff arm. She was momentarily distracted by the swell of the woman’s muscles—so much like her girlfriend’s—before she saw her mother standing with said girlfriend in front of her house.

Someone had smeared TRAITORS across the front wall in bloodred paint, half the letters smudged and faded. Buckets with pink water stood sentry beneath them. Signey Soto and Nida Vincent turned, swollen sponges weeping red in their hands. Their palms were so wrinkled, it was clear they had been at work for hours. Maybe even since she’d left. The fence—the one Papa had built to keep worshippers from bothering Faron in her own yard—was in pieces across the lawn.

Elara’s bottom lip trembled. She was so fucking tired.

“It’s okay. Go ahead. I’ve got her,” Elara heard, seconds before a pair of familiar hands grabbed her shoulders. Signey, her Langlish girlfriend and former co-Rider, watched her through shrewd brown eyes, taking in every tic of what Elara was so desperate to hide. Signey had been at the top of her class at the Hearthstone Academy, Langley’s military school for dragon Riders, before and after her dragon, Zephyra, had chosen Elara as their co-Rider. Elara would have had better luck hiding a dragon beneath her bed than hiding her emotions from Langley’s most promising young soldier. “Elara, you need to get some sleep. Maybe for a century or two.”

“Ha ha,” said Elara, swallowing another yawn before it could prove Signey’s point. Even now, she wanted to blossom under Signey’s undivided attention, something that had been difficult to get since the battle. Elara chalked it up to their both being busy, mainly because she was afraid to dig any deeper when she was already so stressed. “Did you see who did this?”

“No, but…”

“But what?”

Signey lowered her hands. It had been an emotional day, so Elara allowed herself a moment to marvel at her girlfriend’s soft beauty. Her round face was framed by loose curls that tumbled from her widow’s peak and past her shoulders, the black of a moonless sky. Her once bronze skin was now the rich brown of clay, tanned darker by the relentless Iryan sun. Her oval eyes were umber beneath naturally arched eyebrows. Her fleshy nose and crooked teeth gave her character. She was two inches taller than Elara and built differently, which was emphasized by the lace-lined house dress she wore. It belonged to Elara, and so, on Signey, it was tight in the bust and loose at the back.

Despite the storm clouds that gathered in her expression, Signey Soto was so stupidly beautiful—inside and out—that just looking at her made Elara want to smile. She regretted every mistake she had made, but not the ones that had led her to Signey.

But when Signey’s shoulders straightened into a soldier’s stance, Elara braced herself for bad news. “They were gone by the time we made it to the porch, which likely means it’s one of your neighbors.”

Elara swallowed. All the sleepy houses that lined the block suddenly looked like ancient beasts, sunlight making their windows glow like wrathful eyes. Four of them belonged to families she knew: the Hanlons, the McKays, the Pryors, and the Harlows. The rest belonged to families she knew of. Any one of them would have just cause to do something like this. Any one of them could have witnessed what Faron had unleashed.

“Well, I’m here now,” Elara managed. “Let me take care of this. Your hands look six times older than you do.”

“You need to sleep.”

But Elara was already calling on the gods, hoping that Mala wouldn’t mind such a frivolous use of her powers. The deity appeared in a shower of twinkling silver stars, her wide nose wrinkling at the sight of Signey—of a Langlish Rider—on Iryan land. Even though Signey had fought against her own country in the Battle for Port Sol, Elara had needed to plead for her girlfriend’s right to stay by her side. Iryan officials thought Signey was a spy, just as they’d assumed of Reeve, and Elara was not looking forward to having the same argument with her gods.

Thankfully, Mala soon dismissed Signey to return her attention to Elara.

“You have summoned me at a fortuitous time, Maiden Empyrean.” Mala’s frown was as deep as a gorge. Elara’s pulse was already jumping from this new form of summoning, and Mala’s expression sent her heart rate to new heights. Terrifying possibilities ran through her mind, from the withdrawal of her Empyrean powers to the condemnation of her family for all the devastation they had wrought. But nothing could have prepared her for the shock wave that pulsed through her mind when Mala said, We have finally located your sister.

FARON VINCENT HAD BEEN A SURVIVOR SINCE THE MOMENT SHE’D gone to war.

On the battlefield, it had been easy to justify death. People had to die so that she, and her island, could live. It wasn’t until afterward that she’d been forced to reckon with what she’d done to keep breathing. All the lives she had destroyed. All the lives she was still destroying.

Faron survived, and others suffered for it.

The bodies she had left behind in San Irie hadn’t died by her hands—not like the many Langlish soldiers and Riders she had cut down during the San Irie Revolution—but her hands were still slick with their blood. Awake, she saw their charred bodies every time she blinked, brown skin burned red, then black, muscle and organs and bones reduced to putrid remains. Asleep, she woke screaming from nightmares in which the scorched husks of the Queenshield, of her neighbors’ children, of Iryan civilians, reached for her with furious hands, their hollow mouths accusing her with cauterized tongues: Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.

Once, San Irie had worshipped her as a saint. Once, she had been the voice of the gods themselves.

But now she knew she was nothing but a harbinger of death—and she had brought that death on a dragon to her island for her own selfish purposes.

By the time Lightbringer began descending toward an unfamiliar strip of land, Faron had cried for so long that her eyes felt swollen and crusted. During the journey across the Ember Sea, that infinite blue ocean that stretched between San Irie and the northern continent of Nova, Faron had remembered the look on her sister’s face as Faron had taken Iya’s hand and flown away from the smoking capital of Port Sol. There had been no time to apologize or explain. There had been only the sound of two hearts breaking, a sound oddly similar to that of powerful dragon wings beating on the wind.

Faron had lost Reeve. Her gods. Her people. She couldn’t stand to lose Elara, too.

But maybe she already had.

The greenery below resolved itself into an archipelago of seven islands of varying sizes. It was the Hestan Archipelago, where Elara had spent two months enrolled in Langley’s dragon-riding academy, Hearthstone. Faron had seen it on a map in Pearl Bay Palace, this inverted V off the coast of the hooked Langlish land that formed the bottom of Nova. She couldn’t remember now if Iya had placed a clay crown atop the archipelago, marking it as a target in his upcoming conquest, but her stomach tightened all the same.

Lightbringer’s forces now consisted of three dragons—Goldeye, Ignatz, and Irontooth—as well as their Riders—Marius Lynwood and Nichol Thompson, Estella Ballard and Briar Noble, and Commander Gavriel Warwick and Director Mireya Warwick—but most of the other dragons and Riders had fought for San Irie during Iya’s attempt to claim it. Eventually, they would return here, and surely another battle would break out.

Faron was too tired for another battle.

“Your mental tears are being wasted unless their purpose is to irritate me,” Lightbringer said through the bond he had forced upon her. “There is only one dragon here, and he has no interest in battle.”

She hated the growl of that voice in her mind. This was the second time the dragon had spoken to her directly, and his voice was like claws slicing poisonous lines under her skin. It left behind a miasma that was hard to shake off.

They landed smoothly in a wide field on the first island, the name of which Faron had never bothered to learn. Iya jumped from the saddle onto flattened grass cupped by the golden sand of a long beach. Low tide lapped at the shoreline in peaceful waves, retreating periodically back into Serpentia Bay. Faron dropped behind Iya with a wince, her thighs unused to long flights on dragonback—or even short ones. It felt as if her skin had been scraped raw by Lightbringer’s diamond-hard scales.

Then the boy before her turned, and Faron’s breath caught.

Reeve Warwick gazed steadily at her, his eyes the clear blue of the Ember Sea, his red-brown curls haloed by the sun, his candle-white skin pinkened from overexposure, his dragon-eye necklace resting over his chest. But it wasn’t Reeve Warwick, she reminded herself. It was Iya with his cutting smile who watched her, his appearance little more than a trap to weaken her resolve.

She couldn’t forget that there were four beings staring back at her from those cold eyes: Reeve Warwick, whose body had been possessed and whose soul was caged too deep for her to reach; Gael Soto, whose soul had been corrupted and whose flashes of humanity had seduced her into dooming the world; Lightbringer, the dragon they were bonded to, whose innate malice made him a danger to two realms; and Iya, the parts of Gael that were Lightbringer and the parts of Lightbringer that were Gael, the singular godlike creature who was determined to get her to believe he was all that remained of the boys she knew.

The boys she was here to save.

Faron swallowed and forced herself to breathe. To remember why she had taken his hand, climbed on his dragon, and set fire to her reputation.

Iya may have declared himself a god, but Faron was his undoing. You are nothing but the heart I can’t seem to destroy, he had said to her hours ago, his eyes wild and his hands tight around her throat. He could not destroy her, but she could destroy him—starting with his hold on Reeve and Gael.

Or so she hoped.

Iya’s smile deepened, as if he could hear what she was thinking—and maybe he could—but before either of them could speak, there was a shouted welcome from above. Ahead of them was a hill with a plateau, and atop that hill was a white girl perhaps a couple years older than Faron. Her red hair was styled into a chin-length bob, and she wore a Hearthstone uniform: a marigold blouse with a standing collar, a black blazer with marigold cuffs, fitted breeches, and leather boots.

As they crested the hill, Faron realized there was a medallion dragon stretching in the grass behind her, golden with a barbed tail and belly scales the pale yellow of an old sponge. His eyes, like Lightbringer’s, were green, but that was their only similarity. Lightbringer was the only imperial dragon in existence, the white of a newborn and massive enough to overshadow even a carmine, and his bulk and spikes made him a dangerous weapon. By comparison, the yellow dragon suspiciously narrowing its gaze looked like a child.

“Cruz, Margot,” Iya said, greeting the dragon and then the girl. “Where’s your father?”

“He’s waiting in the courtyard,” said Margot. “We saw you arrive while we were flying, and I thought I should walk you there.”

There was a calculating edge to the way Margot looked at Iya, as though she was judging him against some silent set of expectations. Faron couldn’t tell whether he fell short, however. Her expression gave little else away.

Iya nodded his agreement, and Margot paused to whisper something to her dragon—to Cruz—that sent him back into the air. Lightbringer sat unmoving in the field, now joined by Irontooth, Goldeye, and Ignatz. The Riders made their way up the hill, the Warwicks leading the throng. Had Elara felt this continual pulse of fear while surrounded by enemies and dragons? Had she lifted her chin, as Faron was doing now, and armored herself with the lie that everything would be fine if she stuck to the plan?

It was a silent walk through a verdant valley surrounding a fortress of obsidian. Walls as tall as a dragon flew Langlish flags from towers in every corner, each flag the color of one of the four breeds: red for carmine, yellow for medallion, blue for ultramarine, and green for sage. On the other side of the walls was a courtyard and a keep, and in front of the keep’s raised portcullis was another white man. His complexion was ruddy, his blond and silver hair retreating from his wide forehead, and he wore a black suit with the Langlish starburst on the right breast. He and Margot had the same narrow noses, the same brown eyes, the same round cheeks.

Faron realized this must be Margot’s father seconds before Gavriel Warwick muscled past her to say, warmly, “Headmaster Luxton. Always a pleasure.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” said the headmaster of Hearthstone Academy, his thick mustache twitching over his thin mouth. He and the commander shook hands like old friends before Luxton dropped into a deep bow before Iya. “It is an incredible honor to meet and host you, Gray Saint. I am Oscar Luxton, Wingleader for my daughter, Margot, and our dragon, Cruz. We’ve cleared the second floor for your forces.”

Elara had explained Wingleaders and Firstriders to Faron during one of her fire calls from Langley, a connection of voices that required only an open flame to allow them to hear and respond to each other, but Faron hadn’t bothered to retain the information. Her sister aside, a Rider was a Rider to Faron; it didn’t matter their precise role in the colonization of her island.

“And when,” Iya asked, “will you grapple with your role in it? Five years ago, your home was in shambles because of the Langlish. Now your home is in shambles because of you.”

Guilt settled in Faron’s chest, squeezing her lungs to make it impossible to breathe. Iya sounded s