Chapter 3

I stare, transfixed, my throat clamped tight. The Gent I knew was big, yes. Strong, imposing. But this creature’s heart thuds in his chest with the sound of war drums, its breath pushes me back with the strength of a stiff breeze as it huffs through its fangs, its chin on the ground. Its outstretched claws are only a few scant paces away from me, each razor-sharp talon as tall as I am.

Someone steps close. The priest. “Place your hand on the warrior band, Talia,” Nazar orders, his words too loud, too harsh.

“I—” Grit chokes me; I can hardly breathe. Nazar grunts and grabs my loose right hand, slapping it to my left bicep. Another searing pain jabs me to awareness.

“Send it home,” he orders. “Home, Talia. Say its name to release it back to its plane. Now.”

“Go,” I gasp, turning back to the ferocious god before us, and once more speak the forbidden name. “Go back, G-Gent. Go home.”

The words are more question than command, but a moment later, all the air in the valley is sucked away. My hooded cloak whips violently around me as the Divh—the mighty, enormous, gloriously reborn Divh of the Tenth House—vanishes into nothingness.

Nazar catches me as I sway.

“Where is your brother?” he demands.

“I—what?”

I blink at Nazar, suddenly, damningly aware of what I’ve done, the crime against my family and the Light. More than one crime, too. More than one! I twist away from the priest, hiding my bloody, burned arm.

“Nazar, you have to understand,” I begin, my teeth starting to chatter. “I didn’t mean…I didn’t?—”

“Your brother ,” he says again.

I turn toward the jumble of rock, all that’s left of the promontory after Gent’s passage, and point.

“There,” I finally manage. “He’s… I left him. There.”

Nazar nods, then glares at me. “The horses fled into the forest in the attack, Darkwing too. The well-trained ones will still be close. Find them and wait for me.”

“But the rest?—”

His face hardens. “The rest are dead. The men. Adriana. All of them.” He lifts a hand toward the distant tree line. “Get the horses. I’ll bring the boy.”

He strides away.

I turn a half step toward the forest but don’t move at first. Instead, I stare at the ruin of the clearing.

We’d ridden into this valley not an hour earlier filled with laughter and dreams. Now the valley is strewn with bodies—known and unknown, old and young, horse and rider alike. I pick out the dark green cloaks mounded over silent forms, and my stomach churns. Anyone who stumbles upon this clearing will know that something dire has happened to the Tenth House. Something terrible and final, an arrow through our very heart.

We’ll be attacked. There’s no doubt in my mind. We’re one of the farthest houses on the eastern border of the Protectorate, cut off from the larger houses to the west by mountain and forest. The marauders and brigands have already been worse this spring than ever before. If they hear…if they somehow learn…

Bile rises in my throat, and I stagger away, not stopping until I’m back over the crest of the destroyed valley and once more in the shadow of the forest. I strain toward its embrace, seeing death in every tree, every blade of grass, and almost cry with relief when I make out Merritt’s horse—and three others just beyond.

“Darkwing,” I snap, harsher than I intend. The horse’s head comes up, his eyes rolling as I grasp his bridle. Angrily wiping away my tears, I duck under Darkwing’s head and move quickly through the forest, securing any other animals I can find—whether ours or the marauders. I try not to think about the riders of these steeds, lying somewhere in the field behind me. I pull the horses together to wait.

By the time the priest reaches me, my brother in his arms, the entire valley has fallen still. Not even the birds chatter in the trees.

Nazar lays Merritt’s body on the soft earth. With a strange, almost surreal detachment, I realize the priest has already removed the gray feathered arrow from Merritt’s body, already bound my brother’s wounds with long strips of his cloak. Merritt’s hair is matted to his skin, his brow caked with sweat and dirt, but no life remains in his pale face.

I tear my gaze away from him, stare at Nazar. “They’re all dead?”

“All. Five Tenth House soldiers and Adriana, six attackers.” His face is drawn, and he looks impossibly old to me. “When Merritt was struck, I was on the ridge with you. The others were down at the water, on foot, most with their swords still strapped to their saddles. By the time I reached them …” He grimaces. “Our fallen are avenged, but they are still dead.”

He speaks as if he holds himself to blame for the death of five fighting men and an untrained handmaiden—him, a priest of the Light. But I don’t deny him his guilt, any more than I can deny myself my own. Five Tenth House soldiers…Adriana…

And by the Light… Merritt.

The world wavers, darkness surges, but before I can slip away completely, Nazar’s voice brings me back into focus.

“There’s water in the skins,” he says curtly.

I nod. My brother shouldn’t go to the Light dirty and broken. He should be sanctified, his face wiped clean, his hands clasped over his heart. Pulling my own tattered cloak from my shoulders, I use its cleanest sections and gently, so gently, prepare my brother not for a life of tournaments and champions, but for eternal Light.

Nazar returns sometime later, his tunic stained with fresh dirt, no doubt from the graves of our fallen retainers and Adriana. Numbly, I watch him lift Merritt’s still form and carry him to where he’s made a makeshift pyre of branches and the cloaks of our retainers.

“Pray over your brother, Talia of the Tenth, and we will give him a warrior’s death,” the priest says. “Then we must be gone before anyone else comes to this place.”

“Adriana?” I whisper.

His voice is hard as flint. “Struck in the first pass. Her grave remains open; it’s yours to close if you wish it. You can say your goodbye to her but remember—every moment with her takes you from Merritt, and he is your brother and lord.”

“My…lord.” I swallow hard, but glance to where he points, and stumble over to where there are five mounds in the dark, crumbling soil. Five mounds and one trench, with an oddly small, heavily wrapped form lying within it. How can death shrink a person so quickly?

I pick up the small shovel Nazar has left beside the trench. It’s meant for covering over campfires, not graves, but it clearly has done the job. I push it into the rich earth, pull up a surprisingly light mound of loose dirt. The forest is willing to take our offering, it seems, even if we don’t want to give it.

I drop the first mound of earth upon my only friend.

“Adriana,” I whisper. I can’t get past her name, tears falling thick and hot as I shovel dirt over her. Sorrow washes through me, chased by anger, then pain, then more anger, over and over again, rolling tides of loss and rage. With each scoop, I feel a part of us is being covered over and hidden away, obliterated forever. Our laughter. Our chatter over visiting bards and lords. Adriana’s hissed warnings whenever someone came too close while I was battling shadow warriors in the dark. Our giggled assessments of men and boys. Our wishes and hopes. Our fears. Our plans for a shared future now buried in rich forest soil.

“Adriana,” I manage again, the words of the Light a blur to me, mumbled and hissed and moaned over her. I finally drag myself away from the freshly formed mound and trudge back to Nazar.

For a second time, I stare down at a body prepared for death as Nazar begins the sacred rite of passage, his chant as haunting as the wind on a barren winter’s night. Merritt seems impossibly wrong, lying there. Like Adriana, he’s too small, too still, especially on his pyre of gathered branches, his body offered up to the open sky. When Nazar strikes flint to stone and sets the pyre ablaze, I can almost hear Merritt’s laughter once more, can almost see him riding, proud and strong. Can almost see him leaping into the air to jump—knowing he would be caught. Knowing he would never die.

Tears well up again, and despite the dishonor and my own returning fury, I let them fall. Here is my brother, my only brother. Here’s all the hope I’ve ever had.

Nazar doesn’t speak for several long minutes as the fire burns down. Doesn’t move, in fact, from my side. But when I finally step away from the darkening embers, the priest lifts a hand to stop me.

“You’re banded,” he says, his voice as punishing as a fist.

And just like that, I know.

There’s still more dying to do this day.