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I had no one,Talasyn thought.Back on the Great Steppe, there was no one to hold me when I cried, when I missed a family I never knew, when I felt I had nothing.

She headed toward the sound, rounding the corner. Oryal was leaning against the granite wall and weeping, face buried in her hands.

“Lady Oryal,” Talasyn said softly, touching her on the shoulder. “We have to—”

Oryal appeared to crumple at such gentleness. She turned to Talasyn, spreading her arms like a child begging to be carried. The little painted flowers on her cheeks had been melted by her tears and now ran down her face like streaks of blood.

Talasyn hugged her.

“Lachis’ka,” Oryal said, through sobs that rang with desperate grief, “it’s so difficult. You understand how I feel, don’t you?”

Talasyn nodded mutely, rubbing Oryal’s back even as she kept an eye on their surroundings for the approach of any potential threats.

“I don’t know which of us is more unfortunate,” Oryal continued, shaking in Talasyn’s arms. “We both lost our mothers when we were young, and now—at least you still have Prince Elagbi, but—but at leastmygrandmother didn’t kill my mother.”

What?

There was a tearing of the veil between the material realm and aetherspace, and Talasyn heard a crackling, like oil dribbled into a hot pan magnified a hundred times over—a sound sherecognized from whenever the Tempest Severs activated. Oryal’s hand was on her spine, and there was a jolt, as though that hand had pushed her with all the resounding strength of a horse’s kick. Bluish-white lightning filled her vision and shotthroughher body, the pain immense, like a million burning wires.

Her knees gave way, snapping like twigs as an abrupt, frightening numbness consumed her from head to toe. She dropped to the carpeted floor with a thud, a dark fog crawling along the edges of her sight.

Something sharp was jabbed into her neck. A blade—no, a needle. Talasyn barely felt it, on top of everything else, but soon another layer of pain—a different kind—blossomed underneath the lightning’s shock. Thousands of tiny glass shards forced their way through her veins as—something—ate at her magic.

It was nothing like the abrupt loss of walking into the sarimans’ nullification field. It was a torturously slow erosion. The light inside her faded. She struggled to hold on to it, struggled to stay conscious. Begged it not to go.

A glass-barreled syringe fell to the carpet beside her. It was empty, but a bead of liquid remained on the tip of the hollow steel needle. The droplet shone a bright turquoise, marbled with ribbons of crimson.

Sariman blood and rain magic.

Oryal loomed over her, a wraith in a rose-colored dress. Lightning crackled in her fist. Her eyes flashed white with the Tempestroad.

“You really don’t belong here in Nenavar, Lachis’ka.” Oryal’s voice, coming from much too far away, was the last thing Talasyn heard—and that scarlet-streaked face twisted in contempt was the last thing she saw—before the remaining fragments of the Lightweave vanished from her being and everything went black. “No one in the Dominion court wouldeverhave fallen for that.”

Talasyn plummeted into that black space, as vast and deep as the Mouth of Night. She could almost be within those caverns again, with the wind howling and the water rising, with warm fingers trailing down the inside of her wrist like safe harbor in a storm.

Alaric,she thought.

She tried to hold on to him the way she hadn’t been able to hold on to her magic, but soon even he, too, was gone.

And there was only darkness.