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No one had expected Gaheris to use all of his stormships and his entire army in such a devastating assault. Kesath had grown in wealth and power precisely because of its strategy of accumulating resources from conquered Sardovian states, but the Night Emperor had apparently decided that wiping out all form of resistance was a greater priority. Most of the Heartland had been completely flattened, with countless dead. The Sardovians’ base in the Wildermarch was gone and the last stand that they were mounting here in the capital was in the process of being utterly crushed.

The husks of lightning-razed mills and workshops proliferating Lasthaven’s industrial district sheltered Talasyn and her two companions from the worst of the wind as they made their way through the ruins. The rains hadn’t reached this part of the city sprawl yet, which was the only stroke of luck in what had been a trulyrottenday.

“How’s she holding up?” Talasyn asked, glancing over towhere Vela was being supported by a cadet. The air was thick with dust, stained crimson from the myriad fires, but Talasyn was close enough to see that the Amirante was having difficulty breathing, her complexion deathly gray. Blood soaked through the cloak that had been wrapped around her torso as a makeshift bandage, seeping out in copious amounts from the wound inflicted by a shadow-smithed greatsword.

After her frigate crashed, Vela had been attacked by the same giant Shadowforged whom Talasyn had encountered and taken by surprise on the frozen lake, a month and a half ago. It had to be him: she would have recognized his stature and the style of his armor anywhere.

Talasyn had killed him with a light-woven blade of her own. If only she had done so back on the outskirts of Frostplum that night. The Amirante was in bad shape.

“She’s fading fast,” said the cadet. He was still a boy, several years younger than Talasyn and shaking in his too-large boots but trying valiantly to put on a brave face. “We have to get her to a healer as soon as possible.”

Talasyn squinted through the gloom. “There’s a rendezvous point just up the street.” Or what was left of the street, anyway. The one saving grace was that this district had already been obliterated and, thus, the Night Empire had focused its attentions elsewhere. The area was deserted, heaps of debris walling it off from the ground skirmishes scattered throughout the rest of the city.

From the moment she had saved Vela and the cadet from the giant legionnaire, Talasyn had been operating on the hope that the rendezvous system was still in place. The spots had been marked before the battle; there should be healers there, as well as teams to ferry people to the carracks for evacuation.

Not that there would be anywhere left to evacuatetowhen this was over, but she tried not to dwell on that.

A tower had collapsed onto their intended path; there wasan opening between the mounds of twisted metal wide enough for their party to squeeze through one at a time. Talasyn motioned for the cadet to go first. She then gently nudged Vela forward, murmuring words of encouragement to the injured, disoriented woman, whose bones felt impossibly brittle beneath Talasyn’s fingertips. No sooner had Vela disappeared through the gap when Talasyn heard the shriek of the Shadowgate, crackling with sharp malevolence.

Fuck.

“Go,” she told the cadet through the gap. “I’ll hold them off.” He started to protest but she interrupted him brusquely. “You need to get the Amirante to the rendezvous point, and someone has to buy time.Go.I’ll catch up.”

Once Vela and the cadet were safely away, Talasyn whirled around to confront the three helmeted figures emerging from the battle’s mists. She slipped into... not an opening stance, not exactly. Instead, she stood stock-still in an almost meditative posture, assessing the situation as the Shadowforged fanned out, the better to launch a simultaneous offensive from different directions.

The figure directly in front of her was quite possibly the legionnaire who had carved out Vela’s eye with a shadow-smithed knife the year before. Talasyn couldn’t be entirely sure because their mirror image was to her right, identical in build and armor from head to toe, but it had definitely been one of them. The distinctive style of their helms showed their brown eyes, which regarded her with twisted delight. She’d encountered them the previous sennight as well, in a vicious battle onboard a Kesathese ironclad that Sardovian forces had tried and failed to commandeer. In her head she called them the Thing and the Other Thing.

“Hello, little Lightweaver,” purred the Thing. “Lasthaven has fallen. The remains of your fleet are scattered. It’s not too late to beg. Perhaps then we’ll make this quick.”

“I understand that this might come as a shock, but I don’t exist to make your life more convenient,” Talasyn said evenly.

The figure to her left let out a chuckle. He had a lithe build and a relaxed pose that belied the dark, crackling, double-bladed staff that he was casually resting on his shoulders. “I wouldn’t banter too much if I were you,” he hummed. “You might be in for a world of pain. The twins are already pissed off because you killed that big lug, Brann. They were sweet on him, you know—”

“Shut up, Sevraim,” growled the Thing.

It dawned on Talasyn that Brann had been the giant legionnaire’s name. She shrugged, trying for flippancy. “May his shade find shelter in the willows from Zannah’s all-knowing eye, but, honestly, I doubt it.”

The Other Thing, the Shadowforged to Talasyn’s right, spoke up then, her black cloak rustling as a barbed mace materialized in her gauntleted fists, already slanted into an attack position. “You’re finished, Lightweaver. The Sardovian Allfold is no more.”

Talasyn spun two curved swords, one shorter than the other. They were like molten radiance in her hands, filling the air with golden heat. “In that case, there’s nothing left to do but take all of you down with me.”

The three legionnaires charged and she sprang into action, her blades of light clashing against staff and knife and mace. Talasyn made liberal use of crumbled pillars and toppled ledges, springing off them and spinning and slashing at her foes as she counted the minutes in her head, trying to determine when would be the best time to retreat. It had to be once Vela and the cadet were close to the rendezvous point, but already Talasyn was at a clear disadvantage, staggeringly outnumbered. Still, she had a chance if she could movefaster, if she could strikeharder—

There was a new flare of shadow magic from somewhereelse. Fromsomeoneelse. Chains of darkness wrapped around a sizeable chunk of fallen stone and hurled it into the back of Sevraim’s hand a split-second before his staff could find its mark on Talasyn’s skull.

Sevraim swore under his breath, his weapon winking out of existence. He rotated his wrist experimentally, as though checking for broken bones. “What did I do wrongnow, pray tell?” he complained as Alaric Ossinast placed himself between his legionnaires and Talasyn. She could only stare, dumbfounded, at the crown prince’s broad back. The spikes on his pauldrons glinted, grotesquely skeletal, in the glow of nearby fires.

“Find your own plaything,” Alaric instructed in his deep rasp. “I have a score to settle with this one.”

Talasyn bristled. As soon as the other Shadowforged had reluctantly melted back into the smoke and rubble, she brought her two swords together and melded them into a single sharp javelin, which she hurled at him with a fierce cry. Alaric brought up one gauntleted arm, folding it in front of his chest; the javelin crashed into a shield of shadow, and both fizzled out of existence. His left flank was unguarded and she didn’t give him any opportunity to correct his stance. She was upon him in an instant, back to curved swords again, one blazing in each hand.

Alaric quickly conjured a whip from the Shadowgate, wrapping it around Talasyn’s ankle. He gave a sharp tug and she fell, flat on her back on the ground, the wind knocked out of her by the impact. He transmuted the whip into a falchion and brought it down over her prone form just as she sprang up, crossing her swords in front of her, timing it just right, timing it so that the blades intersected over his, trapping it between them. And, just like that, she was looking up at the Kesathese prince’s half-shrouded face for the first time since Nenavar.

They strained into each other. For Talasyn, the rest of the world faded, eclipsed by Alaric in all his danger, hawklike gray eyes burning down at her above the obsidian half-mask.

“Nice to see you again.” His sarcasm cut through the air as precisely as any knife, the lethal edge of the shadow-falchion almost grazing her neck.

“Why, did you miss me?” she retorted, trying her very best to angle one of her blades in such a way as to stab him in the throat.