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Instead of a lake, the western part of Tiran’s barrier ran along the ground below the Venholt range.

The land passage had been blocked with snow when the Caldonnae had attempted their crossing ten years ago, but at this time of year, right at the beginning of the Deep Night, it would still be passable.

And by the time the expansion spell had finished pushing the warming veil westward, it would touch the feet of the mountains, which were porous with caves.

Thomil had used those caves as shelter on the few occasions he had risked hunting dangerously close to Endrasta territory.

Some of the caverns were shallow, providing only passing cover from the wind, but some ran deep enough to hold their autumn temperatures even as the world around them froze solid.

Survival on those slopes was not certain—not even likely—but there was a chance.

“You have your bag, right?” Thomil turned back to double-check with Carra as they crept into the alley behind their building.

“Yeah.” Carra adjusted the heavy bundle on her shoulders with a frown. “Although I still think stealing all the widow’s coats was overkill.”

“Eh, you say that now.” Carra didn’t remember the Deep Nights beyond the barrier.

Thomil had hoped that by taking the darkest of back alleys, he and Carra might make it out of the quarter unnoticed, but no such luck. They had barely made it a block before three guards barred their way down an alley.

“You there!” one of them shouted. “All Kwen are to remain indoors until given permission to leave!”

These weren’t regular city guards, Thomil noted, taking in their armor and brass buttons.

They were barrier guards, called in from the edges of the city as reinforcement.

City mages and police might be unused to getting their hands bloody.

But these men had been killing Kwen long before the carnage of the last few days.

“I’m so sorry, sir.” Thomil opted to play things safe.

“I’m trying to get this girl to her mother’s apartment.

As you can see, she’s injured.” He hoped they didn’t examine the blood on Carra’s shirt closely enough to determine that it was not her own.

“I have a permit from my employer in my pocket if you let me—”

One of the guards grabbed Thomil and slammed him against the grimy alley wall, twisting his arm behind his back. A hand clawed at him, digging into his pocket.

“There’s no permit in here,” the guard said, cranking Thomil’s arm a fraction higher, “and what the hell is this?” He held up a cylinder he had fished out of Thomil’s pocket. The mark on the cap was red for danger. And Thomil was grateful Sciona had tasked him with training a conduit on his voice.

“Bang,” he said in Caldonnish—and the guard’s hand blew to pieces.

Before the man could start screaming, Thomil whirled around, gripped him beneath the jaw, and shoved him hard. His head went straight back into the alley wall, and he crumpled, unconscious.

The other two barrier guards had their firearms up and pointed at Thomil, but shooting in such a tight space would put them in danger from ricocheting bullets.

Only one of them took his chances. The shot missed, blowing a hole in a rusting garbage can.

Thomil was on him before he recovered from the kickback, raining punches on him.

Years ago, Thomil would have easily incapacitated a Tiranish guard with one punch.

So far removed from his hunting days, it took him three—which was two too many.

The third guard caught Thomil in the head with his club, splitting the world into a hundred ringing fragments, and Thomil came back to himself under the Tiranishman, a knee on his solar plexus, crushing the breath from his body.

Thomil lifted an arm to defend himself, and the guard’s club struck it away, cracking bone.

In a moment of icy certainty, Thomil knew he was going to die.

“Carra!” he bellowed through the pain and lack of air. “Run!” Don’t look back!

“Shut up, Blighter!” The man lifted his club to bring it down on Thomil’s head—then jerked back. The light went out of his green eyes as his club slid from limp fingers to the cobbles.

As the Tiranishman slumped sideways, Thomil braced for the sight of Carra with her knife covered in blood. But the guard clearly hadn’t fallen to a stab wound. It had looked more like a hard blow to the back of the head. And the figure standing over Thomil now was far bigger than Carra.

This was a Kwen he didn’t recognize—a railway worker, from the look of his bulging arms and the hammer in his hands.

“All right there, brother?” a voice asked in Kwen pidgin, and Thomil realized that there were several more workers behind the first, all holding hammers and pickaxes.

They were broad in the shoulders like Arras, their hair touched with fire like Carra’s.

Endrasta. But they helped Thomil to his feet and brushed him off like he was one of their own, as Carra sheathed the knife she had all-too-predictably drawn.

“Careful out here, brother,” one of the men said. “They’ll see us all dead if they catch us. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Then, what are all of you doing out here?” Thomil asked, gratefully leaning on the shoulder his rescuer offered him.

“We’re getting out of here.” This speaker was a woman, out of breath from rushing to catch up to the men with a baby in her arms. “Look!” She shifted the child on her hip to point west. “The gods have sent us a sign!”

Thomil followed the gesture to where the barrier was expanding toward the mountainous horizon. That was when he noticed the coats and extra blankets bundled onto the Endrastae’s backs. They were serious about braving the Deep Night.

“You don’t know all the risks,” Thomil said.

“You’re right,” one of the railway workers agreed. “But the risks if we stay are certain.”

“The police are already jailing and shooting us without trial,” another worker said.

“That man was ready to kill you just now. After whatever that was”—he gestured in the direction of Leon’s Hall—“how long do you think it will be before they round up everyone with a dash of copper in their hair and start Blighting us to death en masse?”

“Run with us!” the woman said, holding her child close. “Let’s be rid of this place before it’s rid of us! Let’s go home.”

These people knew nothing of Sciona’s theories that Blight would drop off with the barrier expansion. If they could have hope, then so could Thomil. Carra took Thomil’s good hand, and with their new kin around them, they ran.

“Do you know the best way to the caves?” Thomil asked one of the Endrastae, wondering if it was too much to hope that he and Carra had fallen into step with experienced mountaineers.

“More or less,” the Endrasta smiled. “You?”

“More or less.”

Outside the barrier, the Kwen would have only minutes to find shelter before the cold began claiming lives. But before that, they had to reach the new edge of the city alive.

The expanding barrier had disrupted the usually placid air inside Tiran, sending winds howling down the streets, swirling dust and knocking down people, trees, streetlamps, anything unused to standing against a gale.

Changing pressure swelled and popped in Thomil’s ears as though he was running full-tilt up a mountain instead of across level pavement.

More guards had taken up position in the streets, blocking the way westward, but the Endrasta railway workers weren’t the only Kwen to take the shifting barrier as a sign, and the sparsely spread Tiranishmen were increasingly overpowered as more Kwen surged from their workhouses and apartment complexes.

In panic, Tiranish guards had begun firing indiscriminately into the tide of fleeing Kwen.

A bullet struck the Endrasta woman in the leg.

She buckled with a scream, barely keeping hold of her baby.

Thomil turned back to reach for her, only to realize how useless he was with his injured arm. But Carra was already there.

“I’ve got him!” She took the child from the woman’s arms and clutched him to her bloodstained chest. “Don’t worry, Auntie, I’ve got him!”

One of the railway workers tossed his pickaxe to a friend and slung the whimpering woman over his shoulders.

“Keep running!” reverberated through the streets and alleys. They were words all Kwen knew well. Even those who had been born inside the barrier knew the echo from their parents and grandparents. “Forward! Don’t look back!”

Somewhere in the chaos, the gunfire had dropped off. Ahead of them, a brass-buttoned barrier guard paused to examine his gun in confusion, only to be trampled by the oncoming Kwen and die screaming as his bones broke beneath their feet.

“Their rifles have stopped working!” one of the Endrastae said in surprise. “Why? How?”

“Does it matter?” someone else said.

Thomil knew why, but there was hardly time to explain.

If the guns had stopped working, it was because the barrier expansion spell had burned through all life inside the Main Magistry building and moved down the subsequent branches of Sciona’s spellweb to tap parts of the Reserve—including the energy pool designated for firearms.

It meant that everyone in Leon’s Hall was dead.

Realizing what the absence of gunfire meant, Carra turned to look at Thomil in pain and concern. If there had been any sliver of doubt, it was certain now. Sciona was gone. Thomil met Carra’s raw silver eyes and repeated the chorus around him:

“Don’t look back.”

The wave of Kwen had reached the former edge of the city, marked only by a line where thick green grass met sodden brown.

The moment Thomil crossed onto the brown, bones crunched underfoot.

Layers of them. Some fresh and strung with wet vestiges of muscle, some brittle with age, turning to dust beneath the hundreds of feet pelting out of the city.

These people or their parents or their grandparents had all crossed into Tiran separately with different hopes for what the city might hold. They were one now, bound by the sorrow of the crossing and a will to live that could outlast all Tiran’s machinery. One tribe. One purpose.

Sciona had posited that all emotions—fear, anger, sadness—were just energy, equal in their potential power, but Thomil found himself disagreeing as more and more Kwen fell into step around him.

There was more power in him now than there had been during the crossing ten years ago when he ran in fear.

For the first time, he grasped the force that had kept his sister moving, pulling him onward with her through all their loss.

For the first time, he ran the way Maeva had: not from oblivion but toward a hope bigger than himself.

Thomil had always understood that it wasn’t Carra alone that he had borne across the lake.

But he now understood that it hadn’t been the Caldonnae alone either.

We are one people with one purpose, Beyern had said .

But the ‘we’ was more than the Caldonnae, more than any coalition of tribes.

It was Arras pushing Maeva a little further than he had gone, Maeva pushing Thomil a little further than she had gone, Thomil pushing Carra a little further still—even Sciona Freynan pushing them both a little further still.

Like so many he had loved, maybe Thomil wouldn’t live to see the dawn.

Maybe Carra wouldn’t. Maybe it would be a hundred generations before the sun rose on a life of dignity for their descendants, but the worthwhile run was not the sprint.

Tiranish police and barrier guards shouted orders to one another, pursuing the fleeing Kwen into the boneyard, and Thomil put his good hand on Carra’s shoulder.

“Run ahead of me!” He pushed her out before him just in case the Tiranishmen got their guns working again; a bullet would have to go through him first. Carra had a good pair of legs like her father and scarcely slowed him down, even with a pack on her back and a baby in her arms.

The expanding barrier raced ahead of the Kwen, the life force of a hundred mages, politicians, and city guards lighting the way to the mountains.

Thomil felt his legs tiring, an old ache setting into his lungs, exacerbated by years of breathing the factory-poisoned air of the Kwen Quarter—when the barrier slowed as though in mercy.

It had reached its planned perimeter on the lower slopes.

As the flood of copper-haired runners poured through the light, there was a tingle, a brutal drop in temperature, but no Blight.

Carra yelped as the icy air bit through her insufficient shirt and trousers. Thomil just breathed in the cold he had thought he would never taste again.

Home .

Unobstructed stars lit the sky above the mountains, putting all Tiran’s electric marvels to shame.

“Put the baby inside your shirt,” an Endrasta told Carra as he draped a blanket over her and the small child, even as she tried to assure him, through chattering teeth, that she was fine.

“Make for the caves!” an older Endrasta called, taking control of the confused mass of shivering Kwen. “Cover your extremities and keep moving! This way!”

Time was precious, but Thomil took a moment of it to look back at the barrier. Wrapped in the icy arms of his homeland, he imagined that his sister, his parents, and all the Caldonnae watched from that light that had taken their lives. The twinkle of magic became the spring gleam in Sciona’s eyes.

To hope. Sciona lifted her glass, and Thomil raised a fist in return.

To hope, Highmage Freynan.