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T he warrior should make a decision in seven breaths.

“One!” I gasp, pulling my long sword around in a wide, sweeping lunge, low enough to cause the four-foot-tall, flying weevishes to spin away, their chittering whoops and wheezes sounding so much like laughter that I narrow my eyes.

Half a dozen of these flying spawn of the Seventh House’s mighty sandworm monster bob around me, pushing me back—back on the narrow ledge.

I can barely breathe with all the debris their leathery wings kick up, and I can’t see all that well, either.

“Two!” I spit out, hacking my way forward the moment the smallest of the creatures exposes its underbelly. At the first slice of my sword, it screams and poofs out of this plane. I whirl in one motion, hauling my sword around in a vicious arc.

“Three…four.” My aim is true, and the blood thrall from the first cut has made the remaining five creatures jittery and foolish.

I take out two more, but as I spin around in the flow of water and wind, I catch sight of a rider high in the mountain pass above me, watching me in this abandoned canyon.

A lone rider on a steed, wearing a cloak of… what is that color?

All this happens in the space of a breath, but it’s a breath I can’t spare. I miss the next screeching beast as I complete my killing arc, and I wince at the miscalculation. I’ve confronted these plague-born spawn before. If I don’t dispatch the rest of them in, well, two more breaths?—

But it’s already too late.

I rush forward, slashing away at the fourth weevish, then the fifth, and they pop out of existence with satisfying screams of irritation.

I’m not truly hurting them, of course, but by besting these weevishes on the battlefield I’m keeping them from their next stage of evolution—an evolution that has to be earned .

And this last weevish manages it. Even as I arc my sword high to slice a vicious stripe through the sixth, it convulses, jerking away from my sword as if yanked out of reach by an unseen hand.

Then it explodes with a feral scream of glee, bursting out of its glistening carapace and morphing into a creature a third again larger than its weevish stage, lifting itself skyward with more powerful wings and lashing its multiple appendages out in all directions.

These appendages have actual claws that drip poison, a precursor to the thick hide of its adult state, where the appendages draw back to become razor-sharp scales, the better to administer a lethal dose.

I personally think the external claws do a good enough job on their own.

A second after the worm transforms, the shockwave strikes me.

“Blood and stone !” Despite my best efforts to hold my ground, I’m knocked backwards off my feet, bouncing painfully across the rocky scree by the force of the weevish’s transition.

The flying worm soars straight up into the sky, convulsing in exultant joy at its evolution.

It’s forgotten me entirely, spinning off the muck of its discarded skin and showering me with a rainstorm of oozing flesh and gore.

Then it disappears entirely.

A far-off roar of deeply satisfied monsters reaches my ears—the weevish’s mother?

My own powerful Divh?—but their joyful, ululating cry is faint enough I know they are safely on their own plane, not crashing through the few remaining trees of this mountain pass.

Too many monsters have done that already in the run-up to the Tournament of Gold, now nearly four weeks past. The mountain could use a rest.

“ Light ,” I groan as their cries die off.

I stagger to my knees, then upright. I flip my cloak open and wipe my sword clean before sheathing it anew, then drag a forearm across my grimy face.

When my own Divh, Gent, brought me an entire army of enormous, otherworldly creatures at the close of the Tournament of Gold, I’d assumed my job would be merely finding enough warriors to bond to them.

I hadn’t understood that all unbonded Divhs would consider me their ambassador on this plane…

including newly minted sandworm mothers who needed a warrior to help their babies transition from weevish to wormlet.

Hanging my head, I work my hands through my gore-soaked hair, slicking off the worst of the mess.

Then I hear the stamping hoofs, the heavy, gusting exhale of a nervous, but stalwart horse. The rider from the high pass.

I straighten and turn around in one movement, but though my hands are loose and at my side, I don’t pull a blade—not at first. Never at first. The warrior doesn’t betray his abilities when surprise might yet serve him…or her. Especially her.

Instead, my gaze rakes across the watcher, still at a distance where a bow or spear might serve but not a sword, and he has drawn no weapon either. He sits atop his horse a few lengths ahead of a second steed, barely visible around the narrow entrance to this ledge. He’s not alone, then.

“I would have rendered aid, warrior, but you seemed to be in no need of it.” The voice is strong and full—and not one I’ve heard before.

“I didn’t,” I call back, my gravelly croak no longer a grating affront against my own ears.

I’ve gotten used to it, and in this garb—alone on this ridge—it’s not such a bad thing to sound like a man.

I may be the head of my own house, commander of a battalion of fierce and otherworldly monsters, but I’m still a woman alone against a brace of fighting men whom I don’t particularly want to beat to death, even though I could.

The Protectorate has need for fighting men, now more than ever.

Even men I do not know and cannot place. While before, I could have sworn I’d caught a bright and vibrant color of this rider’s livery, it’s now nowhere to be seen. He’s hidden the colors of his house beneath a dull gray cloak, keeping them from my view.

Interesting.

“That was a remarkable thing, given that the numbers were well against you. Those were sandworm spawn? Weevishes, I think they’re called?

At least—they were. It’s been some time since I have been to the southern plains.

I expected, even hoped to be free to take part in the Tournament of Gold, but fate is a cruel mistress.

I assume you took part? And more importantly, you clearly survived.

That was a bigger challenge than usual, if the traveling bards are to be believed.

I come to pay my respects to the new lord protector, having never had the pleasure of meeting the old one. ”

I squint at the warrior, hearing the mountains in his tone, the eastern brogue so similar to the way my own brother used to speak.

But this is no boy. He looks to be of an age to me, and there are no men with Divhs whose lineage I haven’t been exhaustively trained on.

The only one close was Lord Orlof’s son, a boy of maybe fourteen years, notable mainly because he was supposed to be my betrothed.

I grimace. Fortiss had been kind enough to send a runner to the Twelfth House, advising them of the events of the Tournament of Gold. And, too, that I wouldn’t be coming to wed the son of that house.

I’ve never met Lord Orlof’s son—I don’t even know his name.

I’m sure he’s a good enough boy, though, and I’m sure, like most fourteen-year-old children, he has no real interest in being wed to someone he’s never met.

I hope the Lord Orlof isn’t too disappointed, though… we’ll have need of his son soon enough.

The Twelfth House is the smallest of all the houses in the Protectorate, and being a mountain house, its Divh is likely similar to my own Gent in his original form—an imposing creature, but not the goliath he became upon the death of my brother and my subsequent banding to him.

I rouse myself from my thoughts as the warrior continues to peer at me.

“You’ll be heading to the First House then?

” I ask him gruffly, once more keenly aware of the roughness of my voice.

To my own ears I don’t sound anything like a man, but I managed to convince enough people these past few weeks that it’s easy to fall back into the cadence.

And, again, I’m a single female alone on a mountain road.

Even if he had heard of the wild story of Talia of the Tenth House who took up the mantle of her brother and fought in his place to gain a seat at the Court of Talons, this rider wouldn’t assume I was her.

Especially considering the layer of worm guts that’s currently drying to a crispy exoskeleton over my clothes.

“I am,” he says gravely, looking around the barren ledge.

“You have a horse nearby? We didn’t see one on the road come down from above, and there can’t be any easy passage from the rocks below.

Ride with us, if you’ve finished with your work.

You can tell us the tales we have missed in our travels from the eastern borders. ”

“The eastern…” My brows go up as my brain finally catches up to the rest of my body. “You’re coming to us from the Exalted Imperium? Are their agents headed this way? Their army?”

Despite my best efforts, my mind cartwheels through too many thoughts at once.

It’s been weeks since the Tournament of Gold, and my father has returned to the Tenth, thank the Light, his saddlebags filled with gold and his retinue swelled by a dozen fighting men.

But they are new men, and our house—his house—is one of the smallest in the Protectorate, perched in the mountains overlooking the Blessed Pass.

It’s the primary passage into the Protectorate from the Imperium, and I’ve only known one good man to ever come through it.

The warrior sits back in his saddle and regards me curiously. “Who are you, that you know so much about the eastern borders? What house do you hail from?”