Page 47

T he shock of our crash into the water blanks all my senses until a moment later we’re out again, and Gent opens his great palm to the sky. He beams down happily as I splutter, bedraggled and sodden.

“Did I look like I wanted a bath?” I demand. He throws his head back and howls with simple joy, then grins down at me like a proud parent as I scramble back in his palm, bracing myself on the leathery hide.

“You know why I’m here? You know what I need to know?”

He huffs contentedly.

I widen my eyes. “You do, don’t you?” My mind actually starts hurting inside my skull. Not the muscle and blood and skin and sinew, but actual thoughts giving me real pain. “But how? How do you know what I need before I even know how to ask for it?”

He doesn’t have an answer for this, just continues beaming at me. His glance slides off to the right as if he’s contemplating another impromptu dive into the depths of the lake. “No! No,” I say hurriedly. “I need to know, to understand…”

Words fail me once again, so I just create images in my mind, imagining me at the Eighth House, then at the First, and then at the Tenth, as if I’m literally walking out of one chamber in one house and into a second chamber in the next.

Gent cocks head at me, and I sigh. So much for him knowing what I need to understand.

“House to house,” I say, scrubbing my hands over my face as I try to make him understand.

“I need to travel house to house. Like…how did you find us? How did you know all the way back in the beginning where we were when we needed you? How did you know to come to us before any of us were banded to you?”

Gent squints at me as if I’m an idiot, then lifts his other mighty paw and draws it close.

With the softest, most delicate movement, he taps the claw of his smallest finger in the center of my forehead.

Never mind it’s like being hit by the broad side of a pony, I don’t stagger back—it’s that gentle of a touch.

For a moment, there’s no Fortiss, no Tennet, no crown or prophecy. Just me, and the one creature who always comes when I call.

Gent huffs again in hooting encouragement, and I gasp as my mind fills with images of great vistas, mountains, the wide bowl of the open plains, bands of riderless horses—and a million sunsets and sunrises, with trees growing from sapling to towering sentinels the only indication that time’s rolling on.

Then, over the mountains and through the rich forests of the east, an army comes—not a great army, not a powerful force, but thirty ragtag men and women on powerful steeds, packhorses trailing behind.

It’s an exploratory party of some sort, their Imperial standards flying boldly as they ride.

They flow across the wide plains, stopping at broken ruins of castles and keeps, plundering and powering on.

They ride all the way to the west, but their energy also extends back the way they came.

It stretches in a curious starlit trail eastward toward the rising sun, through mountains and endless forests, beside a wide and tumultuous sea to a glorious city of gold where there are books, people, and learned men—soldiers, a room laden with maps, and another dominated by a throne of gold…

And I see it all.

“But how…” My mind balks at the barrage of imagery, bouncing from one scene to the next as I struggle to understand.

Above me, Gent huffs again, the roll of his warm, chuffing breath sweeping over me.

I know in my heart that he intends to ease my stress, but it only serves to drive me to a heightened frustration.

It’s all right here , right in front of me.

And somehow, I can recognize—everything.

People I’ve never met, moments I’ve never experienced, events that I have no connection to that I have no way of understanding.

But how is that possible? Because I don’t know these people, I wasn’t there, I’m not part of…

Then I see it. The man at the head of the troop of Imperial riders—grinning, laughing, every inch the conquering warrior enjoying the spoils of his search. He pulls out a circlet of gold with jutting decorations on either side, and he places it on his head.

Everything in the timeline leaps into brilliant focus.

The flow to the west as well as the flow to the east, the memories of a land destroyed long, long ago.

And in every stop along the way, small, curved beacons buried in the walls and foundations of buildings large and small light up like a million crescent stars, each of them connected to the others by a thin filament of light. Talonstones .

I stare in absolute wonder, my breath stilling in my throat.

These thirty men and women from the Imperium are little more than marauders, but there’s nothing for them to conquer but ruins of long-ago holdings.

Holdings that I now see in split view through the eyes of a man who wears a winged crown—General Mirador.

I hear his thoughts as if they’re my own—there was a people here once, and there would be again, all for the glory of the Imperium.

I think of the Shattered City trapped between the Tenth and the Twelfth Houses, a place so full of dread that when the Protectorate had formed the holdings that would support its great families, they hadn’t based one there.

The houses to the east were small, nimble, and the Shattered City was too much to try and protect and contain.

There were too many places for marauders to hide, for animals to shelter, for rumors to build.

But in the plains and the west, the ruins were merely long-ago castles and manor houses, as well as remains of villages next to thriving waterways and verdant fields.

Even along the Meridian mountains, the terrain is so much more beautiful in my vision than it is now—a wide valley of trees and thick green grass, a deep lake.

Nothing like the yellow, waving, grass-covered plains here now.

And the location of the Eighth House is a good place for a manor house—the first of several that would lead this land, all for the glory of the Imperium.

Mirador looks up at the sky, a frown marring his brow beneath his golden crown, and I strain to see what he sees as he lifts his left hand into the sky. Divhs, I think…but not only Divhs. Something else.

Something worse.

“Talia?”

The sound seems to be coming from far away, but it’s not Gent speaking my name, prodding and shaking me.

Still, it is Gent whose gentle poke is growing worse now, so much worse, as in my mind Mirador’s eyes snap wide, fixing on an unknown threat.

A sense of profound, unutterable loss blasts through me, the driving spike of Gent’s talon shoving through my mind, skewering me with a pain so great that I screech out?—

“Talia!”

I wake up choking, a stream of water pouring over my face, into my mouth, as powerful arms hold me tight to something warm and firm, my legs kicking out violently, my arms flailing.

“ Talia ,” Fortiss yells again, upending another carafe of water over me, soaking me and Tennet behind me, who grunts with effort as I pitch and writhe.

“I saw—saw it! I saw it,” I splutter, struggling for breath, for sanity.

If anything, Tennet holds me tighter, while Fortiss grabs my thrashing arms at the wrists and pulls them in tight.

The three of us are so close we could fit into our own grave, and the combined pressure of them finally quiets me.

I meet Fortiss’s golden eyes, feel them searching mine as if he can somehow pry the answers out of my mind.

I open my mouth to speak, but no words come out.

“Tell me what you saw,” he urges, and a wave of panic overtakes me again, images pouring through me, drowning me.

It’s too much, though, and I shake my head violently, trying to shove it all away. “What…what happened?” I finally manage. “T-tell me what happened to me.”

Some silent communication passes between Fortiss and Tennet, and Tennet’s pressure eases on my shoulders while Fortiss steps away, pulling me with him with a gentle hold on my wrists until we reach the long benches.

I blink around, confused. We’re back on the stone overlook of the Eighth House, and I’m drenched to the skin.

“How much water did you dump on me?” I grumble as Fortiss slowly eases me into a seated position.

“Barely two cups worth,” he lies as he drags up a stool and sits close to me.

Tennet stands at my side, legs braced wide, as if he expects me to tumble over into a faint.

“You agreed to summon Gent, and then you seemed to shift into almost a running motion, but you never moved. Your right hand swept out, your left arm cocked, you leaned forward…and then you convulsed, your skin turning nearly blue, your hair, clothes, all of you suddenly drenched. Hardly any time had passed at all, but you started gasping and flailing, and I didn’t want to smack you awake. Water seemed the better choice.”

“I guess I should be grateful for that,” I say, then feel the gorge rising inside me. I lean forward, my elbows on my knees, as Fortiss scoots back—but he doesn’t leave me. He won’t leave me, I think—just as Gent won’t.

Nausea rocks me again.

“I’m fine,” I gasp, and I feel his sure touch as he smooths my hair back, slicking its still too-short length into place behind my ears. I spend a few moments dry heaving before finally regaining my breath again.