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W e spend another few hours packing up the Savasci’s home, but it’s obvious from the start that Syril has seen this day coming for some time.

While there’s plenty of evidence of children—clothes, dolls and well-used toys—only warriors remain in this camp.

There’s little else to move other than food and a few provisions for each of the women.

Everything else Syril orders to be added to a growing pile destined to become a pyre.

Tennet lends his back to the effort, but his face grows stormier with each new addition. Finally, he’s had enough.

“Why burn it all?” he confronts Syril as she throws another small pile of children’s clothes onto what will soon become a pyre. “Are these children and their mothers all dead?”

She recoils a little, startled out of wherever her thoughts had taken her.

“Of course they’re not dead. They were sent to safety.

Some of them as much as six months ago, others after the first attack and the destruction of the Eighth House.

It wasn’t safe for them here. And we have gone through too many cycles of privation not to know the signs.

There are places where they can blend into the villages, and we’ve amassed enough wealth over the years that we don’t need to go empty handed anywhere. ”

My lips twitch. The Savasci are some of the most skilled thieves the First House has ever experienced.

If they did show up someplace empty handed, they certainly didn’t leave it that way.

I glance over to see if Fortiss shares my reaction, but he’s standing at the far edge of the Savasci camp, his gaze hard on the Eighth House rising silently in the distance.

He’s up on his toes, his fingers twitching.

That’s not good.

“Then why not simply hide these goods until you reunite with them?” Tennet persists.

Syril sighs. “Because we may not reunite with them, Lord Tennet, and I won’t let their belongings be used by the skrill to fool others with their illusion magic.

Besides, if we do survive this night, when we do, we’ll be forever changed.

They will be forever changed. And the trappings of our past, especially bits of clothing and toys they are even now outgrowing have no place in the lives we will forge.

We’ll keep our tools and our weapons, the food we can carry and the clothes that can serve us in the weeks ahead.

The rest we will make or buy when the time comes. ”

“But this—” he holds up an intricately carved comb, sized for a young girl, almost like it’s a weapon, but there’s nothing but sorrow in his voice. For a man made of fire and fury, Tennet burns strangely soft for the innocent. “This is fine work.”

Syril’s eyes fall upon it, and her mouth falters a bit, her gaze going a little soft.

“You’ve had the luxury of having a place to call your own, a place of safety and certainty.

We have that luxury, too, as the Savasci—but only here.

” She taps between her breasts with two fingers.

“Anything of value that cannot be carried here doesn’t truly serve you, not when you’re both hunted and hunter. ”

Tennet looks like he’s about to object but merely sets his jaw. Gently, Syril takes the comb out of his hand and tosses it high upon the pile.

Glancing back to the edge of the camp, I stiffen. Fortiss is gone.

Blood and stone. “Syril, I’ll be back in just a?—”

“Lady Talia!” A tall, lean Savasci calls me from the opening of the great cave, and I wheel toward her, blinking as she leads a row of more than a dozen women out of the shadows, all of them in tunics and breeches, their well-muscled arms bared.

Some of them I’ve seen before, some I haven’t—but they all could be sisters in the way they move.

Stern-faced, sharp-eyed, and as fluid as the wind through the trees, they follow the first woman until she stops in front of me. Tennet and Syril have turned as well.

“These are the women you will band—with no training?” he begins, blustering, but Syril places a hand on his shoulder, staying his complaint.

“Arrant, Johl! Report with your men,” she calls out. A few moments later, a small knot of guards appear as well, the soldiers who’d managed to survive the first attack of the skrill and remained to serve the Savasci. They line up with the women, a group of nearly twenty souls.

“These are the best warriors I can offer you, Lord Tennet.” She hasn’t removed her hand from his shoulder.

“I trust them with my life. I have trained most of them myself. They will follow your lead wherever it may take them, even into the Light itself. But if you can’t accept them, I’ll release them now. It’s your decision.”

I bite my lip to keep myself from smiling, though no one is looking at me. Still, Syril has caught Tennet well and truly in her trap. He grits his teeth so hard I can hear them grind together, but he nods. “Then we shall fight,” he says.

By the time he turns back to me, I’ve schooled my face into stoic indifference…but I don’t miss the fact that Syril’s hand is still on Tennet’s shoulder. She’s easily ten years his senior, I think—but only ten. Could there be a connection there?

Not a possibility we have time to consider today, of course. The Savasci and guards now stare at me with a mixture of hope, anxiety, and wonder…and I can’t say that I blame them. I don’t know what I’m doing either.

The warrior acts first with the mind, then with the body.

I square my shoulders and lift my voice.

“I’ve been blessed with a battalion of Divhs who need warriors, and you have been chosen to meet that need.

” My words carry out boldly across the open space and into the plains.

Before I can even wonder if Gent is listening, I hear his hooting laugh of pleasure, equal parts commentary and call to arms of Divhs I’ve barely met.

But their buzzing energy builds within me, and I gesture to the wide plain.

“To take the band is a swift and painful experience, but the pain is fleeting and the connection life-long. The best advice I can give you is to surrender to it. To leap, knowing you’ll be caught. ”

Gent’s howl is louder now, and it’s joined by the keening cries of twenty-some additional beasts, their roars pounding through my blood so loudly I can barely hear Tennet’s question.

“How will they know whose Divh is whose? Do they just pick?”

“No.” I shake my head, sudden clarity laying out the way in front of me. “I do.”

I point at the woman closest to me, the oldest of the group of warriors.

Gray streaks her hair, and deep lines bracket her mouth and eyes, but they tell the tale of a woman who not only fights with ferocity but laughs with all her spirit.

As I focus on her image, an answering call screams across the Blessed Plane, and I see the creature in its full, magnificent glory before it bursts into view.

The group collectively gasps, and they should.

A bird almost as large as Wrath soars over us, breathing fire.

Though she only has one set of taloned legs, the talons are that of a raptor and the glint of steel at the end of her orange wings indicate that her wings are every bit as vicious weapons as her claws.

She screams and the woman I’ve designated as her match shocks me by screaming back, a wild and vibrant howl that has the winged phoenix banking back sharply, searching the ground where we stand.

Wind whips off the plains and around us, drawing our unit more tightly together.

I command the woman forward and extend my left arm as she approaches, palm up. At my direction, she places her left hand in mine, barely flinching as I squeeze our hands into a tight grip.

What happens next does make her flinch, of course.

As I hold her gaze steadily with mine, I can feel the lowest strand of my segmented warrior band break away and carve its path down my bicep, into the crook of my elbow, and along my forearm, leaving a bloody welt in its path.

It spins around both our hands and cuts into the warrior’s wrist, burning its way up her arm until it burrows deep into her bicep, circling it in a ferocious clamp.

Her eyes widen, and she falls back. But she doesn’t falter from there. Her chin comes up, her jaw sets, and her hand redoubles its strength as she grips mine.

“What’s your name?”

“Selena,” she shouts, And I realize the wind hasn’t died down, and that the phoenix is not the only Divh that has entered this plane. The sky is choked with flying creatures, while furred beasts pound the earth as far as the eye can see.

“Go and fight, warrior Selena,” I command her.

The scream of the phoenix fills the air as Selena turns toward the open plain.

She breaks into a run, arms pumping, legs churning, and her phoenix sees her as of course only she can, the beacon of her warrior partner lit up like the sun.

She swoops down with her talons bared, and moments later, the two of them vanish into the Blessed Plane to complete their bonding.

I turn to the next soldier nearest me, a guard whose face is a mass of scars and long-ago broken bones.

His Divh appears in my mind’s eye, a mountain of a landed creature that looks like a fall of boulders taken physical form.

We grasp left hands, the warrior’s massive paw dwarfing mine, and he proves himself to be a quick study.

“I am Rud,” he shouts—and he still has to shout, as the screaming all around us has only gotten worse.

Rud’s grip nearly crushes my bones as the band leaps from my arm to his, but his eyes glitter with ferocity and pride as his rock-boulder Divh roars ebulliently and pounds its way to him, running with both hands and feet connecting with the earth.

Rud turns and, as Selena did before him, shouts in pure, unfettered joy at the breathtakingly ungainly creature galloping our way.

In that moment, he doesn’t look like a guard of nearly five decades in age.

He may as well have been my own brother, seventeen years old, wild and free, racing toward his Divh and hurling himself forward, knowing that he would be caught.

The two practically collide before they vanish to the Blessed Plane.

The banding goes quickly after that. In less than a few hours, the full company of warriors has disappeared, and the wide plains before the Savasci’s camp have fallen quiet. Both Tennet and Syril search the heavens, him with something approaching shock on his face, her with pure wonder.

“What a gift you have given them, helping them become warriors, Lady Talia,” she murmurs.

To my surprise, Tennet turns on me, his eyes gone hard and fierce.

“She should be banded as well. You know that. If you’re going to band all these…”

I shake my head even as Syril scoffs at him.

“You’ll all be as blind as newborn babes without my eyes to show you how the skrill play you for fools.

Banding with the Divhs is not a prize to be awarded to the best at playing warrior games, not here, not now.

We may as well be thrust back into that first Great Conflict, thirty horsemen facing a mountain spilling over with evil, seeking the aid of the most unlikely allies. We will fight in the way that we must.”

“Then afterwards ,” he stresses, not willing to cede the point.

In this at least, I fully agree with him. “Afterward you will have a Divh so fierce, it will give Tennet’s dragon pause,” I promise her.

She barks a laugh. “Done.”

We turn our attention to the far horizon. “Will they be ready to fight?” Syril asks quietly, though there’s no one left to hear but the healers standing at the ready for when the warriors return.

I shrug. “Most of them will. Some may be overcome with sickness and need to be tended, but they’ll join as soon as they can stand.

Their bond with their Divhs will demand it.

And if the Light blesses us with any luck at all, we’ll have the warriors from the other houses up and down the borders to aid us as well.

We’ve seen only a little of what the skrill have to offer. We’ll need all the help we can get.”

Tennet glances around. “Where’s Fortiss?”

Syril sighs. “He’s gone back to the Eighth House to find what he may. Lord protector or not, he’s like every man in that regard. They’re never content to leave well enough alone, but the Eighth House holds on to its secrets tightly. If he’s not careful, it may hold on to him too.”

I look at her sharply. “What are you talking about? There’s nothing in the Eighth House anymore but illusions.”

“But what are illusions but shadows of what we expect to see?” Syril grimaces. “If there’s anything that can haunt the lord protector, he’ll find it. And when he finds it, he’ll learn truths he may not wish to know.”

“Blighted path ,” I mutter. “Tennet?—”

“I’ll take care of the warriors,” he booms, as I take off toward the horses. “You go bring our leader home.”