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“ E veryone—off the plains. We need to get out of sight,” Fortiss announces.

“We’re ready for you.” Syril steps up as Fortiss steps into full lord protector mode, issuing orders for us all to follow her. We take no more than a half-dozen strides before I falter, and Caleb yells something about my back.

Then darkness rushes over me like the skrill, and I’m gone.

I awake to find Tennet staring at me through one bloodshot eye, the rest of his face covered in bandages. Both of us are sprawled on low pallets separated off from the rest of what looks like a dozen sickbeds.

“You just can’t help wanting to crawl into bed with me, can you?” He grins at me.

If I had the energy to throw something at him, I would.

Instead, I grimace, and struggle to pull myself into a sitting position.

The pain in my right shoulder is intense enough to make my sight go white for a moment, and when I refocus again, Nazar is at my side.

One gentle palm is on my left shoulder, another is gripping my right bicep, and he’s staring me keenly in the eyes as I refocus.

“What do you see, Lady Talia?” he asks, and I barely keep from giggling, which I know is not the right reaction at all.

Still, this is Nazar, a high priest of the Imperium and a banded warrior to one of the fiercest Divhs I’ve ever met.

I stare at him, not truly seeing his face as I try to capture the images assaulting my mind.

“I see the Blessed Plane,” I murmur, and my voice sounds as wrong as the vision feels. “I can see them all—even Gent. I can’t connect to him, hear him. But I can see him with the rest of them. They’re healing, Nazar. They are well.”

I frown over in what I think is Tennet’s direction. “Ayne is injured more than he should be, more than even he expects to be,” I tell him. “He’s submerged in the great lake up to his nostrils.”

Tennet’s response is a short, percussive curse.

“Ayne took it into his head that he needed to protect everyone, everywhere, all at once—most especially the fire-breathing Divhs who weren’t prepared for battle.

The fire falcon was—young. And stubborn.

She wouldn’t band with anyone but Syril, and Syril couldn’t, not yet.

When she set herself aflame in self-defense after getting weighed down by skrill, Ayne decided he’d save her. ”

He grunts and I can almost picture him flopping back on his blankets. “He’s an idiot.”

But my mind is already wandering down distant shores, searching, searching…but not finding. “So much is lost to me,” I murmur. “I can see, but I can’t connect. And Gent…”

Nazar taps my right shoulder, sending a blinding shot of white-hot pain through me. My gaze sharpens again, and his face snaps back into focus. “You were stung by Rihad’s scorpion, in its first pass before it picked up you and Fortiss.”

“His,” I correct him through the pain. “Zhang.”

He nods, giving me the briefest of smiles.

“Scorpions don’t usually leave anything but poison behind when they sting.

But in this case, Zhang did. A pebble the size of your thumb, shaped almost like a talonstone but not of any stone that I can identify.

It was more like cement. Fortiss said you’d understand it but offered no other explanation. ”

“Because I didn’t have an explanation to offer,” Fortiss says.

I turn, blearily, as he moves toward me.

Pain blankets his expression, but centers in his eyes as he stares at me—worry, I realize.

He’s worried about me, and that realization kindles a small rush of warmth in me, though he’s not looking so well, himself.

He’s not injured like Tennet, but his movement is off, too slow, too awkward.

He holds up a small stone object, offering it to me. I stare down at it, dumbly.

“That’s what was inside me?”

“Part of it. We don’t know if it broke off the tip of Zhang’s tail, but that seems the most likely explanation. There’s a second piece as well, buried in your shoulder blade. When we attempted to remove it?—”

“No,” I cut him off short, a wash of agony ripping through me, a memory I cannot fully understand. “No. Leave it there. I can move my shoulder.”

I make the attempt at it to prove my point. The pain is sharp, but manageable, while the idea of them wresting that piece out of my bone the way Fortiss ripped the crown free of its cement prison makes me want to faint. “So this was around the barb on his tail? And it split off when he stung me?”

“That’s my thinking.” Fortiss grimaces. “I wanted to see if you had a different idea.”

I snort, rolling the tiny piece around in my hand. “I don’t. And I was helping him, by the Light. It seems like if he had wanted to do me harm, he could’ve just left us there. He didn’t. None of the other bits of cement remained on me, right? Why did this survive?”

“It was wrapped around his tail,” Fortiss suggests. “Maybe his poison…” he sighs. “I don’t know. I suspect only Zhang does, since he broke it off deliberately, wedging it into your bone.”

I wince at the image, and Nazar turns to me.

“Do you see him in the Blessed Plane?”

“I…” I break off, frowning, then I shake my head. “No. If he’s there, I can’t connect to him. Honestly, I can’t really connect to any of them.” I refocus on Nazar. “Is that the price of wearing the winged crown, then? It breaks apart the connection between warrior and Divh?”

His brows go up. “You’ve lost all connection?”

“I mean…” I shift uncomfortably. “No. I can still hear and speak to all of them at once but—I mean Gent. The ones I’m banded to. Those—they’re gone from me.”

“Mmm.” He nods. “It’s telling that the leader of the Imperial delegation, the first great warrior, found the crown first, and used it to clear success in the Great Conflict, then immediately gave it away.

It’s also telling that it was banished to the Western Realms at some point over the centuries.

I suspect that to wear the winged crown gives the bearer the power over both Light and darkness, without true connection to either.

That power would allow you to draw the darkness from the blighted path, command it, and return it at will.

It might also allow you to draw all the Divhs to your service, command them, and return them at will as well.

Should you truly wish to cleave to one or the other in real partnership, however, the crown won’t allow it. ”

“But I only had it on my head for an instant ,” I moan.

“I wasn’t trying to rule the world, Nazar.

I was trying to free Fortiss and Zhang too.

Even Zhang seemed terrified of the thing, but I had to get them out.

I had to get them free. Besides all that, how am I still able to talk to the skrill if I don’t have the thing on my head? ”

Nazar holds my gaze. “Can you hear them now? From their home in the Western Realms?”

I feel the blood punch out of my face at his question, but I reach out with my mind…

A chorus of eager hissing swamps me.

“I can. Just…like the Divhs. I’m not connected to any one of them but…” I swallow. “They can hear me. They’re all just right there waiting for me to put the crown on again.”

Fortiss folds his arms over his chest. “We need to understand this better. There has to be something about the crown in the great books that we recovered here, and maybe more than we realize in the volumes we have back at the First House. But we can’t return there through the Blessed Plane, Talia. We must ride across the open plains.”

“But why?” I asked, though I already know the answer to my own question. I shake my head fiercely. “I’m not that injured, Fortiss, no matter what Zhang stuck into my shoulder. I’ll be fine. I won’t slow you down.”

His mouth sets into a firm line. “I won’t risk it, and I won’t risk you. You’re too important.”

“All right, fine.” I wave at him, suddenly exhausted though I stiffen my spine so as not to betray myself. “Then I can ride across the open plains with a small company, and you can go back to the First House as fast as you can—with the crown. Someone should go back.”

“I won’t return without you,” Fortiss says, with such hard certainty that I blink. “And Tennet is too damaged to fly, even if Ayne did return to this plane.”

“I can ride,” Tennet assures him, but his voice sounds different, and I look back to see him collapsed back on his pallet, Syril scowling down at him.

“He’ll be strong enough to attempt it in another day,” she says quietly. “And stubborn enough to stay tied into the saddle. But it will take another few days for him to be able to move with any speed.”

“Since when does a woman want speed over skill…” Tennet mutters, but Fortiss turns to Nazar.

“Talia’s not wrong, though. We should send a delegation back through the Blessed Plane ahead of us, to learn what we may about the skrill with the books I’ve left there and to prepare for our return.

Right now, the darkness sleeps. But until we fully understand it, it’ll remain a threat.

To us, to the Protectorate as a whole, and eventually to the Imperium.

We can’t afford to let the skrill wake again without being ready. ”

“But they remained sleeping for a long time before, right?” Caleb gestures at the collection of the sick and injured. “They made their stand, and they definitely proved that they could hold their own with us in open combat. Maybe that’s all they wanted to prove.”

“They made their stand, and in the course of the battle, the crown of wings was wrested from its holding place and returned to the Protectorate,” Fortiss counters.

“That may change things, it may not. I don’t worry so much about the skrill acting on their own, though.

There was something guiding them until Talia donned the crown. ”

“The shadow monsters?”