Page 85

ONE MONTH LATER.

T he day dawns in absolute splendor across the wide, grassy plains, the sun rising over the eastern horizon turning the world into an endless sea of gold.

Off to the right, his great form throwing a monstrous silhouette against the Meridian mountains, Gent tips his head back and howls. The hair on my arms goes up, every nerve pricking to awareness.

In the nearly three months that I’ve been banded to my colossus, I have heard him howl in many ways, for many reasons. For joy, in excitement, in battle rage, in despair. But this is different. This howl seems to shake the very mountains and make the skies tremble.

Before us on the wide plains, the long sinuous grass shivers and writhes, whipped by an unseen wind. It’s not just the elements of this plane that respond, either. The sky snaps tight and suddenly the field before me is filled with Divhs.

Remarkably, none of them have wings. There are enormous four-legged cats, bulky-bodied bears with fists the size of manor houses, and beasts that seem more spikes than body—but all of them heavily muscled, broad—and howling.

“What’s this?” Fortiss yells above the cacophony as he joins me on the overlook of the Eighth House…

well, what is now my house, the Thirteenth.

It will take some time for me to get used to that, to everything that’s happened since we sent the Imperial delegation back to the heart of the Imperium with spices from the south, precious metals from the northwest—and casks filled to bursting with Twelfth House wine.

Fortiss’s shoulder brushes against me as he moves closer, his hand finding mine with that unconscious ease that still makes my heart quicken.

Even in the midst of this astonishing display of Divhs around us, I’m acutely aware of him—the clean scent of his skin, the warmth of his palm, the way his breath matches my own without either of us trying.

We’re together here as in all things, and I may never get over the wonder of that.

Tales from our spies who followed along in the path of the Imperial delegation have also been reassuring, and for that I’m truly thankful.

There will be no more soldiers, no more politicians to placate, at least not anytime soon.

Instead, we can focus on rebuilding our troops of warriors and Divhs and creating new connections between our finest councilors, artists, and tradesmen and the mighty giants of the Blessed Plane.

Not just the Blessed Plane either, I think, as my gaze strays to the ridiculous statue that yes, still stands of me…

or of Ehlyn, as I prefer to believe. A reminder of what’s possible for women in the Protectorate, and what’s possible in partnership with some of the most extraordinary stone masons and illusionists I’ve ever encountered, the skrill of the Western Realms.

There’s so much ahead of us, but this morning, with Fortiss at my side, my eyes are only for Gent as he whips around, throwing his massive arms wide.

He turns his palms up, open to the sky—first the right, then the left.

Then he slams his hands together with a percussive boom!

that proves too much for a section of the Meridians.

I hear the rocks explode outward, feel the rumble in the earth.

For a moment, I wonder what great caves he’s now revealed, what windows into the mountains he’s just opened for us, and know the Savasci will probably be exploring just that before the day is done.

Then Gent once more puts his right hand out and his left, palms up. He swings around to stare at me, and in my mind, I see two spinning crowns entangled together.

“He wants us to put them on,” I shout to Fortiss, the words lost in the howling wind. But Fortiss hasn’t come this far, nor grown so close to me, that he can’t hear me when I speak.

“Heart to heart!” he shouts, grinning. He reaches into the pouch slung to his side and pulls out the golden crown—pristine and gleaming as he holds it high. “Plane to plane!”

I follow, though my fingers are far more clumsy, my heart shivering with dread even though I know— know!

—that the danger of separation is past. Still, I doubt I’ll ever forget the moment my tie with Gent was severed without warning, that devastating ache of loss that filled me and emptied me at once.

I also know that together, Fortiss and I have overcome the fearsome prophecy of his solitary death foretold in the room of this great house—if only because we returned to that same room, now fully cleaned and cleared with sage and Savasci healing rituals, and saw an entirely different prophecy unfold before us, one I still can’t quite process…

but which I look forward to with every echoing heartbeat.

Now, however, Gent’s howl only increases in urgency and excitement at my hesitation, and I fumble out the second crown of wings, Ehlyn’s crown.

I hold it up with trembling hands, not missing the difference between the two circlets—Fortiss’s polished and loved, mine battered and bent, but both of them shining in the sun, the work of master craftsmen long ago lost to history.

Fortiss catches my eye and in that glance is everything we’ve endured together—every battle, loss, and triumph.

I remember the first time I saw him, a cipher in the forest, and marvel at the man before me now, eyes bright with adventure and possibility.

How far we’ve both come from those first teasing exchanges, from reluctant allies to this—a bond so complete it feels like it’s written into my bones.

“Warrior to warrior!” I shout, speaking the last of the words we found—finally—in the ancient books from Daggar’s library.

There’s no clear indication about what they mean, exactly, but they feel right, they feel good.

And when we read them and heard the hooting joy of Gent and the triumphant scream of Szonja—echoed by what sounded like every Divh in the Blessed Plane—we knew they were important.

This morning feels a fitting time to utter them into life.

I place the crown on my head in perfect timing with Fortiss.

All the Divhs roar with a wild, unbridled joy, then those with paws or powerful forelegs swoop them high—and drive them into the ground.

Those built for stamping pound the ground with heavy hoofs, and those with nothing but bulk to recommend them, leap into the air then drop down, jolting the earth with their feet.

It seems like the entire Protectorate must shatter with the force of every blow, and the Divhs continue on and on until Fortiss and I are wrapped in each other’s arms, crouched against the wall of the Thirteenth House overlook, wincing and shrinking tighter together as boulders fall all around us and the very mountain seems ready to collapse into the ground.

But it doesn’t collapse.

Instead, after a few more mighty thuds, the earth itself falls away beneath the paws of the Divhs.

The wide plain before us suddenly darkens in a long, sinuous stain that sweeps out in front of the Thirteenth House as far as I’m able to see.

This apparently is the sign the Divhs have been waiting for.

They erupt in another wave of mad howls and whoops, and another tide of pounding follows.

This one, so fast and rhythmic it seems to take on a vibration all its own.

“They’re breaking the plain!” Fortiss gasps. He wheels to me, his eyes suddenly filled with equal parts horror and wonder, and I know my expression echoes his. “What have we?—”

Look .

Gent’s command can’t be ignored, and from far above the mountains, Szonja screams with approval as the stain that darkens the plains erupts with a geyser of water.

Similar spouts burst across the wide valley, torrential plumes that shove up from the ground as if an ocean has been lying in wait all this time beneath the grassy plain, waiting for its chance to gust forth.

The Divhs scramble back, some of them winking out entirely, others retreating as water fills the space, covering over roads and trees and pushing up towards the Thirteenth House until it laps the causeway that leads up to the great manor building.

Then the water rushes back again, draining away as quickly as it filled, but leaving thick grassy lawn behind it, sapling trees by the thousands, and a wide, lush bank to mark the edge of a crystalline blue lake.

“Talia,” Fortiss whispers, and his voice is so shaken that I turn to him, only to see him staring over my shoulder, far up the mountain range. “Look.”

And that’s when I turn and see that the inhospitable harsh crags surrounding the Thirteenth House stronghold are now filled with trees, strips of tall grass, and thick tumbles of bushes, wildly blooming with blue and white flowers.

The carpet of flowers chases its way up the mountain and into the trees until the rocky outcroppings finally emerge far, far up toward the peaks.

Gent’s howl has me turning around again, and I blink to see him floating far out in the middle of the water of the huge, glistening lake, his arms waving wide with joy as he sees me watching him.

“What have we done?” Fortiss asks again, but his voice is trembling only with wonder now, not horror. In unspoken synchrony, we reach up and remove the crowns from our heads with shaking hands. I stare down at the two circlets, feeling the weight of power in my grasp…power and possibility.

Fortiss puts into words what I can’t bring myself to say.

“These gifts were too mighty for us five hundred years ago,” he murmurs.

“Even if Mirador hadn’t struck down Ehlyn, the delegates of the Imperium would never have survived long with power like this.

The contract would have soured, the partnership between the first leaders would’ve fractured.

Better that the second crown was lost to us for so long—and that the price to pay for wielding the one we had left was so high that no lord protector would ever dare attempt it except in direst need, lest he lose the thing he valued most.”

He sighs, squinting out over the enormous lake. “Rihad didn’t care about any of that. He didn’t want the power to heal a broken plane. He wanted only to destroy and rule through chaos.”

“Do you think the Imperium knew…about any of this?” I ask. “Do you think those First House lords ever explained what happened here?”

He grimaces, then glances at me. “Do you?”

I shake my head. There may be a time of reckoning, yes, a future battle to be fought, but not here.

Not now. For now, we can explore the magic newly returned to our land and can look to see how we might ask the skrill to build—not destroy—homes, cities, and works of intricate beauty like the statue of Ehlyn, proudly reaching out to all who venture this far across the Protectorate.

Fortiss takes my hand again and turns me to him, but no more words are needed. I rise on my toes to press my lips to his, a kiss that carries the weight of all we’ve survived, all we hope to build.

When we part, he rests his forehead against mine. “Heart to heart,” he whispers, echoing the ancient words that feel increasingly like a vow between us.

“Plane to plane,” I answer, completing the phrase that now holds so much more meaning than when we first discovered it.

“Warrior to warrior,” we finish together, and the words hang in the air between us, a promise as binding as any ceremonial oath.

It’s a new dawn, and as the sun continues its soaring ascent over the eastern horizon, my heart spills over with what may come.

Fortiss and I turn again to witness this newest, most glorious gift of the Divh, a gift of twinned connection and power they had given us all those centuries ago when we first called upon their aid…and have been longing to return to us ever since.

The way of the warrior, once more, is life.

Beautiful. Powerful. Fierce.

And never again to be walked alone.