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M oving with my assailant’s momentum, I curl my hands around his forearm and leap sideways, launching up and out.

My feet connect with the wall, and I take one, two steps, then leap, arcing out and around.

Then I crash into him from behind, propelling him forward to the floor.

It’s not until I land heavily on his back that I realize who I just dropped, and I roll off to the side.

“Fortiss! What in the blighted path?—”

I’ve underestimated his clear anger, whether at me or at my impressive defensive moves. He lunges for me and wraps an arm around my torso, dragging me across the hall and through a doorway. He all but hurls me into the center of the room and slams the door behind me.

“Will you stop !” I begin, trying to scramble away. But he’s on me a second later, his body draping over me just enough to flatten me face first to the floor, while he grabs my head in his hands and clamps tight, smothering my ears.

I’m so startled I freeze, like a kitten picked up by the scruff of its neck, and he pulls me back into the curl of his body just enough that he doesn’t crush the wind out of me.

I’m overwhelmed by the sheer everything of him—the hard thud of his heart, the way his skin smells of wind and sky, the rasp of his breath.

My own breath locks up in my throat, and my heart hurls itself against my ribcage, trying to bang its way to freedom.

“Pay no attention to anything but my voice,” he whispers urgently as my left hand flails ineffectively at his forearm, my right trapped beneath me.

“Focus on my voice, only my voice. I’m telling you the secrets of winning a battle with a Third House fire lizard, and you’re desperate to know, consumed with focus, and you care about nothing or anything but the words that I’m saying, their texture and weave, their weight and force. ”

He continues on, and still caught, mesmerized, I do as he say, relaxing in his hold and trying to breathe as quietly as possible.

I listen to him pour words over me like he’s ladling perfumed oils into a bath, the colors of them whirling and swirling together, then draining out to return to his hands and be poured out again.

Faintly, so faintly, I feel a pressure deep within me, first in the crown of my head, then my chest, then at the base of my belly, a spinning spiral of energy that swoops down my body and is gone.

But Fortiss doesn’t ease up with the torrent of words until my body loosens and I relax to the floor, lost in the endless flow.

Finally, he sags down over me, and in that moment, I feel the weight of him not as an enemy, not as a friend, not even as a comrade in arms…

but as a man. The first man I ever truly thought might see me for who I was, who I might be.

The first man whose flirtatious teasing shone a light down a dangerous path I yearned to follow.

Sudden awareness shoots through me, followed by a wave of prickling heat. Fortiss and I are no strangers to each other, after all. We’ve kissed—first by mistake, and then…well, then…

I desperately try not to move, not to do anything to ruin this moment like I did the last time.

Because when we kissed in the caverns of this house, I wanted more—so much more.

I wanted to feel the weight of him not just over me but inside me, to connect as closely as a man and woman could.

I nearly got that wish, too, that fateful night…

but I had too many secrets I couldn’t share, and I was far too awkward to know how to get what I wanted without betraying who I was.

Because I wasn’t just an ordinary woman that night, I was a banded warrior and thus a heretic and an outlaw in the Protectorate. I couldn’t reveal myself then—wouldn’t.

But I did want him. Wanted this . And now, with Fortiss draped over me as if he just saved my soul from the blighted path, my body remembers every last drop of that wanting, that need.

I may know well the way of the warrior, but I have no blessed idea about the ways of women when it comes to wooing a man.

Still, it seems like his body pressed against me, his lungs heaving, his breath hot on my throat is a really, really good start.

My heart kicks into a fast staccato, sending my blood rushing through me with a winding, skittering need.

I draw in a careful breath, praying to the Light that I don’t embarrass myself, and whisper, “Fortiss?”

“Shhh,” he breathes out, and my eyes nearly cross as the murmur lifts the hair across my neck to brush my chin. Forget laying with the man, he could just breathe on me and that would probably do the— “There. The spell is cast.”

I freeze in his arms again, all desire flattened like a twig beneath a carriage wheel. Slowly, carefully, I shift beneath him, but his attention is fixed on the door we just entered. “The what?” I ask him quietly.

He glances down at me as if suddenly realizing I’m beneath him, but he catches on quickly.

His eyes instantly warm, and his face eases into a rakish grin that a bare few breaths ago would have been the best thing I’ve seen in weeks.

“Well, hello, Lady Talia,” he murmurs, angling his body to the side to allow me to turn to face him. “This is unexpected.”

I don’t try to escape the circle of his embrace, but I tell myself it’s only to keep him talking. Because the way of the warrior sometimes calls for baldfaced deception.

“What spell, Fortiss?” I ask again, meeting his golden-eyed gaze. “What are you talking about?”

All his previous urgency has ebbed away, and he chuckles. “You know, it never occurred to me that all I had to do to get you to stay still was to tackle you to the ground.”

Another wave of warmth blooms deep in my belly, but I can’t unhear his words. “Fortiss. What spell?”

“Mm.” A crafty expression crosses his face, like he’s just bested a warrior on the battlefield without his opponent even realizing it. “It’s not what you think.”

“Oh, I have a pretty good idea.” I glare at him, suddenly understanding what he’s done, and why he seemed so different on the steps of the First House.

“You found something in Rihad’s library, like maybe the book of magic he used to reach out to the demons in the Western Realms. You discovered other magic too, safer magic, and you thought you’d give one of the lighter spells a try.

Only once you set that magic in motion, you realized that maybe it wasn’t so safe after all, and you wanted an ally who wouldn’t go bleating to the councilors that you’d just opened a box of snakes. ”

He blinks. “All right, it’s exactly what you think. How are you feeling about it?”

“Annoyed. Get off me.”

He complies, and I feel the loss deep in my belly, so I scoot back from him several feet, levering up to a half crouch. “You shouldn’t be reading Rihad’s books alone, Fortiss. You definitely shouldn’t be trying out some of his pet incantations. This isn’t of the Light.”

“Maybe not, but it’s magic that’s been rolling around this house for hundreds of years, I just never knew it.

” Fortiss leans back against a chair, one knee up, the other extended out, as if this impromptu conference on the floor of some guestroom is perfectly normal.

“Nazar helped me work out the language of the Western Realms—it’s not so different from ours, did you know that?

It looks different, but if you speak the words aloud, the next one comes easily to you.

He says theirs is an oral tradition, and only the more powerful combinations must be written, because those, you don’t speak unless you’re intending something out of the ordinary. ”

“Like magic.” I press my lips together, trying to beat down my own superstitions.

“Nazar is a priest of the Light.” My priest of the Light, it should be said, but this doesn’t seem like the time to emphasize that point.

Nazar came to the Tenth House when my younger brother Merritt was barely eleven years old, right on the cusp of stepping into his role as warrior of our house.

As a priest of the Imperium, he sanctified the transfer of our Divh from my father to my brother and guided us all on our path in the Light.

But there was far more to Nazar than I ever realized.

Learning that he can speak the language of the Western Realms doesn’t shock me as much as it should, but there still are rules about such things.

“I can’t imagine he’s good with you walking down the blighted path on your own, and I also can’t imagine him walking it with you. ”

He shrugs, his expression turning mutinous. “He warned me off.”

“And you ignored him. Rihad would be so proud.”

“I need to understand .” The snap to Fortiss’s tone makes me stiffen, and a sudden need to flee coils within me—alongside a need to stay, to explore, to understand this shift that’s happened so quickly in the man I only met a month ago.

Even as I think the words, they convict me.

How well do I really know Fortiss? I saw him for the first time skulking around in the forest outside the Shattered City, barely a quarter hour before my brother died.

I didn’t see him again until Nazar and I led a brace of road-weary, battle-shocked horses into Trilion a few days later.

By then, I’d changed so much I wouldn’t have recognized myself if I met me on the street—my hair hacked off, my arm scarred bloody by the banding of a monster in a ritual I barely understood, my men and brother murdered by unknown assassins.

Fortiss was everything I expected in a vaunted warrior of the First House—bold, arrogant, and beautiful.

And when he’d thought I was the man I’d disguised myself as, my own brother, he’d treated me like he would treat any other warrior.

When I’d worn the robes of a woman, he’d treated me like he would any woman.

And I never once had stopped to think about who he really was, other than cobbling together a scant understanding of his background and reveling in a brief, precious connection to the Divh he finally bonded to.

I don’t know Fortiss. At all.

And now he’s the lord protector of this land, in large part because of me.

“Then you will understand,” I say into the silence that’s swelling around us, threatening to take on a life of its own. “But there’s understanding, and then there’s knocking me to the ground because you’re afraid of me falling prey to some spell you’ve just unleashed using Rihad’s unholy book.”

“Well—I was in the middle of it when you sent word of the arrival of the Twelfth House warriors. Nazar has been warning me for days to expect a conclave of the houses to descend upon the First, demanding answers—but I wasn’t expecting Orlof or…

whoever this Warrior Tennet is. And certainly not your father hard on their heels.

When I finally returned to my task, I had to finish the incantation more quickly than I wanted or risk the energy not having anywhere to go.

And I wasn’t in the best frame of mind.”

He has the grace to look a little chagrined, but that doesn’t make me feel any better.

Far from it. A fear strong enough to border on nausea has begun to take root in my stomach, and I have to fight the urge to press my fist into my belly to keep it from spreading. I glower at him some more. “What kind of powers did Rihad have?”

Fortiss rubs his hand through his hair. “Manipulation, I think, or that’s the one he used the most. Those pages were heavily worn, the parchment thin as rose petals.

And when you think of Rihad, it makes sense.

” He shifts his gaze to me. “You never met the lord protector outside the tournament, but he always gave the impression of being larger than life. He could walk into a room and fill it up just with his presence, no matter if it was the size of this chamber or the great arena of the coliseum. I’d always just assumed that he was gifted in the art of swaying men, and perhaps he was.

But he also was aided by the spells in that book.

People would be honest around him to their detriment.

People would believe in him, defying their own logic.

People would accept his orders, do his bidding, believe whatever he told them as if it were sent down by the Light itself.

He was a great man, even when you inherently knew he wasn’t a good man, but he was the lord protector, and so it somehow felt right and just.”

“And now you find out that it’s all lies.”

“Not lies, exactly,” Fortiss corrects me, and in that moment, he looks more tired than any man of twenty-five years should.

“Rihad believed that he was given this power by divine right. He believed that he deserved it, and that he could rule equally well without it, just not as quickly. He was a man who needed speed on his side. There are other books, with other spells, including conjuring ones.”

“The snake demons in the fire,” I murmur.

The first time I had been in Rihad’s chambers, on the hunt for any clue as to who might have murdered my brother, I’d seen the creature he had summoned to him.

A tall, wraithlike being whose body was made up of snakes.

It didn’t matter if it was a real creature or merely a representation meant to shock and awe—it had done the trick for me.

I’d see that thing in my nightmares for the rest of time.

“And worse. So much worse that’s coming for us if we don’t go out to meet it first.” He makes a face.

“Except now my top Divh commander is being summoned back by her betrothed. So, forgive me, I made an adjustment to the spell of honesty I just cast that…could prove interesting. That which is hidden must be revealed—by everyone. Everyone is going to speak their whole truth. We don’t have time for anything less. ”

I peel open my eyes wide. “ Fortiss ,” I protest, my words a raspy squeak. A spell of honesty ? “What did you do?”

The bells in the high tower chime over the last of my words, and he rolls to his feet.

“We’ll be working that out with your father and your betrothed in my council chambers shortly, Lady Talia,” he says, holding out his hand. “So, I guess we’ll see, no?”