Page 6 of Dance of Kings and Thieves

“Malin.” Kase gripped my arm. Shadows swirled around his face, making it difficult to discern him from the darkness engulfing the shore. “I must help him.”

“How?”

“They’ll never admit it, but his mesmer has folk fearing they’ll fall down to the hells.”

Valen was exhausting himself by splitting the earth, then bending it into the rocky walls. But if Kase could break earth with fear . . .

“Have you done such things before?”

“No, but it feels as if my skin will split if I don’t.”

I held my palms up. “It is the same with me. Mesmer burns tonight. But what good are memories?”

He kissed me fiercely, pulling back with a snarl. “Alver vows are powerful. Trust your mesmer to do what it desires.”

When he released me and sprinted down the line of cracking streets. Alver vows. We hadn’t had time to truly explore what our union had done to our magic. This surge of power, this desire to burst if I did not find a way to release my mesmer, could only be a new strength made from loving the Nightrender.

Kase was far from where Valen was breaking the stone, but all at once a wall of darkness rose in front of him. An ominous pitch devoid of light. This was not like his ribbons of night; this was like stepping into nothing.

And he was racing right for it.

I opened my mouth to scream his name, but the inky black swallowed him whole.

“What was that!” Tova gaped, staring at the place where Kase had disappeared. We both looked incredulously at the dismal shadow wall, searching for any movement or sign of the Nightrender.

No. No. My heart stuttered in panic. What happened, where had—

I jolted when a new splash of dark mist appeared only a few breaths after Kase had faded into the first. It opened directly beside Valen, and Kase spilled out.

“Hells!” Tova covered her mouth. “Mal, did you see that? You saw that, right?”

She must’ve been too stunned to realize my eyes had not left my husband since he’d faded into nothing.

How had he done that? Kase had moved me with shadows more than once, but I’d never seen him . . .jumpthrough them in such a way.

Alver vows.

I studied my palms. We were more powerful together.

“I’ll carve the path, King,” Kase shouted at Valen.

The fae king stood, chest and shoulders heaving from the exertion.

Kase opened his palms. Skeins of murky blackness dug into the earth. A shudder came from Kase’s mesmer and more crevices split the way. Valen laughed and seemed to breathe in a new energy, racing down the fissures, shaping the stone and soil into looming walls.

“Get them before they find the gap!” Raum’s voice spurred me from the beauty of Kase’s power back to the open gaps left to fill.

Raum had a short blade in hand and pointed to one large hole near the shoreline. He was joined by a few of the earth fae, a few Kryv. Niklas ran to Junie and stood on the other side of the gap, creating a bracket around it, while tossing pouches of combustible elixirs into the hole where skydguard started to appear from arcades and alleyways. Skyds flooded out of the sewers and tenements in a wave that seemed to come from every direction.

Dammit. They knew the route. It was likely they had memorized the best paths that would keep them out of any line of sight until it was too late. They intended to overpower our growing fortress before Valen and Kase could encompass us in a protective wall.

Breath stilled in my chest. They knew the route to the shore. Bymemory.

My lip curled in a grin as the truth of it dug deep into my mind. A glimmer of shadows coated my fingers. Not from fear, but from . . . something else. It was as if Kase’s mesmer spilled from my pores, but mine shaped it into something new. Somethingstronger.

Skyds came ever closer. They’d appear, then fade into their secret places of cover, but I knew they were there, always advancing.

They would not touch my folk. There would be no funeral pyres. Not tonight.