Page 43 of Prisoner of Darkness and Dreams (Fated to the Sun and Stars #3)

Though her voice is calm, her eyes are burning with a fire I recognize too well: the hunger for revenge.

“If I do nothing else in this life,” she says, “I want to bring down the Temple that took my family from me. And I’ll join the fight whether you like it or not.

Still, I’d rather have your approval.” She gives Ana a small smile. “Please?”

“I know how awful it is to feel powerless,” Ana says, pushing back her own anxiety when she sees how much her friend needs this. “So you should do what you have to.”

Ana looks around at us. Her eyes are shining with tears, but when she speaks, her voice is strong and steady.

“How do I go about making her an emissary, anyway?”

Alastor jumps up. “Well, first of all, she needs a seal…”

As we find the parchment and ink to make Tira’s protections official, I offer my thanks to Tira for volunteering. But I’m also aware that in a few hours, we’ll be departing Agathyre on separate routes, and I’ve forced yet another painful goodbye on Ana.

MORGANA

Our journey through the Miravow is much less eventful this time.

Diomi organizes for several of Agathyre’s best guides to escort us, and as we travel through the forest, they pave the way with offerings and prayers that keep the trees quiet and the larger animals at bay.

One of the guides tells me their job is made easier by the fact that I was recently healed by the gaidonesti.

Since I carry some of the forest’s magic, it’s more at peace with me.

It makes me think of the way Etusca protected us so fearlessly when we first traveled through the forest. At the time, only she really knew the extent of the danger that faced us, and she came to help us anyway, keeping us safe from the hazards of the forest with her warnings and prayers.

Before I left Starfall, when we were saying our goodbyes, she was still trying to protect me, clutching me tight and murmuring warnings about Caledon.

“It sounds like he’ll do anything to become more powerful. So please be careful, my dear,” she said.

“I will,” I replied, pulling back from the hug to study her face. “Do you think Caledon will be able to recreate the potion?”

She tilted her head. “He might. I invented it myself, but you can get all the ingredients in Trova. In fact, some of them you can only get in Trova. Dimane is common enough, but I had to send special orders to Ulmire for saltzquill.”

“But even if he did, it wouldn’t work for him, right?”

She shook her head. “No, it shouldn’t. Not when his magic is already mature. ”

That conversation should’ve been a consolation, but as we travel out of Agathyre, I’m not at peace like the forest. I don’t think I can be with Tira gone. Every step we take toward the Trovian border is a step further away from the Filusian one, which she’s going to cross with Phaia.

Whenever we’re separated, bad things happen—the purge, Caledon’s trap for me. I don’t care that I’m being superstitious. It’s not paranoid to be afraid of something going wrong when something is always going wrong.

That’s the tone of my thoughts when we cross the border and leave the dryads behind. We head toward Tread, staying off main roads and traveling through farmlands. But then, as our first night back in Trova falls, we spot several fires burning across the horizon.

“Cleansing rituals,” Mal explains. “They light the fires in the villages when they feel particularly threatened by evil. It’s supposed to keep it away, but it usually just means someone’s gotten spooked, and there’s a local heretic hunt.”

Someone has taken a match to my sense of foreboding, setting it alight for all to see. It feels like a warning.

“There’s so many…” I say, swallowing at the thought of all those frightened, angry Trovians, setting their fires in the hope they’ll be spared.

“Yeah, it’s weird,” Mal says, frowning.

Leon holds me close when we camp out under the stars that night. We sleep out in the open rather than stop somewhere overcome with Temple paranoia. But the next day, we’re low on fresh water and supplies and have to stop at a nearby village.

We decide Leon and I will go together—we’re both glamoured, and we figure a couple will seem less conspicuous than a strange man on his own. Particularly if the community is already looking for enemies.

As soon as we enter the village, the atmosphere pressed down on us like a fog.

The streets are quiet—we barely see a soul—and when we reach the center, it’s obvious why.

A wooden platform sits in the village square beside the sanctuary.

It’s a simple structure, with four legs and a flat top, and yet it manages to make my blood run cold .

“Do you think it’s a purge?” I ask Leon, unable to keep the rasp of unease from my voice.

He shakes his head and points. “No. Look at the scorch marks on the edge of the wood. The clerics only execute people with swords in a purge, correct?”

I nod, shuddering at the memory of that day in Otscold when I watched my friend being cut down.

“They used magic here,” Leon continues. “I saw something like this in Newtown. It’s a cleansing—penance for sins, but not a village-wide execution.”

“There’s something on the sanctuary door,” I say, moving closer to try to read the text written on a piece of parchment nailed to the wood. I just catch sight of the word heretic when I feel Leon’s hand on my elbow.

“There’s someone watching,” he mutters without looking at me. “Come on, let’s keep moving before we attract too much attention.”

We soon discover most of the businesses are shut, unfriendly closed signs firmly pressed to their windows. Growing frustrated, Leon eventually bangs on the door of a bakery.

“Open up, please,” he calls through the door. “We’re hungry travelers who just need a loaf of bread. We can pay well.”

Footsteps echo from within the bakery, followed by the squeak of a door being unlocked and opened—just a crack.

A middle-aged man pokes his head through the gap. He glances at us, then looks over our heads to the street beyond.

“How many loaves?” he grunts.

“Two, please,” I answer. “Then we can be on our way.”

He slams the door shut in our faces, only to return a few minutes later with a bag of bread. We hand him our coins, and as he reaches out to pass over the bread, the daylight hits his face. I see the dark circles under his eyes, the haunted look in them.

“If you don’t mind me asking, sir,” I say in my most innocent voice. “What’s going on in the square? ”

His eyes widen and he violently shakes his head.

“You said you’d be on your way. Now leave, gods damn you, or you’ll bring all the Gloamlands down upon us.”

And the door slams shut once more.

The fires burn again that night, and then the next, until we decide we need clear answers. We send Alastor into the nearest settlement, agreeing that his sensic magic will help offset any paranoia about him being a man traveling alone. When he returns, his expression is grim.

“It seems Hallowbane isn’t the only place that’s been hit by a sudden influx of clerics.

” He sits down on a rock beside the trail, sighing.

“Even with my magic, it was hard to get anyone to stand still long enough to get the story out of them. They’re terrified.

The Temple’s upped its quota for sacrifices and rituals lately.

Traveling groups of clerics have been going around conducting raids on homes and claiming that the gods demand it. ”

“But they’re not purging whole towns?” I ask.

“No. This is different. They’re not looking to punish a specific group for the town’s crimes. Just looking for heretics, apparently.”

We move swiftly on, everyone unsettled knowing that bands of clerics are roaming the area. I turn over Alastor’s news in my mind.

“You’re wondering what the point is, aren’t you?” Leon asks me, pulling his horse up beside mine.

“I am. What does he gain from this? Is he just looking for more solari to drain?”

“Maybe,” is all Leon says, but I feel so much more than those words suggest. I sense this makes him nervous too, and that agitation is as real as the reins between my fingers or the breeze upon my skin. He doesn’t like not knowing what Caledon is up to any more than I do.

When I fall asleep, just a half day’s ride from Tread, I wonder when I got so good at reading Leon.