Elsabet
“My lady, is there anything else you need?”
“No.” dismisses the soldier hovering outside her tent with a curt word. He hesitates a moment before scuttling off, half frightened and half relieved.
She lies back on the hard ground. She has been provided with a feather-tick mattress and a camp bed, of course, but she does not want to sleep. Too many thoughts burn in her mind for rest to come.
Beyond the fragile enclosure of her tent, she can hear the Malgasi soldiers moving around their encampment, deep in the sea caves outside Castellane. She knows she had terrified the men when she’d appeared in the night, bloodied and covered in plaster dust, only to collapse in their midst.
The shame of it—for her, a Belmany, to collapse among peasant soldiers—but her legs had no longer been able to hold her up. Kalman, the captain of the guards, had barked orders for a medic to attend to her burns, but had waved him off. She wanted the pain, wanted to feel it. It was the pain of her failure.
The scope of that failure became clear to her over the next days. Seven—Joss Falconet—had done all that she asked, but the Sword Catcher had escaped from the Trick and been executed by the Prince. The Temple of Anibal had been destroyed, and Bagomer and Janos had been killed. ’s stone had saved her life, but the effort had cost it nearly all its power. It is cold now beneath her skin, cold as a dead man’s skin. It will need to be replaced by one of the Belmanys’ few remaining Source-Stones before can use her power again.
Worst of all, now knows there is another magic-user in Castellane—the red-haired girl who caused all of this. Somehow, one of the filthy Ashkar, that class of diseased vermin, has gotten her hand on a Source-Stone and used it to unleash a power that rivals ’s own.
But is not beaten yet. As she listens to the sounds of the sea crashing against the inner walls of the cave, she feels her own fury pulse inside her, stronger than any magic. She has lost her guards, but she still has her army. She has drained her stone, but there is still power to be accessed, behind the walls of Marivent. The blood of the Belmany phoenix runs in the veins of both the King and the Prince of this city.
She will reclaim her birthright. She will take Castellane for her own. And when she does, she will destroy the woman with the Source-Stone. She knows her name already, the name of the Ashkar woman she had seen first in the library at Marivent. It had come to her with the fading power of her stone, which had recognized a fellow sorcerer and whispered its dying alarm into ’s ears.
Her name is Lin. Lin Caster.