Chapter Two
THEA
B eneath their horses’ hooves, snow crunched like broken glass, the only sound to permeate the eerie silence of the forest. The outskirts of the capital, Vios, should have been teeming with wintry woodland life…
and yet they were desolate, a graveyard of trees closing in.
The centuries-old evergreen pines were dead, and above Thea and her companions, the canopy was barren, naked branches reaching up into the sky like skeletal fingers, more evidence of a cursed and dying world.
Cold seeped through every layer of clothing, causing an irrepressible shiver to take hold of Thea.
Early morning light filtered through the treetops, casting a pale blue hue over the frosted landscape before them.
The air was so crisp that Thea could taste the ice on her tongue.
Frozen streams and icicles hanging from rocks greeted them, and for a moment the midrealms were suspended in time, the stillness of the woods almost hypnotic.
But time could not freeze. Thea knew that better than anyone.
Her fate stone warmed against her skin as she rode.
She’d cast the fucking thing into the seas, only to have it find her again hours later.
No one could escape fate, or time. She was living proof of that as her name day dawned around them: another year closer to twenty-seven, the age where she’d be wiped from the world.
‘Do you know any Warswords who were granted immortality during the Great Rite?’ she had asked him once.
‘Tell me that’s not why you’re doing all this? Tell me it’s not why you want to become a Warsword? Because you want to live forever?’
‘I want to live longer than two and a half more fucking years.’
Thea could have laughed. Make that one year , she thought darkly. Hawthorne had told her he’d take her to one of the rare immortal Warswords if she mastered her magic. They’d both failed in that regard. He’d broken his vows, and she’d lost her magic entirely.
In the aftermath of the battle of Notos in Tver, it had ebbed away, despite Wren having removed the suppressant alchemy from her fate stone.
For whatever reason, her connection to the storms had severed.
Once she had felt them like beacons in the long, dark night, but now…
now, there was nothing. Though she hadn’t admitted it to the others, she missed the magic sorely, like a piece of herself had vanished and she wasn’t entirely whole.
She still found herself reaching for it, expecting to feel its spark within, only to remember how empty she was.
Even now, thunder rumbled in the distance, and yet she felt nothing.
The Great Rite seemed further away than ever, along with any chance she might have of skirting her fate of death at twenty-seven.
‘You’re ready, you know.’
‘Ready?’
‘For the Great Rite. When you feel its call, you go. Drop everything and go. You will emerge a Warsword. The very best of us.’
The words had been spoken on the blood-soaked battlefield in Notos, where she’d truly earned the name Shadow of Death , so sure she was on the cusp of feeling the Furies’ call.
For so long she had imagined wielding a Naarvian steel blade of her own and riding a Tverrian stallion across the midrealms. She had pictured accepting the gifts from the rulers of the kingdoms with her head held high: the vial of springwater from Aveum’s Pools of Purity, the mysterious vial of poison from Harenth…
And though the armoury of Delmira stood no longer, she had the designs for Warsword armour stashed safely in her pack and had sworn to find a master armourer worthy of the task.
Cal and Kipp’s voices wrenched her from her thoughts. They were debating something behind her, getting louder and more insistent with each passing moment.
‘For Furies’ sake,’ she muttered, twisting in her saddle. ‘What is it now?’
‘Nothing,’ Cal replied quickly.
‘It’s not nothing,’ Kipp countered with a disbelieving shake of his head. ‘That storm ahead got us thinking. We were just talking about your magic.’
Thea’s stomach rolled. ‘What about it?’ she ground out, setting her eyes back on the trail ahead.
‘That you haven’t used it,’ Kipp said. ‘Not for a long while now. Not for a year.’
Thea sighed, warring between frustration and weariness. ‘I told you, I can’t.’
‘Can’t, or won’t?’ Kipp pressed.
‘Leave it alone, Kristopher,’ she warned.
‘We have. For months we’ve kept quiet about it, but now…’ Thunder cracked in the near distance again, but he forged on. ‘Well, we’re almost caught up with Hawthorne. Don’t you think you might need to use your magic against him?’
Thea’s teeth ached as cold air whistled between them with her sharp intake of breath. ‘I’m not talking about this.’
It was a sore subject. Through Wren, Audra had gifted Thea a small box of meditation cards to help her train her magic, but no matter how hard she tried, no matter how many countless hours she spent studying them by the fire, not even a flicker of power had answered her summons.
There was one card she carried on her person, one whose words she would chant to herself over and over.
The card itself was faded and crumpled from being clutched in her dirty, clammy hands, but the message was seared into her memory: strong of mind, strong of body, strong of heart .
Sometimes she suspected she was none of those things, and that was why her magic had left her.
‘We’re not letting you get away with this anymore, Thea,’ Kipp interrupted her thoughts. ‘Cal, back me up here.’
Cal sighed. ‘Your magic has always manifested when you’re angry, right?’ he asked her, urging his horse up alongside hers.
Thea shot him a glare. ‘I’m always angry.’
‘No shit,’ he muttered.
‘Thea, we’ve seen what you can do. That kind of power isn’t just snuffed out overnight,’ Kipp said gently.
Thea clicked her tongue in frustration. ‘Well, I’m telling you that mine was. Can we drop it now? We’ve got a traitor to capture.’
‘So you keep saying, but without magic, how in the realms do you think you’ll get those manacles on him?’ Kipp argued. ‘You may be the Shadow of Death, but Hawthorne is the Hand of Death… and traitor or not, he’s still got a Warsword’s power.’
Cal made a noise of agreement. ‘If you tapped into your magic, I think you could cause a thundersnow if you put your mind to it. That’d catch a Warsword, no problem.’
‘First, he’s no Warsword,’ Thea snapped. ‘Second, sure – I haven’t used magic in a year, but I’ll just tap into it and whip up a fucking thundersnow, shall I?’
Kipp snorted a laugh. ‘Pfft – even when you and your magic are being more agreeable, I doubt it. There hasn’t been one recorded in centuries, not even in the depths of Aveum winters.’
‘It’s always winter here,’ Cal griped.
‘Which is exactly why I think we should go to the Singing Hare, just for a —’
‘We’re not giving up our advantage for you to go get drunk in a tavern,’ Thea retorted.
‘But… it’s your name day.’
‘Precisely. So I get to choose how I spend this day, and all my limited days to come. And I’ll spend them well. Hunting my enemies and bringing them to justice.’
Kipp shook his head. ‘You used to be fun,’ he muttered.
But Thea had stopped listening. ‘Look!’ She pointed to the coals of a small campfire a few yards ahead. ‘He camped here.’
Kipp’s brow furrowed. ‘Seems like a stupid spot to camp. We’re hardly an hour into the woods.’
‘We’ve been running him ragged. His horse is probably in need of rest – doubt he had much of a choice in the matter.’
Thea jumped down from her saddle and investigated the nest of now-frozen ashes. There, around the rocks, were deep bootprints in the snow.
‘We’re gaining on him.’
‘Thea…’ Kipp said, his voice serious this time. ‘We’ve just ridden through the night and slayed a dozen cursed men. I can’t speak for Cal, but my generally useless arse isn’t up for a battle with a Warsword. We need to rest. We need to regain our strength before we take him on.’
The truth of his words hit her hard in the chest. She clenched her jaw. ‘We make the most of the daylight and ride until nightfall. Then we’ll rest. How does that sound?’
‘Deeply unpleasant.’
‘You can have my share of the ale…’ Thea offered.
Kipp gave her a sideways glance. ‘Keep talking.’
She laughed. ‘That’s it. That’s my offer. Take it or leave it.’
‘You drive a hard bargain, Highness.’
Thea shuddered. It had been a long and hard road to learning her true identity as one of the lost heirs of Delmira, the fallen kingdom.
Harder still had been discovering that not only did she and Wren have an older sister, but that this so-called sister was the one they called the Daughter of Darkness, the evil prophesied as the bringer of fire and blood.
That she and Wren came from a royal family of power-hungry traitors and shadow-lovers.
‘Beware the fury of a patient Delmirian.’ Malik had spoken those words to her a long time ago now, and when Thea first thought she understood them, she’d assumed they were in reference to her. But she’d been wrong. It wasn’t her who Malik had been talking about.
With a start, she realised the others were waiting for her response. ‘Piss off,’ she quipped, and started forward in earnest once more.
‘Not very princess-like!’ Cal called after her.
Thea urged her mare to quicken her pace. ‘I’m not a fucking princess,’ she shouted back.