Chapter 2
Nansar
The training blade sang past my ear, close enough that I felt the displacement of air.
I dropped and rolled, red dust billowing around me, then surged into a crouch.
My blade swept low in a perfect arc—but Ahrick had already ghosted away, materializing behind me like smoke, a single sweep of his foot putting me on my back.
"Better," he said, his tone carrying that familiar note of measured assessment. "But your shoulders are still giving you away."
I'd heard the legends about Ahrick long before we met.
The Vaktaire were already mythical warriors bred across generations for combat, their reflexes enhanced, their instincts sharpened to a killing edge.
But even among the Vaktaire, Ahrick's name was spoken with reverence.
They said he'd held the Narrows of Kelthis against two hundred raiders with only eleven warriors, the pass running crimson by dawn.
That he'd killed a Kresh battlemaster in single combat with nothing but a broken pipe.
That three warlords had placed bounties on his head high enough to purchase kingdoms—and bounty hunters still refused the contracts, knowing them for the death sentences they were.
I'd dismissed most of it as exaggeration. Then I met the male. And somehow, impossibly, this living legend had chosen to train a disgraced royal on a prison planet at the ass-end of nowhere.
I pushed to my feet, breathing hard but controlled—not the desperate gasping that would have consumed me a year ago.
Sweat carved clean lines through the red dust coating my pale skin.
Over a year on Palaydium had forged me into something new.
The soft, spoiled duke's son who'd stumbled off the transport—angry, confused, drowning in shame—had been burned away by this harsh world's unforgiving environment and Ahrick's relentless instruction.
I adjusted my grip, feeling the calluses that now armored my palms. Stronger. Faster. Harder. But the physical transformation was nothing compared to what had changed inside.
The shame still lived in me. It always would.
Not shame for being here—I'd earned this sentence—but shame for how easily I'd been played.
How Ambassador Yaard had slithered into my life during my mother's disappearance, when I was raw and desperate.
The Kerzak had been so sympathetic, so understanding.
He'd listened to my grief, my confusion, my rage at my father for refusing to explain where she'd gone.
Your father sent her away, Yaard had whispered. He never valued her. Never valued you.
And I'd swallowed every poisoned word. Goddess help me, I'd believed him.
Yaard had taken my pain and weaponized it, honing my anger until I couldn't see past the blade he'd placed in my hands.
Until I'd been willing to help him, to participate in his schemes, convinced I was striking back at the father who'd wronged us both.
The truth had been devastatingly simple. My father had sent my mother away to protect her. To protect her from the very male who'd manipulated me. And I'd been too blind, too consumed by my own hurt and anger to see it.
I'd been a fool. A youngling playing at rebellion, never realizing I was just another piece on someone else's game board.
"Again," I said, settling into my stance.
Something that might have been approval flickered across Ahrick's face.
Some said he was the finest warrior who'd ever lived.
I believed it. More than that, I knew I wouldn't have survived my first month on Palaydium without him.
The planet was a dumping ground for the sector's worst—murderers, slavers, war criminals.
The old me would have been torn apart. The new me, forged by Ahrick's training, was considerably harder to kill.
We circled each other in the red dust, boots leaving shallow prints in the packed earth.
The settlement's crude buildings sprawled in the distance, a ramshackle collection of structures that barely qualified as civilization.
Forty-eight years left. The thought no longer crushed me.
My father, Duke Ako, had forgiven me—somehow, impossibly, after everything.
And he'd brought my mother Helene back from Earth.
Any day now, I would have a baby brother or sister I might not meet for decades.
And best of all, Ambassador Yaard had been executed for his crimes.
The shame still coiled in my chest like a serpent. It always would. But Ahrick had taught me that shame could be a teacher, if I let it, rather than a poison.
I struck first this time—a high feint followed by a genuine low thrust. Ahrick parried both with minimal movement, his blade a blur, but I was already spinning away from where his counterattack would land.
"Good," Ahrick said, and this time the approval was unmistakable.
Our blades continued their deadly conversation, steel kissing steel in sharp, ringing notes that echoed across the wasteland. Then a shrill whistle pierced the air—distant but cutting through our focus like a knife.
We froze, weapons locked mid-parry. Ahrick's head snapped toward Fange City, his entire body shifting into that coiled alertness that made him so dangerous. The settlement sprawled far enough away that its usual cacophony of violence and desperation didn't reach us, but we kept watch. Always.
My eyes followed his to the tower jutting from the city's heart. Smoke billowed from its peak—thick, dark, and the color of fresh blood. It stained Palaydium's sickly yellow sky like an open wound.
"Persico," I breathed, lowering my blade.
Ahrick's nod was barely perceptible, his scarred face unreadable as stone. The Kerzak crime lord commanded his empire through smoke signals that reached across this forsaken planet. Each color carried its own message, its own threat. Red meant something was happening. Red meant blood would flow.
"Should we be worried?" The question left my lips even as my fingers maintained their death grip on my blade.
"No." Ahrick sheathed his weapon in one fluid motion. "Persico knows better than to come after us."
I'd heard the tale enough times to picture it—Ahrick's blade opening the Kerzak's flesh just enough to promise death without delivering it.
Those scars served as Persico's permanent reminder of who commanded the wastes beyond the city's walls.
An unspoken treaty had held ever since: the crime lord kept his empire of vice and violence contained within Fange City's crumbling boundaries, while Ahrick forged exiles into survivors in the red dust beyond.
Still, I couldn't tear my eyes from that crimson smoke as it twisted and writhed against the dirty yellow sky, my gut tightening with an instinct I'd learned to trust.
A sound pierced the moment—delicate, almost musical against the harsh wind. A chirp from inside our shelter.
My knuckles went white around the blade's hilt. Ahrick's entire body transformed, muscles coiling like a spring, his body going still in that predatory way that meant danger.
The chirp repeated itself, insistent.
The comm unit.
"Inside." Ahrick's voice dropped to barely a whisper. "Now."
We crossed the dusty ground in seconds, our boots leaving twin trails in the red earth.
The thick hide door whispered aside as we ducked through.
Our shelter stood isolated from the other scattered habitations—intentionally so.
Sound was currency here, and secrets were worth more than water.
The comm unit we possessed wasn't just contraband.
It was a death sentence if discovered. Every desperate soul on this forsaken planet would gladly paint the walls with our blood for the chance to possess it.
Even disgraced nobility had its advantages. My father, Duke Ako, had leveraged connections I preferred not to examine too closely. The Alliance Prime had ensured the device found its way to me through channels I didn't want to think about. It was a tether to a world I could no longer inhabit.
Ahrick positioned himself at the entrance, a sentinel carved from stone and scars, while I knelt and pried up the loose floorboards at the far corner of the shack. The unit nestled in its hiding place, screen already glowing with an incoming transmission code that made my pulse quicken.
My father.
I thumbed the connection active. Duke Ako materialized on the small screen, and despite the poor resolution, he radiated that ageless quality that marked our kind—blonde hair flowing past his shoulders, ivory horns catching the light like polished bone. Two centuries had barely touched him.
"Nansar." No warmth. No preamble. Just my name, sharp as a blade. "We have a situation."
"Father." I matched his tone, conscious of Ahrick's shadow at my back, his attention divided between the world outside and the conversation unfolding.
"Two hours ago, an Alliance escape pod crashed on Palaydium. We've been monitoring its trajectory." Those pale blue eyes—so like my own—burned through the screen. "I need your help."
The words landed like stones in my gut. "What kind of help?"
"The pod contains a human female. Chloe Blackwood—Admiral Cullen Blackwood's daughter.
" He let the name hang between us, heavy with implication.
"The Admiral is one of the Prime's inner circle.
Chloe was traveling to Calpa to see him.
" Something flickered across his face—regret, perhaps, or shame.
"We used her as bait. To trap the human trafficker, Declan Hewes. "
Even in our isolation, news traveled. Declan Hewes' capture and subsequent escape had circulated for months.
Behind me, Ahrick's breath caught. My own lungs felt suddenly too small.
"The red smoke," Ahrick said, his voice like gravel. "Now we know."
"If Persico reaches her first—" The words died in my throat.
A human female. On Palaydium.