9. Before Reign of T（error）
Before: Reign of T(error)
ZORA RAVENAL, TWENTY-TWO YEARS OLD
FOUR MONTHS AGO
Aurora coughed softly and cuddled closer to me as we walked through the town’s center toward home. I rested my chin on the top of her head, enjoying her warmth and her distinctive scent—laughter and happiness.
The tips of her blond hair shimmered bright pink, matching the dye streaked through her right eyebrow.
All imports were impacted because of the Storm Wars, so she’d saved up for months to buy a bottle of dye from an old shipment, and I’d spent all morning painstakingly applying it.
My fingertips were stained bright pink, but the result was worth it.
She looked beautiful.
Above, canvas flapped loudly against brick. A fifty-foot portrait hung across the civic center. BEWARE, EMPEROR ALEKSANDER THE SADISTIC AND TARANTULA brING THE STORM WARS TO THE NORTH.
Below the warning was a detailed painting, the most recent portrait of the Emperor. The artist had captured his depraved likeness with remarkable exactitude. His face hadn’t changed much since his teenage years.
Lifeless pale eyes rimmed in dark circles stared down at me from a face with angular features, hollowed cheeks, hateful maroon lips, inky hair, and shockingly dark eyebrows.
My favorite part: his big aristocratic nose had a large, discolored bump at the top, and a single scar stretched across the skin on the front of his neck. Every time he looked in the mirror, I hoped he thought of me and how I’d damaged him.
“Zora, Aurora—is that you?” Blake called down the street. Puberty had turned him from an annoying boy into a tall, handsome, and even more annoying man.
Aurora and I shared a look. Then we both ran down the street, giggling like teenagers. Blake shouted our names, but his voice grew distant as we crossed the snowy cobblestones.
“You’d think he’d take the hint by now,” Aurora said as she struggled to keep up with me.
“Men are stupid.” I leaped down the stairs where the street intersected with the first row of townhomes.
“Men very stupid,” Squire sang with the energy of a scornful woman (accurate).
Aurora stepped down one stair at a time while I waited at the bottom. “Where are all the strong warrior men?” she asked. “Where are all the Knight Mages who slay dragons and yearn for women?”
“I think Blake is experiencing yearning,” I pointed out as I grabbed her arm. She gave me a grateful smile and leaned against me for warmth.
Squire nodded. “Yearns for me?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Yay!” Squire hooted.
Aurora playfully punched my arm. “No, I need a man who will burn the world to the ground with their physical prowess, murdering everyone, just so they can worship at my feet. They’ll pine longingly for months, following me around, begging, doing anything to curry my favor.”
She smiled dreamily.
“That sounds like stalking,” I said. “And if a man did that to you, I’d kill him. For your own safety.”
She winked, nudging me. “But what if someone did it for you? You’re also dangerous. It would be . . .” She put her hands together and mimed an explosion.
“Disturbing,” I said.
“Hot.” She blew me a kiss.
I blew her one back. “I would stab this fictional man so many times he’d be begging for death as he bled out across my lap and—”
“Uh, never mind.” She laughed. “Speaking of horrors, did you hear just last week the four Adams brothers went outside the walls on a dare and they were all killed by a dire bear? I swear, we’re suffering from a masculinity crisis. Did you hear they were—”
“I heard.”
I’d found their severed pieces and hauled them back inside the gate for the funeral pyre.
“Well then, let’s discuss something positive,” Aurora said, resting her head against me with a contented sigh. “The new wool lining technique we’ve been perfecting makes gloves extra-warm.”
“I’ll top that. I discovered a new snowboarding trail.”
Aurora laughed. “That doesn’t beat my obsessions. Have you seen the new wool shirts that are super thin and—”
BLARE.
We stopped. “Another magic storm?” Aurora asked. “Why do they keep targeting us—”
BLARE—BLARE—BLARE.
“DIRECT INVASION,” Manto, the head council member, bellowed. His words traveled on the wind, loud and haunting through the Commune.
Aurora and I turned to each other in slow motion as chaos exploded. People screamed to their neighbors and stopped what they were doing. Parents picked up their young children and ran inside. Doors slammed shut. Locks clicked.
I grabbed Aurora’s arm and sprinted, dragging her with me, running as fast as possible. My hackles rose when we got to my street.
Icicles the size of people hung off lampposts and porches, glittering with lines of silver. A magical blizzard. I searched the horizon, but unlike during the Great Siege of the North, there were no dragons, no roars, no flames. The sky above churned with dark clouds, but no sleet fell.
Has a Royal Mage somehow already attacked?
“Mom!” I screamed as I ran up the steps to our home, throwing myself inside.
Silence.
The central hearth glowed dark red with dying embers, my snowboard sat untouched beside it, and the chessboard on the end table was set up for tonight’s game.
“Mom?”
I searched every room, rushed upstairs, but the house was empty.
“Mrs. Ravenal . . . ?” Aurora called out downstairs, her voice trailing off with confusion.
A neighbor would know. I sprinted out to the street and up the slippery steps to the house beside ours. I raised my fist to—
The door flung open, ice shattering. “Zora—they took . . . they took . . .” Mrs. Sheridan trailed off helplessly, tears spilling down her red face as she struggled to breathe. “They took your mother.”
Aurora gasped behind me.
In slow motion, I grabbed Mrs. Sheridan by the front of her cape and shook her with all my might. “Who took her?”
She sobbed. “They were on horseback and—”
“Who?” I shook her harder. She coughed, hanging her head uselessly. I shoved her back, slamming her roughly against the door. “Tell me.”
“Two . . . Royal M-Mages,” she whispered.
I backed away, and she collapsed. After running back home and racing up the stairs to my bedroom, I donned my thickest layers and grabbed my goggles and bone daggers.
“You can’t go out there.” Aurora blocked me and Squire, her arms wide across the doorway. “The ice will kill you. Zora, you can’t go out and . . .” She hyperventilated and reached for me. “Don’t go!”
I shook my head. “There are no circumstances where I don’t go after my mother right now.” I shoved past her, and she didn’t fight, collapsing back against the doorframe as I ran down the stairs and out into the street.
Aurora’s voice screamed behind me, “I love you! Be safe!”
“Love you too,” I whispered, disappearing through the gate in the Commune wall. Heading deep into the forest, I passed the mystifying spot where a single rose bloomed, edged with frost.
Mrs. Sheridan had said they’d taken Mom on horseback, but no true Northerner would ever ride them into the woods. One wrong step and you’d pitch straight into a tree well—never to be seen again. We mostly rode them within the Commune walls.
There was only one path they could’ve taken: the riverbank. I followed the river east, passing the creaking bridge where I’d had my first kiss and then broken the nose of the future Emperor. Possibly my best work.
I kept going, deeper into the wild.
In the river, branches were piled high into the sky, blocking most of the water’s flow, creating a wide pond that protruded off to the left.
Smoke billowed out the top of the structure through a natural vent.
Dire beavers. They were as large as people, and I’d stumbled upon many of their engineering feats.
I never hunted them, and they didn’t bother me.
We had different roles to play in this forest.
Hunching low, fighting through intensifying sleet, I continued forward as my fingers and toes went numb.
There were no shortcuts in survival.
ROAR. In the gray clouds, there was a snapping whoosh sound. Silver scales glinted. Pestilence? The dragon disappeared into the storm.
Why is he heading in the same direction? Why is he here?
Heartbeat pounding in my ears, I continued onward.
Hours later, a faint object shimmered dark on the horizon.
I dropped onto my belly, falling deep into the fresh snow, face down, as I held my breath. Snow burned against tiny slivers of exposed skin. Slowly I lifted my head, goggles half above the frozen line. Squire poked his feathery head out of my scarf to also look. Mist drifted around my face.
Shadows moved along the white riverbank. A dire horse?
I stayed as low as possible, belly-crawling into the forest and creeping quietly through the trees.
Up ahead, a black dire horse traversed the bank and a person rode, draped in a familiar, expensive white fur cloak.
A second person stalked beside the steed with something large draped over their shoulder.
I moved closer.
The one riding the steed, rocking perilously like they weren’t used to a saddle, wore a full golden mask.
The Emperor.
Beneath him, the man leading the horse turned his head toward the trees. He wore a partial platinum mask and had a spider tattooed on his jaw.
Tarantula.
More imposing than I remembered, his height and musculature were staggering. His hair was also curlier and more golden than I recalled, the strands glowing like expensive honey in the streaks of sunlight that broke through the clouds.
Tarantula’s bundle moved.
Slung over his wide shoulder like a sack of ice was a woman wrapped in furs. She lifted her head, and her strangled screams were muffled, distorted by a gag. Mom. I stifled a gasp.
Shaking with rage, I crouched lower.
Closer.
I pulled back my right arm, bone knife gleaming.
Rule of survival: To beat a predator, you must play its game.
I burst out of the tree line and flung my dagger.