Prologue

Wizardry was outlawed for good reason. This simple truth nagged Victoria of Ourtown as another body crumpled. Another skull crunched; another torso smacked the sodden turf. Nobody, she thought, should have this power.

A trio roared toward her, two men and a woman, teeth bared, blades high. Tingling thrilled through Vic’s nerves as her mind swept air molecules into a solid mass around the attackers. Her hand clenched, the mass contracted, and three more Relmans fell. Bliss suffused her blood, sizzled across her skin, turning the freezing rain to mist. She imagined she looked like a wraith, a passing haze that left a trail of corpses in its wake.

Around her, soldiers brawled, slipping in the icy mud. Grunts and shouts peppered the rain. Stoneknives scraped. Crystal daggers squelched. Screams melted into groans, into sobs. A Relman wept over a gaping belly wound. Imploring eyes found Vic’s, and the soldier flopped back, her face clear of pain as red stained the grass beneath her skull. An officer rushed forward, a rare length of steel aimed at Vic’s heart. She hardened the air. His sword snapped. His body crumpled. Killing was all too easy with a wizard’s power, but she had a job to do: win the field for Latha and end a twenty-year war.

Her death toll mounted through the gray morning and long into the afternoon. At last a horn blared, and a small party emerged from a rubble-strewn breach, white flag held aloft. At dawn, the Lathans had made a show of setting sulfa charges at the base of the wall surrounding Relm’s capital, but it was wizardry, not ordinance, that had blown open that hole. At least the Relman surrender meant they were finally on the path to peace.

She released her power, and an ache bloomed behind her eye. Cresting a hill, she walked slowly back to the Lathan command pavilion, picking her way through a mile of sprawling dead before she left the battlefield and climbed a grassy slope to the royal banners. Her temple throbbed. Nausea clawed at her throat. The bleak, gray sunlight, weak as it was, hurt her eyes, and she wanted nothing more than to find a dark corner where she could curl around her pain.

“We won!” Princess Bethniel, Heir to Latha’s throne, ducked out of the pavilion and threw her arms around Vic. “The fieldmarshal went down to meet the Relman command. We’ll sleep in real beds in the city tonight.”

“We owe it all to you.” Prince Ashel’s smile eased the pounding behind Vic’s eyes. Black spiraling curls and midnight-dark eyes made him the masculine image of the princess, with a breath-stopping beauty that quickened her pulse. She forced her gaze toward the bandaged stump hidden in the folds of his cloak. She didn’t deserve his gratitude. Six weeks before, she’d abandoned him to the Relmlord’s depravities, and he’d lost half his hand.

In the field below, the Lathan fieldmarshal’s banner rippled as it approached the white flag of the Relman command. The last battle in a twenty-year war was finished. In this single day, she’d slain more people than she had in the five years she’d gone by Vic the Blade, when she used to sneak into Relman camps and kill their officers. When her blood, hot for revenge, had entered the icy chambers of her heart, and remorse had steamed away like the rain. When she’d killed with her hands and a dagger. Drawing her blade, she held the cut-crystal weapon to her chest and felt her heartbeat reverberate through the hilt. Regret, not vengeance, ran through her veins now. No matter how many Relmans she’d killed today, it wouldn’t make up for her failure to save the man standing in front of her.