ELARA VINCENT HAD BEEN A SURVIVOR LONG BEFORE SHE’D GONE to war.
It was a mandatory trait for an eldest daughter, the experimental first child whose personality was a diamond formed under the extreme pressure of her parents’ expectations. Growing up, it had manifested in fervent peacekeeping and anxious respectfulness, especially after her sister was born. Faron, in all her glorious chaos, teased Elara endlessly for being docile. Nonconfrontational. Prewar Elara didn’t believe in going to bed angry or being needlessly impolite—even to old Miss Johnson from down the street, who took the briefest pause as an invitation to tell you how each of her nine kids were doing.
But being gentle on a battlefield was a good way to get killed, and Elara hadn’t survived the war against Langley at thirteen to shed the lessons that had kept her alive.
The first and most important one was simple: It was her or them.
Now eighteen years old, Elara sized up her ex-girlfriend Cherry McKay for a weakness to exploit, confident before they even began that she would win this fight in three moves.
Two, if Cherry made the same mistake.
The gods had blessed Iryans with the ability to summon ancestral spirits, and that gift was wielded in three general ways. For most, it was commonplace, taught in schools and mainly used for communication. For some, it was a religious calling, a talent to be dedicated to the gods at one of the temples across the island. For the rest, it was a weapon to be wielded in service of the nation, a means of protecting the Iryan people from their enemies.
Combat summoning was so heavily associated with the Iryan Military Forces that most civilians didn’t bother learning it, but Elara was not most civilians. Before the war, she’d practiced her forms and tested her limits. During and after the war, she’d built on those skills and perfected them. Combat summoning required discipline: the knowledge of how to call an astral, contain an astral, and safeguard your own strength. The longer she channeled an ancestral spirit, the more her own soul eroded until her body shut down to save what was left—and that was a hard thing to remember with enemies raining down their own magic upon her.
But there had been no margin for error then, and there was no margin for error now. By the end of this week, she might be a soldier. Officially, this time. She just had to defeat Cherry first.
“And,” Aisha Harlow shouted, “summon your astrals!”
Only Elara could see the ancestral spirits who answered her call. They were her relatives, after all, summoned by her to support her in this fight. For most, the astrals who came to them were the spirits of family recently deceased, though she’d heard stories of summoners who could call any dead relative to whom they’d had the strongest emotional connection. Luckily, for Elara, those ancestors were one and the same.
The astrals of her maternal aunts, each one killed during the war, surrounded her now: Vittoria Durand, the youngest, with her hair up in twists and a mischievous smile on her face; Mahalet Durand, the oldest, thick with muscle carved from years of swimming and running track; and Gabourey Durand, the middle sister and the most violent, whose love for the bottle was only equal to her love for the fight. Elara reached for Aunt Vittoria, her skin warming as the extra soul settled beneath it.
On a hot day like today, it felt like torture to summon. But Elara already felt stronger, powerful, more dangerous.
Across the grass, Cherry smirked at her. Elara smirked back.
“Ready?” Aisha’s burgundy braids fluttered as she dived out of the way. “FIGHT!”
Lightning crackled across the field. Cherry’s fingertips sparked white-hot, wielding the electricity her astral helped her conjure like a whip. Elara met her with a simple shield—first move—that swallowed the bolt, enhancing her own magic. The shield shrank to a ball of energy that hovered between her palms. Lightning shot across the surface of it, making it glow almost as bright as the sun.
Sweat gathered on Elara’s skin. Her body felt as if it were on fire.
Finish her, niece, Aunt Vittoria crooned inside her head.
Not yet, Elara replied. If she attacked now, Cherry would just throw up a shield of her own. Her ex had quick instincts, but she was bad at multitasking; she could block an attack, but she’d leave herself open to a counterattack. In that time, Elara could take her down, a fight won in three moves. But she knew she could do it in two. She could do better, and wasn’t that the goal? To be the best?
She wouldn’t get into the Iryan Military Forces—into the aerial branch called the Sky Battalion—if she wasn’t.
Beneath her feet, the ground shook as if an earthquake were hitting Deadegg, but Elara remembered this feeling too well to look away. Cherry had no such focus; she never did. As she’d done every time before, she allowed herself to get distracted by what was happening on the street.
And that was when Elara attacked.
She swung the ball of energy like a cricket bat. Cherry was blasted off her feet. Elara drew on Aunt Vittoria’s magic one last time to soften the ground, saving Cherry from a painful landing. Then she purged the astral from her body and gasped like a drowning man rising above the waves.
Victory in only two moves. She was improving.
“Every time,” Cherry complained as Elara joined everyone in gathering around her. “That one wasn’t even my fault!”
“Nice job, El,” Wayne Pryor said as Aisha helped Cherry sit up. “Did you catch the commotion, though? The queen has arrived.”
Elara had ridden in enough of Queen Aveline’s fancy coaches to know what it sounded like when the horses cantered over the intermittently paved Deadegg streets. It had been impressive the first couple of times, but now she just associated the rumbling sound with at least a full day of her sister, Faron, being in a bad mood.
“Do you guys have to leave?” Aisha asked. Her eyes flicked over Elara’s shoulder to where Reeve Warwick was sitting in the shade of a guinep tree, buried between the pages of his latest book. As if he could sense the sudden attention, he glanced up, but whatever he saw in their expressions apparently wasn’t more interesting than what he was reading.
This field, with its overgrown grass, wilted wooden fence, and fallen barbed wire, had once been part of a farm. But many of the farms in Deadegg had gone under, leaving fields like this as their graveyards. As sad as they looked, these lots were better off than the blackened patches of land that had been ravaged by dragonfire, charred soil that could never again yield new life, livelihoods that had been destroyed in an instant. At least here she could still dream that, in a few more years, this field would transform into something new.
Besides, Elara liked to spar here because it was only about a ten-minute walk from her house, so she could get home quickly when she needed to. Today, she didn’t need to. She may have fought every battle alongside her sister, a soldier in theory though never in rank, but Elara was not the Childe Empyrean. The queen was never in Deadegg for her.
“No,” she answered, and left it at that. “Cherry, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Humiliated, but fine.”
Cherry was on her feet now, her plump lower lip curled into an exaggerated pout. A year ago, Elara would have taken this as an invitation to sway forward and nibble at that lip, to wrap an arm around that narrow waist and pull their bodies together, to press a kiss to the little freckle on Cherry’s throat until she forgot to be upset by her defeat. She didn’t miss Cherry, but she missed that playful closeness. It had been a nice distraction from the doubts forever screaming in her head.
“Let’s take a break,” Elara suggested. “Who wants to go get us some juice?”
One quick hand game of sun moon stars later, Wayne was jumping the fence and jogging down the sidewalk to find a cart. Elara headed over to Reeve, who paused to hold his place in the book with a blade of grass before he set it aside. Her smile widened when he pulled a bottle of water from his bag.
“I love you the most,” she told him after she’d downed half of it.
“We both know that’s not true,” he drawled, “but I’ll take it.”
Reeve was the picture of relaxation here, his back resting against the curved bark and his legs crossed at the ankles. It was a side of him that Elara hadn’t always had access to. She had met him when he’d stumbled into the Iryan war camp at thirteen years old, and even that almost hadn’t happened; the soldiers had been ready to kill him for somehow evading the scouts and the perimeter guard. He’d been shaking then, rolled papers stolen from his father’s war room gathered to his chest as he’d gasped in broken patois, “I need—I need to talk to the queen!”
But he was Langlish, and the son of Commander Gavriel Warwick, the leader of the Langlish Empire. Reeve was now allowed, by royal decree, to live in San Irie, but it was only so he wouldn’t be murdered for treason by his own people. As far as friends went, he had her, and by extension he had her neighbors Aisha, Cherry, and Wayne. As far as family went, he’d been taken in by the otherwise childless Hanlons, and they seemed to treat him well enough.
Everyone else in and out of the town line took one look at Reeve’s silver dragon’s-eye pendant or heard him speak patois with his persistent Langlish accent, and they held him personally responsible for everything the Langlish Empire had done to their island. Elara was glad to see him this loose, this open, this calm, but it made her sad, too.
Reeve had betrayed everything he’d known to be an enemy of two countries.
She dropped down next to him in the shade, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. “It’s hot!”
“Is it?” Reeve asked with faux surprise. “On an island in the middle of the Ember Sea?”
Elara jabbed him with her elbow as the rest of the group made their way over. Instead of juice boxes, they were each holding a different flavor of freeze pop; Elara was handed a pineapple one and Reeve received the last cream soda. Because she was a good friend, she didn’t complain.
“Can you believe that by this time next week at least one of us might be in the Sky Battalion?” Wayne asked, sitting in front of them. He shoved his dark curls away from his forehead, but they immediately tumbled back over his damp skin. Cherry’s head rested on his shoulder, her eyes half-lidded, her skirts lifted to bare her shins to the mild breeze. “Or, even better, we could be chosen to pilot Valor.”
“I can’t believe they commissioned a new drake at all,” said Aisha, using her freeze pop to cool the back of her neck. “It’s been years. Not since—which one was it?”
“Nobility,” Elara answered around a yawn. “The last one built before the war, and the one that now acts as the queen’s personal transport.”
Drakes—the giant flying metal war machines made from a textured material called scalestone—were semisentient; they were built by summoners channeling astrals to mold the scalestone into the size and shape of dragons. Iryan magic could affect any metal as easily as it affected the world around it, but scalestone was impervious to dragonfire, and it amplified Iryan magic until it could rival the war beasts in power. That made it San Irie’s greatest resource, especially since it could only be found in San Irie.
Years of experimentation had revealed that using astrals to build the drakes left a faint trace of their lives behind in the particles of the metal. Those traces made it impossible to predict what the resulting drake would look for in a pilot, and three pilots were needed just to get it off the ground. But no one made the leap from regular soldier to Sky Battalion pilot without there being an open drake to fly.
Thankfully, Queen Aveline had decided to have a fifth one built leading up to the San Irie International Peace Summit, a drake she had named Valor. Political vultures from empires across the continent of Nova—Étolia, Joya del Mar, and, of course, Langley—would be arriving in the Iryan capital of Port Sol in just a few days. The queen wanted to establish San Irie as an independent island nation on an international scale. To force the countries of the closest continent to negotiate with San Irie as an equal, not as a temporarily freed Langlish colony. Though the announcement of the Summit had proven controversial, even with her own parents, Elara had barely registered the enemies who would soon be on their shores.
No pilots had been chosen for Valor yet. Recruitment was tomorrow. And Elara was old enough to enlist. Her dream had been rekindled. Better still, it was actually in reach.
So what if she hadn’t gotten around to telling her family? She was ready.
She didn’t have to be the Childe Empyrean to do something incredible.
As soon as she sucked the first piece of her freeze pop into her mouth, a ball of light swirled into view.
An astral call.
Elara squinted into the light, cool pineapple juice melting on her tongue as the astral resolved itself into her grandfather Winston. Her father’s father looked exactly like his son, except his goatee was fully gray while her father’s was graying and his head was shaved whereas her father had grown locs halfway down his back.
A message for you, said Pa Winston, flickering at the edges.
Elara already felt as if she could sleep for at least three hours, but if she didn’t give her ancestor permission to share her body, then she wouldn’t get the message. And if she ignored her father’s message, then she’d be in for it when she got home.
She sighed. Yes, okay.
Pa Winston settled inside of her, his presence like a thick blanket around her soul. It would have been soothing if it wasn’t so unforgivably hot today. But she breathed around the flare of heat and opened her eyes, allowing him to feel the breeze, to smell the earthy scent of grass and dirt, to hear the quiet conversation her friends were having. To feel alive again.
In return, he spoke in a voice identical to her father’s: Elara, you and Reeve need to come home as soon as possible. Dinner is ready… and Queen Aveline needs to speak to you.
As soon as the message was delivered, Pa Winston faded away. Elara sagged against Reeve’s side, her eyelids like weights. She had never gotten formal magical training after learning the basics at school; everything she could do was self-taught, especially without a local temple where she might have found a teacher. Impressive displays of summoning, like the ability to channel multiple astrals back-to-back without passing out, were few and far between outside the major cities. Most of the particularly gifted summoners joined the Iryan army.
Just as her aunts had. Just as Elara was going to.
“My father wants us at my house,” she yawned into Reeve’s shoulder. “Apparently, the queen wants to talk to us.”
“She wants to talk to us?” Reeve asked. “You and me? Is he sure?”
“More likely he just wants us both there to present a united front for Faron. But there’s dinner.”
Reeve picked up his book, brushing grass off the cover. He lowered his voice when he spoke, but that didn’t stop his words from piercing Elara’s heart. “Are you going to tell them over dinner?”
Elara tried to imagine it. Her mother always went out of her way to cook as much food as possible when the queen came to visit. She conjured an image of market-fresh lobster, bright red on a bed of green vegetables and shining with a thin coat of butter, next to bright yellow pieces of chewy curry goat. They would all sit down to eat, and Elara would make sure to clear at least one plate before she brought up her plan to leave in the morning to enlist at the nearest base in Highfort.
Instantly, the fantasy cracked apart. Her mother would scream the same way she’d screamed when she’d gotten those condolence letters, one for each aunt, that now sat in her drawer at home gathering dust. Her father would go cold, his expression like the gray-purple clouds that gathered before a thunderstorm. And Faron… Faron hadn’t even gone to war without Elara at her side. She’d be hurt. Furious.
Betrayed.
Elara’s throat closed up. “Maybe I should save the announcement for if I even get in?”
“If?” said Wayne. “You’re the best of all of us, Elara. If they don’t take you, the rest of us won’t even be considered.”
“You taught me how to combat summon without burning out,” said Aisha. “And I’m still not as good as you.”
“I’m not going to inflate your ego,” said Cherry, lifting her head long enough to stretch. “But I agree with them.”
Reeve arched his eyebrows in a silent signal that he was well aware Elara was just making up excuses. But she knew her family well enough to know that they would take this dream from her before it even had a chance to blossom into anything real. They had already lost too much and too many to the military. Vittoria. Mahalet. Gabourey. Even Elara and Faron had only brought half of themselves back from the battlefield.
She’d spent five years rebuilding the trust her parents had in her. Five years of waking in the middle of the night to find one or both of them looking in to make sure she was still safe in her bed. Five years of being the responsible to Faron’s reckless. Five years of ensuring that her parents looked at her with pride instead of fear.
If it were any other dream, they would support her. But they would never support this.
After she got in, after she hopefully became a drake pilot, maybe they would see her accomplishments and come around. But when it was just an idea, just a flame of aspiration she kept close to her heart, it was too easy for someone to blow out.
“I’ll tell them,” she mumbled to Reeve. “Not at dinner, but—after the queen leaves tonight. I’ll tell them.” Then she raised her voice, finding a smile for her friends. “And thanks, everyone. But we’re all going to get in. Maybe the gods will smile down on us, and the three next pilots of Valor are sitting right here, right now.”
Elara ignored the heavy gaze she could feel on the side of her face. Because if she looked at Reeve, she would have to acknowledge that she was lying to both of them.