The world came in flashes as Alira ran through the jungle. Branches. Vines. Fallen bramble and brush. She darted through it all, with no effort to be patient or quiet. She’d smelled smoke on the rainy wind—smoke from the direction of home. All that mattered was getting there.
Anjel was a village woven between the limbs of mature Furywood trees whose tops pushed against the dome of the sky itself. And as Alira cut out from one stretch of jungle into the open, she could see the smoke curling amid those very treetops—streaks of angry dark against the grey sky.
“Oh gods,” Kora gasped from behind her.
Alira didn’t answer. Nor did she cease her mad dash. A tall, timber palisade ringed the Furywood grove of Anjel, and she angled left toward the nearest gate, picking up speed now that she was in the open.
Her mind raced faster than her feet. Fire was necessary. For warmth. For food. For safety.
But the Stormborn she’d lived among for these years were as careful with open flames as the Seaborn she’d been born into were with blazes aboard their wooden ships at sea. There was a chance, always a chance, of an accident. But it was a small chance.
And in a rainstorm? How could flames have broken loose in the wet?
The wall, bending away from her, brought one of the gates into view. It lay open. Blown open.
The wide hinges were shattered to splinters, the slabs of thick wood thrown to the ground like children’s playthings, as if a horrible wind had blasted them in.
Alira and Kora skidded to a stop. They stared.
Beyond that open wound, inside the wall, there was a bare expanse where nothing was meant to grow. Storage huts and livestock pens peppered the distance between the gate and the ship-wide trunks of the Furywood trees. In other days, even under the slanting rains, there would have been women and men and children walking and working the grounds. Today, it was in flames. And the only people still walking were Bloodborn.
If Alira hadn’t known them by sight, not recognized them from when she’d seen them from the high branches that morning, she’d still have known them by their laughter. The pelting rain and the thickness of Anjel’s walls had kept the sound from her ears, but there was no mistaking the otherworldly cacophony now that she and Kora stood in the magick-blasted gate. It was animal screams and high-pitched laughter, and for a heartbeat she was back at that abandoned temple with Bela and the evoker Tukaha, facing a Bloodborn woman who had almost killed them all.
Alira took in her breath in a gasp. As the air flowed into her chest, she was back at Anjel, and there was not one Bloodborn woman before her. There were dozens.
They were magickers. All of them. Like the evokers, their hands wove invisible threads of power. But where evokers breathed their power in golden Char, the evokers laughed their power in red blood.
It was streaked upon their faces, congealing to splotches and hideous strings. Some of it belonged to the Stormborn who’d not reached the ramps that ran into the mighty trees. Some of it belonged to themselves. Alira could see the bite marks that they’d driven into their own shoulders. She could see it as clearly as she’d seen the same half-moon shape in the shoulder of the Bloodborn magicker who’d almost killed her and Bela—a curve of blood the very shape of a woman’s jaw.
Behind her, Kora reacted with a scream of her own. But Alira’s hands had already found Whéuri’s bow. She’d swung it into her hands, nocked an arrow. By the time the nearest Bloodborn woman had turned in their direction with a red-streaked smile, Alira was already loosing the string.
The arrow leaped away as the string went taut. Time slowed into one long exhale. She held the bow steady while the fletching cleared, and the arrow flew straight and true through the rain, cutting through the Bloodborn woman’s long, lank black hair to bury itself in the base of her neck.
The woman was kicked backward by the impact, blood spouting, her laughter turned into a scream.
Alira was already pulling another arrow, searching out another target.
An arrow whistled over her shoulder. It was Kora’s shot. The panic and horror with which the young woman had reacted to the Bloodborn had been set aside. This was a hunt, and her instincts had clearly kicked in; her arrow pierced the back of a Bloodborn woman who’d been standing above a fallen Stormborn man. She went down.
It was chaos, but flash by flash, Alira took it in. The magick of the Bloodborn had destroyed the gates. A sudden assault. Only a handful of the fallen watch had weapons in their hands. The Stormborn had fled for the ramps that led up into the great trees—the safety of height and home. Some had made it. The Stormborn in the Furywood branches above would’ve waited as long as they could for their friends and family. Then they’d sliced through the counterweight lines, and the ramps had snapped upward like closing jaws, cutting the village in the trees off from the Bloodborn below.
Bows were singing from archers moving in the shadows of the great canopy, but the Bloodborn were weaving their threads. The winds they wove swept the arrows away like annoying insects and cast down the archers they saw, breaking bodies against broken branches. Others of the Bloodborn were weaving fires, as Tukaha had, a magick that spat flame against the rain.
Furywood would not burn easily. But against such magick—
“Alira!”
Kora shouted in the same moment that her faster reflexes had nocked and loosed another arrow. Alira’s eyes snapped around and saw that, while she’d been looking ahead, the young girl had looked to the side. There was a small building not far away. Little more than a shed, but it had windows. There were Stormborn crowded inside, their faces terrorized. Two Bloodborn women were fighting against the barred door. A third stood behind them, her hands weaving in red mist—but whatever magick she was making of the blood, it was shattered when Kora’s arrow punched into her shoulder and spun her down into the mud.
Alira nocked the arrow she had in her hand and loosed a shot of her own at one of the other Bloodborn, but Kora’s shout had already made her target flinch and turn. The arrow splintered against the wall just above her head.
Their prey was aware of them now. Surprise was gone. And standing together, they’d be easier targets for whatever magicks the Bloodborn threw at them.
“Separate!” Alira shouted, and she darted out into the open space between the wall and the great Furywood trees, closing the distance on the shed even as she drew another arrow. To her right, Kora was running parallel along the base of the wall. She, too, had her hand to her quiver.
In just a quick glance, Alira saw, above the young woman’s face guard, the redness of her eyes. She read it against the murder of her family. This wasn’t just a hunt for her now. It wasn’t just a defense of Anjel. It was vengeance.
Alira pulled her sight back to the Bloodborn ahead. The woman Kora had hit was rolling, trying to get up. The one she’d tried to hit had ducked away and was caught with indecision between the two advancing huntresses. The third was already weaving.
Running, feeling the lift and fall of her feet against the wet ground, the in and out of her heaving chest, Alira aimed and loosed. In the same moment, the woman’s fingers gripped and twisted on a mist of blood she’d spat into the wet air.
Where there had been nothing, there was a wall of air, shimmering in the rain. The arrow hit it and bounced away. Then the wall hurtled forward, sweeping through the wet.
Alira dove to her right, curling the precious bow to her chest to protect it. The wall clipped her feet, spun her across the ground. Mud smeared up against her face guard.
She didn’t dare stop to get up. She didn’t know where the Bloodborn’s magick might fall next. Instead, she let her momentum carry her forward, bending at the hips, allowing her natural roll to bring her feet to the ground. Then she crouched into her toes, digging them into the ground as they slid and her body came upright. Her bow was already forward, but her other hand was outstretched for balance. Her mind counted the precious moments, straining for that point of enough control when she could reach back into her quiver for another shaft.
She felt the magick wall to her left, felt it swinging toward her. She saw the Bloodborn woman laughing—and a heartbeat later, an arrow slamming into the side of her head.
The wall burst apart, drenching water over Alira’s hood. She blinked the splash away from her eyes, moved her focus to the next target: the one she’d nearly hit.
Too slow. The woman had recovered and was weaving. But she wasn’t looking at Alira.
“Kora!”
The Bloodborn thrust her palm forward, and for an instant, the air compressed against the rain in front of her. Then it burst forward, spinning, kicking spray. It struck Kora squarely in the chest, like the punch of the storm god, and hurled her backward through the rain.
Alira’s fingers had another arrow now. Cursing, she brought it to the string and pulled. She loosed it, but a heaving gust of wind struck her from behind. The arrow went low and away. It was no natural burst of wind. And coming from behind, it meant that she and Kora now had the attention of the Bloodborn around the Furywood grove too.
Good. Every moment the Bloodborn were focused away from the trees gave those in them a chance to regroup. It could mean dozens of lives saved—at the cost of two.
She and Kora had managed to take out less than a handful. One day, perhaps, it would be sung about among the Stormborn, just as Belakané’s glories were sung about among the Seaborn. The difference would be that Bela had survived the attack that made her famous.
There were dozens of the Bloodborn inside the walls. None of them would be surprised now, and Kora might already be down. Only seconds might be left.
If there was one thing a huntress learned early, it was that a moving target was a harder target. So Alira sprang to her feet as the wind passed by. She ran left again, toward the shed. The woman who’d taken an arrow to the shoulder was up to her knees. She was spitting blood and weaving. An unmoving target. Alira almost grinned as she lifted the bow in mid-stride and loosed a shot into the dead center of the woman’s chest and dropped her backward into the rain.
That left one at the door of the shed. What good it would do to take them out now, when so many other evokers were probably converging on them, Alira didn’t know. But it was something.
Her feet were eating up the ground. The woman still standing was between one of the fallen and the shed door. She was weaving; another fist of air, presumably. There would be no time to pull for another shot. So Alira passed the bow to her off-hand and unsheathed her long knife. And when the punch was loosed, she was ready. She bent backward, letting her feet slide forward in the mud. The wind shimmered over her, just inches from her face, and then her feet struck the dead Bloodborn’s body and caught. Her momentum flung the rest of her upright and over the corpse. Her bow hand hit her target’s face. Her knife plunged into the woman’s gut. As the rest of her body crashed forward, it drove the woman into the door. The knife went through, sticking into the wood on the other side.
The last time she’d been so close to a Bloodborn had been the night Tukaha had been killed by one. In nightmares, Alira could sometimes still see the wet point of the dagger sticking out from the evoker’s chest, the pale skin of the Bloodborn’s face behind her shoulder in the darkness, just visible through the veil of her long, black hair.
Feeling the last breath of the magicker pinned against the door felt like payback now.
She tugged at the blade’s hilt as she pulled away, but her hand only slipped on the bloodied grip. Sensing more Bloodborn closing in, she let it go.
She turned and dodged away from the shed, away from Kora, and saw three women looking at her, their backs to the Furywood trees. All of them were weaving.
She ran. No destination. Just away from the shed and the innocents within.
The first and second weaves were punches. Both missed and landed behind her. One cratered the wall of the shed. The other clipped the corner of it, blasting bricks and wood into a shower of debris.
The third was a punch too. It caught her in the hip.
Alira screamed from the sharpness of the pain, and then she was spinning through the air, careening through a world that was upside down.
She hit the ground, skidded, and tried to get up. Her leg revolted, a shocking agony in the joint—was her hip shattered?—and all she could do was rise to her elbow in the mud, her one leg stretched awkwardly out to the side. She’d dropped Whéuri’s bow. It was a dozen feet away.
Alira tried to crawl to it, her fingers clawing into the rain-soaked earth, drawing her closer, fist by fist. Then something—magick or metal, she couldn’t tell—struck her in the back of her head.
She collapsed. The world shifted and spun, threatening to go dark. She saw feet. Gaunt fingers lifting Whéuri’s bow from the mud, then dropping it back down in two useless pieces. The feet moved away. And there were many of them. She lifted her head up, saw through her reeling vision that the Bloodborn were all pulling back. Retreating toward the open gate, abandoning the attack. The fires beneath the Furywood trees were going out.
She almost had time to smile.
But then she saw, too, that there were Stormborn captured by the attackers, being herded by magick and fear. Kora was among them. Her bow was gone. Her hood had been pulled back, and the rain was falling on a face that was bruised and bloody. Her arm hung wrong from her shoulder.
Then strong hands lifted Alira up. A burst of wind pushed her forward, stumbling painfully in their wake. And she knew that she was being taken too.