“Do you know where it is?”

  The head scoffed. “Everyone knows where it is.”

  “Everyone?” Risha repeated. “Then why hasn’t it been found? Claimed?”

  “First off, no one can use it, so what’s the point,” the head said. “Second, it’s in a bit of a… hard-to-reach place.”

  Risha closed her eyes and sank back against the wall. Of course.

  Panic began to claw up her chest, into her throat. There was no solution she could see that would save both her and Jas. And even if there was a path that led only to her survival…

  No. She refused to think like that.

  Jas laughed bitterly. “We can’t even get past one Sentinel,” he muttered. “How are we supposed to get to Samhara?”

  “Oh shit, there’s a Sentinel?” The head glanced at the broken door. “I might be able to get you past it.”

  “You can? How?” Jas demanded.

  “Well…” The head gazed at Risha, evaluating. “I could, if she wasn’t dying. Then again, maybe dying would make things easier.”

  “She’s not going to die for this,” Jas growled.

  “I didn’t mean literally,” the head said, rolling its eyes. “You have the same powers as Leshya Vakara, right?”

  Wordlessly, Risha nodded.

  “That means you can manipulate your own body.”

  Jas sat back, frowning. Maybe recalling the same thing she did: of feeling his heartbeat against hers, the roadways of his veins, the momentary control she’d had over his life.

  The lives of six people in her hands, crowding her chest, waiting to be snuffed. Risha’s fingers dug harder into her thigh.

  “Leshya Vakara killed off certain parts of her own body to stay in Mortri longer,” the head explained. “Why can’t you do the same?”

  Because she hadn’t known that was something she could do.

  “So she would be cutting off certain functions, but not truly killing herself?” Jas clarified.

  “That’d be it.”

  Jas fidgeted with excitement. “Risha, will you try?”

  What other choice did she have, at this point? Better to experiment on herself than on Jas or the spirits in this realm. Still, trepidation had perched on her chest, making breathing even more difficult.

  Jas held her hand. “I’ll be right here,” he whispered.

  Risha closed her eyes. Her body was riddled with pain and exhaustion, and the more she concentrated, the more she understood how little time she actually had left. But power floated within her—a sweet song, a clear, cold breeze.

  Her blood was the murmuring of a funeral procession, her breath the last sigh of wind at the end of the world. Green seeped through her eyelids, and red, and black. She saw the taunting markers on the pathway within the void between Mortri and Vitae.

  She delved deeper, deeper, until she burrowed into the space between her muscles, the fat and the tissue, the struggling organs. The protein and lean muscle within her was eroding, breaking down to provide her some semblance of vitality.

  The mausoleum fell away and it became just her and her body. She traveled through her own lethargic blood, seeing for herself how everything necessary had been depleted from her liver and muscles, the fat stores drained, waste and toxins accumulating. Even her brain was affected, stifled and sluggish.

  She needed energy. Water. The human body could not sustain itself without it.

  But she could trick it into thinking it could.

  Risha targeted her heart, lungs, liver. She threaded her power through her muscles and coiled it around the base of her brain where it met her spine. Slowly, carefully, she fed them the power singing at her core, dark and formidable. Her heartbeat pulsed in her fingertips as it grew stronger, nourished not with sustenance but with magic.

  For a second she faltered, unsure if this would be enough. Then something cool and calming swept over her like shade on a hot summer day. She basked in it, lingered in order to collect her strength and continue.

  Her headache gradually receded. Her dizziness diminished. She drew in a large breath and savored the expanding of her lungs, the moisture in her mouth. All the small miracles she hadn’t properly been grateful for when she’d had them.

  She opened her eyes and sat up straight. She felt as if she had woken from a long, deep sleep, her fatigue washed away.

  “It worked.” Her joints were no longer stiff and painful to move. “I really did it.”

  She turned to Jas and her smile dropped. Before, she’d noticed the edges of him had turned hazy. Now those edges had become even more transparent.

  Risha fumbled the marigold out of her pocket and placed it in his hands. It held for a moment before falling through.

  “Risha,” Jas whispered.

  “Don’t,” she snapped. “You— What did you do?”

  His hand. He had been holding her hand, and when she had faltered, when that wave of energy had come to bolster her—

  “It worked, didn’t it?” Jas said. “Are you feeling better?”

  Physically, yes. But to know he had siphoned off some of his spirit into hers—

  She pressed a hand against her chest. “Jas.”

  “I’m sorry.” He dropped his gaze. “I didn’t… I didn’t know how else to help.”

  “Promise me you won’t do that again.” When his face tightened, she raised her voice. “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  The Sentinel outside gave another cry that made the stone around them tremble. The head’s eyes swiveled toward the door. “Well done, good job, but maybe let’s get going now?”

  Risha exhaled shakily before wiping her eyes and turning back to the head. “You want us to bring you along?”

  His eyebrows rose. “Uh, yes? If you want to get past the Sentinel, that is. And if you want to find Leshya Vakara’s weapon.”

  “What do you get out of it?”

  “Well…” His mouth pursed a couple times while he thought. “All right, fine. My body is still somewhere out there. If I bring you to Leshya Vakara’s weapon, you need to find it for me. It’s the least you can do after my heroic sacrifice to aid your ancestor.”

  Risha didn’t like the thought of traveling with a stranger, let alone one who was a decapitated head, but he’d been right about using her power to fix herself. He had been a guide for Leshya, which meant he knew enough about Mortri to be their guide, too.

  “Deal. What do we call you?”

  “Val will do,” he said.

  Risha gingerly got to her feet and picked him up, making sure he faced out to better see where they were going. The sensation of holding a live head in her hands was disconcerting, to say the least. “What do we do?”

  “Usually squaring up against a Sentinel is impossible. They’re incredibly strong, and those swords they carry aren’t just for show. They can shred both spirits and flesh like they’re parchment.”

  “In other words, we’re all done for if one catches us,” Jas said.

  “Brains and beauty. You love to see it.”

  “What else can you tell us about them?” Risha asked as Jas blinked.

  “Hold on a moment.” They waited in tense silence until the clicking of bones sounded again. “Hear that? They can’t really see, so they use that sound to guide them.”

  “Like a bat?”

  “Precisely.”

  “So that’s why it couldn’t find us in here,” Jas murmured. “But once we step outside…”

  “It can only detect what’s immediately in front of it,” Val finished. “And is drawn to things that move.”

  “What direction is Samhara?” Risha asked.

  “North.”

  Risha gathered her resolve and pressed her shoulder against the door. She carefully maneuvered it open wide enough to slip back out, which proved more of a challenge while holding a head.

  The Sentinel stood to the north. It had become bipedal again, turning this way and that. It was much closer than she had hoped.

  “It might be under orders to not return until it finds something,” Val whispered as she shifted to hold him under one arm. The movement of his jaw when he spoke tickled her side. “We have to sneak past it.”

  “You said it’s drawn to things that move,” Jas hissed.

  “It only senses what’s in front of it,” Risha reminded him. “We move when it turns away.”

  “If it rattles its bones at you, do your best impression of a statue,” Val said.

  With that last piece of advice, Risha moved away from the door. The Sentinel was at least a hundred yards away, facing south. The sky illuminated the creature’s sword, creating a jade runnel down its length.

  Risha slowed her breathing. The air around her felt thick enough to take a bite out of. Jas and Val didn’t make a sound, but she couldn’t help the way the grass whispered and bent under her footfalls.

  The Sentinel turned. Risha froze, locking her limbs in place and accidentally squishing Val’s head. The Sentinel’s ribs undulated, clicking and clacking together, and it swung its skull-like head from side to side. After a long moment, it turned the opposite way and repeated the motion.

  Risha covered her nose and mouth with her sleeve to better stifle her uneven breaths. Jas was slow and cautious beside her. They walked north for another couple minutes before Val bit her arm in warning and the Sentinel twisted back toward them.

  She had to freeze midstep, swaying slightly. Jas was utterly still, his shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on the horizon. She hardly dared to breathe as the Sentinel took one step, two, its ribs clattering, searching.

  Her foot trembled a few inches above the ground. She tensed her leg as tight as she could, silently pleading with herself to not fall over, to not move one inch. Her face grew damp with sweat.

  The longest minute of her life passed until the Sentinel finally turned away. Risha held back a gasp of relief and set her leg down, ignoring the cramp in her calf.

  They repeated this twice more, until they were far enough away that Val whispered they were in the clear. Risha ducked behind a barrow and sank to the ground, setting Val down.

  “Are you all right?” Jas asked as he knelt beside her.

  “I will be,” she panted. “Just not used to everything wanting to kill me.”

  In stronger light, she noted Val’s face was angular and handsome, some of his black hair falling in a wave of bangs over one eye. When he realized she was staring he grinned, revealing sharp teeth.

  “If you want that weapon, you better get used to it,” he said. “Because one Sentinel’s going to be the least of your problems.”

  Risha wholeheartedly believed him.

  XIV

  Ah, fuck.

  Taesia sometimes wondered if she had the best or the worst luck. At moments like these, it was a toss-up.

  She should have remembered sooner. The Lunari royal family had a tradition of tattooing their foreheads with the phase of the moon under which they’d been born. But her mind was spinning, and her body was one cough away from falling over. Everything hurt, and Nikolas was still in the Bone Palace, being punished by his god—

  “Bow,” came a low, droll voice behind her. The Noctan man with the constellation on his forehead and the familiar around his neck lifted his nose at them. “You are meeting royalty. It doesn’t matter from which realm you come—decorum must be followed.”

  Taesia glowered. But, seeing no alternative, she turned and made the appropriate genuflection while trying not to wobble. Julian copied her.

  “Was that really necessary?” the princess asked of her aide. Then to Taesia and Julian, “You may rise. Or stay on the ground, if you prefer. I don’t care so long as I get answers.”

  Taesia forced herself back up. Julian reached out to steady her. “Our story might be… hard to believe.”

  The princess regarded them with an unfathomable expression. “Two Vitaeans stand in Noctus,” she said at last. “Do you know what happened to the Vitaeans and Solarians who were trapped here when the portals closed? They died. The Solarians went first, choked off from the light they need to survive. Then gradually the Vitaeans withered away, even with their homes surrounded by stardust lamps. We did the best we could to save them, but in the end, it was hopeless.” Her gaze never left them, drinking in every detail she could. “No one has seen a Vitaean in Noctus in centuries. Which means you and that… that building came through a portal.”

  “Yes,” Taesia said. “A portal created by Conjuration.”

  One of the aides asked, “What is that?”

  “It’s…” Taesia cast around for the Noctan equivalent of the word, but she’d either never learned it or hadn’t cared to memorize it. “Isadril?” It meant summoning, but even that couldn’t come close to describing the chaotic magic of Conjuration.

  “Quintessence,” Julian added softly. “Magic from a fifth realm that was used to create the portals between the others.”

  The princess narrowed her eyes in a silent order to explain. Taesia swayed on her feet.

  “I think I’m gonna take up your offer to sit down,” she muttered.

  “You mean to tell me,” the princess said when they were done explaining Godsnight to the best of their ability, “that Phos—the god of Solara—plans to destroy this realm? That he sits beyond that damnable barrier on the hill?”

  “The god isn’t here in the flesh.” Taesia’s fingers idly traced a whorl on the rickety table’s surface. “He’s probably in his own realm. He’s using one of his descendants as a conduit and controlling the other entirely.”

  “How were you able to escape him?”

  Her throat constricted, and Julian sent her a worried look. “Because we pulled one of them out of Phos’s control long enough for him to free us. But he couldn’t escape.”

  The princess and her aides communed together silently. Eventually the princess’s whip retracted back into her shadow familiar, which looped around her wrist in a bangle.

  “Four hundred and thirty-two,” she whispered. “That’s how many servants worked in the palace. There were at least three hundred guards. My three brothers and my two sisters. Their partners and children. My mother and father.” Her voice hitched and she turned away. “Gone. Crushed.”

  Taesia stared at the dark wood of the table. Julian touched her hand, but she barely felt it.

  Hundreds and hundreds of deaths at Phos’s hand, and more to come should he succeed with his plan. Innocents buried under the weight of a foreign monument, bones atop bones.

  The aide with the sword—a soldier of some sort—approached the princess, but she raised a hand to stop him. When she faced Taesia and Julian again, she was composed.

  She walked to Taesia and lifted her arm to inspect the lightsbane shackle. “What earthly magic do you possess, then, to make these necessary?”

  Taesia bristled. The same inadequacy that filled her in the Noctus Quarter struck her now, of being among those with whom she shared ancestry but never quite belonging.

  She had already proven herself a fraud by not immediately recognizing the status symbol on the princess’s forehead, her lack of knowledge about Astrum, her paltry retention of their language.

  In Vitae, her magic would have been a source of pride. Her lineage, her name, inspired awe. But here…

  “I’m a Shade,” she admitted at last.

  The Noctans did not make a sound, and Taesia’s molars ached from how hard she clenched her jaw. The princess released her arm.

  “I don’t understand your peoples’ jokes,” she said curtly. “Or perhaps my meaning alluded you?”

  Taesia slid back her chair and stood. The soldier reached for his sword, and the Shade’s familiar spilled down his arm in a shield of fluid darkness. Julian stayed seated, face pinched.

  She and the princess were of similar height, but the princess carried herself like someone who understood that a mantle had been placed upon her shoulders; one that could not be removed. That she had not only inherited a title, but all the responsibility that came with it.

  Taesia had tried to shove that mantle away. In the end, it had strangled her.

  “I understood you,” Taesia said. “My name is Taesia Lastrider, and I am a Shade from Vitae.”

  The princess frowned. “Lastrider…”

  The aide with the familiar inhaled sharply. “Lilia,” he hissed. “She is dalyr.” The princess, Lilia, backed away from Taesia with wide eyes.

  Julian stood at their reactions. “What does that mean?”

  Taesia cleared her throat. “Dalyr is a word to describe the Houses,” she explained. “Basically, the Noctan equivalent of godspawn.”

  The three Noctans stared at Taesia—not in awe or fright, but something between the two.

  “And you?” Lilia directed at Julian. “Are you also dalyr?”

  “No,” Taesia cut in before he could respond. “He’s a Hunter from our realm. He tracks beasts.” Julian’s throat bobbed.

  “Phos wanted to use the descendants of the gods,” the aide with the familiar murmured. “But you escaped. Which means Phos will be looking for you.”

  “And you, Highness,” said the soldier. His voice was lighter, his accent more refined. “If he was targeting the Lunaris specifically…”

  “Then as the sole survivor, I am a threat,” Lilia finished for him. She flexed her fingers, long and tipped in black nails. “Nesch.”

  The curse brought a sudden memory to the surface. Dante, all of twelve years old, had learned the word in the Noctus Quarter and recited it proudly back at the villa. Their mother had overheard and pulled on his ear until he cried out an apology.

  Taesia sank back onto the chair and closed her eyes. What would it be like, she wondered, to return to the Lastrider villa and find it crushed with her whole family still inside?

  “Phos mentioned the Lunaris,” Julian said. “And that getting rid of them was beneficial for his plan.”

  “We are one of the oldest clans of Inlustrous, so that is no surprise,” the princess agreed. “We developed the practice of harvesting stardust.” Taesia’s mind supplied a drawing from one of the villa’s books, of a Noctan sticking their long fingers into the pockets and holes of fallen stars and meteors to extract stardust. Inhaling it caused those with magic to become stronger, and created a drug-like effect on those without it. “The prolonged exposure enhanced our Shade abilities. The only ones who could rival us are Nyx himself, or…”

 

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