The Hurricane Wars: A Novel

Alaric knew that he would have to kill the girl eventually. The Shadow could only fall when there was no light to banish it. As long as the girl drew breath, she was a symbol for the Sardovians to rally around. As long as Sardovia stood, Kesath would never be safe. Would never be free to achieve the greatness that it was meant for.

All around us are enemies, Alaric’s father reminded him time and time again. And the Lightweaver was an enemy. From the moment Alaric first heard the hum of her magic, first saw her on the ice, bathed in moonlight, bringing a golden dagger down over his legionnaire’s broken form, he had known that there was no way that she could be allowed to live.

Which was all well and good, but he couldn’t exactly set about killing her if she was nowhere to be found. She seemed to have gone to ground after Frostplum, sitting out the rest of the battle for the Highlands.

Alaric redirected all his frustration into glowering at the Light Sever as it spilled over the side of the cliff, a waterfall of radiance that shone against the rough, dark granite.

It wasn’t a true Sever but, rather, the remnants of one. The cliff’s summit bore several collapsed archways and piles of rubble, which were all that was left of a Lightweaver shrine, situated in what had once been the border between Sunstead and the Hinterland, before the Night Empire conquered the two states. The legionnaires originally assigned to destroy this Light Sever hadn’t been thorough and, as a result, some of it had lingered deep beneath the bones of the earth, gradually rising to the surface.

It was a good thing, Alaric reflected, that Sardovia had withdrawn from this region long ago and a Kesathese patrol had spotted the stream of blazing magic before the Lightweaver got to it. The girl’s power was formidable enough without the assistance of a nexus point.

With a final outpouring of the Shadowgate from splayed, black-gauntleted fingers, a slim section of the struggling Lightweave vanished and Alaric rappelled further down the cliffside, his steps quick and steady on the granite ledges. There were three legionnaires below him, poring over a wider fracture, chipping away at it with inky masses of the Shadowgate that curled like smoke amidst the air and rock of this high altitude.

“Work faster,” he instructed once he had joined them. “The Night Emperor requires our presence at the Citadel.” They were planning a multipronged attack on several Sardovian cities; the Legion would join the first wave alongside Kesath’s conscripted regiments.

“Easier said than done, Your Highness,” Nisene replied, her throaty voice just the slightest bit petulant. “This one’s stubborn. For every inch we remove, a foot comes back, it feels like.”

“We should just blast this section,” opined Nisene’s twin sister, Ileis. She aimed a fitful kick at a nearby boulder to emphasize her point. “Expose the whole vein so we can dismantle it at the root. I’ve got some shells in my pack.”

Alaric shook his head. “That could trigger a landslide. It might even bring down the entire cliff—we don’t know how deep this Light Sever goes.”

“And so what if it brings down the entire cliff?” Nisene asked slowly.

“There’s a village at the base,” Alaric pointed out. “I do not consider it wise to destroy their homes for the sake of saving time.”

“Your father wouldn’t care about Sardovian villagers,” Ileis retorted. “If the decision were left to him.”

“They are no longer Sardovian. They are Kesathese, like us.” Alaric frowned behind his half-mask. “And I am not my father. The decision is mine to make, not his. I’m the one leading this mission.”

The twins turned to him in eerie unison, subjecting him to the weight of sly, searching gazes from two sets of brown eyes glimmering silver with magic, peering out from identical helms that crisscrossed over their bare faces in whorls of obsidian, sporting winglike projections along the sides. He gritted his teeth against what threatened to be a migraine. Ileis and Nisene could drive a man to drink, and not in the flattering way that such an adage was usually meant.

“Prince Alaric’s right, my ladies,” Sevraim called out from where he dangled a little further away on fixed ropes, pouring shadow into light. He’d removed his helm a while back and the sheer amount of concentration required to dismantle a Light Sever had caused beads of perspiration to dot his smooth brow even in the cold mountain air. “How many times do we have to tell you two that not everything can be solved with explosions?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Nisene said blithely.

Alaric’s lips pursed in disapproval at the coarse language. Sevraim merely grinned, lopsided and amused, teeth flashing white against mahogany skin. Ileis cocked her head with interest, and Alaric dearly wished, not for the first time, that he had subordinates who were capable of attending to the task at hand rather than their baser urges.

He was stuck with these three, though. He and Sevraim had grown up together, had trained together since childhood, and once they became legionnaires and met Ileis and Nisene, Sevraim had immediately roped the twins into those antics of his that Alaric bore on sufferance. There was a certain irreplaceable kind of trust that came with having spent most of their lives fighting a war side by side. Within the Legion, their combat formations were the most seamless, and Alaric supposed that he tolerated Sevraim, Ileis, and Nisene well enough during downtime.

A soft fluttering sound made the four Shadowforged look up. Alaric was expecting a skua, the standard messenger bird of the Kesathese army, or a raven, the messenger bird used exclusively by House Ossinast. To his consternation, however, what descended toward him in a swift glide was a mop of ashen feathers, binding a slender bill and beady orange eyes into a plump frame.

A pigeon.

It landed on Alaric’s shoulder with a gentle coo and extended a spindly leg to which had been tied a rolled-up scrap of vellum, waiting patiently while his legionnaires looked on in bewilderment.

“Is it lost?” Ileis demanded.

“Can’t be,” muttered Sevraim. “All messenger birds are aether-touched. They always fly true to the intended recipient.”

“Someone in the Sardovian regiments has finally grown a brain and decided to come on over to the winning side, then,” said Nisene. “Better late than never, I suppose.”

“The audacity,” breathed Ileis, “to directly contact the crown prince—”

Alaric thought that maybe he should add speaking only when spoken to to his mental list of desired qualities in subordinates. He slipped the missive loose from the knotted twine around the bird’s leg and unfurled it in his hands. The pigeon flapped its dusky wings and took to the air once more, soon vanishing behind the clouds.

It turned out to be two sheets of vellum, rolled together. Alaric scanned the message that had been hastily scrawled on one sheet, then folded up the other and tucked it into his pocket. “I have to go,” he announced. The Shadowgate poured forth from his fingertips, ripping the message apart until it was nothing but ashes that scattered in the breeze.

“Where?” Nisene asked in deeply suspicious tones.

“That’s classified.”

“Ooh, a secret mission,” Sevraim gushed as Alaric began climbing back up the cliff. “Do you need a partner, Your Highness?”

Alaric rolled his eyes at Sevraim’s transparent attempt to escape the current tedium. “Negative. The three of you will stay here and finish dismantling the Sever; then you will proceed to the Citadel for the meeting with Emperor Gaheris.”

“Without you?” Ileis prodded. “How are we to explain your absence to His Majesty?”

“What makes you think I’m not off to do his bidding?” Alaric challenged, scrambling onto another ledge without looking back.

“You aren’t,” Nisene called out.

He smirked to himself as he climbed higher. “Just tell him that I have an urgent matter to take care of.”

Upon reaching the summit, Alaric headed straight to where their four wolves were docked on a large, partially collapsed platform that rose up from the sea of temple ruins. So named for their pointed snouts, the coracles gleamed jet-black in the early-afternoon sun, their barrel-chested hulls bearing the Kesathese chimera in silver paint. Alaric slid into the well of his coracle, raised its black sails, and took off, the wolf’s prow slicing through the air like a scimitar, its aether hearts spitting out iridescent fumes of emerald green as it soared over the cliffs. Toward the Eversea.

Here is a token of good faith, the message had begun. Exchanged for the hope of clemency.

It could only have been a matter of time before a Sardovian officer switched sides, Alaric supposed, but the turncoat really couldn’t have picked a better moment. If they could get information on the Allfold’s defenses, it would assure the success of the Night Empire’s upcoming attack—one that would be launched on such a scale as had never been seen before on the Continent, and thus bore the equivalent amount of risk.

And as for the information that the turncoat had already shared . . .

Alaric dug into his pocket for the map that the pigeon had brought him and perused it, mentally charting the most expedient route. The Lightweaver had over half a day’s lead on him but he was confident that he would be able to catch up. If not in the air, then on land, within the borders of Nenavar. He had to stop her before she reached the Dominion’s Light Sever.

Alaric did his best to ignore the cynical inner voice telling him that if he had just cut her down on the frozen lake a fortnight ago, he wouldn’t have had to abandon all his other responsibilities for this wild chase that already had the makings of a diplomatic crisis stamped all over it. No matter what, Gaheris would be furious once he learned that Alaric had acted on new intelligence without consulting him. After all, what if this was a trap? And if it wasn’t, and the worst-case scenario happened, the Night Emperor would find out that his heir had angered the Zahiya-lachis by trespassing on her realm. Either way, the consequences were going to be severe.

It would be far kinder, Alaric thought sardonically, for the Nenavarene to execute him instead of handing him back to his father.

Still, there was no other choice. In all his twenty-six years, Alaric had never seen the Sardovian Lightweaver’s ilk before. She was a slip of a thing who bulldozed her way through combat with willpower like iron, besting him and one of his deadliest legionnaires even though she had neither legitimate training nor regular access to a nexus point. With the latter, there was a very real possibility that she would be unstoppable.

He really should have just finished her that night on the outskirts of Frostplum. But Alaric had been . . . fascinated. Perhaps it was too generous a term, but that was honestly how he’d felt. They’d been surrounded by a plethora of dark barriers, each one strong enough to shred her into a million pieces despite her built-in resistance, but he hadn’t let that happen. He’d followed some impulse and waved the barriers aside. She’d been a frightened little rabbit at first and he’d put her through her paces on the ice, under the seven moons, studying the way she moved, the way she bared her teeth at him, the way the aether gilded her olive skin as her features twisted from fearful to murderous. The way her narrowed eyes shone golden with her magic, reflecting the distant fires of the battlefield.

Then she’d cracked her skull against his and stabbed him in the shoulder, and he’d spent the next few days concussed and unable to use his right arm. Once he was more or less recovered, his father had meted out the necessary punishment for allowing the first Lightweaver to crop up in nineteen years to escape, and Alaric had been unable to get to his feet or do much of anything for another few days.

He had let his guard down and he had let the girl go, and now everything that Kesath had achieved—had toiled and risen above the fray to become—was in jeopardy.

The end of the Hurricane Wars was in sight. Sardovia was cornered, and cornered animals were the most dangerous. Affording them any sort of advantage at this point could spell disaster for the Night Empire.

All around us are enemies.

Sunstead had attacked Kesath when they learned about the stormship prototype that his grandfather King Ozalus’s Enchanters were building. The Lightweavers had wanted to steal the technology for themselves. They had killed thousands of Kesathese, including Alaric’s grandfather, to do it. And the rest of the Sardovian Allfold had simply stood by and watched.

If not for the Lightweavers, Ozalus might still be alive and Gaheris wouldn’t have been thrust into power ill-prepared and in mourning, his country already at war.

If not for the Lightweavers, Gaheris wouldn’t have become what he was today and Alaric’s mother wouldn’t have fled the Continent.

Alaric’s jaw clenched. His mind was once again going down a treacherous path. As he steered his airship over an expanse of barren gorges and waterfalls sluggish from the cold, so too did he steer his thoughts in a direction more befitting the crown prince of the Night Empire and the Master of the Shadowforged Legion.

Gaheris had the strength and courage to do what was necessary, even if all of Lir itself were against him. Alaric was proud to be his son.

And he needed to focus on what he had to do: get into Nenavar; kill the girl.

Talasyn, Alaric thought, the name summoned from the turncoat’s message as his wolf glided over the rocky southeastern coastline. Her name is Talasyn.