now, the smallest sun stubbornly clung to the expanse above, and the Everseeing’s last eye was yet open.
Soon enough, though, Aa must relinquish his hold on the sky.
Then night would fall.
And so will he.
Mia’s eyes were on the ground ahead, narrowed in the stinging winds. Her tears were long since dried on her cheeks. The earth before her was parched, a million cracks spreading out into the dead earth like black spiderwebs. She was now so deep in the wastes, she was beyond the reach of most maps of the Itreyan Republic. East across the desert lay a crescent of dark granite known as the Blackverge Mountains. The range stretched southward in jagged peaks and spires, stone fists that punched and tore at the sky. According to the map on Ash’s skin, a narrow pass wound its way through the Blackverge, opening into the ruins of the Ashkahi Empire beyond.
And there lay the Crown of the Moon.
She had no idea what awaited her in that place. A woman more powerful than she was, that much was certain. A woman who’d lived with naught but shadows for company since before the rise of the Republic. A woman gripped by madness, who hated the Night and jealously guarded the very thing that could wrest Mia’s brother from his plight and, at the same stroke, finally see an end to her father’s twisted ambitions.
Her vengeance.
Mia’s fear made Mister Kindly’s absence all the more acute. She missed Eclipse like a part of her had been severed and burned at the stump. Thinking of the way the shadowwolf must have ended, falling in defense of her brother, and adding the daemon’s destruction, Butcher’s death, Ashlinn’s murder to the ever-growing list of reasons why Julius Scaeva deserved to die.
And O, by the Black fucking Mother, die he would.
But first …
Cleo.
Julius spat and grumbled and complained, but Mia was feeling too hollow to pay attention to the camel’s griping. Sipping from a flask of warm water, she felt Saan sinking ever lower to the horizon at her back, the light about her fading slow. She kept one watchful eye on the sands ahead—the monsters that lurked beneath the earth were ever on her mind. She knew from past experience that the beasts of the Whisperwastes were inexplicably drawn to her shadowwerking. Enraged by it. If she ran into a sand kraken or retchwyrm, her tale might end before she ever reached the Crown.
Mia wondered at that—why the predators of the Whisperwastes were so infuriated by her power. Loremasters said that the monstrosities of the deep wastes were born of the magikal pollutants left over from the Empire’s destruction. But if the Ashkahi Empire fell when the Moon was struck low by his father, perhaps Anais, the fragments inside her, the horrors themselves, were all connected somehow?
Still, it could be worse. On top of the monstrosities of the wasteland she was riding toward, she might also have to worry about—
Julius bellowed again, snorting and spitting. Mia cursed beneath her breath, the noise finally breaking through the rime of numbness about her heart.
“Shut up, you ugly whoreson.”
The camel bellowed again, rolling what seemed to be a full gallon of spit around in its throat. It stomped, warbled, tossed its head. Mia sighed and turned her eyes to the direction the camel was gargling in. And there, in the distance, she saw a cloud rising from the southern reaches. Smudged on the horizon in dark red.
“Storm, maybe?” she muttered. “The Ladies are still pissed at me.”
A spray of white spittle came off Julius’s lips, and Mia slowly nodded. She doubted the Lady of Storms was in a hurry to black out the sky again.
“Aye, you’re right. This is something else.”
Reaching into her saddlebags, she withdrew a long spyglass, trimmed in brass. Holding it to her eye, she peered into the rising dust. For a moment, she had trouble finding focus among the rolling curtain of red. But finally, dying sunslight glinting on their speartips, glimmering on their plumed helms …
“Fuck me very gently,” she breathed. “Then fuck me very hard.”
Itreyan legionaries. Marching north in formation, their cloaks billowing in the whisperwinds. Row upon row. She saw by their standards that they were the Seventeenth Legion out of southern Ashkah. All ten cohorts, by the look. Five thousand men. And though it could be that their commander had simply sent his fellows north into a barren stretch of nightmare wasteland for a pleasant afternoon stroll, Mia knew in her heart they