have been simpler to cloak herself beneath her mantle of shadows, disappear entirely. But if Jonnen had given Scaeva details about the map and the Crown, the Seventeenth would know where she was headed anyway. The foot soldiers wouldn’t move as swift, but she had to deal with their cavalry, one way or another. And so Mia set her shadow moving, sending it out across the wasted sands in a myriad of shapes, stretching toward that hateful sun. Calling to the dark, just as she’d done the turn she first met Naev, the turn she first fled for her life from—
Ahead.
Mia peered into the distance, saw a trail of churning earth approaching her out of the west—as if something colossal swum beneath the dirt. She glanced north, saw another two runnels converging on her.
“All right, bastards,” she murmured. “Let’s go give them a kiss.”
Mia dragged on her reins, turning Julius toward the oncoming cavalry charge. Still twisting the shadows about her, she squinted at the oncoming horsemen. They were riding in formation, shields raised, spears pointed upward in a glittering thicket. Their line was a hundred horses wide, five deep, the leaf-green standards of the Seventeenth Legion streaming in the whisperwinds behind them.
Mia leaned over the reins, urging Julius to run faster. Ahead, someone among the cavalry blew a long note on a horn. Every man in the first and second rows lowered his spear. Another blast rang out, and Mia saw the third and fourth rows string their bows, ready to loose a volley of two hundred arrows down on her head. She glanced behind her, the shadows about her twisting and coiling, peering at the lines of boiling earth converging on her position. The closest was only thirty or forty feet behind her now, hidden beneath the storm of dust Julius was kicking up.
Closing fast.
At the sound of another horn, the archers loosed a flight of black arrows into the air. Julius bellowed as Mia grabbed him hard by the ear, steering him away from the incoming hail. And with a prayer to the Mother on her lips, Mia reached out to her shadows and wrapped them about her and the beast she rode.
The world dropped into a haze—not the black it had been beneath her cloak when two suns shone, but a blur nonetheless. Julius stumbled as he went half-blind, Mia clinging for dear life with her fingers, thighs, and teeth. But to his eternal credit, as smelly and ugly as he was, the beast didn’t fall. Overcome with a panic, Julius instead broke east as the arrows began to strike. Mia heard the patter of hundreds of shots into the sands she’d rode on a moment before. Arrows piercing the earth and the thing that swam beneath it.
She heard the cavalry sound their horns again. The thunder of their hooves diminishing as they slackened their pace, dismayed at her disappearance.
And then …
“The fuck is—”
“Kraaaaaken!”
Mia threw off her cloak of shadows, fingernails digging into Julius’s fur as she looked back over her shoulder. Rearing up out of the churned sands, she saw half a dozen massive tentacles. The appendages were dark, leathery, lined with jagged hooks of awful bone. Drawn by her shadowerking, pierced a dozen or more times by the cavalry’s arrows, the enraged sand kraken dragged itself up out of the broken earth toward the men who’d hurt it. The monstrosity wrapped a hooked tentacle around the closest horse and rider, pulling them toward its hideous beaked maw.
Their horses were thrown into a frothing panic. The cavalry commander roared at his men to attack. But as another soldier cried out in fear, pointed at the two new runnels of boiling earth bearing down upon the cohort, utter chaos broke loose.
Another kraken burst from the blood-soaked sands, larger than the first. Drawn by the blood and screams, it cleaved a half-dozen riders in half with one sweep of its arms. A hail of arrows came raining down, a monstrous howl of pain shook the ground beneath Julius’s hooves. Dust rose in a boiling cloud, red sands and blood spraying in all directions. Mia saw flashing steel, silhouettes dancing in the haze, heard the blast of horns as a third kraken reared up from the bloodied earth and bellowed in hunger and rage. Some horsemen broke, others charged, still more milled about in chaos and confusion. Tentacles and swords and spears cut the air, men and monsters bayed and howled, the stink of blood and iron hanging