Her body crumpled, and her sword clattered to the ground.
A whine of panic erupted in Eliana’s skull. She spun back to the threads and launched herself at them. She grabbed Remy’s hand, pulled him with her through the ring of light.
A gunshot cracked the air.
Behind her, Simon cried out.
Eliana turned back to reach for him, but something yanked him away, out of her reach. She saw a flash of his face, bright with pain, and then he was gone. His threads shifted sharply, veered, then righted themselves, as if a cloud had passed over them and then the sun had returned. The darker threads, those hissing tendrils of time, split and reformed. They grabbed Eliana and Remy, flung them forward. Her mind screamed with fear. Something gripped her throat, stole her voice.
Then she set foot on solid ground. The threads snapped closed behind her, singeing her heels.
She took a breath, desperate for a cool, quiet world of green. The royal gardens behind the castle Baingarde. It was a peaceful evening.
But then a bolt of fire zipped over her head. Breathless, she ducked, pulling Remy down with her. They hit the ground hard. Mud sucked at their feet and hands. The twin black smells of blood and smoke sent her head reeling. Something barreled past them, some great beast with a mottled furred head and a long serpentine tail. With each of its thundering steps, the earth quaked. Something glinted around its ankles as Eliana watched them streak by. Flat strips of metal embedded in swollen skin, each piece glowing with a familiar light.
Horror swept through her. This creature was not quite a cruciata, at least not like any she had seen, but it was close enough, and it wore castings. On its back sat a gray-eyed child with wrists that snapped fire. Eliana’s blood turned cold. An elemental child, controlled as the adatrox were.
She pushed herself up. Remy scrambled to his feet beside her. The world was an uproar of sunlight and fire, darkness that moved and howled. Something was burning nearby. They ran, choking on smoke, and found a rocky ridge to hide behind. They wedged themselves into a crevice slick with mud and blood. Beside them lay a man in armor, his glassy eyes open wide and one of his legs torn away.
Eliana hid the light of her castings against her chest and stared over the rock at the chaos beyond.
It was a battlefield, so vast it could have been the entire world. Soldiers in armor swung their swords, flung their spears. A horse with no rider raced by, its reins trailing. Eliana flinched as a shadow-hawk flew shrieking past them. It dove at an armored soldier, talons first, and expanded. A cocoon of darkness wrapped quickly around him, smothered him, and slammed him to the ground.
Night had fallen, and yet bursts and beams of light illuminated the fight in erratic flashes. Eliana saw a pale woman with short black hair swing a black staff topped with a glowing blue orb. The orb drew shadows from the ground, and soon a pack of dark wolves bounded away from her and into the battle, their jaws open wide. A man struck the ground with a glowing shield, cracking the earth open. Five soldiers stumbled clumsily into it, and Eliana saw one of their eyes as they fell—gray and cloudy, expressionless.
Her blood chilled. Adatrox.
“Look.” Remy, crouching beside her, pointed to her left, where the silhouette of an enormous mountain loomed in the distance. A thousand tiny lights spilled across its foothills. Fires marked an enormous stone wall. It was a city built on the hills that rose up toward the mountain, and at its apex stood a faint gray castle with towers reaching for the sky.
“Baingarde,” Remy whispered. In his voice, she heard the same reverent awe that had kept him reading about the Old World night after night, year after year.
Something exploded nearby. Fire bloomed and grew. A soldier flew—flew—away from the inferno, carried swiftly away on spears of white light tipped in shadow.
For a moment, Eliana could only stare. She had spent a dark lifetime in the palace of an angel, but never before had she seen one with wings.
Remy tugged on her arm, drawing her down. They flattened themselves behind the rock. Eliana’s castings trembled against her palms. Breathless, face pressed into the dirt, she tasted magic on her tongue. It choked the wind, sparked cold and metallic in her mouth, as if she’d kissed a bolt