Extraits

Habim had told Iseult once, War is senseless. She’d always thought he’d meant it figuratively. Now she knew he’d meant it exactly as he’d said. War was senseless, overwhelming her sight, her touch, her hearing.

Safi believed it, for in that space between one heartbeat and the next, while the beast roared over her with light and heat and sound, Safi’s entire being focused into a flash of thought. A memory, sharpened like the finest of blades. Everything you love, her uncle had said, gets taken away, Safiya … and slaughtered. But you will learn soon enough. In all too vivid detail, you will learn. Then he’d told her: If you wanted to, you could bend and shape the world. You have the training for it—I’ve seen to that. Unfortunately, you seem to lack the initiative. Well, Safi was calling horse shit on that. She didn’t lack initiative—she was initiative. Through and through. Initiate, complete. Safi was ready to bend the world. Ready to break it. And with that thought, a new life began.

“You should run now,” he warned the man. “Or I will kill you.” The man’s lips curled back.

“Seven of us and only one of you.” He grabbed Aeduan’s shirt.

“Exactly,” Aeduan said. “Which is why you should be running.”

“Because,” he said eventually, the slightest frown marring his brow, “it is always easier to blame gods or legends than it is to face our own mistakes."

“Stop seeing what you want to see, Merik Nihar, and start seeing what’s really here!”

Why do you hold a razor in one hand?

“So men remember that I am as sharp as any edge.”

And why do you hold broken glass in the other?

“So men remember that I am always watching.”

"So it will come down to timing, then." He rolled his writs. "Who betrays whom first."

Yet right before unconsciousness could take hold, a smell like damp smoke tickled into his nose. Like campfires doused by rain. Against Aeduan’s greatest wish and will, his mother’s face drifted across his memory—along with the last words she’d ever said to him.

Run, my child, run.

Safi was beyond anger. Beyond temper. This was her life now—forever running, forever changing hands from one enemy to the next until eventually the enemy severed her neck. It had been inevitable, really. Her magic had cursed her from the day she was born.

And, of course, craft a new name for the empress. “Iron,” she suggested as they resumed their trek west, following the sun toward Saldonica. “Steel? Oh, Iron-y.”

That made her chuckle. Not Vaness, though, who now glared. “Oh, I know!” Safi clapped her hands, delighted by her own genius. “I shall call you Un-empressed.”

“Please,” Vaness said coldly, “stop this immediately.” Safi absolutely did not.