Beneath the cloak, Dorian—Wanhope—had decided to go bare-chested. A god felt not the cold. He strode forward, decisive to cover for his earlier hesitation, great knots of vir rising in his skin. He gestured and a young man was brought forward. Dammit, Wanhope hadn’t wanted Jenine to see this. But it was too late, and there was no way she would go where she couldn’t see him after he’d almost doomed them all by standing around looking lost.

The young man’s name was Udrik Ursuul. All of the aethelings in Khaliras had been killed, but seventeen who’d already left for their Harrowings still lived. Udrik had impregnated the wrong Modaini oligarch’s daughter and had to flee, thus failing his uurdthan. He’d come home to beg mercy.

“Do you know, Udrik, if you raise thirteen legions of krul, you can command them yourself, but if you raise just one more, you have to master an arcanghul?”

“A what?” Udrik’s brows were still heavily kohled, menacing despite his fright.

“It’s a creature that these wild men didn’t dare try to master,” Wanhope said. “Tell me, brother, is it better for one man to die, or the whole people?”

Udrik’s eyes widened, and then widened again as Wanhope cut his throat with the obsidian knife. He dropped to his knees, throat spurting, then tumbled awkwardly on his back. Dorian felt—or imagined—the jubilation of a thousand Strangers. He blinked. Control, Dorian. Control it. He didn’t dare to watch what this next part looked like from that other reality.

Wanhope extended his arms and his wings toward the host before him. “Arcanghulus! Come! Be known to me!” The weaves spun out from him easily as if the vir itself was helping him, as if he’d done this a thousand times. Green lightning danced around him. A train of blue fire looped around him. Then the ground began to boil around Udrik’s corpse. Clumps of dirt burst and stuck to the body. Flares danced over Udrik and the corpse’s muscles tore, skin ripped.

The shamans saw their mistake. They hadn’t dared raise an arcanghulus, and Dorian had. An aurochs-horn bugle called the wild men to charge. But only half did.

A bolt of lightning cracked the earth before Wanhope, blinding him, and thunder ripped over him and over both armies, dropping men to the ground on both sides.