Lark flushes. “Some of us do, just so we don’t have to cast it midbattle. I heard that you’d only started with the sword a bit ago….”

Something in his voice gives me pause. No one knows I can’t call aether armor except the other Legendborn and Sel and Alice. “Um…”

Lark’s voice is suspiciously mild and neutral. “Ye haven’t exactly had time to train. These are just temporary, until ye get the hang of casting and forging aether on yer own. Thought it might be a nice sort of… er, Rite gift.” He knows, somehow. But he’s not rubbing it in my face.

Lark might be decent after all. Doesn’t mean I want him bonded to me for life.

I stroke my fingers across the leather, smooth without a single mark or dent. I wonder if they’ll be strong enough to protect my arms the next time I call aether. If a Merlin made them, maybe they are. “I didn’t know the Rite was something to celebrate with gifts.”

“The old ways get forgotten, I guess. Anyway, if ye don’t like ’em—”

“I do!” I clutch them to my chest. “I like them.”

He chuckles. “I’ll tell ma da.”

I slip the gauntlets on one at a time and feel the waiting quality of the leather. Like they belong to me. I pull the gauntlet straps tight, and that feeling is confirmed. They’re ready to be mine, and no one else’s.

We ride a few minutes more into the darkness, turning farther away from residential lights onto a dim country road. Some classic rock song is on the radio, too quiet for me to identify it. Leaves kick up as we pass, swirling in the chill air outside. I use the time to mentally rehearse the Rite and my speeches.

Abruptly, Lark reaches toward the knob on the dash to turn the radio even lower, and the rhythmic electric guitar is replaced… by an otherworldly, low-pitched yowl.

“What the—”

A deep thwunk as the car hits something. Lark curses.

Like an animal shrugging, the front wheels of the vehicle lift with a grinding metal sound.

I scream, bracing as everything in the center cupholders falls down to the back seats. Cold coffee splatters across my face, a plastic cup hits my chest. I’m jabbed in the shoulder by a stray pen. Spare change rains down from overhead; my phone is lost behind me. I end up pressed against the seat looking at the sky through the front windshield.

“Fuck!” Above me, Lark’s moving faster than I can see—Merlin-fast. Unbuckling himself, turning to me from the front seat. Pulling on my seatbelt, ripping it open. His hand grabs for my waist.

A crack streaks across the thick, bulletproof front windshield above us. It shatters—a shower of glass—and Lark is yanked skyward, away from me.

Something has him by the legs.