My sire was already standing on the gravel drive, as unruffled as you please. In his severe black jacket and trousers, and with his coldly handsome face, he looked like a man you never ever wanted to cross swords with because he would rather wait until you turned around and then stab you in back so he wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of seeing the light drain out of your eyes.

“Intriguing,” he said. “The cold mages pull heat and energy from the spirit world and lock it up in this world, thus stealing it from us, but this red-haired man is dispersing it through their bodies back into my realm. I would never have seen any of this if you had not escorted me through. I shall have to think about what this means.”

“Father! He’s going to kill all those people! Save them. Save Vai! I beg you.”

“You are a slave to the chains that bind you to others. That makes you weak.” His smile cut.

I licked a spot of blood off my lip. “No, it makes me strong.”

The history of the world begins in ice, so the bards and djeliw claim, and it got so cold so fast I was pretty sure the world was going to end right under my feet. A gossamer undulation like wings of frost flared at his back, and the veins of his closed third eye smoked like night on his brow.

He raised a vast pressure of cold that began to choke down the fire. Drake’s young fire mages collapsed first, crusted all over in a skin of ice. The soldiers cowered in fear, guns dead.

My ears throbbed. My eyes were sucked dry of moisture. My lips stung.

Drake saw us, for the shadows had been ripped right off me. I thought it must surely end quickly. What mortal could stand against the Master of the Wild Hunt?

But Drake blazed. The flood pouring through Andevai and the eru surged as an ocean tide around the fire mage. Like a volcano, Drake had become the flowing energy that consumes all in its path.

Soot spun in black tornadoes into the sky. Lightning sparked and flashed. The air above the palace grew so hot that a green aura of light appeared and twisted in the sky.

Ice and fire warred in perfect balance, neither able to retreat or to advance.

I ran forward to grab my sword. Drake did not notice. He dared not take his eye off the Master of the Wild Hunt, because no matter how powerful he and Andevai together were, fire mage and catch-fire, to falter even for an eyeblink would bring the ice crushing down.