Every breath froze her lungs, every thought was informed by the cold. This high up, Lenora picked up layers of sparkling frost on her face and clothing as the hawk drifted through hazy clouds. Her bald head glittered with ice. Her furs and leathers were stiff and cracked from the cold, but her blood burned inside, filled with rage and anticipation of the weeks to come. Soon she would feel the warmth of the Noreelan sun on her skin again. And then, when the fighting was done and magic was back in the hands of the Mages, Lenora would be free to seek her own very personal revenge.

There was movement far below, a hundred specks passing across the snowfields and then drifting across the harbor, rising higher and coming up to meet her. Her Krote warriors on their hawks. They all knew their mission, and she sensed their eagerness, heard it in the shouts and laughter that accompanied their approach. Weapons glinted in the ice-cold sunlight, and Lenora could not recall the last time she had seen so many of her warriors smiling.

They circled their mighty hawks above the harbor for several minutes, shouting to one another, waving good-bye to the snow and ice, full of bravado yet doubtless harboring their own private thoughts: relief and trepidation; excitement and fear. Each Krote carried arrows and stars, shield and slingshot, pouches and bottles of various poisons. Singly they were fearsome; together, in a group so large, they looked like the end of the world.

“Let’s go and find some sun!” Lenora shouted. She was the first to peel away from the formation and dip her hawk’s nose, heading out to sea. Warships passed by below her, then a couple of small coastal patrols, and then within minutes the sea’s surface was disturbed only by giant icebergs, and the occasional splash of something huge rising and submerging again.

Lenora had dreamed of this forever. As they flew south toward Noreela for the first time in three hundred years, she remembered the day she left . . .

SOMEHOW IT HAD all gone wrong. The Mages—the exiled Shantasi Mystic S’Hivez and his lover, Angel—had lived so many dreams, won so many rapid victories, drawn so much power to their sides in the magic they had twisted to their ways . . . and now they and the remnants of their army fought their final defense on the northernmost beaches of Noreela. Disbelief clouded Lenora’s vision. It was a hazy red, the color of life, as if blood were teasing her eyes before leaking away forever. She had no doubt that she was going to die. Whatever strange powers the Mages once had, the ferocity of the Noreelan people’s army had shattered her confidence, leaving it strewn across the Noreelan landscape and trodden down into battle-bloodied soil. They had been fighting for weeks, and the only end in sight was death.