“This,” Reed says finally. “What we’re doing, what the Prime is planning. This is necessary. Our father knew it, but he was too scared to see it through. So we’ll see it through ourselves.”

I shrug out of my jacket and pass it to him. “I want that back,” I say before severing a braid of my hair and handing it over as well. “The hair, I’m not as attached to.”

He chuckles. “If this goes well, you can have them both back, plus anything in Bedrock. If you want the General’s star chain, I’ll give it to you.”

“I want him dead. That’s all.”

He nods silently, then offers me his palm. I take it, and we shake.

“Godspeed, sister,” he says.

It’s nice to be called that again, even if it reminds me of the one I lost.

Chapter Forty

Three days after Reed heads for Bedrock, with Ember soaring overhead, the largest aurora I have ever seen paints the northern sky at dusk. What begins as shifting ribbons of green and blue stretching for the stars becomes a rippling wall of color. Like a curtain, hanging from the sky to the horizon, red in places, even yellow or purple. It shimmers, flexes, inverts.

Powder Town’s residents gather in the foothills, their eyes turned to the sky, speechless. It is eerily quiet, but there is a tension in the air, the understanding that something is about to change.

There’s a tug at my sleeve, and when I look down, a girl stands beside me. “What is it?” she asks, wide-eyed. It takes me a moment to place her—Rain, the child who didn’t know what an execution was.

“The start of a very big storm,” I tell her.

Her eyes gleam with excitement. “I always knew you were gods touched,” Rain whispers.

A woman steps up behind her—the girl’s mother. “What sort of storm?” she asks. Others are turning toward me now, drawn by these questions. “What have you seen?”

“A silent storm that will rage for many moons. Nine or ten.”

A murmur spreads through the crowd.

“Will it bring dust?” someone calls out from the shadows.

“It might.”

“How will our crops survive?” a panicked voice asks.

“And what about our trade with Bedrock—will it be safe to travel?”

“The wastes haven’t seen a storm like this in over a hundred years,” I say. “There’s no telling what, exactly, it will bring. But it will pass, and when it is over”—my gaze flicks from the northern ribbons of light, east, toward Bedrock—“the General’s rule will end too.”

Now the crowd chatters wildly.

“Have you foreseen this, Bringer of Life?”

“How will we beat him?”

“Where is the Verdant? Shouldn’t we go there now, before the worst weather?”

“Tell us, Green Goddess.”

“Should we pray?”

“What do we do?”

“Tell us!”