But even if they somehow won through, the havoc inflicted by the war, the horrible price in pain and grief and loss paid by the people of Alera would leave them in no condition to do battle with the chaos of the great fury’s dissolution. A people already steeped in violence and war would still be drunk on rage and blood, blind to any other path.

When they ran short of foes, they practiced their skills upon one another. Of course they had. It was all they knew.

How to stop it? Provide his people with another enemy, to focus their wrath outside of themselves? Tavi glanced toward the Canim camp and shivered. He thought of Doroga and Hashat—and Kitai. His stomach turned in slow, revolting knots.

It couldn’t be allowed to happen. Such a struggle would not be quick. The blood-thirst of a generation of Alerans at war would be only temporarily slaked, and in the end it would change nothing. They would turn upon themselves.

Gaius Octavian, the young First Lord of Alera, sat alone and followed the possible paths in his mind. He clenched his fists, hoping in vain for an answer to come, for certainty to suddenly flow through him.

But it didn’t.

With a word and a savage slash of his hand, he darkened the tent’s furylamps.

No one should see the First Lord weep.

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 12

Amara and Lady Veradis descended onto the forward command center of the Legions surrounding Riva, where the banners of multiple High Lords declared the presence of the most potent powers of the Realm. A nervous young Placidan Lord in charge of aerial security nearly roasted them almost before they had a chance to give him the appropriate password. Amara had been forced to redirect the full force of her windstream into the young man’s face, all but scattering him and the squad of Knights Aeris accompanying him from the sky. It was a flier’s traditional means of communicating extreme displeasure at the stupidity of a fellow flier, providing a humiliating and discomforting but generally harmless rebuke.

“You’re really quite amazing with windcrafting, Countess,” Veradis said. The young healer had always seemed to be a woman of great self-possession to Amara, but there was something nervous and quick to the rhythm of her speech tonight. “Honestly. I don’t think even my father controls his power that precisely.”

“I’m a flier. Your father has several other furycrafts to practice and a city to administrate.”

Veradis made no reply, and Amara cursed her thoughtless words. High Lord Cereus certainly had no city anymore. Ceres was a memory, its people a band of scattered and widely dispersed refugees—where they survived at all. “What I meant to say,” Amara said quietly, “is thank you, lady.”