“What would the inferni need protection from?” Saengo’s gaze flicks to mine, and I know she’s recalling the time I nearly crossed paths with one.

Kendara had sent me into a mineshaft in search of some crystal buried deep in the Coral Mountains. The inferni had been a creature of shadows and embers, its edges distorted and shimmery with smokeless heat. The mere sight of it had been terrifying. Like most Evewynians, I hadn’t believed such creatures still existed.

“Firewenders,” he says. “There’s an old Nuvali custom for firewenders to hunt the inferni to prove their mastery over their element.”

I make a face at this and hope the custom is long dead.

“Now that we’ve finished with the pleasantries, what’s the true purpose of this gathering?” he asks me as I shovel rice into my mouth. His lip curls, and I resist the urge to chew with my mouth open just to irritate him.

Saengo’s cheeks go pink, but I only swallow my food and say, “I have questions I was hoping you’d be able to answer.”

He looks amused. “Well then, I’ll try not to disappoint. What sort of questions?”

“Did you know that the Calling of Light has four crafts?”

“Yes,” he says, like it should be obvious. “Please tell me you didn’t come here just to ask that.”

I ignore the remark. “But how did you know? The craft of soulrender was torn from the compendium I was reading last night.”

“The Soulless was a soulrender,” he says in that condescending tone. “There obviously had to be a fourth craft, even if knowledge of it is no longer taught to the Nuvali. Nor to anyone in Thiy.”

“Why is that?” Saengo leans over her plate in interest.

“As game hunters, soulrenders used their craft primarily on beasts, but—”

“But when a shaman reaches a certain level of power,” I say, remembering what Ronin had told me, “the limitations of shamanic crafts begin to bend.”

Theyen nods. “Exactly. The Soulless continued to push until those limitations broke, until he could rip the souls not just from beasts but from other people.”

Even if the Soulless hadn’t gone mad with power, shamans with the ability to strip away souls—even if only those of animals—would be a strange and terrifying power indeed.

“Souls are the source of all our magic. To steal them was desecration. So soulrenders were hunted into extinction.”

I rub the spidersilk of my robes between two fingers, remembering the ragged edges of the torn pages. The Soulless couldn’t be erased from Thiy’s history—his mark still scars the land—but his power had been so dark and so hated that those who came after tore what knowledge they could from that book. And likely from other books as well.

“That’s terrible,” Saengo says.