“I don’t know. I’ve offered her hospitality while an escort comes from the capital. And we’ll hunt down the [Necromancer].”

“But we can’t afford—”

Risel fell silent as her son shouted that something stank. Her elder daughter was crying; this ride hadn’t dealt with their poor spirits at all.

First the increased tax and now rogue [Necromancers]. He stopped next to Risel’s mount and leaned there for a while.

He was tired. But that was an endemic problem of Afiele, of Noelictus. The Kingdom of Shade.

1.06 P

Ser Dalius was gone.

Cara must have passed out for a few seconds after lying in the meadow. The young woman heard the voice in her head, jerked upright. She pushed herself up. Then Cara looked back down the broken slope to the tomb’s entrance.

She stood there, wishing she had anything of him to bury. She would have stopped another moment for him, to mourn and thank him. An hour, a day.

Later, she would. But right now, the young woman, the [Singer], desperately longed to be free. She looked over her shoulder at the world beyond. And she tasted air, fresh, clean.

With each step she moved faster, running out across the grass, opening her arms to the sky. She laughed and nearly cried with relief.

The sky! Fresh air! Beautiful—

The young woman halted in her tracks and stared about. The…beauty of nature?

Her first image of the outside world had been blue skies, a verdant forest. And that was partly true. But only by comparison with the black, unforgiving tomb.

“What’s…wrong with this place?”

Cara scuffed a foot at the dirty, ashy green grass. She glanced at the thin, withered trees with dark leaves, some bordering on black. The bark was equally as dark; in two places she spotted a pale inner wood, but bleached of the regular brown she expected.

Even the flowers were far more muted in color than they should be. Black and white predominated, or variations of the color. It looked like someone had swept a volcanic eruption over this place and only gotten half of it off. Minus the lava, obviously.

Cara blinked around as her dark-accustomed eyes adjusted. It was certainly brighter, but this was not the bunnies and flowers she’d been dreaming of. She glanced over her shoulder, at the place where the ground had opened up, revealing the buried tomb. Then she glanced up and her eyes widened.

“The sky. God. What happened to the sky?”

The young woman realized that ‘blue skies’ would only be true for an artist’s interpretation. It was some grey palette, like the beginning of a storm front without the clouds and only a hint of ochre blue mixed in.