“Fair enough,” I concede, anxiety stinging through me over the size of the search for me. “Where are you taking me?” I ask as we zoom toward the glittering blue-and-purple mountain city.

Bleddyn shoots me a grin over her shoulder, her emerald eyes gleaming. “To someone who’s used to dangerous company.”

Part Three

PART THREE

Xishlon Land

CHAPTER ONE

SMARAGDALFAR MAGIC

Mora’lee Starr’lyrion

Voloi, capital city of Noilaan
Eastern Realm

Three days ago, five days prior to Xishlon

Her ears have been cropped.

Mora’lee’s gaze passes over the Urisk girl’s scarred ears, outrage tightening her chest as fierce sympathy rises for the lavender-hued teen staring up at her through pale amethyst eyes. The bright, early-morning sun streams down on the girl’s ear-tips where the points used to be, her short iris-hued hair chopped into a mass of irregular, floppy spikes.

They brutalized her hair too, Mora realizes, news of this type of thing going on in the Western Realm bad enough to hear about, but to actually see it...

In all her twenty-six years, Mora doesn’t think she’s ever witnessed something so heartbreaking.

She glances at Bleddyn Arterra, her newfound friend and Eastern Realm Resistance ally, struggling not to appear shocked as the breeze flowing up from the Vo River buffets their garments, puffed clouds scudding across a vivid blue sky, the bright sunlight making Mora’s emerald-patterned Smaragdalfar skin sparkle. Merchant and pedestrian traffic has already picked up on Voloi’s Sixth Tier thoroughfare, the main road only a few handspans away, just past her outdoor restaurant’s filigreed metal railing.

Bleddyn sees that I’ve noticed the girl’s mutilated ears, Mora’lee grimly considers as she notes Bleddyn’s grave look.

“Mora,” Bleddyn says in a congenial tone, her Vu Trin uniform bleached a lightened black by the bright sun, “this is Olilly. Olilly, meet Mora.”

Mora smiles warmly and takes the girl’s hand, used to offering friendship and shelter to refugees and Resistance workers on her Smaragdalfar-rune-powered and varg-rune-warded air ship. Olilly’s handshake is uncertain, her gaze fluttering down to her feet repeatedly.

Mora’s heart twists and she makes a point of not glancing again at Olilly’s ears, even as a spitting anger ignites against the Mages.

Monsters. You monsters. She can’t be more than fourteen years of age.