Title Page

Kameron Hurley

THE MIRROR EMPIRE

THE WORLDBREAKER SAGA

BOOK I

Dedication

For Renny, Heidi and Ryan:
the thief, the queen, the jester.

Map

Quotation

“We take our shadows with us.”

Dhai saying

Prologue

PROLOGUE

When Lilia was four years old, her mother filled a shallow dish with Lilia’s blood and fed it to the boars that patrolled the thorn fence.

“Nothing can cross the thorn fence,” Lilia’s mother said as she poured the blood onto the hungry, gnarled fence. The boars on the other side licked up the blood. Lilia liked the boars’ yellow eyes and wrinkled, mucus-crusted snouts. They reminded her of hungry babies. The thorn fence kept out the semi-sentient walking trees and conscription gangs who sometimes climbed up from the churning bay that clung to the base of the cliffs. The cliffs and the fence should have protected them forever. Her mother was a blood witch and never doubted her power. If you fed enough blood to a thing, her mother said, it would do all you asked.

Lilia traced the scars on her mother’s arms and her own, and she believed her.

Until the day something crossed the fence.

It was high autumn, and the leaves were falling. Lilia sat on a shallow, chalky outcrop overlooking the toxic mix of lavender poppies and bulrus ivy that cloaked the heath between her village and the thorn fence. A sea of colorful leaves swirled through the air. She had dressed herself in tattered white bone-tree leaves, pretending to be the Dhai hero Faith Ahya. She played alone, rubbing her face with dandelion heads and pretending she could fly. Her mother hated it when she played that game, because it meant climbing up onto the outcrop and launching herself off it, arms outspread, hoping with each leap that some great wind would take her into the sky.

The pale green light of the satellite Tira bathed the world in a burnished emerald glow. The broader sky was a brilliant amber wash. It was the only color Lilia knew the sky to be. Tira, the life-giver, had been ascendant as long as she could remember.

Lilia scrambled to the top of the outcrop once again and spread her arms. This time, surely, the wind would carry her. As she prepared to jump, she saw the trees on the other side of the heath tremble. She froze. The thorn fence stood between her and the trees. Whatever stirred there, she resolved to face it bravely.

A wave of fuzzy gray treegliders leapt from the forest canopy. They spread their webbed limbs and glided down into the field of poppies – dozens and dozens of them. The big-eyed creatures bounded toward her, hurling themselves onto the thorn fence. First one, then two, then six, eight, twelve. Impaled on the hungry thorns.

Lilia shrieked and slid down from the outcrop. The barrier’s tendrils wound about the treegliders’ trembling bodies. She scrambled forward, desperate to free them.