Maralah took the worn hilt of her weapon and pulled it from the sheath at her back. The room cooled. A soft violet light emanated from the length of the willowthorn branch. In response to her touch, the branch awakened; the hilt elongated and snapped around her wrist twice, binding her fate to the weapon’s. She watched blood weep from the branch, gather at its end, and fall to the stones. The weapon sang to her, the voices of hungry ghosts, all Saiduan, all collected in the living weapon when Sina was at its height. The invaders did not have ghosts, because their souls were not of this world. A pity, that. Her weapon was always so hungry.

Maralah swept the sword over her head and slammed it into the living flesh of the hold. Violet light burst across her vision. The weapon keened. The hold wailed as a massive wound appeared on its face. Thick, viscous green fluid gushed from the hold, pouring across her forearms, her boots. Her weapon licked greedily at the soul of the hold.

She prayed to Sina it would be enough to survive the night.

Chapter 2

2

High summer, the festival season, when the Temple of Oma played host to dozens of traders and craftspeople, all of them eating and sweating and drinking in the temple’s great banquet hall. During her decade in Oma’s temple, Lilia had learned how to navigate through its mass of humanity like a skilled sea captain.

She spent her time in the temple scullery cleaning sinks with morvern’s drake and bottling honey from the giant spotted beehives in the back garden. In the afternoons, she hobbled up the long tongue of the grand stairway, favoring her mangled right foot – which had never healed properly – and changed the bed linens for the temple’s novice Oras – the parajistas, tirajistas, and sinajistas who would claim the title of Ora on passing their initiation. The other temples – those dedicated to Para, Sina, and Tira – only trained one type of jista, but Oma’s temple claimed the very best of them all, bringing them together into one very powerful – and, in Lilia’s opinion, very arrogant – bunch.

As Lilia came downstairs, dragging a bag of dirty linen too massive to take through the scullery stair, she saw her friend Roh waiting for her next to the heavy carved talon of the banister.

She hesitated on the stair. He saw her and grinned. His grin could fill a room. It pierced her heart every time she saw it, because that grin made her want to trail after him like some love-struck fool, and she had seen enough novices and drudges acting just that way around him to realize how silly it was.

A plump novice named Saronia passed behind him. Seeing him grinning at Lilia, she said, “You should be pickier with your affections, Roh. You can afford to be.”