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Chapters (64)
  1. Front Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  6. Pronunciation Guide
  7. Prologue
  8. Part One
  9. One
  10. Two
  11. Three
  12. Four
  13. Five
  14. Six
  15. Seven
  16. Eight
  17. Nine
  18. Ten
  19. Eleven
  20. Twelve
  21. Thirteen
  22. Part Two
  23. Fourteen
  24. Fifteen
  25. Sixteen
  26. Seventeen
  27. Eighteen
  28. Nineteen
  29. Twenty
  30. Twenty-One
  31. Twenty-Two
  32. Twenty-Three
  33. Part Three
  34. Twenty-Four
  35. Twenty-Five
  36. Twenty-Six
  37. Twenty-Seven
  38. Twenty-Eight
  39. Twenty-Nine
  40. Thirty
  41. Thirty-One
  42. Thirty-Two
  43. Thirty-Three
  44. Thirty-Four
  45. Thirty-Five
  46. Part Four
  47. Thirty-Six
  48. Thirty-Seven
  49. Thirty-Eight
  50. Thirty-Nine
  51. Forty
  52. Forty-One
  53. Forty-Two
  54. Forty-Three
  55. Forty-Four
  56. Forty-Five
  57. Forty-Six
  58. Forty-Seven
  59. Epilogue
  60. Excerpt from The Sun and Its Shade
  61. The Night and Its Moon Playlist
  62. Acknowledgments
  63. About the Author
  64. Back Cover

Over the months, Amaris became a sponge. She absorbed knowledge, tactics, and skills every day. She would learn any ability, craft, trade, or technique from anyone at the reev who’d give her the time of day. Even Grem begrudgingly let her into his forge a time or two to show her how he hammered their weapons and made their blades from molten steel. She could have sworn she caught him smiling as he pounded away at the red-hot, unformed blade, but he stopped himself as soon as she saw the curvature of his lips. He chased her from his workrooms, remembering some old belief that blacksmithing—like Uaimh Reev—was not for women.

For months she trailed behind in their run, too proud to let herself stop no matter how pathetic her stride or how feeble her limping steps. Then one day, she kept pace with Grem. The older reever had been the slowest of the group, and it was to his extreme displeasure that she began to stay within arm’s reach of him. The day after she surpassed him, he found a reason to excuse himself to an errand in the foothills and wouldn’t return to the reev for a very long time.

* * *

By her third year at Uaimh Reev, her muscles had hardened beneath her pants and under her tunic, turning her soft arms and legs into taut, sinewy appendages able to throw the iron balls on the field and hoist the disks above her head. As the months had stretched into seasons, she’d felt the sword become such a familiar part of her that she ceased to notice its weight, switching between left and right hands until neither could be encumbered by the blade. The steel was now an extension of her body.

The softness of her cheeks ebbed into the features of a woman. Any fat from her childhood was gone after her first winter in the fortress. She had acquired a few new scars from the ring. Perhaps the largest scar in her collection, apart from her self-inflicted dagger wounds, was a nasty scrape of skin from a time she had sprinted past Malik and Ash on the mountain in an attempt to show off and twisted her ankle on a loose rock, tumbling an arena’s length down a drop-off before her bloodied arm and leg and caused enough friction to stop her fall. Odrin had watched over her as she washed and bandaged the wounds to ensure she wouldn’t catch infection, eyeing the tonics she chose for her health, but he hadn’t needed to intervene or correct her.

By the time Amaris was eighteen, she was ready to take the oath as a full-fledged reever.

Nineteen

“Is it always at sunset?” she whispered.

Odrin smiled, though he kept his eyes forward.