Chapters (64)
- Front Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Pronunciation Guide
- Prologue
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Part Two
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Part Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Part Four
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Epilogue
- Excerpt from The Sun and Its Shade
- The Night and Its Moon Playlist
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Back Cover
Having checked the perimeter, Amaris lay down for another uneventful evening. It would be another night with only the trees, the wind, and her thoughts.
Until it wasn’t.
Twenty-Five
Amaris opened her eyes.
An eeriness soaked into her as she tried to understand what about the still, windless night felt so very wrong. The discomfort prodded her with unseen fingers, urging her to examine her surroundings. The night had cooled, and with it hung the fresh scents of the forest and its living vegetation. The slumbering shapes of Malik and Ash were scarcely discernible by the light of the moon. The horses were as still as statues. Had they heard something?
She strained her ears but couldn’t discern any sounds. There was no nocturnal hooting of owls, no evidence of rodents foraging through the leaves, or even the flitting of insects. She didn’t hear the trees, though she could see a slight breeze rub their leaves together. She’d been wrong. This was not a windless night. Why couldn’t she hear the wind? Everything was far too quiet. Her heart quickened against the confusing realization, and she wondered if she’d fallen sick and lost the gift for hearing.
She brought her fingers to her ears, pressing her thumb and middle finger together to hear the gentle, papery sound of skin on skin. It was such a quiet gesture, one no one else would hear, but it was enough to let her know she had not gone deaf while she slept. Something else was happening. She hadn’t been awoken by sound but by its sudden absence.
She reached for her weapons on instinct.
Amaris’s dagger had never left the strap on her leg, not even in sleep. Her sword and bow were lying neatly beside her, both within arm’s reach. Unwilling to break the pressing silence, she slowly rose to a crouch, fingers wrapping around the limb of her bow. She took one muted step away from the blanket on which she’d slept, then another. She followed an unknown sense as it angled her toward the trees, one silent motion at a time.
Like all reevers, she knew how to be stealthy. She’d been trained in the art of moving between breaths and keeping to the shadows. Their training exercises in ambush had ranged from fun games of hide-and-seek to the night-darkened slinking around the keep that had resulted in broken bones and the occasional light stabbing. Their covert nature of handling disruptions within the continent’s kingdoms was part of what had led less-educated villagers into thinking of them as clandestine assassins rather than the silent peacekeepers of the realms they cunningly served. While nearly any reever would have known how to conceal the sound of their feet in the brush, Amaris’s small size and lightweight agility had graced her with particularly feline movements.