At almost the same time, Evander shouts, a sound that clutches at my heart. My eyes snap open. As we draw our swords, my mind struggles to make sense of the grisly sight just in front of the glowing blue gate, separated from us by a distance of a hundred feet or less.
Valoria clings to my arm as a misshapen figure fresh from the Deadlands struggles to push itself upright, clearly having fallen out of the gate. Swallowing hard, I force myself to focus on any details that might point to the identity of the unfortunate mess of blood and mangled flesh as it crawls toward us.
There’s a tattered necromancer’s black uniform hanging in strips over a shattered leg. A hand clutching at a spill of guts. A bald head crowned with crimson. A torn and gushing throat. And just about the only part of him still wholly intact, a single bright-blue eye.
A familiar eye. One that looked into mine mere nights ago, full of warmth and understanding—orphan to orphan—as I accepted my master necromancer’s pin.
“Master Nicanor!” As his name tears from Evander’s lips, the horror of this reality hits me in a dizzying rush.
“What happened?” I cry, my heart beating an erratic melody against my ribs. “Where’s Master Cymbre?” Nicanor shouldn’t have been in the Deadlands without his partner. It’s against the rules.
I want to run to the edge of the cliff, to close the distance between us and be with him in his final moments. But like Evander and Valoria, I’m frozen in my tracks by a mixture of fear and revulsion as the battered and bloody figure crawls toward us with painstaking slowness, an arm outstretched.
This can’t be happening. Not tonight. Not ever. Not to someone as good and wise as Master Nicanor. I wish I could tell myself I’m dreaming, but Valoria’s screams assure me I’m painfully awake.
Nicanor opens his mouth. I tense, ready to hear the name of his attacker, but the raw, guttural sound that emerges is less than human.
Not halfway between the gate and where we stand, his broken body cradled by the roots of an old cypress, he collapses and gasps out his last breath.
II
I close my eyes, drowning out the horrible scene before me, and allow my mind to carry me back to the beach below these very cliffs, where Evander and I stood with Master Nicanor only a week ago.
There was a bonfire that night, stretching toward the indigo sky, calling for dancing and the kind of celebration we Karthians love best: one that rages late into the night, long after the moon and stars have gone to bed.
And though there were only four of us gathered on the beach on that sweltering summer’s night, we ate and drank enough for a crowd.
“More elderflower wine, anyone?” Master Cymbre asked, holding up a blue glass bottle and glancing at each of us in turn. The firelight melted years off our teacher’s face, and I had a sudden urge to throw my arms around her waist and hold on the way I did when I was ten. The year she took me in and began my training.
“I think it’s time we present your students with their pins, Cymbre.” Master Nicanor, her partner, drew out her name with the lyrical accent of a southern province. Sim-bree. He rose, the flames glinting off his bald head, and held up a velvet pouch.
The sight of that little bag made my breath hitch in my throat.
Cymbre leapt to her feet, accidentally whipping Master Nicanor in the face with one of her long cinnamon braids. I disguised my snort of laughter as a cough while Nicanor rubbed his cheek. In my seven years of training at Cymbre’s side, watching her every move as she worked with her partner, I’d seen this happen more than once.
“Ready?” Master Cymbre’s steel-blue eyes sought mine.
Squaring my shoulders, I nodded. She knew as well as I did that I’d been ready from almost the moment I began shadowing her steps seven years ago.
Cymbre then turned to Evander. He grinned at her as he dug his toes into the sand, restless, more than ready for this next big adventure.
Clearing her throat, Cymbre intoned in a solemn voice far from her usual drawl, “Odessa of Grenwyr. Evander Crowther. Please rise.” Evander winked and grabbed my hands, and we supported each other in standing as Cymbre continued, “The pins you are about to receive will signify your status as master necromancers to all of Karthia.”
I raised my chin a fraction as my teacher—my former teacher now—stepped forward to fasten a gleaming gold and sapphire pin to my crisp new necromancer’s tunic.
“Wear it with honor,” Master Nicanor murmured, though there was no need for such formality.
There were no spectators that night, after all. The pin ceremony called for at least one member of a mage’s family to bear witness, but Evander’s mother—the only family either of us had—refused to come. Ignoring the ceremony was her way of protesting that Evander and I had chosen this path when she was dead set against it.
I wondered if she knew how much it wounded him, or if she was too oblivious to see through the mask of pleasantries he put on for her. After all, she couldn’t see how Evander felt about me.
At least we had Master Nicanor, ready in a pinch to be our fill-in family for the ceremony.
“Nervous about next week’s raising?” he asked me as Cymbre turned to fasten Evander’s pin. My teacher’s partner was so tall, he had to bend his knees to converse with most people. “King Wylding requested you specifically,” Nicanor said quietly. “Requested the Sparrow,” he corrected himself, smiling at my nickname.
“You know I don’t get nervous. It’s just . . .” I toyed with the twin eye-shaped sapphires on my new pin. None of the other mages I knew had ever bothered to tell me how heavy the little pin felt as it rested against their hearts. “Without this pin . . . without this title, I’m just . . .”
“Just an orphan?”
Startled by his understanding, I blinked up at Master Nicanor. His bright-blue eyes turned dark like the depths of the sea, unreadable for a moment.
“How did you know—?”
“Before I was Master Nicanor, I was just Nicanor of Dargany Province.” He smiled, and my heart skipped as understanding passed between us, orphan to orphan. I’d never thought to ask about his life before coming to Grenwyr City, and he’d never offered to share. “When I was a trainee, earning that title was everything. I thought that without it, I’d be just another poor boy condemned to a life in the Ashes. Insignificant.”
Unable to speak around a lump in my throat, I nodded and glanced at Evander, who tossed me a wink as Cymbre admired his new pin in the firelight. Without his title, he would still be nobility. Still be someone’s son. Still be a brother. A mapmaker. An adventurer. Without my title, I’d be just a poor girl lucky enough to have been raised by the Sisters of Death. I’d be nothing more than a charity case.
I clutched my new pin, the cold metal digging into my sweaty palm.
This is a job to Evander, and one he loves, but to me, it’s everything.