Prologue

The Lady strode through the dark chamber, the glow that surrounded her lighting up the room—a light that wouldn’t be seen by any observers. She’d come, as she often did, to look upon the face carved into the limestone sarcophagus. Reaching out, she trailed her fingers down the figure’s cheek.

Moira. A simple child, but The Lady still fondly remembered the years she’d spent watching that child grow up. Moira had been the first crack in the plan. A first-generation godborn—or she should have been. Instead, she’d been born fully human. Still, that meant a one in four chance that her own child would be godborn. The Lady had played longer odds than that over the years, and she had ways to improve the odds, so she’d continued her work.

Then, Fox had meddled, and Moira never met the Prince, never bore his child. The strands of fate that The Lady had been weaving for centuries split in two, and Moira’s only child was born human, ending The Lady’s last hope that something might be salvaged from the plan. It would take years for all the circumstances to align again, and it was unlikely that she had that much time left. Whatever Fox’s intentions had been, there were eight wardens now, and his tampering might well have caused the very events The Lady had been trying to prevent.

“Until next time, Daughter,” she said, with one last look at the carved face. She turned to leave, but to her surprise, someone stood behind her.

“Herasis,” the figure said.

“Don’t call me that, Demesis.”

“If you insist, Lady. I’m on your side, you know.”

“It’s not a matter of sides. You can use your false name if you like, but I will not.”

Demesis sighed and shook her head, then peered around the burial chamber. “Why do you come here and torture yourself?”

“I want to remember her. Someone should.”

“She had a family.”

“Not the one she was meant to have.”

“What’s done is done. We don’t know what’ll happen in the future. Pallisur may still fail for any number of reasons. For instance, did you know Arodisis has a pawn in play?”

“A pawn? Who? And since when does Arodi show any interest in anything that happens outside of her temples?”

“She wouldn’t tell me who it is; she just says she wants to keep an eye on things.”

“I don’t trust her.”

“She’s not that bad. She was just as fooled by Pallis as the rest of us. She hasn’t spoken to him in five thousand years.”

“We have to stop him.”

“I agree, but I’m glad your plan failed—it was dangerously close to what Pallisur is attempting. For all we know, it could have had the same effect.”

“The risk was small. Combining the four sources of magic isn’t what caused the Burning.”

“You don’t know that. Any risk of another Burning is too great, and now those threads you wove are still out there, unanchored.”

“That’s a problem for the future. For now, we need to deal with Pallisur.”

Pallisur was closer to getting what he wanted than at any point in the last five thousand years, but The Lady had come up with a new plan. Moira’s son was useless, wandering aimlessly around the countryside without any understanding of what was happening in the wider world, but he wasn’t her only pawn. There was another that still held some promise. An unlikable man, but one who was already scheming in ways that would work to The Lady’s advantage. She couldn’t interfere directly, but she was an expert at manipulating the odds. The danger was greatest when there were eight wardens. An obvious solution suggested itself.

Chapter 1 »