Teaser

  The horn falls.

  Lightning answers.

  A golden prince burns brighter than he ever has—and meets the shadow that refuses to move.

  Tonight, Eryndor learns what breaks first:

  Pride, power… or a man.

  ...

  Selara and Varon were two thin coins, paled and low, their rims skimming the teeth of the Murath peaks. The wind that came off those red-boned mountains was colder than before, a knife slipped under the city’s collar. Torches hissed. Banners trembled. The Pinnacle Arena—filled past safety and sense—leaned as one body toward the two figures waiting in the sand.

  Varrick lifted the Rod of Tyran and rolled his shoulders like a dancer loosening before the last song.

  The Masked Man stood.

  The horn fell.

  Varrick moved first because men like him always did. A slash of the rod and a white scar of lightning ripped the air, spearing for the mask. The strike should have cracked stone and spine alike. Instead, the shadow tilted its head—barely—and the bolt went wide, smashing the third-tier railing. Men fell. The crowd behind caught them and passed them back like children at a festival.

  “Oho,” Varrick laughed, delighted at the scream he’d drawn from the bowl. He spun the rod; sparks crawled its length like insects searching for meat. “Don’t blink, old ghost.”

  He came on in a flurry—rod, heel, knee, a knee again, rod—fast enough that his cape snapped, like a standard in a gale. The arena lit in hot flashes, the smell of cooked air crawling over tongues. He was a golden storm made into a man, and the crowd remembered why it loved him. Varrick was cruel, yes; Varrick was indulgent. But Varrick was also spectacular, and the city was starving.

  The Masked Man moved without hurry. He stepped sideways as though the world made room for him. He seemed to step into places the rod hadn’t yet struck, the way a man steps between raindrops as a joke and keeps doing it long after the rain should have made him a liar. Not a dodge. Not speed. Refusal.

  The rod clipped the mask once. Metal rang. Somewhere in the stands, a drunk sobbed, “He can be hurt,” and tried to turn that sentence into a prayer. The Masked Man’s head rocked an inch. He steadied. He did not answer.

  Varrick grinned wider. “Good,” he said, breath quickening. “Feel something.”

  Another cascade of blows—feint high, crack low, lightning unfurling like a banner—and the Masked Man gave ground, one step, two. Varrick saw it, the way predators see a gate left unbarred. He pressed.

  “Now,” Lord Gorath said softly from the imperial box. “Not yet,” he told himself a breath later, and his fingers loosened on the railing. Measure twice. Cut once. Let the boy strut.

  Varrick feinted again, then stabbed the rod’s butt into the sand and whispered a word that had traveled down his family like a disease.

  ...

  The Rod of Tyran woke.

  A ring of blue fire sprang up around him, ribs of light building a cage, then flaring outward as spokes, then again, until the wheel rolled in every direction. The first three rows threw themselves flat. The light found the Masked Man and kept rolling—as if the shadow were a stone in a river that remembered how to go around rocks without ever touching them.

  Varrick’s smile ticked, almost a flinch. He hid it under laughter.

  “Old trick,” he said, though he had never seen any man do it. “Try mine.”

  He bit the wax-stopper from a small ivory box, swallowed the dark paste, and the taste of iron found his tongue.

  Bloodroot was a gift that had burned more warriors than it ever saved.

  The Bloodroot hit him like a forge door opening into his chest. His pupils shrank to knife-points; his skin flashed hot; lines of blue fire crawled his neck and dove his veins. The crowd howled. Priests paled. The court physician in the second tier closed his eyes for one careful breath, then opened them again because this was his penance.

  Varrick’s grin sharpened to something with teeth.

  “Now,” Lord Gorath said again, and this time his fingers stilled. Yes. Now. Burn.

  The prince of sparks became a blade.

  Where Varrick had been fast, he was now indecent. The rod blurred. Sand flecked the air in white needles. Each step sounded like thunder escaped from its owner. He struck—and struck again—and at last he caught the Masked Man on the shoulder, drove him a half-step sideways, scraped a rent in the dark leathers. The wolves by the emperor’s box barked once, the sound the body makes when it recognizes victory and tries it on for size.

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  “Bleed,” Varrick hissed, breath hot enough to scorch his own lips. “Bleed for me.”

  A low ripple moved through the stands. Hope. Even the hateful kind is still that.

  High above, Rynna’s hand stilled on the bowstring—not in fear, but in recognition.

  The Masked Man’s answer was to look at him.

  Not through the mask—at him. Varrick felt it, the way men feel the weather in their bones. A cold that made the Bloodroot’s fire taste suddenly like something spilled and sticky.

  “Who are you?” Varrick demanded, and in that instant, the question was honest.

  The Masked Man tilted his head. When he spoke, the voice seemed to come from behind the boards of the world.

  “Your last lesson.”

  The torches near the far gate went out together, as if slapped by an unseen hand. Not wind; absence. The dim spread like ink dropped in a basin. Names tore off banners and fell, letters coming apart before they reached the sand. The sound the crowd had been making—the laughter, the drumbeats, the prayers—peeled away until what was left was the naked shape of fear.

  “Hold!” the herald tried, but his mouth made no sound. He touched his throat and stared at his hand as if it had betrayed him.

  The Masked Man lifted one palm. Shadows bled from under his feet and went hunting. They found the bright wheel Varrick had cast and climbed it like spiders climb a child’s hoop. They flowed sideways to torchlight, misbehaving, unlearning. The wheel stuttered and became ribs again; the ribs broke and lay like old parasol bones in a street after rain.

  Varrick snarled. He surged forward, Bloodroot driving the engine of him until his hands shook from too much gift. The rod sang—an ugly, eager sound. He cracked it at the mask with the malice of a hammer meeting a skull.

  The Masked Man caught the rod.

  Caught it.

  Not with speed. With certainty, the way a man catches a dish he has already washed and knows where it belongs on the shelf.

  Varrick pulled. The rod did not move.

  Something minuscule panicked inside him and leapt into his eyes. He smothered it with rage—easy; he had practice. He kicked, perfect and unforgiving, at the inside of the knee. The Masked Man shifted his weight and was simply not there to be unmade.

  “Varrick!” someone cried from the west tier, a woman who had loved him once for three nights and five poems. “Varrick—”

  The Masked Man turned his hand.

  The Rod of Tyran—artifact of plunder, heirloom of a family that had learned to turn gods into ornaments—groaned. Lines of light crawled its length and went dull. A hairline crack traced from its mouth to the grip, as if a pen had signed its unmaking.

  No one in the bowl breathed until the crack stopped spreading.

  Varrick wrenched it back, disbelieving. The crack didn’t widen. It just kept existing, which was somehow worse.

  “You don’t get to break my things,” he said, very quietly, and drove his forehead into the mask.

  Metal met metal. The sound they made wasn’t a sound. Men flinched without knowing why. Varrick reeled, laughed through blood, spat red, and went in again.

  He refused to acknowledge the wobble in his knees.

  The Masked Man opened his hand as if dropping a coin in a beggar’s bowl.

  The arena floor sank.

  Not everywhere. Just under Varrick’s lead foot.

  Only an inch; then another. Sand became silt became something with memory. Varrick stumbled, caught himself purely because he was a remarkable animal, and lashed at the shadow’s neck.

  Black fingers closed on the rod a second time. A twist. A pull. The prince of sparks found himself kneeling, one hand in sand that felt wrong to touch, the other on a weapon that no longer behaved like his.

  His breath rasped. Bloodroot burned his throat raw. He could feel his heart starting to race too much, like a horse that wants to run itself to death because the field is finally open.

  “Varrick,” Lord Gorath said softly, almost kindly, though he knew his son could not hear him. “Measure. Then cut.”

  The Masked Man looked down at the kneeling man with the odd, polite attention of a physician asked to listen to a stranger’s chest at a party for a laugh. His shadow swelled. The wolves beside the imperial box pressed their bellies to the stone and tried to crawl into it.

  Varrick did the only thing left to men like him when truth arrives: he made himself larger than the room containing it. He ripped the rod free, screamed, and lit himself like a pillar. Fire wrapped him, blue and white, eating oxygen, eating sense. For a heartbeat—two—the arena saw a myth: a young god, bright and beautiful, blade and flame.

  He threw everything—he was.

  The Masked Man stepped forward into the light.

  The fire failed to land.

  It seemed to curdle in the air, the way milk curdles when it remembers what a cow is. It dripped. It sank. It left an after-smell of hot coins and shame.

  Varrick stared. The Bloodroot that had sung his muscles to joy a moment ago whispered a different song about cost.

  “Who are you?” he asked again, hoarse now, ragged.

  “Not your king,” said the dark.

  Then the Masked Man hit him.

  He did not wind up. He did not strike a clever angle. He put his knuckles on Varrick’s jaw and pushed a simple truth through bone.

  Varrick flew as if thrown by a siege engine. He hit sand and skipped. The rod left his hand, turned once in the air like a thing reconsidering its choices, and landed near the shadow like a dog that had learned a better master’s name.

  Silence climbed the tiers one stair at a time.

  ...

  In the imperial box, Gorath’s jaw moved once and then was still. A cold, bright thought occurred to him and stayed.

  Varrick tried to rise. He had never learned not to. He made it to his knees, to one foot, to knees again. Bloodroot’s gift flickered like a candle bullied by a mouth that has grown bored of blowing. He reached for the rod because men reach for what has made them feel like themselves.

  The Masked Man put his heel on it.

  Varrick looked up, sweat in his eyes, blood in his teeth, fury everywhere else.

  The Masked Man regarded him for a single breath, the way a hunter regards a stag it might spare for next winter. Then he turned his foot and broke the Rod of Tyran.

  The sound the rod made was not loud. It was exact. A small crack ran through every tier in the bowl.

  Noblemen flinched as if each had been slapped in private. Priests looked at their hands again to make sure they were still attached to men and not joined to something else.

  Varrick made a sound that hurt to hear. Fear had found him now and set its teeth in his voice.

  The Masked Man’s gloved hand lifted, a question hanging from its fingertips.

  “Yield,” a judge’s aide whispered reflexively, though he knew the rules and the hour, and anyway the word was not for Varrick.

  “Yield,” Rynna said under her breath, not because she wanted mercy but because she knew the shape of this ending and did not need more corpses made into lesson-sticks.

  Varrick’s mouth worked. Pride announced that it would keep speaking even if the rest of him had to die to prop it up.

  “No,” he said.

  The Masked Man’s hand fell.

  Varrick collapsed backward like a door unhinged. He lay there, breath moving in one shoulder and nowhere else. Alive. Perhaps. Beaten. Absolutely.

  No one cheered.

  The quiet climbed slowly, stair by stair, until the whole bowl held its breath.

  The arena had forgotten how.