Page 29 of All the Wandering Light

“The Ninth Army,” he said. “Your father wrote that the emperor sent them to the southern villages. He also wrote that he was requesting an army to protect Azmiri.”

My heart slowed. “And Jangsa—”

“The emperor will send soldiers,” Tem said. “That smoke will be visible for miles. Jangsa might not be part of the Empire, but the emperor will want to know if there’s been an attack on his border.”

“And if there are other attacks,” I said, “on other villages—”

“The emperor will send soldiers there too.” Tem’s voice was grim.

“Leaving the Three Cities weakened.” My throat was dry. “Vulnerable.”

“Why fight the entire Empire,” Tem said, “when you can just cut off its head?”

I slid slowly to the ground. The snow was soft, almost comforting. I gazed at the pillar of black smoke and tried not to think of Azmiri. The witches had burned it too, hundreds of years ago—it had almost been destroyed. Would they do so again? I saw black smoke wreathing the village, blanketing the whitewashed homes and narrow lanes, devouring the stand of pines where Tem and I had played as children—

Lusha was coming toward us. Her face was pale, her mouth set in a hard line, but her eyes were blazing. I had seen that expression before, countless times—at the age of six, when she had accosted one of the village boys who had been teasing me; on Raksha, when she had confronted River. I knew, with a sinking heart, that it would be impossible to sway Lusha now. If she had made up her mind to go straight to Azmiri, that was what she was going to do.

“Pack everything up,” she said as she strode past. “I want to be halfway to the Ashes by sundown.”

Nine

Chirri

THE DAWN REACHED her hut before any other, nosing its way through the shutters. Chirri was already awake, hunched over a pile of talismans that would have seemed a hopeless jumble to a casual observer. Bronze, bone, wood—each had its own purpose, but could be combined to weave spells as complex and multitoned as a symphony. She wasn’t casting a new spell but strengthening one that already existed, laid down decades ago by the last village shaman, her aunt.

It wasn’t enough. She groaned at the realization that she would have to stir from her cross-legged position on the floor—the process of getting up and down was something she tried to keep to a minimum these days. Small Nuisance, the one-month-old dragon sleeping at the foot of her bed, stirred and yawned. He was the last of the baby dragons who had been unwanted guests in Chirri’s hut. She had sold the others, mostly to traveling merchants who often remarked on the quality of the dragons bred in the mountain villages. For some reason, she had turned down their offers for Small Nuisance, despite the fact that he was the most troublesome of the brood, sharpening his claws on her furniture and taking an extraordinary amount of time to understand the practicality of doing his business outside.

By the time Chirri finally lifted herself to her feet, she was light-headed and out of breath. The downside of a long life, she had often thought, was that you had to spend as much time in an old body as you did a young one.

Undaunted, she took up her staff and stepped outside. The clouds below her hut were woolly and gray with rain, partly obscuring the village. A whitewashed home here, a lane strung with laundry there—the rest was tucked under the cloud. Mount Imja to the north, separated from Azmiri by a thinly forested valley, was clear, its white peak glittering in the early light. To the north and south stretched the Aryas, towering and blanketed with snow. The sky was a vast canvas, richly blue.

Though Chirri never had any shortage of responsibilities, she always paused to look at that view.

A wisp of cloud hovered not fifty feet below her hut. Chirri slowly descended toward it, leaning on her staff, beating her way along the precarious trail worn by her own boots. She had fallen only once, during her overly excitable youth, in a hurry over something she couldn’t remember now. Chirri never made the same mistake twice.

Small Nuisance followed her down the slope. He didn’t try to settle on her shoulder, knowing he would receive a rap on the snout for the impertinence. The light in his belly was just beginning to darken—it would be a rich emerald when he was fully grown. Chirri, who still told herself she intended to sell the beast eventually, tried to ignore the fact that his presence made it easier to navigate the shadowed path.

Upon reaching the finger of cloud, which was tangled in clover and grasses, she removed a vial from her chuba. Gently, she blew part of the cloud into the vial, then stoppered it. The cloud appeared to dissolve once placed in the vial, but that wouldn’t affect the magic.

Some magics were older than talismans, Chirri knew. Talismans were useful, though most these days were imbued with a dark magic, a stolen magic, and they were now beginning to falter. But shamans had existed before there were talismans, and while their magic then had been of a quieter variety, they could not truly be called weak. Unlike most shamans, Chirri had been taught those magics.

She climbed back to her hut and started a fire in the pit outside her door. Once it was hot enough, she tossed the vial into the flames. The glass began to char, and then to melt, glowing as it warped and stretched. Chirri spoke the incantation, and the trapped cloud rose out of the flame, invisible but for a flicker of silver here and there, like metal catching the light. The wind rose, scattering the cloud over the village, where it broke apart, vanishing.

The wards protecting the village seemed to shiver. Chirri closed her eyes and felt them knitting together, their threads tightening, sealing any gaps worn by weather or time.

Chirri settled herself on a grassy ledge with a sigh of relief. Small Nuisance perched beside her, and she fed him scraps of balep that, for some reason, she had stored in the pocket of her chuba after last night’s dinner. He devoured them, snorting in an exuberant way that might have been intimidating had he been larger than a kitten.

Chirri waited.

An hour passed. The sun crept higher, and the clouds dissolved. Finally, they came.

It was difficult to distinguish them at first—they could have been ordinary shadows, perhaps cast by tree branches tossed by the wind. But these shadows were not attached to a tree or anything else, and the sunlight did not disperse them. They crept up the mountainside, gliding like dark snakes, moving with no particular hurry, but with a clear purpose. Chirri could see it all from her high perch.

Would the wards hold?

The shadow-figures paused at the edge of the village and seemed to recoil. Chirri thought she caught the edge of a cry, twisted and barely human. The shadows melted together, and then they surged, throwing themselves at the wards.

The wards held.