The mountain road vanished at the cliff’s edge.

Or that’s what it looked like from Jhared’s perspective atop Seravina’s broad back, halfway through the pass. His Forest Guard patrol trotted in neat formation behind him; Lieutenant Sevar and Commander Carn rode ahead, their horses’ glossy hindquarters rising and falling at the trot. All Jhared could see beyond the top of the steep rise was the seductive arch of the autumn sky, sweeping toward forever in shades of blue that were sweeter than song, filling him with infinite impossibilities.

It shamed him that the mere thought of going over the edge set his heart racing and a cold sweat running between his scarred shoulders. He had faced much worse than mountain heights in the past weeks: his body still bore the marks of the Legacy’s hatred and Alende’s fury. It shamed him that even now, after twelve years of the Teaching and more than half that many years under the training of General Nadel, a part of him still longed to fling himself off the cliff just to experience the precious seconds of ecstasy the sky would offer before the rocks at the bottom crushed him.

Seravina trod too close to the steep incline on his left. When he twitched the reins, she tossed her head before stepping deeper onto the path toward the rock face and the priestess riding beside him. He knew the road’s abrupt end must be an illusion, a veil between him and the truth: what he perceived depended on where he was standing, and just now the slope blinded him to the switchback on the other side of the ridge. He had discovered so many of his own veils recently that even though it distressed him, this new distortion didn’t really surprise him. Not so long ago he wouldn’t have believed he could lie to his foster father or hunger for the kiss of a traitor or shatter his oath to Avelos. But he was still Shorn, after all.

Near the rear, Anzo whistled an off-tempo version of “The Road to Velantar,” torturing the old ballad into a marching tune. Jhared grimaced and pulled his gaze from the temptation of the sky to focus on what lay ahead of him. When his patrol reached the switchback, he knew he would see that the road continued on, as it had since the days of the ancients, when the council reinforced its tenuous link to the northern clans and their silver mines with stone as well as with the enticement of trade in the south. On this fall afternoon, he knew the road unrolled out of the burgundy- and copper-colored Parnas Mountains, all the way down to Aven Plains. He counted on that reality to extinguish his treacherous desires and safely ground him.

Except that it didn’t.

The sheer drop ahead made Jhared’s innards spin. The road no longer existed at all. It had collapsed beneath a steep slide of gravel and fallen trees. Lieutenant Sevar trotted on without apparent concern for the damage caused by the rockslide, his back straight in the saddle, his golden head turned toward Commander Carn’s shaggy white one as they spoke. Jhared felt a dull thud against his breastbone.

“Soldier, is something wrong?”

He glanced at the slender, black-haired woman to whom he’d been given as a bodyguard. Her first long days of riding and nights sleeping on the ground amid a patrol of rough men hadn’t doused her intensity. The Bearer of Cael’s Blade watched everything around her with an all-consuming gaze. When she turned her midnight eyes on Jhared, he felt as though she knew things about him that he did not.

“Lady, look. Look ahead.” He gestured toward the danger.

She frowned. Commander Carn barked a laugh at something the lieutenant said. They trotted closer to the road’s end, with no sign of halting.

Jhared sucked a breath. “Lieutenant! Commander! Beware ahead!”

The patrol responded to Jhared’s cry with well-drilled efficiency, wheeling their horses into a defensive line. Even in the rutted pass, they moved at speed. It would have been a perfectly executed maneuver if not for the pack animals: three hot-blooded Clan Everen coursers who never would have been used for baggage if not for the loss of Forest Guard mounts in the killing winds. They shied at the commotion, and the second of the three, a chestnut colt, tore loose his lead. Sturdy, steady Anzo kicked his mount forward and grabbed up the broken tether before the chestnut could bolt. Fast-moving, slower-thinking Twitch tried to leap his horse clear of the panicked animal and almost tumbled off the road. As Twitch scrambled away from the edge, Jhared legged Seravina close to the rock face, shielding the priestess from the frightened horses and the drop before them. The woman’s gaze was on the sky.

Lieutenant Sevar’s glare, however, landed squarely on Jhared. “Denaban, what in the name of—”

“Lieutenant, up there!” The priestess pointed toward the west.

Jhared turned more slowly than the others, his focus still on the rockslide. He felt the storm before he saw it, a reverberation against his chest. Seravina pinned her ears.

“Lady save us,” Jase muttered, rubbing the blessing tattooed along his cheek.

“The Good Lady don’t have anything t’do with that!” Esran spat.

The cloud writhed above the mountains, not five miles west of the pass. It was the color of a falcon’s wing, as dark as the grey-feather curse. No man could mistake it for a natural storm. No natural storm ripped through the spirit as this one could or sliced through leather armor and tore flesh to the bone.

“Demon spawn!” Carn snarled. “You want we should run for it, Lieutenant, or try to find a hide?”

Caves honey-combed the mountains throughout the pass, but it wouldn’t be an easy thing to find sufficient shelter to fit the patrol and fifteen horses. If they didn’t find stone before the winds reached their killing speed, their journey would end swiftly and horribly.

Sevar faced the cloud without flinching, a terrible need twisting his wind-scarred features, a predator’s need to master what hunted him. “We run. Curse the skies and the creatures in them. Once again, we run.”

As the first high-pitched strains of the killing winds blew toward them, Jhared watched the cloud roiling and felt the same roiling within himself. The storm had slain so many already. In Velantar, entire families—three and four generations deep—had been wiped from the world. Men he had respected had been ripped apart. His foster brother Branlen would forever bear the scars.

He moved as though in a fever dream, every moment distant and unreal. He heard himself shout a second warning about the road. No one responded. The Bearer of Cael’s Blade eyed him closely.

Jhared looked at her and his breath caught as human figures shimmered around her, silvery shadows of no substance. He couldn’t turn away, though he urgently needed someone to lead him back to a place that made sense. The shadows seemed to be her, a host of ghostly priestesses. One smiled at him from horseback; three of them threatened him with Cael’s Blade; some stared at him through the avian eyes of a demon’s mask; one stared with no eyes at all. Seravina whinnied and jigged. Jhared grabbed for the pommel of his saddle, retching over her withers.

“Soldier?” one of the shadows hissed. “Are you with me?”

His stomach was turning flips like an acrobat at the summer faire. His head was being pounded into shards. He wasn’t sure he would stay conscious. “I’m fine,” he croaked.

“If you’re fine, then you’d best sit up,” she whispered. “Your lieutenant is watching you.”

Jhared inhaled the reassuring scent of warm horse, struggling to find his still center amidst a force trying to suck him into darkness. Was it poison? Herbs existed that could weaken a man’s mind and cause him to die raving. There were people who might be pleased to see him dead: Alende. Ziabela.

Ah, Zia. I am sorry!

“Soldier!”

Pain stabbed him back to awareness. The priestess gripped him hard across the forearm, where Alende’s dagger had scored him. Her other hand was reaching under her cloak for the black hilt of her Blade.

“I’m fine,” he said again, shaking free of her and straightening. “It’s only a bit of fever returned. Prepare yourself, Lady. We must run.”

Commander Carn bellowed commands and the patrol began to reform its neat file. After a hesitation, the lady’s hand slid away from the Blade and she gathered her mare. Lieutenant Sevar called the order that sent them off at a gallop. Within a span of heartbeats, Sevar’s agile border horse crossed the short stretch to the pile of gravel and rock. The beast struck the place where the road no longer existed.

And kept running.

Hooves struck the ground in a flawless cadence, first Sevar’s stallion, then the commander’s black. The road unrolled without interruption through the pass, as it must have done all along. Jhared stared in bewilderment. The destruction was only another illusion in this unreal moment. He glanced sidelong at the priestess. Her silvery shadows had vanished as well. Almost before he could signal Seravina, the mare leaped after the others.

The cloud of the killing winds pursued them as they fled, a dark stain spreading over the sky. Did consciousness or motive exist behind such violence or were the killing winds truly chaos, with nothing so orderly as hatred driving them? This close to the city, hundreds of people lay at risk. The small villages of Clan Manitar speckled the mountainsides, villages that supplied the city with meat, milk, and wool from their flocks of sheep and goats. Decimation of the stock would have grave consequences for already crippled Velantar. The killing winds were not only shattering lives, they were severing the country’s life-veins.

The patrol fled mile after mile, but could not outrun the churning cloud. Beside Jhared, the priestess bent low in the saddle murmuring what might have been a prayer as they pounded over the steep terrain. Her foam-flecked mount ran bravely. Seravina, on the other hand, fretted and fought the bit, lengthening her stride until she was near to running over the heels of Sevar’s border horse. Jhared kept her in line with effort, expecting every instant to hear the winds roar to their killing speed above him. As the land flashed past, Commander Carn’s mount stumbled, then caught its balance and pushed on. Lieutenant Sevar scowled over his shoulder at the sky. After another moment, he signaled the patrol and led them off the road, down the slope and into the forested hills.

Scattered stones, gnarled tree roots, and eroded ravines forced the horses to lose speed, but they fled perpendicular to the storm’s path now. Jhared didn’t dare to look back, focused only on guiding Seravina away from the most dangerous terrain. She had no wish to slow. Halfway down the hill, where a small copse of pine trees cast viridian shadows over the slope, years of runoff had carved a vast gully. It was too wide to jump and too long to go around, but deep enough that the climb back out would be a scramble. The lieutenant and commander drew up their mounts and started down. The priestess slowed to follow. Jhared sat back in the saddle to ease Seravina up to the edge, but she would have none of it. With a trumpeting whinny, she charged forward, her hindquarters drawing deeper under her body. She was gathering herself for a jump.

Jhared knew he should rein her in. The gully spanned nearly twenty feet, a gulf most horses wouldn’t make even on level terrain, but Seravina’s ardor was contagious. He longed to see how far she could take him. He shortened the rein and balanced his weight to help her prepare. His cloak fluttered behind him. His warrior’s tail tugged at his skull. Then the chasm opened, wide and abrupt. Seravina propelled them into the air with a sky-seeking leap.

The wind embraced them. Jhared closed his eyes as intense pleasure-pain rushed through him. The mare’s rise and stretch formed an arc of perfect weightlessness across the chasm. It stole his breath and awoke the old need, an aching heat that radiated from his center to make his muscles hum. Like a half-forgotten dream, he knew the joy of joining with the sacred sky, of reaching lofty mountain aeries. Even as his heart soared with hope, he knew he would find no release. This was only a moment of freedom, and he desired more, a lifetime. In that instant, when he hung suspended above the ground, caught between flying and falling, he understood anew the enormity of all he had lost.

They landed with a jolt. Seravina cleared the far side with room to spare, although it seemed to Jhared they had fallen far short.

A shout from the gully made him wheel around to look behind him. Men and horses were crossing the floor of the chasm and scrabbling up the bank, dusty and sweat-soaked. Only Jase and Anzo still waited on the opposite rim for their turn to cross. Both men stared back up the mountain. Jhared followed Anzo’s gaze to the sky: the cloud had not pursued them off the road. Instead, it had begun to dissipate, melting like snow in the sunshine. Tendrils of mist twisted above the mountains and disappeared. Sunlight pierced the grey as the storm shrank from the size of a fortress to the size of a house to the size of a horse. A breeze feathered over Jhared’s face. Then the cloud was gone.

Silence gripped the patrol. Jhared stared in astonished relief with the others, until Jase threw back his head and roared out in victory. The other men joined him. Amidst the whooping, Jhared’s gaze went to the priestess. The ride had pinked her cheeks and pulled strands of hair free of her long braid. Her dark eyes studied the now clear patch of sky as though she could read some subtle message there.

“Orders, Lieutenant?” Carn asked, once all the men had climbed onto the bank.

Sevar leaned forward and patted his stallion’s shoulder. “Find a place to set camp. We’ve done what we must for today.”

Rather than climb the long, treacherous way back to the road, the commander led them farther down the mountain. Eventually, they would cross another switchback and pick up the pass again, but Carn called a halt before they regained the road. They had pushed free of the trees, with their bronze and burgundy foliage, into a small clearing. A shepherd’s cottage, abandoned for the winter, crouched on a gentle rise beside a sheepfold. At the north edge of the clearing, a creek chattered softly on its way down the hill.

The setting surrendered its peacefulness to the incursion of soldiers. Jhared dismounted with the others, feeling heavy and awkward as the earth claimed him again. He loosened Seravina’s girth and led her on a circuit around the clearing to cool her. Her coat shone silver as she pranced and fidgeted, surveying her surroundings with a baleful eye.

“Well, madam, you do know how to run,” he murmured.

“That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile, soldier. It suits you. You should race the winds more often.”

Jhared glanced up at the priestess, who had caught up to him on her mare. He pulled the crisp autumn air into his lungs and felt his muscles still buzzing. He must be cautious now or his body would continue to draw from its cache of Shorn energy and burn him with deadly desires. Still, he couldn’t keep the pleasure from his voice. “She’s a magnificent horse. I’ve never ridden another like her.”

“I should say not. Seravina’s a rare beast. Captain Mavias’s blood flows in her veins.”

Jhared stopped. The heat in him went suddenly chill. “She’s descended from the Chosen?”

The priestess nodded cheerfully as she swung out of the saddle. “Her grandsire was one of Riana’s blessed Aye, a Mavaye stallion.”

“And the temple gave her to me? Lady, it is against Shorn Law! No man or woman Shorn shall hold sway over the Chosen, neither Aye nor Ael, and none shall command them to do the bidding of the cursed.”

“Patrolman, slow down!” the priestess said, laughing. “Seravina’s not Chosen. She carries only her grandsire’s strength and his love for command, not his spirit. I selected her for you myself.” The woman stopped laughing and her deep blue gaze grew sober. “Do you think I would lead you down the wrong Path, Jhared Denaban? Have you thought on who I am?”

She had asked him almost the same question once before, during the vigil of his Becoming, when she wore another shape: Cael’s. “Do you know who I am?”

“You are death,” Jhared had answered then. “Chaos and death.”

“I am choice,” she had responded. “Choice and freedom.”

Another distortion, that one. Cael’s unholy perspective.

“Patrolman?”

“You are the Bearer of Cael’s Blade. And I am merely a Shorn soldier. Forgive me. The only paths I can speak of knowledgeably are the ones that will take us north.”

“Oh, indeed?” She frowned, visibly dissatisfied with his answer, but she let him lead her back to the sheepfold, where they unsaddled and rubbed down the horses. When she had finished, she lifted a covered basket from among her packs. “As merely a Shorn soldier, do you think you might set up my tent?”

“It will be safer for you inside, Lady. In case the killing winds return.” He gestured toward the cottage, ignoring her tone.

“If the winds return, I imagine I can make it the ten paces to shelter. And there are things to be learned beyond the confines of walls, Patrolman. Please do as I’ve asked.”

“Of course, Lady.” He watched her walk away, then turned to water the horses at the creek. Elongated shadows of the trees striped the water. A few hardy crickets chirped unenthusiastically in the brush. He thought on what he had seen in the pass—the rockslide, the shadow priestesses—trying to make sense of them. He had told the Bearer it was illness, but his fever had broken several days ago, and the symptoms of poison wouldn’t have abated so quickly.

After considering a moment, he decided not to take any chances on the last and pulled two small vials from the pouch at his belt: Madam Kaliska’s restoratives. They were the only things he had ingested in the past three days that were not a part of the patrol’s provisions. The high temple’s healer had given them to him the night before he left Velantar. He didn’t think she wished him harm, but she was a friend to Zia and had been upset by his refusal to support their treasonous plans.

He broke the seals on the vials and emptied their contents downstream of the camp. The foul-smelling liquid swirled into the water and vanished. He let his thoughts about Zia and her traitorous band go with it. Zia was far from him now, in Velantar. But his apprehension about the Bearer didn’t swirl away so easily. What had he seen on the mountain? The images of the shadow priestesses still haunted him. Was he becoming disordered or did the imbalance exist within the Bearer of Cael’s Blade?

I know what true chaos is. I’ve seen past the edges of reason and visited the places where the only reality is disorder. This woman who will travel with you, this creature of the dark, worships that chaos.

Jhared shivered at the recollection of Alende’s warning, reluctant to heed the word of the unbound. Alende was anathema, a Shorn man who had failed to prove his loyalty and failed to pay the price for it. He had tried to kill the Bearer in the high temple.

Had Alende seen the priestess’s spirit-shadows too?

A pattern existed here that refused to come together. The woman wasn’t just a sworn servant of Riana; she was the Bearer of Cael’s Blade, the priestess responsible for warning others of the dangers of Cael’s ways and the second most powerful woman in the high temple. She had been there, hidden, when Jhared shattered his oath to Avelos by slaying the Legacy man who beat him. Rather than earning the high chieftain’s favor by exposing the Legacy’s intrigues, she had promised the faction her silence if they let Jhared live.

Now his life lay in her hands. If she revealed his crime, Lieutenant Sevar would be acting within Shorn Law and Forest Guard code to execute him.

Jhared rolled his shoulders against the impossible pain that wasn’t quite in his back, but in the part of him cut away long ago. The Bearer must have some use for him. Why else had she saved his life? Why else had she insisted he be a part of this mission? Zia had sought to use him to betray Avelos. The Legacy had tried to make him a bloody message for Elder Trianor. Even his foster father had used him to inform on the garrison at Ravia.

What purpose could the Bearer of Cael’s Blade possibly intend for him?

“Someone must walk the dark paths,” she had told him in Velantar.

Jhared didn’t want to think about what that might mean. He had already strayed so far he had lost what was dearest to him. He had lied to Elder Trianor and shielded Zia. He had killed to sate his own rage. Undisciplined. Uncontrolled. Dangerous. Jhared looked at his hands. In the dappled evening shadows, he could see blood on them again. It made him ill when he thought on that moment. The deaths he wrought in defense of Avelos were a matter of duty, and he owned no choice in them, but that night on the street, the sensation of muscle tearing beneath his steel had been deeply satisfying. For a time, it had even felt like justice.

Jhared groaned and scrubbed a hand across his face. He longed to preserve what remained of his oath and to help his patrol find an answer to the killing winds. The Bearer of Cael’s Blade had seen the darkness in him. He couldn’t imagine what she sought from it.