Beneath the roof were balconies peopled by moving figures. Looking to the south along the lip of the mine she saw another watchtower and beyond, all around the rim of the pit-many more watchtowers. The figures were lookouts, guards. Many of them were archers. She could just make out the way they stood with their bows hanging easy in their grip, each with an arrow ready to be drawn. It should not have been a surprise. Criminals must be guarded. But there were so many. Towers were everywhere in the distance, the far ones just bulbous shapes on the horizon. The tiny workers beneath them had no chance of escape, no option but to bend to what promised to be unending labor.

Her eyes, losing the will to scan the largeness of it, drifted of their own accord and settled on the lines of moving forms just below her. There was something unsettling about the sight of them. They looked exhausted. They walked with heads down turned. Not one talked to another. Not one lifted his or her eyes to the sky. The longer she stared, the more she believed she could see individual features and attributes, the shapes of faces and the lay of collarbones thinly draped with flesh. It was because of this growing intimacy that she realized the most ghastly thing was not the staggering numbers of them nor their dejected faзades nor their smallness compared to the project that bound them. There was another reason the line looked so irregular to her eyes. There were children among the laborers. Every third or fourth person she saw was a child no older than herself, some no taller than Dariel. This was too much to bear.

Back in the fresh night air, Mena took a few steps down toward the compound. She lowered herself to her backside. She could not go back to the compound with any sign of what she had just witnessed written on her face. She was not supposed to have seen it. None of them were. Clearly, the world was not as she had been led to believe. She thought of her father in his melancholy moments. Was this why? This was an Acacian mine. It was her father’s mine. It was her family’s. Those people, those children…they worked for her. There were beings who snatched the young from their beds and sent them to fuel the world’s fires. They worked in her name. She wondered if that errant nurse years before had known this. Was that why she felt the right to frighten her, to tease her, and to corrupt her dreams?

She returned to the compound just in time. She had barely stepped into her room and thrown off her overcoat before a hard knock broke the predawn silence. They were to be moved, a voice she did not recognize said, speaking through the door. It was most urgent that she be moved. “Princess, your safety depends on it.”

Why did she not recognize the voice? It was not any of the Marah that had escorted them nor a servant nor anyone she recalled from Crenshal’s staff. And yet she was quite certain that it spoke honestly. Her safety did depend on it. She scooped up her overcoat and glanced around the room, wondering if she needed to make arrangements to bring her things. She thought she would ask whomever it was that summoned her, but when she opened the door she felt strangely prepared to step through it as she was, still flushed from having been outside, coat over her arm, ready. Simply ready.

She did not know that by stepping through that door she was placing one portion of her life behind her forever. She did not know that for years to come she would not lay eyes on her brothers or sister or anybody she had known up until that point. She could not have imagined that crossing that threshold was akin to stepping into obscurity, vanishing from the map, moving out of her skin, away from her home and country and name, into another life entirely.

End of Book One

Few people who had known him in his prime would have recognized the man climbing the dirt path up from the mountain village of Pelos. He walked bearing the scent of goats with him, a horse-sweat smell heavy on his robes, with chicken filth encrusted under his fingernails and stray feathers ensnared in his mane of hair and beard. His breath was rank with wine stink. He cared for the animals in the town’s tavern. It was a beggar’s or a child’s job, one that he could stumble about to attend to, taking breaks to suck from a skin of wine that lent each day claret-blurred edges. There was little in his appearance to betray the man he had once been. He did not even go by his given name anymore. He did, at some point each day, mutter it out loud. He needed to hear it float on the air as a feeble act of defiance, but this was meant for no other human ears to hear.

This evening he stopped at a rock outcropping just off the trail. Before him the mountainous terrain etched ridges and dips, lit by the risen moon. Here and there patches of mist slid through the valleys like ghostly slugs across a damp forest floor. A yellow point of light moved across a far hillside. It must have been a trader with his lamp lit as protection against the spirits. These mountain people were superstitious, frightened of the night and the creatures who patrolled it. The man had no such fears. Part of him desired death at the claws of a belrann or to be carried into bondage by a wood ghoul. Either of these was a fate, he thought, of greater substance than his daily existence. He no longer lived for his conscious hours at all. Should a wolverbear sniff him out and bite his head from his shoulders, he would regret only the loss of his dream existence.

He was just about to turn and stumble up the path toward his hovel of a home, pulled by the dull hunger that had lately come to define him. Before leaving he whispered, “Leeka Alain. I am Leeka Alain. I am not dead. I have not been killed.”

Leeka Alain, once a general in Acacia’s most fractious province. Now what was he? He had had no purpose in life for several years now. All his travails in the frozen north, his sole survival of that first Numrek ambush, his ordeal with the fever and the lonely trek he undertook in pursuit of the enemy host: all these things were behind him. They had amounted to nothing. His notion that he might have a crucial task to fulfill had been mistaken. He had tumbled down off the Methalian Rim nine years previous, riding that woolly, horned mount, believing himself to be the bearer of apocalyptic news.

He found a land already at war, already suffering from a variety of attacks: his king dead, Aushenia smashed by the Numrek, the Candovians roused to rebellion by Maeander, and Acacia’s military might crippled by a disease that made them easy targets for slaughter. In many ways Hanish assured his victory on the Alecian Fields. Leeka had not been there on the day, but he arrived shortly after to behold a carpet of rotting corpses, peppered with flies and vultures and all manner of scavengers.

The weeks after the Fields saw an ongoing butchery that stalked off the battlefield and into every lane and courtyard, into temples and monuments and homes. It seemed the evil fury of the Mein would not abate until every last Acacian was split upon their steel. Other nations, fearing such a fate, allied themselves more and more faithfully with the Mein: the clans of Candovia had never been so united; Senival put up a gallant, short-lived fight before laying down their axes; and the Vumu Archipelago petitioned for peace before even a single blow was struck against them. In Aushenia little resistance of any sort remained. That an empire so long held together could crumble so quickly baffled Leeka. It seemed that all the years of obedience meant nothing. All the praise and tribute lavished on Acacia vanished in an instant, replaced by the fire of long-harbored animus.