Page 165 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
I looked over his shoulder at the decapitated body, the head pitted with yellow eyes that stared unblinkingly at the destruction it had created, its victim’s lower body still skewered in its dead talon.
“I mean he’s a man.” Steeler was still whispering, and I vaguely felt the others drifting closer to listen. “His name is—was—Timothy Grandulous. Twenty-seven years old. Raised in Varchmouth. Given Element Wielding at his Branding. Failed his Final Test four years ago.”
The realization crashed into my heart, sending the beats of it into a frenzy. Nara and Garvis both inhaled sharply, and Barberro cursed.
The attackers are pale. Damaged. Altered beyond recognition,the Cardina jeweler had said.
And now I knew why.
The attackers were pale because they were being kept in that prison on top of Bascite Mountain. Damaged because they’d been tortured endlessly since their Final Test. Altered beyond recognition because they’d been given more magic—morebrands—than their original human blood could handle.
The monsters attacking our villages were the exiled ones.
CHAPTER
48
“By the moonbeam and the mist,” Garvis muttered.
I couldn’t seem to feel the singe of overbearing flames anymore as a wave of cold crashed over me at the sight of that corpse in two pieces behind Steeler, my knives winking where I had impaled it.
An Esholian.
Steeler and I had just killed an Esholian.
And maybe I whispered that out loud, because Steeler was suddenly gripping my jaw between his thumb and forefinger, wrestling my gaze away from the carnage. Back to him.
“We did,” he said, not without gentleness. “But that Esholian just murdered a woman’s husband—a father to two young kids. And if the rest of them can’t control themselves from murdering more, we’re going to have to do it again. Do you understand?”
I started to nod, but his past words seemed to ring through my ears.I need to hear that pretty voice of yours say it out loud, Rayna.
“I understand,” I whispered.
“Good.”
Steeler wrenched one of my knives from the corpse with a sickening squelch and twirled it back to me, handle first.
At the same moment, a vibratingcrashechoed from the direction of the village square, a new layer of screams pealing after it.
I grabbed my knife from him and slid it back into place before wrenching the other two blades out of the corpse and whirling into a run as Steeler took off at a pounding pace.
“The exiled are immune to our powers because they’ve been Branded with all five,” Steeler threw over his shoulder as Garvis, Barberro, Nara, and I ran after him. “And each of those five powers are blending together in ways they can’t control. Their minds are fire, the fire is something else that’s been Shifted, and their Shifted forms aren’t the right kind of material that Object Summoners can grab onto.”
My lungs burned with the acrid stench of smoke that only thickened the further we plunged into it, but I didn’t let my footsteps slow even as Steeler took a sharp turn up a street bordered by shops that were collapsing in on themselves. A single thought was roaring over the rush of my own blood in my ears.
“The regular people who pass their Final Tests with perfectly average magic—they’re the disposable ones,” I panted, terror stripping away at my bones at the thought of Fabian and Don and every Branded adult in this village, Steeler’s adoptive family included. “It’s the people with excess power who can’t control themselves—theexiled—that she wants to use against her sister to win the throne of Sorronia.”
If that was true, then these attacks… they were all just part of atest. Dyonisia was testing out her army on her own people. Testing to see how much destruction they could cause on other magical beings.
I’d never wanted to plunge my blade into anyone’s heart more.
“Well, then,” Barberro said in a voice that wheezed a bit too much for my liking, “let’s show traitor her army will never win.”
Finally, we charged into an opening in the smoke, and I almost ran into Steeler’s back as he stopped dead at the scene before us.
Seven or eight more monstrous figures filled the village square, raging against the handful of villagers who’d stayed behind to try to fight them. Even as we watched, though, one of them whipped out a giant, tapered tail studded with spikes and slammed it into the nearest woman.
The spikes stuck through her face, her chest, her stomach.
