Their lives.
The answer left him before he finished thinking it.
"Take it," Kai whispered into the dirt. "Just save them."
Laughter filled his skull, low and pleased.
Good choice, Prince.
Then the cold came.
It started in his chest, where the shadow Taqa always lived, and spread like ice water poured into his veins. It flooded his arms, his legs, the backs of his eyes. His heartbeat slowed, then hammered, and every beat felt like it belonged to somebody else.
And it didn't stay inside him. Energy bled off his body, so vast the air itself seemed to bend away from it, yet condensed tight around him like a blade held in its sheath. It was a dark purple, deep as a bruise and edged in violet, wrapped in a faint blue haze that crackled with electric sparks. Every spark that jumped across his skin left his muscles coiled and humming, as if lightning had been poured into them in place of blood.
Kai tried to flex his fingers. Nothing happened.
His fingers flexed anyway.
That wasn't me.
No, the voice agreed, closer now, everywhere at once. Sit back. Watch how it's done.
His body rose.
The gravity field that had pinned him like a nail in wood was still there. Kai felt every ounce of it pressing on his spine. But the thing wearing his body simply stood up through it, slowly, the way a man stands up from a chair. His cracked ribs ground together. The dark self didn't care.
Shadows poured off his skin like smoke from a fire. They pooled around his boots, crawled up his arms, and wrapped the curved daggers in his hands until the blades seemed to swallow the moonlight.
Twenty feet away, Kabrikaze stopped walking.
For the first time that night, the Fourth Star mage looked surprised. "Well," he said quietly. "That's new."
"You talk too much," said Kai's mouth, in a voice that wasn't Kai's.
The shadows moved.
Kai had used them to scout, to hide, to sharpen a blade. He had never seen them do this. They lashed out across the battlefield in a dozen black spears, and every one of them found something. The acid-breathing wolf was lifted off its feet and torn in half. The lightning bird screamed once as a shadow punched through its wing and dragged it out of the sky. Three summoned beasts tearing at Yeldvi's body simply came apart.
Is this me? Is this what I could have done all along?
The song faltered.
Across the field, the cloaked woman stumbled mid-note as a shadow ripped through the beast guarding her. For three heartbeats, the melody broke. Cursed soldiers froze with their swords half-raised, blinking at the comrades in front of them like men waking from a nightmare.
It's working. Gods, it's actually working.
The dark self didn't stop to watch. It stepped into Kai's own shadow and stepped out behind the giant earth mage.
The man was nearly eight feet of stone-hard muscle, and he was fast for his size. A wall of rock erupted between them. The daggers went through it like it was wet clay. The left blade opened the giant's arm from wrist to elbow, and the right one would have taken his throat if the ground hadn't heaved and thrown them apart.
The giant roared, more in shock than pain.
Again, Kai thought, and for a moment he wasn't sure whether he was afraid of this power or hungry for more of it. Hit him again.
The world doubled in weight.
Kai's knees buckled. Stones around him sank into the soil. Kabrikaze stood with one hand raised, the air around him warped like heat over a summer road.
The dark self pushed back. Shadows braced against the ground like the roots of a black tree, and Kai's body straightened inch by inch against a force that should have flattened it.
Kabrikaze tilted his head, studying him the way a scholar studies an unusual insect.
"Fourth Star power," he said, "inside a Second Star body. Do you understand what that does, Prince Kai-Zevrin?"
Kai understood a heartbeat later.
His left forearm snapped.
He heard it before he felt it, a wet crack like green wood. Then the pain arrived, white and enormous, and he screamed. Only nobody heard it, because his mouth was still smiling.
Blood ran from his nose. From his ears. Something warm slid down from the corners of his eyes. Black lines crawled under the skin of his wrists where his veins should be, spreading toward his elbows like cracks in ice.
Stop! Kai shouted inside his own skull. You're breaking us!
The body is a tool, the voice answered calmly. Tools break.
The dark self lunged.
It crossed the distance in a streak of violet light and crackling blue sparks, faster than anything Kai had ever seen, faster than Yeldvi's hammer, faster than Althea's arrows. Kabrikaze twisted aside, but not quite far enough. The tip of a shadowed dagger traced a thin line across his cheek.
Black blood welled up from the cut.
The Fourth Star mage touched his face and looked at his fingers. Then he smiled, and it was the coldest thing Kai had seen all night.
"Remarkable," Kabrikaze said. "Truly. But not yet."
He closed his hand.
The gravity didn't double this time. It multiplied. Kai's body slammed face-first into the earth with enough force to crater the ground around him. Ribs that had been cracked now broke completely. His right shoulder came out of its socket. Something in his back made a sound he would hear in his nightmares for the rest of his life, if he had a rest of his life.
The shadows flickered.
Then, like a tide going out, the cold began to drain from his veins.
No. No, no, no. Where are you going?
This vessel is too weak, the voice said, already sounding far away. It cannot hold me. Not yet.
You promised! You said they would live!
I promised you power, Prince. A pause, almost gentle. I never promised your body could survive it.
And then it was gone, and Kai was alone inside a broken body at the bottom of a crater, every nerve on fire, unable to lift even a finger.
* * *
Far to the east, the night air in Midory smelled of salt and money.
Elara Nithralis stood on the balcony of the Nithralis trading house, a ledger open on the rail in front of her. Below, harbor lanterns glittered across the black water, and the four imperial warships rode at anchor like sleeping giants. Somewhere in the Grand Bazaar, drunk nobles were still bidding on crimson pearls.
She had stopped reading the numbers an hour ago. They didn't change no matter how many times she looked.
"The southern caravans?" she asked without turning around.
"Gone, my lady." Orrin Vasque, the house's chief factor for thirty years, set a fresh stack of letters on the table behind her. He was a thin, gray man who wore his spectacles on a chain and his worries on his face. "Three months now. No silk out of Atunmbra, no spices from Merthen, no timber from the Helverton mills. The insurers won't write a single contract for cargo south of Reiva."
"And the pearls?"
"Up forty percent this season." He paused. "That isn't good news, my lady. Nobles buy pearls when they want wealth they can carry in a pocket. They're preparing to run."
Elara closed the ledger. "Then they know what we know. The Emperor sleeps, his eldest wears a borrowed crown, and the south is burning."
"Carefully, my lady. Even balconies have ears in this city."
"Let them listen." She turned, her pale green eyes catching the lantern light. "Ludvik sent his younger brother south with twenty-eight thousand men against an enemy that eats armies. You read the reports from Colrisa. The prince did well. He won't be allowed to keep doing well."
Orrin didn't argue, which told her he agreed.
"There's something else," he said instead, and slid a single letter from the stack. "Our elven porters on the southern road. Six more have gone missing since the last caravan. Taken, not killed. The slavers in the south are paying for elves again."
Elara's hand tightened on the rail. For a long moment she said nothing at all.
"And this," Orrin went on, more quietly. "I had the clerks go back through the capital's grain exchange. Someone bought up the southern grain contracts four months before Count Otavi rebelled. Through three different houses, all small, all new."
"Four months before." Elara looked at him. "Someone knew."
"Someone with a great deal of money, and a great deal of patience."
Out on the water, a bell rang the midnight watch. Elara listened to it fade.
"Pull our ships off the southern coast," she said at last. "Move what we can through the northern ports. And Orrin, find out whose money is behind those three houses."
"And the prince?"
She looked south, toward a darkness she couldn't see the end of.
"If the third prince survives Helverton, I want a meeting with him."
"And if he doesn't?"
"Then we'll need to know who wanted him dead."
* * *
The song began again.
It came back stronger than before, as if the woman was furious at the interruption. The soldiers who had blinked awake for those three precious heartbeats lifted their swords again. Their eyes went blank. They turned back toward each other.
I gave you a chance. I gave you three seconds. And I couldn't hold it.
The earth walls began to move.
Kai watched them through a haze of blood. The stone barriers that had trapped his army in a killing field were sliding inward, grinding across the ground, shrinking the field smaller and smaller. The giant earth mage walked behind them with his wounded arm hanging at his side, his other hand guiding the stone like a shepherd driving sheep into a pen.
On the far side of the field, a burst of wind and steel flared bright against the dark. Naris, still fighting. It flared once more, weaker. Then it went out.
Kai turned his eyes, the only part of him he could still move, searching for his friends.
At the foot of the building she had fallen from, Althea was getting up.
Her bow lay in two pieces beside her. Blood from the claw marks on her face soaked her collar, and her left leg dragged at an angle no leg should. Behind her, a dozen wounded soldiers huddled against the wall, too hurt to run. Above them, the razor-winged beasts circled lower.
Althea tossed the broken bow aside and raised her empty hand.
Kai had almost forgotten. Before she ever picked up a bow, Althea Narami had been a magician. The first time he saw her, she was throwing Yeldvi off a warship with a tornado of fire.
The flames curled around her fingers. Then they climbed her arm. Then they leaped.
A pillar of fire spun up from her palm, ten feet, thirty, fifty, a roaring red column that swallowed the diving beasts mid-flight and turned their screams to ash. Althea stood at the heart of it, hair whipping, one hand raised like she was holding up the sky.
The building behind her caught. Its roof sagged, then folded, and the burning walls came down over the place where she stood.
When the smoke cleared, there was only a mound of blackened stone, glowing at the edges.
Althea...
Among the torn beasts the shadows had pulled off him, Yeldvi pushed himself up on his hammer like an old man getting out of bed. His side was open and red. He looked at the medical wagons fifty paces away, where the refugees and the wounded had crawled for cover. Then he looked at the wave of cursed soldiers and beasts rolling toward them.
He laughed. Even from the crater, Kai heard it, the same loud, stupid laugh that had annoyed half the academy.
"Come on, then!" Yeldvi roared. "Who wants to dance with the thickhead?"
He planted himself between the wagons and the wave, raised the hammer over his head, and brought it down.
The ground answered. A dome of rock tore itself out of the earth and closed over the wagons with a sound like a mountain shutting its mouth.
Yeldvi stood outside it.
The wave reached him. The hammer rose once, twice, a third time, scattering bodies like leaves. Then the beasts and the blank-eyed soldiers closed over him, and the stone dome stood alone in a sea of moving shapes, silent.
You idiot. You were supposed to be inside.
Under the collapsed wall, a single hand still stuck out of the rubble. The fingers twitched.
A breath of wind brushed Kai's ear, so faint he thought he imagined it.
"...Your Highness." Darek's voice, carried on the Air Whisper, thin as thread. "Don't you dare... die before I do."
The fingers closed into a fist.
Every grain of dust on the battlefield lifted at once. A gale of grit and ash howled out from under the rubble and slammed into the beasts circling Kai's crater, blinding them, driving them back shrieking. For long seconds, the whole world was a brown storm.
The storm died as fast as it had risen.
The beasts it had driven from Kai's crater shook the grit from their eyes and turned, snarling, toward the place the wind had come from. They found the rubble. They found the hand.
They poured over the broken wall in a heaving mass of claws, fur and wings, tearing at the stones, digging down. Blank-eyed soldiers followed, drawn by the noise, until the whole pile disappeared beneath them.
Get up. Somebody, please, get up.
When the swarm finally moved on, the stones lay scattered and the hand was no longer there. Kai couldn't tell whether that was better or worse.
The screaming stopped gradually, the way rain stops. First the battle cries. Then the clash of steel. Then the wounded, one by one, until the only sounds left were the crackle of burning wagons and the wet noises of beasts feeding.
The song ended on a single, soft note.
Boots crunched on the edge of the crater. Kabrikaze looked down at him, the cut on his cheek already closing.
"Twenty-eight thousand soldiers," the gravity mage said, almost conversationally. "Twelve hundred magician knights. The pride of the southern garrisons. And you walked every one of them into my hand."
Kai tried to speak. Blood bubbled out instead.
"They told me you were a spare prince with a spear and an overprotective mother." Kabrikaze crouched, studying Kai's blackened veins with interest. "They were fooled. Not one of them saw what you had. A pity the vessel is so fragile."
Behind him, the giant earth mage grunted something. The cloaked woman stood a little farther back, her hood still hiding her face, her head turned toward Kai as if she were listening for something.
"Finish him?" the giant asked.
Kabrikaze stood and brushed the dust from his knees. "No need. Look at him. Nothing walks away from that." He turned away. "Let the crows have the prince."
They left.
Kai lay in the crater and listened to their footsteps fade. The fires burned lower. Smoke drifted across a sky that was slowly turning gray with the coming dawn.
Twenty-eight thousand.
He tried to count them. Not the number. The faces. The young archer who had shared his bread on the road out of Reiva. The supply clerk who stuttered. The gray-bearded captain who told terrible jokes around the fire. And three faces he couldn't bring himself to count at all, because counting them would make it true. Althea had warned him on the first day that the Death Panel turned good men into monsters.
She was right. It turned me into one. And it still wasn't enough.
He thought of his mother, who had spent twenty-three years hiding him in her shadow so that nothing like this could ever happen to him. He thought of Layla, who had cried when he left for the academy and made him promise to always come home.
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I couldn't keep a single one of them alive.
The pain was fading now. That frightened him more than the pain had. His fingers had gone numb, then his arms, then his legs. The cold crept inward, but this time it wasn't the shadow's cold. This was something quieter. Something final.
His heartbeat slowed.
The first crow landed on the edge of the crater and tilted its head at him.
So this is how it ends. A prince in a hole, surrounded by everyone who trusted him.
His heart beat once more, faint and far away.
Then it didn't.
The gray sky narrowed to a point of light, and the point of light went out.
And for Prince Kai-Zevrin Raytingbergh, there was nothing at all.
* * *
Commander Thorne walked through the gravity field as if it were a summer meadow.
Kabrikaze had opened a narrow path of ordinary weight for him, exactly as agreed. On either side, the field still pressed the dead into the mud. Thorne stepped over a soldier from the Reiva garrison. He had signed that man's transfer papers himself.
He did not look down for long.
At the edge of the crater, he stopped. The prince lay at the bottom, broken in ways a body was never meant to break. A crow sat on his chest.
Thorne waved it off and crouched beside him. He had been told to confirm it with his own eyes. He pressed two fingers to the prince's throat.
No pulse. No breath. The skin was already cooling.
Good.
He began to rise.
Kai's lips moved.
Thorne went still. Slowly, deliberately, the dead prince's lips were shaping words. No breath pushed them. No sound came out. The chest beneath them never rose. But the lips kept moving, steady and patient, like someone speaking to a listener only he could see.
Thorne leaned closer. He had interrogated spies in four languages. He could not read a single word.
The first light of dawn spilled over the earth walls and into the crater. It threw Thorne's shadow long and sharp behind him.
It should have thrown the prince's shadow too.
For a moment, it did. Then the dark shape beneath Kai's body began to thin. Its edges blurred like ink dropped in water. It turned gray, then faint as breath on glass.
Then it was gone.
The sun lay full across the prince, and the prince cast no shadow at all. The ground beneath him was simply lit, as if nothing had ever stood between it and the light. As if a shadow had never been there to begin with.
The lips stopped moving.
Thorne realized he had taken three steps back without deciding to. His hand was on his sword hilt. His heart was pounding harder than it had at any point during the slaughter.
"That's not possible," he whispered.
The dead prince did not answer.
Thorne stood at the edge of the crater for a long time, staring down at a body without a shadow. For the first time in twenty years of service, to the empire and to anyone else, he had no idea what he was looking at.