Chapter 1: Overcast
The storm has been sitting on Aretia for three days, and everyone knows it's mine.
Nobody says so. That's the worst part. They just glance up at the bruise-coloured clouds hanging over the valley, the ones that haven't moved since we flew back from the border, and then glance at me, and then very carefully look at something else. The cooks have stopped hanging laundry. Somebody's moved the horses into the lower barn. This morning at breakfast Ridoc asked, in the tone of a man asking about the weather and not at all about his friend, whether anyone else's hair was standing up, and Rhiannon kicked him under the table so hard he spilled his tea.
I eat my bread. I don't look at the window. Under my skin, the power hums like a hive that's been kicked.
Silver One. Tairn's voice drops into my head like a boulder into a well. This is undignified.
I'm handling it.
You are sitting on it. There's a difference. Sitting on a storm does not make it go away. It makes it larger, and you flatter, and I am bonded to the flat one.
I put my bread down. Rhiannon is watching me over her cup with that particular squadron-leader patience that means she'll wait all day.
"I'm fine," I tell her.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
"I was going to say," Rhi says, very evenly, "that Ridoc's hair is actually standing up. Look at it."
I look. It is. A soft brown halo of static around his head, like a dandelion gone to seed. He grins at me, totally unbothered, and wiggles his eyebrows, and a little spark jumps from the tip of his spoon to the metal rim of his bowl with a snap that makes the whole table flinch.
Including me. Especially me.
"I need some air," I say, and get up, and go.
The cliffs above the city are where I go when I need to not be looked at. There's a goat path that switches back up from the rear of Riorson House, and a flat shelf of grey rock at the top where the wind comes straight off the peaks and the whole valley lies below like a map somebody's spilled. From here Aretia looks small. The rebuilt walls, the new roofs, the scorched patch near the gate where the old city burned and nobody has been brave enough to build on yet.
The clouds are lower up here. Close enough that I could reach up and touch them, if I didn't know exactly what would happen.
I sit on the rock with my knees pulled up and my back against the cliff and breathe the way I was taught. In for four. Hold. Out for six. The power doesn't care. It moves under my ribs like something pacing a cage, warm and huge and furious, and every time I exhale it presses closer to the surface.
Five days ago, on the eastern border, a wyvern came out of the cloud under Feirge's belly and I didn't think. I reached. And the lightning came down so fast and so close that for a full heartbeat I couldn't see Rhiannon at all, just white, just Feirge's wing lit up from beneath like stained glass, and the stench of burned scales.
The wyvern fell. Rhiannon didn't. Feirge's left wing has a scorch mark the size of a dinner table on its underside, and she won't fly for another week, and Rhi keeps telling me it's nothing, it's fine, she's fine, it was the right call.
I haven't reached since. Not once. I've felt the power climbing every hour of every day and I've shoved it down, and down, and down, and above the valley the clouds have stacked up thicker and darker in answer, and now here we all are.
"You know they can see you from the training yard."
I don't startle. I'm not sure I could. The voice comes from behind me and slightly above, low and dry and entirely unsurprised, and every nerve in my body that hasn't been busy holding back a storm turns toward it like a compass.
"Let them see," I say.
Xaden comes down the last few feet of the path and doesn't sit. He stands at the edge of the rock with his back to the drop like a man who has never once in his life been afraid of falling, flight leathers dark against the grey sky, swords crossed at his back. The wind pulls at his hair. The relic on his neck swirls black against his skin and disappears under his collar. He's looking at me the way he looks at a battlefield, which means he's already seen every exit and none of them are going to help me.
"Three days," he says.
"I know how long it's been."
"Garrick bet Bodhi a week's wine that you'd crack by tonight."
"Garrick can—"
"I told him that was a sucker bet." He crouches in front of me so we're eye to eye, forearms resting on his knees, and the gold flecks in his eyes catch what little light the clouds let through. "Because you won't crack. You'll just keep sitting on it until it kills you. And Tairn will be very put out, and Sgaeyl will be very put out, and then I'll be dead too, which will be extremely inconvenient for the rebellion."
"That's not funny."
"I'm not joking, Violence."
The name does what it always does, sliding under my guard before I can stop it. I look away from him, out at the valley.
"I almost killed her," I say. "Rhi. I almost killed my best friend because I didn't stop to think."
"You saved her. She'd be in a wyvern's teeth if you'd stopped to think."
"You weren't there."
"I was there." His voice goes quieter. "I'm always there. I felt it the second you reached, through Sgaeyl, through Tairn, all of it. I felt you pull that strike down. It was perfect." He pauses. "It was also four feet closer than you're comfortable with. Both things are true."
"Four feet is the width of Rhiannon."
"Four feet is the width of a wyvern's head. Which is why there isn't one anymore." He reaches out and takes my wrist, the right one, where the power always pools first, and turns it palm up between us. My skin is hot. When his fingers close around it, a tiny blue spark snaps between us and stings, and he doesn't let go. "You've been holding this for five days. I can feel it from the other side of the house. I can feel it in my sleep."
My throat is tight. "Then you know I can't let it go here. It's too much. If I let it out it won't stop."
"Then don't stop." He says it like it's simple. Like it's an order. "Let it all go. Right now. Right here. I'm not moving."
"Xaden, it could hit you."
"Probably will, the mood you're in."
"I'm serious."
"So am I." He stands, and pulls me up with him by the wrist, and steps back exactly two paces to the very edge of the shelf, the whole valley open behind him and the clouds churning above. Shadows are already gathering at his feet. Not the casual flicker he uses to steal a pastry off my plate or tug a strand of hair loose from my braid. Real ones. Thick, cold, ink-dark shadows pooling up around his boots and climbing his legs like water filling a well. "Anything you throw, I'll ground. That's a promise. Anything that gets past me goes into the rock. You can't hurt me tonight, Violet. I won't let you."
I stare at him. The power in my chest has noticed. It's leaning toward him the way I am, eager, hungry, and something in my belly drops in a way that has nothing to do with lightning.
Do it, Tairn says, and for once there's no sneer in it at all. I am right here. Sgaeyl is right here. Let it go, Silver One. You were not made small.
I lift my hands.
It doesn't come gently. It never has. It rushes up through me like a flood finding a crack in a dam, burning along every vein, and I tip my head back and open everything I've been holding shut for five days, and the sky splits open.
The first bolt hits the peak across the valley and the boom rolls through my chest like a war drum. The second is closer. The third forks three ways and one branch comes down straight at the shelf of rock where we're standing, and I scream his name and try to yank it back, and I can't, it's too fast, and then it isn't there anymore.
Shadow. A wall of it, rising from Xaden's feet and swallowing the bolt mid-air, black on white, and the light vanishes into it like a stone into a deep lake. The rock under us shudders. The smell of scorched air is everywhere. The shadows sink back down into the stone and Xaden is still standing there at the edge of the cliff, breathing a little harder, his hair blown back, unhurt.
He's looking at me like he's never been happier to see anything in his life.
"Again," he says.
My hands are shaking. My knees are shaking. Everything inside me is lit up and ringing like a bell. "Xaden."
"I said again." Then, softer, his voice sliding into my head, private, the way only he can: You have no idea what you look like right now.
So I do it again. And again. I pull down bolt after bolt over the empty mountains until my arms ache and the clouds above Aretia start to thin and tear and let through slivers of evening light, and every time one comes too close, he's there. Shadow rising. Light swallowed. Him, steady, watching me with that look in his eyes that I can feel all the way down to my toes.
When it's done, I'm not tired. That's what scares me. I should be wrung out, the way I am after every battle. Instead I'm humming. My skin is too tight. There's still a charge sitting low and restless under my sternum, and it doesn't want the sky anymore. It wants something else.
It wants him.
He knows. Of course he knows. He steps forward off the edge, close enough that the hair on my arms lifts toward him, and doesn't touch me.
"Feel better?" he asks.
"No," I say honestly. "Worse. It's still there."
"I know." His eyes drop to my mouth and come back up. "That's not the storm anymore, Violence."
"Then what is it?"
He takes my right hand again. Laces our fingers together. The spark between our palms is so bright that for a second it lights his face from below, blue and gold, and he doesn't flinch.
"Come home," he says, "and find out."