Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
“You don’t.” Zanaya knew her friend as well as Auri knew her. “You’re too nice and hate the idea of disciplining anyone.”
Aureline winced. “Perhaps you have a point. But that would make me a terrible lieutenant too.”
“No, because then you’d just be following the rules laid down by your general—and you never have any issue with that.” Aureline’s tendencies didn’t make her weak, just different from Zanaya. That was a subtlety Zanaya had learned from her best friend. “Now, lift your sword so we can fix the error in your technique that allowed me to beat you.”
Their swords clashed, the vibration going straight to Zanaya’s teeth.
In truth, Zanaya didn’t have to do much to ensure Auri progressed through the ranks with her—her friend had the ability, just not Zanaya’s driving ambition. She was, however, loyal to the bone, and willing to tie her flag to her best friend’s.
“So you’ll never be alone,” Auri said to her one day, while Zanaya’s faithful hound, Balan—his smooth coat jet-black and his ears sharply pointed—walked alongside Zanaya. “So you’ll always have a lieutenant at your back who you can trust without hesitation.”
Zanaya’s chest ached. “I’m counting on that.”
“And don’t forget Meher,” Auri pointed out with a wicked grin. “He’s still keeping up.”
“As he should.” Zanaya had long forgiven Meher his initial rudeness, but he’d never be to her what Auri was—the friend who’d embraced her before she knew anything of Zanaya’s skill or ambition. “The weapons-master has summoned me to a meeting.”
Auri’s eyes widened at her confession. “He’s going to promote you.”
Auri was proven right. At three hundred, Zanaya was brutally young to be a senior squadron leader, but that was the position she held after the meeting.
She was on the road to the kind of power that would put her in control of her existence. No being beholden to her mother’s resentful care or her father’s absent largesse. No having to bow and scrape to angels who considered her an uneducated blot on polite society. No pressure to mold and lessen herself to fit the world.
Zanaya intended to make the world fit her.
As for Alexander . . . Her cheeks burned, her chest tight. She’d glimpsed him from a distance last summer, and the madness, the obsession, it had hit as hard and as low as before.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t dying.
* * *
* * *
Alexander kept quiet track of Zanaya in the years that followed their first meeting, raised a glass to her when he heard she’d been promoted to senior squadron leader in the army of an archangel on the other side of the world from the archangel whom Alexander had once served. These days, Alexander served no one, his power such that he was considered a threat by most.
All of them waiting, watching, to see when he would ascend.
When it happened, however, it happened to Callie first, the sky a cauldron of jewel blue alive with white lightning, and all the waters in all the oceans and lakes in the world ice-white fire that sparked and glittered.
She’d always been strong, but now, she glowed with the power of an archangel, and for a single moment in time, they considered whether he could act as her second—but there was a repulsion between them that shouldn’t have existed, and that foretold the future to come. Two archangels couldn’t be in close proximity for long periods of time.
“You will ascend,” she said to him one day a year after her ascension, as they stood side by side in front of a frozen lake high in the mountains of the Refuge, while the mountain winds howled around them. “Will you be my enemy, Alex, or my friend?”
“Friend,” he said at once.
But Caliane shook her head. “I’d like to think so, but the power of an archangel . . . It’s this enormous force within, one that could devour the weaker, and that pushes even the strong. I sometimes wonder if archangels are built for war, if we are the control on the world that ensures none of us ever becomes too settled, too haughty, too much for this land.”
Callie had always been the more introspective of the two of them. Alexander was far more pragmatic. Crouching down, he picked up a piece of shattered ice and slid it across the glossy ice of the lake. “I’ll be your friend because it’ll be advantageous in the long run. Have you not seen that the archangels who’ve ruled the longest are the ones with strong ties to at least one other in the Cadre?”
The Cadre of Ten was full at present, but at least five members were Ancients with one foot already out of this world. Alexander was confident that when they went into Sleep, they wouldn’t come back out for eons upon eons—if ever.
“Sometimes,” his mother had said to him of late, “we live too long. Far beyond our time. We must Sleep and allow the young their time.”