Page 2 of The Sundered Realms

She kept her expression perfectly bland, merely raising her eyebrows in return, not rising to his unsubtle bait. She was hardly that poorly trained.

And honestly, it was a great question. Mockery aside, Liris wished she could have gotten away with asking it herself.

Because her secret was not that Liris was far and away the best candidate in generations, though she was. That was a secret, because as long as they kept her trapped in Serenthuar’s citadel, no one outside her teachers would ever know. Even she found herself doubting, sometimes.

Those were the times she wondered if her secret was making her crazy, or if knowing she had it was all that kept her sane, and patient; kept her from casting aside everything she’d been raised to defend out of sheer frustration.

Because the foreigner was rude but absolutely correct: she should have been out there. Serenthuar didn’t train the top ambassadors in the Sundered Realms for nothing.

Serenthuar was one of the unluckiest realms to come through the Sundering, which, centuries ago, had shattered a once-whole world into pocket dimensions, each realm magically tethered to at least one other by a Gate that people and goods could pass through. Most realms were either close to self-sustaining or had enough Gates to make up the difference with imports.

But Serenthuar had only one known portal, and little arable land among its sands.

Fortunately, even before the Sundering they had been known for their craftsmanship, and the elders had doubled down on this: nearly every citizen had to devote themselves to those crafts. Crafts simultaneously expensive enough to bring in a lot of money to buy food, and small enough to not take much space going through the Gate and in so doing occupy space needed to physically take in food.

Serenthuar’s known lack of Gates put them in a difficult negotiating position, but negotiating was the only way to keep afloat. Their ambassadors trained to be the best because they had to be, and they were the realm’s pride as much as their art.

Except for Liris.

“Candidate Liris’ skills require special consideration,” Omaqil said, a useless answer that didn’t surprise her.

What did was the lack of reproach for the outsider’s tone; it wasn’t like Omaqil to let anything pass.

“For your purposes,” the elder continued, “her skills also happen to be uniquely suited.”

Liris hardly dared breathe, hope a painful bolt in her chest.

Was she finally, finally going to get her chance after all, when she’d nearly given up hope?

Elder Omaquil said, “One of her accomplishments is the translation of a lost language called Thyrasel, which has elements a caster might find particularly useful.”

Okay, ‘translation’ was not the most accurate description; decoding an ancient language involved overlapping knowledge, but they weren’t the same skill.

But Liris was far more interested in the implication that the foreigner was an adept spellcaster, and that he needed something from Serenthuar. From her. What were the elders up to?

And that thought twisted that budding hope in her chest, freezing it like a stone. Because she hadn’t had any notion this was coming, and while it was true that the elders were also highly trained and Liris was isolated a lot of the time, the fact that she didn’t have any idea what this was about meant that they still didn’t trust her.

Which did not bode quite as well for this assignment with a foreign spellcaster.

Serenthuar was severely restricted in the amount of outside training their casters could receive, and their ambassadors trained to notice pattern iterations that could prove useful in parleying with foreigner spellcasters for knowledge they could bring back.

So what spellcraft could Serenthuar not cast themselves that was worth trading her knowledge for, that they’d held in reserve for so long?

For the first time, the caster turned the intensity of his gaze on Liris, causing her breath to catch.

But what arrested her and had her fighting to keep her expression even was not his singular focus, but the glinting black earring in the shape of flame. She hadn’t been able to see it before through his hair, and no wonder.

Black flame was the unofficial symbol for people who served demons, shadowy beings that existed in the space between realms and whose only goal was to devour everything alive.

Liris thought rapidly. All the realms she’d have guessed as options for the stranger’s homeland were stridently opposed to demons, so he likely wasn’t a government representative. So Serenthuar was selling her twenty-three years of training to a private individual?

On one hand, that meant he must be incredibly powerful in his own right. She knew what she was worth.

Which was why she was utterly crushed, because it also meant they never had any intention of sending Liris out into the world to fulfill her duty, and her dream.

For just a moment, Liris thought that if a portal to the void opened beneath her feet, she would let it simply suck her away.

And then into her spiraling despair, the demon servant said, “All right, Candidate Liris. Impress me.”

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