Page 38 of Spark of the Everflame

“Were you attacked?” He pulled up on his reins and whirled his head from side to side, scouring the vegetation for a hidden assailant.

But I couldn’t find anything on my body—no blood, no angry red skin, not even a single point where I could localize the pain. The sensation had radiated from around me like it came from the very air itself.

“I—I’m not sure.”

I glanced over my shoulder, scanning the road. My eyes fell to two circular plaques, one etched with Lumnos’s emblem, a flaming sun inset with a crescent moon, and the other engraved with a sword crossed with a bone, the sigil of Fortos. The golden panels were inset into the Ring Road along the strange demarcation line of grass and rock that marked the Lumnos-Fortos border.

The border. I’d felt the sensation just as we’d crossed it.

“Magic,” I breathed. My shoulders sagged in relief. “Fortos must have set up magical wards along their border.”

Henri frowned. “I didn’t feel anything.”

“Maybe it only affects women,” I grumbled. “Wouldn’t surprise me. Isn’t it the only realm that’s never had a Queen?” I huffed irritably. “How convenient that their precious magic has never found a woman worthy of the Crown.”

“That probably has to do with their magic.” Henri caught my confused look. “You know how every realm has two kinds of magic? Light and shadow in Lumnos, stone and ice in Montios, sea and air in Meros, and so on.”

No, I didn’t know about it at all—and frankly, I wondered how Henri did. The details of Descended magic were never taught to us in mortal schools. But Henri said it with such a casual, flippant tone that I felt suddenly insecure about my ignorance, so I bit my tongue and nodded.

“Well, in the other realms, most Descended get one type of magic or the other. Only the very strongest get both. In Fortos, it works differently. The female Descended always get healing magic, while the male Descended get the power to kill—they can make your body decay right in front of their eyes. Makes them tough to beat in a fight. There are some who aren’t fully male or female and have both types of magic, but I hear that’s rare.”

My nose wrinkled at the idea of one’s gender determining their fate. “Why would that affect how the Crown passes down?”

“Because it passes to the next most powerful Descended.”

“So?”

“So if only the men get the killing magic, they’ll always be the most powerful.”

My head shifted at a tilt, a hint of danger surfacing in my tone. “Because a fighter is more powerful than a healer, right?”

“Right.”

Daggers fired from my steel-silver eyes.

His face blanched. “I mean—no, I didn’t mean—of course not. Healers are strong. Very strong! Just as powerful—morepowerful, even—”

“Next time you come crawling to me with an injury, I sure hope I’m not tooweak and powerlessto treat you.”

He flashed me a sheepish smile. “Would it help if I admit that you could definitely kick my ass in a fight?”

It did. A little.

“I could take Maura, though,” he said.

I snorted. “No, you couldn’t.”

He didn’t answer—too busy looking down at his biceps and flexing them with a frown.

“How do you know so much about Fortos magic?” I asked.

“Know your enemy intimately, remember?”

He shot me a suggestive smirk, and though I gave him the most exasperated eyeroll I could muster, the corner of my lips curled upward.

“Perhaps the bias in their magic carried over into how they run the army,” I said. “All the women who enlist are pigeonholed into roles with no prestige or command.”

I thought of the many times I’d overheard my father’s old soldier friends bemoan that women were “distractions” among the infantry’s ranks. To his credit, my father had always taken them to task for it.

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