Prologue
BENAT GALLEGO WAS thirteen when he watched his uncle and cousin burn to death.
He had told himself it would be no different from the other burnings. Anxious onlookers would pack the cathedral’s lawn, trampling the grass as they fought to see the spectacle at the end of the yard. Monxes, Church servants clad in heavy black robes, would scurry around the pyres, adding wood, supervising the soldiers who secured posts and readied chains. And Ben would watch in quiet horror from the shadow of Grace Neus Cathedral, the stained-glass windows in its towers feeling far too much like the Pious God’s judgmental eyes.
But as Ben stood in the yard, soldiers blocking him from the raucous crowd, he knew this was different. It had been different from the moment his father had passed the sentence—not just as Asentzio Elazar Vega Gallego, King of Argrid, Eminence of the eternal Church, but as a man condemning his brother for heresy.
Ben’s mind refused to reconcile the sentence with the happy memories he had of his uncle Rodrigu. The man who had chased him and his cousin Paxben around the palace when they were younger, long limbs like sticky spiderwebs catching Paxben in a delirium of giggles; the man who had pinned the silver Inquisitors seal to Ben’s tunic in front of the reverent royal court a month ago.
That Inquisitor ceremony had been the proudest day of Ben’s life. He had stood in the cathedral, ready to join the society that judged crimes by the Pious God’s doctrine. Paxben would have been inducted when he was thirteen, and one day would take his father’s place as the High Inquisitor, while Ben would be king and leader of the Church like his own father.
That was an impossible dream now, destroyed by Rodrigu’s sins.
Ben’s chest bucked, a sob threatening to send him to his knees.
“Your uncle and cousin are traitors,” Elazar had told him. “Traitors to Argrid, for giving money to the rebels on Grace Loray. Traitors to the Pious God, for dealing in the Devil’s magic that comes from that island. For that, we must expunge their souls.”
“But he was my teacher,” Ben whispered now, as if reliving the conversation could change the present. “He taught me about Grace Loray’s magic. He taught me which plants were good and which were evil. He knew evil. He can’t be a tool of the Devil. He can’t be.”
Around him, the crowd’s noise united in one chanted hymn:
“Purity, to live a life divine. Honesty, that our souls may shine. Chastity, a pureness sure. Penance, humble and demure. Charity, to share his heart. The five pillars of the Pious God, ours to embrace, ours to start.”
Ben’s lungs filled with lead. He’d sung this hymn beside his cousin during services. Paxben had always been pitchy, but once he realized how hard Ben had to fight to keep from laughing, he started making his voice squeak on purpose. They’d stand side by side, Ben trying to sing around his chuckling, and Paxben squawking so off-key that Ben imagined the statues of the sainted Graces covering their marble ears.
The hymn ended, shattering Ben’s concentration. He forced his eyes open.
His uncle was being led out to the first pyre. His cousin would soon follow.
They had been caught buying and selling harmful magic from Argrid’s colony of Grace Loray. Rodrigu had connections to the rebels there. He’d encouraged the spread of the Devil’s magic in Argrid. And he’d roped Paxben into it.
Ben looked over his shoulder, running his tongue across salty lips. On the steps of the cathedral, his father stood in vibrant orange robes that symbolized Grace Aracely, the saint who embodied the Pious God’s pillar of penance.
Elazar stared at the unlit pyres with utter conviction in his eyes. No remorse. No sorrow.
A gust of wind brought the heady stench of soot, ash, and embers that permanently lingered in this yard, a tribute from decades of purging evil. Ben faced the pyres, because he was Benat Elazar Asentzio Gallego, and he would take his father’s place one day. The Pious God had chosen him to lead.
But I loved Rodrigu. I loved Paxben.
I loved them both so much that it must make me evil, too.
At eleven years old, Adeluna Andreu had been a soldier for a year.
The dim New Deza tavern was filled to the rafters with patrons—which in this area of Grace Loray’s capital meant stream raiders. Their body odor mixed with the humidity, and as Lu ran an oily rag over an empty table close to the rear exit, she held her breath.
“We need to know if the raiders are willing to join the revolution,” her mother had instructed as she readied Lu to leave the safe house. “We’ve heard rumors they are gathering, but . . .”
“I don’t bring back rumors. I bring back information,” Lu had said, parroting the words her parents had taught her. The other children of the revolutionaries had watched her with wide eyes between the stairwell railings, and their fear straightened Lu’s spine even now.
She would bring back the right information. She would do whatever her parents needed her to do to send the Argridians back across the ocean, where they belonged.
Raiders bellowed drunkenly at a nearby table and Lu jumped, fingers clenching around the rag. She could feel the ghost of her father’s hand on her back, encouraging her to pick up any information she could grab like scraps dropped from the patrons’ plates.
One table seemed to be the focus of the room’s attention. The other raiders cut their eyes to it every so often, keeping their weapons handy and their postures alert.
Lu eased closer to that table, wiping her rag on the bar along the back wall.
“Which way you leanin’?” asked a pale man with sharp blue eyes, crocodile-skin bracers, and wooden toggles in his blond beard. “The rebels been pesterin’ you too, huh?”
“Can’t get rid of them,” said a round man with golden-brown skin and wide, dark eyes. Lu saw a tattoo on his cheek—two vertical dots over two horizontal ones.
That was a symbol of the four gods worshipped by the Mainland country of Tuncay. And Lu had seen people like the blond man all over New Deza, the center of the territory that the Mecht stream raider syndicate had claimed on Grace Loray.
When settlers first arrived, this empty jungle island, so far from the Mainland, had sat unclaimed by any king or emperor for more than a century. It was a place of possibility and freedom—until Argrid made the island its colony.
Four raider syndicates arose in response, made up of the immigrants from the other countries who called Grace Loray home: the Mechtlands, Tuncay, Emerdon, and Grozda. The separate syndicates protected their own from Argrid with blood and pistols, Lu’s parents said—but the revolution was about all the groups on Grace Loray starting their own country together. And until now, the raiders hadn’t wanted to unify.
But Lu was looking at people from two of the four syndicates, talking with each other.
Her pulse galloped.
“The Church has burnin’s up at their missions. Burn the plants; burn the people,” the Tuncian was saying. He took a swig from a stein. “I knew Argrid’d go and turn on us, but what’s stopping the revolutionaries from overthrowing Argrid and ruling Grace Loray just as bad?”
“I don’t trust ’em.” The Mecht raider stood and slammed his fist on the table, sending his own stein of ale toppling in a waterfall of amber liquid. “I’d rule Grace Loray better than any revolutionaries. Us Mecht raiders should take control!”