Between Life and Death

A girl burns while a raven steals what no one else sees

Sage stands in the Meristone village square, unable to look away as soldiers strap a fourteen-year-old girl to a pyre.

A girl burns while a raven steals what no one else sees

Sage stands in the Meristone village square, unable to look away as soldiers strap a fourteen-year-old girl to a pyre. They cut out the girl's tongue before lighting the kindling—the standard cruelty of a Cleansing, the king's method of purging the Cursed. Among the onlookers, a cloaked male with bottomless black eyes locks gazes with Sage. She tastes his magic on the air—wind that feeds the flames, accelerating the girl's death. Afterward, a raven lands in the ashes and plucks out a glowing glass orb. Sage sees it clearly. Her brother Kaleb, standing beside her, sees nothing. She has always perceived things others cannot—mysterious black feathers, objects only her blind guardian Ezra also perceives. This world devours the different, and Sage carries a secret that could place her on the next pyre.

Sage tries to fight an army alone and is silenced

Crimson banners flood Meristone. Forty-five men stand in rows in the village square, conscripted by royal decree into the king's war against the Cursed rebels. Kaleb is among them—ghastly pale at the end of the back row. Sage screams his name and shoves at the wall of soldiers separating them. Her Water Curse surges, ready to explode. She drops into a fighting stance, prepared to reveal herself to hundreds of soldiers. Then the air vanishes from her lungs. Her body crumples to the cobblestones. Before she blacks out, she sees Kaleb tap two fingers over his heart—their childhood signal meaning both I'm sorry and I love you. She wakes in a stranger's house, in a city she doesn't recognize, wearing someone else's blanket.

The blind woman who raised Sage has been a rebel all along

The stranger is Von—the cloaked male from the Cleansing, shirtless and tattooed and dangerously built. Sage hurls a brass candlestick, then attacks with a water harpoon that slices his arm. He retaliates by cutting off her air again. When she wakes, he tells her she possesses a Dream Curse in addition to her Water Curse, and that Ezra has been keeping secrets. Ezra arrives at Von's house as if she's visited a hundred times—because she has. The cottage trips, the mysterious absences: Ezra has been a Cursed rebel for decades, sacrificing her eyesight to the cause. Von is their best fighter. Sage feels the ground shift beneath everything she believed about her family, but Ezra's explanation lands with inevitability—she trained Sage to fight because this was always her path.