If he knew the truth, he would recoil from you in horror.

Ellysetta flinched at the cold whisper that snaked through her mind, taunting her, filling her with doubts. That voice—a voice that sounded more like her own than the High Mage's— was the same that had urged her to weave Azrahn in the Well. Alarmed, she pulled out of Rain's arms. "Ellysetta?"

"I'm all right," she reassured him, taking a quick step to evade his hands. "It's just that the Mage's memories were so vivid." Not a lie. Not the whole truth either, but she wasn't about to admit the ugliness of her dark thoughts in front of these two shei'dalins. "It's unsettling to be that closely connected to evil... to know what pleasure the Mage felt when he enslaved a person's soul.. ." Ellysetta's shudder was entirely genuine. That gloating triumph, that thrill of dark joy as a weaker soul succumbed to the Mage’s domination was disturbing in every way ... but not half so disturbing as her own echo of that thrill. Gods save her.

She forced her features into a mask of calm and tried to deflect everyone's attention, from her. "Teska, let's not dwell on. this. It doesn't matter, in any case. None of what the Mage showed me shed any light on the High Mage's plans.” She infused her voice with a gossamer weave of Spirit to encourage the Fey to turn their attention elsewhere. Spirit was her strongest branch of magic, strong enough that even Rain and Bel admitted she spun a finer weave than they — and they were two of the Fading Lands' most gifted Spirit masters.

Without so much as a blink of suspicion, Rain turned to the vol Oros sisters. "Were you able to learn anything? What were the Mages and dahl’reisen doing here in Orest?"

Narena frowned slightly, but if she sensed a compulsion weave, she gave no other sign of it. "As you already suspect, Feyreisen, they came for your mate. The High Mage has not given up his pursuit of her."

A chill raised the hairs on Ellysetta's arms. Though the shields spun around her each night as she slept kept her dreams free of disturbing nightmares, she never deluded herself that the Mage had decided to leave her in peace. He was not the sort to admit defeat.

"Do not fear, shei'tani," Rain murmured. "He will never see that aim fulfilled."

"Nei, he will not," Bel echoed, his cobalt eyes calm and filled with unwavering certainty.

She turned to the leader of her quintet, who had become her dearest friend over the last months, and for his sake, she forced a smile and pretended a confidence she did not share. Bel meant what he said. He would die to protect her, as would every other lu'tan who had bloodsworn himself to her. But that would not stop the Mage from coming after her.

Rain brushed a caress of warm Spirit against her senses, but kept his gaze fixed on Narena. "What of Koderas?" he asked.

The shei’dalin nodded and folded her hands in her lap, long fingers twining gracefully. She seemed so calm, so perfectly composed. Serene and queenly. Much more so than Ellysetta, the uncrowned and exiled queen of the Fading Lands.

"The fires are lit, as you surmised," Narena confirmed. "The Eld are preparing their invasion force."

"Where does the High Mage intend to strike?"

"An armada will reach the mouth of Great Bay in five weeks' time and move on to Celieria City once King's Point and Queen's Point are destroyed, but that is not the Eld's primary target. The bulk of the forces from Koderas will attack Kreppes." Kreppes was Great Lord Cannevar Barrial's fortress, located where the Azar River flowed into the Heras. "Once they establish a stronghold there—"

"They can bring the full might of his invasion forces across the Heras to conquer the North." Rain's boots clapped on the hard stone floor as he began to pace. "I thought it would be Moreland, Great Lord Sebourne's keep. It's a straight shot down the Selas River from Koderas. Kreppes is less obvious, but still damaging enough if they capture it."

Narena watched him with a sober gaze. "There is more, kem'Feyreisen. This Mage did not know the exact numbers of the Eld army, but every time he thought of it, his mind compared it to the Army of Darkness from the Time Before Memory."

Ellysetta's heart skipped a beat, then resumed at an accelerated pace. Little was known about the Army of Darkness, but all the legends concerning the scouring of the world that had ushered in the dawn of the First Age spoke in awed terms of an army that stretched farther than the eye could see. An army so vast that, even marching nonstop, it would take days to pass through a place. An army that made the earth shake beneath its boots.

An army of millions, filled with dark magic.

Scholars had scoffed at the legends, declaring them a logistical impossibility. The size of the Army of Darkness was a fanciful exaggeration meant to enthrall audiences, they declared. Most credible scholars of the current age even doubted that the cataclysmic battle between the forces of Light and Shadow had ever happened; though they all agreed that some great war had changed the balance of power in the ancient world and ushered in the First Age.

Ellysetta glanced at her shei’tan, and her heart dropped into her belly. Celieria's scholars might have scoffed and sneered at the legends, and dismissed any who dared take them seriously as ridiculous flitter-wits, but Rain did not appear so inclined. If anything, he looked gravely concerned. "Rain? Surely the legends can't be true." She didn't want to believe it possible. "Millions?"

“The legends are true," Bel answered on behalf of his king, "but I doubt this is. How could the Eld prepare an army of millions with none the wiser? Consider how much food it would take to feed so many. How much cloth to clothe them. How many buildings to house them. Someone, somewhere, would have noticed something—increased farming, increased trade. There would have been some indication long before now."