Circle of Shadows (Circle of Shadows, #1)(32)

Daemon went serious too. “Yeah. I’m sure they’re worried sick and trying to keep themselves occupied so they don’t have to think about it. But we’ll—”

“Shh.” Sora stuck out her arm to stop him and his horse. There were voices in the distance, and hooves. Lots of them. “Quick, into the woods,” she said.

They yanked their horses into the trees just in time. A caravan of a hundred or so people appeared on the dirt road coming from somewhere inland.

While Daemon hid the horses farther in the forest, Sora crept back out close to the road, staying hidden in the low shrubbery. She lay on her belly as she pulled out a spyglass.

“Is that them?” Daemon asked, when he crawled up beside her.

Sora trained her glass on the banners above the wagons. They were the yellow-and-green flags they’d spied last time at the Takish Gorge camp. Red canvas peeked out from the carts, possibly tents.

“Yes,” Sora said. “It’s them.”

She moved her spyglass to the people then, part of her hoping to see mere dancers, prancing around as if celebrating by a fire. But instead, she saw actual fire. A sphere of it, nearly eight feet tall, rolling at the head of the caravan.

Her mouth hung open. “Gods . . .”

“What is it?”

Sora let her arm drop and held the spyglass limply to Daemon.

He took it and focused on what she’d been looking at.

“Daggers,” he swore in disbelief. “Are those flames?”

“Unless our eyes are both deceiving us.” It turned out Daemon hadn’t misheard the wolves about enormous spheres of fire.

“There’s . . . a person inside.”

“What?” Sora grabbed the spyglass and peered through it.

Inside the orb, a silhouette marched. Occasionally, the flames parted, and Sora saw the actual woman inside. She was propelling the entire sphere forward.

Holy heavens. What was this magic? It was nothing like what the taigas could do. Every muscle in Sora’s body tensed. “The fire doesn’t even hurt her; it just obeys her. I’m afraid to look at what else is over there.”

“Me too.”

And yet a hard determination crystallized between them. It was a fragile bravery, like thin ice in a pond full of dread. But it was courage nonetheless.

Sora took a deep breath. Then she raised the spyglass to her eye again and scanned the rest of the column of people in the caravan.

Crow’s eye.

A snowball ten feet in diameter rolled after the fire orb, freezing the scorched ground as soon as it touched the dirt and leaving a trail of frost behind.

A small tornado followed the snowball, sucking up the frost. Like with the sphere of flames, there was a person visible inside. He collected the frost and occasionally hurled the snowflakes back out like icy throwing stars.

Never in any of Sora’s studies or even in the myths and legends her mother wrote had Sora heard of magic like this.

Her spyglass focused on a boy gliding on a platform of something wriggling. Sora gagged.

“What is it?” Daemon asked.

She coughed and pointed the spyglass in the direction of the caravan. “Insects,” she said hoarsely. “There’s a boy being carried by a moving platform made of insects. Just like the wolves said.”

Daemon’s eyes widened, and his skin shaded green, as if his body was warring between the shock of disbelief and the desire to throw up.

And at the very end of the procession, two massive, muscled horses carried the last of the mysterious group. Both wore dark green cloaks with hoods that hid their faces from view, but there was a sternness to them that hammered another crack into Sora’s courage.

“Maybe we should go back to the Citadel,” Daemon said. “This isn’t just harmless magic. It’s too big for you and me.”

Sora shivered, but she shook her head. “We already lost them once when we reported back to the Citadel. We can’t lose them again. There’s too much at stake. After what we saw at Paro Village, there’s definitely something bad going on.”

“Then what do you propose we do?”

She lowered the spyglass. “Stick to our plan. Follow them, learn what we can, and then I’m going to kill Prince Gin.”

Sora and Daemon waited for the caravan to pass, then followed as if they were ghosts, disappearing into trees and melting into the shadows. As the sun reached its afternoon peak, they arrived at a fork in the road. One path went farther inland into farm country, the other, out toward the coast. The fire orb at the front of the procession chose the road toward the sea.

“They’re heading to Kaede City,” Daemon said. “How convenient for us.”

Sora nodded. Maybe they could sneak past the caravan once they got closer to the city and report to the taiga outpost.

An hour and a half later, the smell of the ocean blew in from the coast, tingeing the air with brine. Kaede City was a short distance away, a small harbor town with roots in fishing and seafaring.

The caravan stopped in the sparse forest just outside the city. Sora and Daemon ducked behind a cluster of mossy boulders.

One of the cloaked figures rode up from the back of the line.

He removed his hood. The reptilian scars were undeniable.

The man who had burned down the Citadel. Who killed Sora’s sister. Who wouldn’t stop at battlefields soaked in blood in his quest to achieve the Evermore.