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could handle what she should have known she could not; or because Lorcan was clever and she was grief-stricken and foolish; or because she was forced against her will to grasp the powers of a warlock.
    Anything, she would think, is better than the truth—that I reached for the powers of the Hells so I wouldn’t have to think of something to say to the half-devil stirring up my blood in ways I didn’t want to think about anymore.
    The power poured into her, like slick, dark water filling a basin, and churned through her, stirring through every vessel, every part of her.
    “Say
adaestuo,
” Lorcan said.
    She opened her eyes. “
Adaestuo
.”
    The power seemed to burst into being in the air before her mouth and, channeled by her outstretched hands, streamed across the clearing and exploded against a fir tree with a sickly violet light.
    Farideh stared, agape, at the force of it. The wood had splintered and charred where the blast had struck it, and embers of purple light still scintillated at its edges. A single word and she’d blown off a piece of the tree nearly as large as her head.
    She might never please Mehen with her sword work, she might never rival Havilar’s skill with her glaive, but this … this was breathtaking.
    It was also loud. At the explosion, Havilar sat bolt upright. Mehen did not wake so much as materialize on his feet, falchion in hand. His eyes went straight to the tree, with its ring of strange, purplish embers … and then followed the path of the blast back to Farideh, her hands in Lorcan’s.
    She tried to leap away, to put as much space between her and the cambion as she could, but she couldn’t move. Lorcan had folded his arms around her, as if this were nothing, as if no one were watching, as if Mehen weren’t advancing on him with his bare blade.
    “You were made for this,” he whispered, and kissed her, just under her cheekbone. He vanished, and Farideh lost her balance and fell to the ground under the astonished stares of her sister and guardian.

T HE H IGH R OAD, TWO DAYS SOUTH OF N EVERWINTER
    10 K YTHORN, THE Y EAR OF THE D ARK C IRCLE ( 1478 DR )

(S IX MONTHS LATER )
    T HE WAGON LIMPED ALONG THE H IGH R OAD MORE SLOWLY THAN Brin could have walked, but after well over a month, he was tired of walking. To be honest, he was tired of wagons as well, and ships and horses too. He was tired of moving, and the call from the lead wagon that the caravan had reached the city of Neverwinter couldn’t come soon enough.
    Brin watched the road behind them, stretching on beyond another four lumbering carts of former refugees returning to rebuild the city that had fallen nearly a quarter century ago. He did not see—as he feared—the cloud of dust on the horizon that half-a-dozen knights on chargers would kick up as they pelted along the dirt road.
    This didn’t calm him the way it should have. In fact, the longer he didn’t see any sign of his cousin, Constancia, the more he worried she was just behind the last hill, ready to grab him by the ear and haul him home. He looked up at the clouds hanging in the blue summer sky and wondered if he had made an enormous mistake.
    Constancia would say so: It was irresponsible. It was foolish. It was possibly illegal. And why, she would ask, by the lions of Azoun, Neverwinter?
    The call had gone out halfway across the continent that the Open Lord of Waterdeep was rebuilding Neverwinter out of its shattered ruins, and all her citizens—and their descendants—were encouraged and invited to return. Among the thousands of people filtering in through the city gates, no one would notice one more boy.
    And there was the city’s history—the famed clockworks and fanciful buildings, the artisans whose creations were still prized—that had caught Brin’s attention. And the catastrophic death of the city by earthquake and volcano, that had held it.
    But perhaps most of all, it was far enough away that no one would know who he was or what he’d done or