The Shadow at the Border
The storm had no right to exist. Nox had built it himself, thread by thread, out of malice and old grief and the particular shade of black that lived behind his ribs, and now it rolled over Thistlewood like a verdict. Lightning cracked without thunder. Rain fell upward in places, confused by the wrongness of the magic that summoned it, and the villagers who looked up into that boiling sky knew, in the marrow of their bones, that nothing natural was coming for them.
He rode at the head of his shadow-soldiers with his hood down, because he wanted them to see his face. Fear worked better when it had features to remember.
"They'll have moved the shard by now," Cyrus said beside him, voice pitched low beneath the wind. His horse sidestepped a smoking cart wheel, one of the first casualties of the soldiers who had gone ahead. "Word travels faster than we do, Nox. Some farmer's boy could have run it to the next village an hour before we crossed the ridge."
"Then we'll ask the farmer's boy." Nox did not look at him. His eyes were fixed on the huddle of stone cottages ahead, the crooked church spire, the well in the square where, according to three separate informants and one very…
