Free The Spirit War by Rachel Aaron Page A

different, whatever changed, she was still the master of herself. The demon was still buried. She could feel the rock in her mind keeping him down as clearly as she felt her own arms. The shadows weren’t his doing, but that almost made things worse. The demon she could deal with, but these new visions were alien and frightening. Every time she saw them, which was all the time now, she couldn’t help thinking that maybe she hadn’t been truly rebuilt that day. Maybe something was still missing, something important.
    Maybe she really had gone mad.
    Against her better judgment, Nico opened her eyes and looked up again, past the coiling snake creatures that streaked through the air and up to the sky itself. It was hard to make out under all the movement, but if she stood very still and focused on one spot, there was no mistaking it. There, at the very top of the world, something was moving. Something enormous, something sharp, dragging across the other side of the sky’s dome.
    Fear closed over her like ice, and she slammed her eyes shut. It made little difference. From the moment she’d first seen the things clawing the sky, she could not unsee them. The dread followed her waking and sleeping, eyes open or closed, and through it all a thought went round and round and round her head, like a marble rolling around the inside of a bowl.
    Only mad people saw shapes against the sky.
    She stayed like that for several minutes, eyes shut, forcing her breath to remain calm. Finally, when she’d worked up the courage to open her eyes again, Nico looked over her shoulder at Josef. He was standing at the back of the boat with the Heart in his hands, moving through his stances. His face was blank, eyes half closed.To an outsider, he probably looked bored, a man going through a routine, but Nico had been watching him all her life that she cared to remember. She could tell he was upset as well as if he’d screamed it. It was written all over him: in the tenseness of his footing, the way his hands folded white-knuckled around the Heart’s hilt, the clench of his jaw. Something about this trip to Osera bothered him deeply, and until she found out what, and why, she could not add her fears to that burden, no matter how desperate she got. Whatever had changed in her that day in the valley, nothing could change the fact that Josef was the center of her life. He was her partner, her savior, the one person who had never done her wrong, who had always believed in her even when there was nothing to believe in. Whatever he needed out here in the middle of the sea, she would help him reach it, and no madness, no bizarre other world that crept across the real one would keep her from being whatever he needed her to be.
    That thought alone drove the fear back, and Nico gripped it like a lifeline as she turned again to face the islands rising like swords from the sea.
    Seen on a map, the kingdom of Osera looked like a wall separating the Council’s eastern seaboard from the wild waters of the Unseen Sea. Though even those who lived there called their land “the island,” the kingdom of Osera was not one island, but dozens, a long line of mountaintops rising vertically from the ocean along the Council coast. Most of these islands were uninhabitable, their sloping sides too steep for anything other than sea birds, but at the center of the chain the islands grew wider, and there was room for people, especially on the island of Osera itself.
    Even on its largest island, Osera was like a wall. Over fifty miles long, the main island Osera measured barely twenty miles at its widest point. Dominated by the peak at its center, the island wasconstantly sloping. This slope was long and gentle on the Council side, but steep and short on the side facing the Unseen Sea. Because of this quirk in geography, and the fact that the face the island turned to the open ocean had borne the brunt of the Empress’s attack, the eastern side of the island had been left to