Chapter OneGuinevereThe bandits had fallen upon them in the middle of the night, and all the guards were dead.
Guinevere crouched inside the wagon, watching through a hole in the side of the canvas bonnet as the bandits picked through the ruined camp. For some reason, this was the only thought running through her mind—that all the guards were dead. She had not learned any of their names since setting out from Rexxentrum, and now she never would.
There were five of them, which was the most her parents could afford to hire. She’d seen each guard fall to the onslaught of blades and arrows through the same canvas-edged hole, her screams stifled into the mound of her palm. According to her parents, it wasn’t proper to converse with the hired help, which was why she hadn’t. But she should have known the names of the men who’d died for her.
Didn’t they deserve that much, at least?
No point wondering what corpses deserve. The voice in her head was the guttural hiss of newly lit coals crackling to life. Guinevere fought it as hard as she could, but it was like trying to hold back a sneeze. Her eyes watering, she left her bedroll and slowly retreated deeper into the wagon.
“Check inside!” someone barked, most likely the gigantic orc who had led the charge into the clearing and lopped one guard’s head clean off his shoulders with an equally gigantic greataxe. “Let’s see what we have!”
Guinevere scooted backward over the wooden boards until she could go no farther. She heard the panicked lowing of Bart and Wart and the restless stomping of their hooves on the forest floor as the bandits approached. Her parents’ oxen were tethered to the trees beside the wagon, and she hoped with all her heart that the bandits would leave the poor beasts alone. Most likely, though, Bart and Wart were as doomed as she was.
You aren’t doomed. Teinidh of the Wailing Embers raked her fiery claws through the scorched recesses of Guinevere’s soul. You have me. Set me free. Let me burn.
“No,” Guinevere whispered. She reached back, her hand closing over the lid of the pearwood trunk that had been so carefully transported over the Amber Road the last few days, along with the supplies for the journey and the wares that her parents would sell once she met them at the port city of Nicodranas.
Fire was uncontrollable; if Teinidh was unleashed, everything would be destroyed. The trunk—its contents—were too precious to risk.
Guinevere tried to calm herself with a series of slow, deep breaths. It was heightened emotion that called the wildfire spirit forth. If she could just tamp down on the fear . . .
The faint moonlight streaming into the wagon was blocked out by a host of figures peering inside. While the leader was an orc—Guinevere spied his hulking frame in the distance, trampling over the campfire that the guards had made to ward off the autumn chill—the rest of the bandits were human, garbed in pilfered, mismatched armor. One was wearing a helmet, still wet with blood, that Guinevere recognized as having belonged to her guard. She gave an involuntary shudder, and the slight movement drew the men’s attention.
“Well, well.” One bandit squinted at the flowing, lavishly embroidered hem of Guinevere’s white silk nightgown. “If it isn’t a lady, done up so fine.”
“Let’s see if she’s got any jewelry on her,” another bandit eagerly suggested.
She let the men drag her out of the wagon. There were six of them, and their rough hands bruised her arms while she shook like a leaf and tried not to look at the dead guards strewn about the clearing. Teinidh scrabbled at the walls of her mind, insistent, hungry for the kill.
Now, now, now! Until there are only cinders, until the wind scatters them to Tal’Dorei and beyond.
No. Guinevere squeezed her eyes shut. Please. She didn’t want to destroy the trunk, didn’t want to hurt Bart and Wart, didn’t want her parents to blame her for making things worse. I must be braver. I will be braver.
Yet fear surged within her like the inferno that she was trying so hard to suppress.
The bandits hauled her farther away from the wagon and closer to their leader but stopped when the one wearing the bloodstained helmet noticed the thin silver chain around her neck, glowing in the moonlight.
“Bet this is real silver,” he mused as he and the other men surrounded her, flashing identical avaricious grins.
“What’s the holdup, Symes?” the orc standing in the remains of the campfire demanded. “Bring her to me!”
“In just a minute, Lashak.” Symes’s grimy fingers brushed against Guinevere’s neck as he gripped the chain. She bit her tongue so as not to cry out in fright. “Want to see what pretty trinket milady brought us.”
He gave a none-too-gentle tug, freeing the rest of the necklace from where it had slipped beneath her nightgown’s bodice. The bandits had clearly been expecting a valuable gem of some sort; they blinked in consternation at what was dangling from Symes’s fist on the fine loops of metal.
It was a tiny sparrow skull, set in a bed of white-speckled brown feathers. A hole had been drilled on the skull’s top and packed with soil, from which sprouted a lacy green fern, lashed securely to its miniature container by intricate silver knots.
“Doesn’t look like an aristocrat’s pendant to me,” remarked another bandit, scratching his bearded chin. “Looks more like one of ’em wild mage totems . . .”
They were going to figure out what she was, perhaps as soon as they drew their next breaths. And when they did, they would kill her, because she was too dangerous to keep alive. “Sometimes I think she’s better off dead,” her father had said once, when he didn’t realize Guinevere was within earshot.
Better off dead—but she didn’t want to die—
Panic combined with Guinevere’s fear, swirling and igniting, higher and higher. The dam burst. The bones and feathers of her totem shook. The soil had been dug up from the same fire-razed forest where she’d been born, and it fed her, fed the power she hadn’t asked for, her eyes flashing as the connection to another plane was wrenched open.
The connection that had been forged the day she emerged into the world, red-cheeked and squalling and covered in her mother’s water, while the woods her parents were traveling through disintegrated into ash all around them.
Now, twenty years later, in another forest halfway across the continent of Wildemount, Teinidh appeared beside Guinevere, blazing and statuesque, her humanoid body made of intertwined burning branches, eyes like molten craters and hair a crown of flames.
The bandits’ jaws dropped, and they hastily began backing away. It was the last thing the six of them did in this life, other than scream as the wildfire spirit swept through their circle in a vicious red-gold blaze. The putrid, sickly sweet odor of charred flesh filled the night air.
By the time it was over, Guinevere swayed unsteadily in the middle of a ring of smoldering bodies blackened beyond recognition. Teinidh was gone, but the conflagration remained. Leaves and underbrush caught on fire, and flames swiftly licked their way toward the surrounding trees.
The bandit leader had been too far away to get caught up in Teinidh’s attack. He was still far away, rooted to the spot, gawking at Guinevere. She turned and fled—not to safety, but to her parents’ flailing oxen. The act of summoning Teinidh had sapped her of strength, but she picked up one of the dead guards’ swords and, with what little might she still possessed, brought it down over the ropes that tied Bart and Wart to the already smoking tree trunks.
The two oxen bolted as soon as they were free, no thought left to them but to escape the inferno. As they vanished into the darkness, Guinevere stumbled back to the wagon—the fire hadn’t reached it yet; she had to save the trunk—
A meaty fist tangled in her long, loose hair, spinning her around with enough force that she was vaguely surprised her neck didn’t snap. With all his subordinates dead, Lashak roared in fury, raising his free hand to strike her. Guinevere’s meager courage vanished, and she closed her eyes again, bracing herself for the blow.
But it never came.
When she dared to look, an arrow was sticking out of the bandit leader’s spade-sized palm.
The orc seemed as startled as she was. For what felt like ages, the two of them could only stare at the projectile, which had sliced clean through Lashak’s hand.
The spell was broken when a deep, resonant, and thoroughly bored voice drifted into their ears over the sputter of burning leaves: “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”
Copyright © 2025 by Thea Guanzon. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
