“It’s a delightful vision,” Cassias said. “He would throw the Lowgold rankings into chaos. In ten or fifteen years, he could grow into a pillar of our Arelius family, and follow me and Jing to the top of the Truegolds.”

Cassias shrugged out of Eithan's arm and turned to look him in the eye. “But he won't be ready in a year. Even if he were, he would be no match for the Jai clan exile.”

Eithan's eyes sparkled. “But you haven't heard about his second Path.”

When Eithan told him, Cassias was speechless for a moment. After a pause, he forced himself to start breathing. The Underlord was just needling him again, to watch him squirm.

“Please don’t worry me like that,” he said at last. “I almost believed you.”

“Then you were almost correct.”

The horrifying possibilities of Eithan’s plan started to creep into Cassias’ mind one by one, but he refused to consider them. “He’s not born of the Blackflame line. He couldn’t handle the madra.”

“Didn’t you wonder why I’d given him a top-grade Bloodforged Iron body?”

“But you can’t get him the aura though, surely, unless you’ve tucked a dragon away…in the…”

He trailed off. Horror dawned on him as he realized where they were going.

Eithan beamed. “Serpent’s Grave. We’re heading right into the dragon’s mouth, as it were.”

…that might work.

Heavens help him, but that might actually work.

“No,” Cassias said, still refusing to acknowledge the truth. “The branch heads will never allow it. The Skysworn will never allow it. The Emperor will never allow it!”

“There’s an old saying about asking forgiveness rather than permission,” Eithan said, “but the essence of it is, ‘I’m going to do what I want.’”

Cassias had given up his spot in the family for Eithan. He’d suffered for Eithan’s mistakes, taken the heat of the family’s anger over Eithan’s childish whims, and hauled his family halfway across the Empire to Serpent’s Grave…and then left them again, because Eithan had wandered off.

But even he had limits.

His shouts woke Fisher Gesha. She made it to the top of the stairs to see the Underlord with a hand over Cassias' mouth, stopping him from calling out to Lindon.

Cassias hadn’t even gotten a chance to draw his sword; Eithan had seen every movement coming, broken his techniques before they formed, broken his stance, and broken the flow of his madra. It had taken him no more effort than scooping up a kitten.

Cassias stopped struggling, his shoulders slumped. There was no standing against an Underlord.

As Lindon and the entire Arelius family would soon realize.

***

It was their last day before landing in the Blackflame Empire, and Lindon was up early to train. Not earlier than Yerin, who was sitting with legs crossed outside the circle of wooden dummies at dawn, already cycling.

And now, this was to be his final attempt at the eighteen-man course before landing in Serpent's Grave. He slipped the parasite ring into his pocket and cycled his madra, standing in front of the first dummy.

He glanced at Yerin so that she would start counting. She nodded. “Run it.”

Lindon moved with a speed born of habit, striking at the targets on the right arm, torso, left arm. Without looking, he raised his forearm to block the counterstrike.

He could hear the bone creak.

The sudden pain was a flash of lightning down his arm, but he'd already moved to the second dummy. The injury cooled just as quickly, his Bloodforged Iron body drawing his madra directly to fuel his recovery.

It had been impossible for him to complete the course. Even if he'd executed each step perfectly, every hit that landed on him took too much of his madra. He'd asked if he could stop the drain, and Eithan had looked at him as though he were crazy. “Can you stop your body from healing? No. That's what bodies do. Yours just does it a little too well.”

With two Iron cores and three weeks of training under the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel, he could barely, just barely, finish the eighteenth dummy.

This run went smoothly all the way up to number sixteen, where he placed his foot too wide and didn't have the footing to take the overhead blow. He blocked with both arms crossed, but he was supposed to stay on his feet. This time, thanks to his misstep, he went down to a knee.

He couldn't allow his last attempt to end in a failure.

Lindon slammed the heel of his hand into the dummy's chin, pushing an Empty Palm through the bottom of the circle and into the center. The madra penetrated, even though the hit had been off-center, and the circle glowed.

He lunged for the next dummy, clearing the last two without incident.

As soon as the last bell rung and the last light shone, he draped himself over the wooden frame, panting and sweating. Both his cores were weak and empty, and it would take him half an hour to refill them even under the effects of the pill.

But that wasn't the important part. He looked to Yerin expectantly.

“Twenty-one, by my count.” She chuckled at his relief as he sagged off the dummy, collapsing to the floor. “That's more than nothing. I'd have been proud of that at Iron.”

“I don’t believe you had a course like this when you were Iron,” Lindon said, lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling.

“No, I had to fight half a dozen starving wolves with a shaving-razor.” She sighed and moved into the center of the ring. “You got a count going?”

He hesitated. “Yerin, we're already there. I don’t mean to suggest anything...”

“Start the count,” she said, steel in her voice.

He started counting.

She leaned into the first dummy, her Goldsign blurring silver. First target green, second target blue, third target white. One-two-three and she was onto the next one. Even with just the bladed arm, she was faster than Lindon.

Yerin complained that she couldn't make the Goldsign do what she wanted it to. Over and over she said that, until Lindon was sick of hearing it. To him, she always looked in complete control.

She reached the ninth dummy in seven seconds, and this one had a target low in the abdomen—where the core would be, in any sacred artist but Lindon—one in the chest, and one in the center of its head. It was one of Lindon's favorites, because it only moved its arms defensively; it never hit him back.

Yerin struck the lowest circle easily, the second a little slow, and her third blow was knocked aside by a wooden hand.

All the previous eight dummies, which had remained lit until then, dimmed slowly as though the light leaked out of them.

She stood there panting, glaring at her wooden enemy, and Lindon thought the red rope around her waist had brightened from dark red to the pure crimson of fresh blood.

Finally, she screamed, her Goldsign striking forward and taking the dummy's head.

She didn't look at Lindon or excuse herself, dropping to the floor right there and beginning to cycle. Her cheeks and throat were flushed with anger, her scars standing out in stark contrast to her red skin.

Lindon was already walking to a box in the corner, which was filled with replacement heads. They'd picked up some extra wood on one of their landings, and every time Fisher Gesha said he needed practical experience, he hollowed one out and filled it with the simple scripts and basic constructs the dummies needed to function.