Emeralis Veilborne knelt between her parents' bodies and swore she would end the war that made her. Two soldiers had left them in the dirt outside the hut. One wore the black cloak of the shadow hunters. One wore the gray robe of the sorcerers. Enemies. Yet they had fought side by side to protect her, and they had lost. She wiped blood from her father's cheek. Her green hair fell over both faces like a curtain. Her katana lay beside her, still clean. She had frozen when the killers struck. She would not freeze again. "You shouldn't be here." The voice came from the doorway of the small wooden hut. A girl stepped out, blue and black braids swinging, water swirling above her open palm. Koral From The Deep. She had pulled Emeralis from the river weeks ago and taught her the acid spells that hollowed stone. The only friend Emeralis had left. "They found us," Emeralis said. "Both sides. Together." Koral crouched across the bodies from her. Her water settled back into the flask at her hip. "Then you know what you are now." "I don't know anything." "Yes, you do." Koral touched the father's gray sleeve, then the mother's black cloak. "He was a sorcerer. She hunted his kind. They hid you because your blood carries both. A hybrid." She said the word like a wound. "The law on both sides is the same. Someone like you cannot be allowed to live." Emeralis stood. Her legs shook. "That's why the two of them came together. To kill me." "To kill all three." Koral rose too. "You were the target. Your parents were in the way." The truth landed harder than the grief. Emeralis pressed her hand to the arcane bloom tree beside the hut. Vines answered her touch and coiled up her arm. Acid dripped green from her fingertips and hissed on the ground. Her parents' magic. Both bloodlines, alive in her hands. "They'll send more," Koral said. "When these two don't return." Emeralis looked at the river winding past the hut, bright and calm. She could run downstream and hide for a year. Maybe two. Then they would find her again. They would always find her. So she chose the harder road. She lifted her katana and cut a strip from her father's gray robe. She cut a second strip from her mother's black cloak. She tied both around her wrist, sorcerer and hunter, knotted into one. "I'm not going to hide," she said. "Both sides want me dead for being proof their war is a lie. So I'll prove it. I'll find whoever ordered this and end the war they're feeding." Koral studied the knotted cloth. Then she filled her palm with water again. "Then we bury your parents. And we start moving before dawn." Emeralis knelt and began to dig.