The sound woke Ren Vale two hours after midnight.
It wasn’t the thunder of an artillery engine, nor the alarm shout of Lord Ren’s sentries on the upper low roof wall.
It was a cry that sounded like a violin string snapping under five hundred pounds of tension. A high, piercing sound shriek that cut through the thick red clay of the firing chamber and set the teeth shaking in Ren’s jaw.
Ren scrambled off his wool blanket. His stiff thirty-year-old knees struck the dirt floor with a dull ache. He ignored the throbbing protest in his cedar-braced right knuckles, lunging across the dark hearth toward the corner where Mira slept.
Mira had fallen from her firing stool onto the red clay.
She was curled on her left side, her small boots kicking against the dirt in reflex spasms. Her charcoal wool shawl had slipped from her shoulders, exposing the front of her linen tunic.
Through the thin white cloth, a terrifying, many-sided soft glow blazed.
The smoky quartz that had earlier claimed her right arm and collarbone was no longer stationary. It was spreading across her chest like frost racing across a frozen windowpane. See-through, razor-sharp crystals were pushing through the deep skin of her chest bone, crawling leftward across her ribs toward her heart.
