Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One by Karina Sumner-Smith Page A

since she’d seen him last, his clothes rumpled and shoulders weighted by untold weariness. A man who stared at her unspeaking.
    The silence grew to fill the space between them and expanded, like a great bubble where speech and movement died. It expanded into the empty room behind him and the hall to either side, compressing Xhea’s chest until she felt that even breathing was an intrusion.
    Still the magic urged her on, whispering: Here. Here. Here.
    “I’m here . . .” she started hesitantly, only to be interrupted.
    “I know,” he said, his voice heavy. Such rage. Such exhaustion. “I know why you’re here.”
    I don’t , she thought. Not anymore .
    He stood back and gestured for her to enter, then closed the door softly behind her. Xhea looked around the tiny apartment. Bare walls, bare floor: this, she realized, wasn’t anyone’s home. It smelled stuffy and faintly metallic, bringing a bitter taste to the back of her throat. Carefully, she folded her knife and slipped it into a pocket. This was not a resurrection—she knew that now with perfect certainty—but she was no closer to understanding.
    “My daughter must have spoken to you, to tell you we were here.”
    “Yes,” Xhea said. “I mean, we spoke, but she had problems remembering.”
    Shai’s father ran his hand through his hair, then rubbed his eyes. “But you’re here now. Please tell me that you know how to free her.”
    “Free her?” Xhea asked.
    His expression darkened, then he shook his head. “It’s easier, somehow, to think of it that way. Free. Release. Kill. It’s all the same in the end. Just tell me you know what to do.”
    “But—” Xhea said and stopped, the words She’s already dead caught between tongue and teeth. Instead she asked slowly, haltingly: “Where is she?”
    She already knew the answer. Tether and magic alike pulled her, called to her.
    Here. Here. Here.
    But she was suddenly afraid, so afraid. She walked in the direction that Shai’s father pointed: down a dark, narrow hall toward a single closed door at its end. Xhea kept her hand steady as she pushed the door open—but only just.
    There in the bed lay the body they had sought. It lay still, dressed in a thin nightgown and draped with a white sheet, leaving only arms and face exposed, skin pale as any drowned corpse. Those arms were thin, and the shoulders, all so wasted that Xhea felt she could count the bones beneath. Pale hair spread across the pillow, surrounding a gaunt face—a nightmare’s version of the one she had come to know.
    No , Xhea thought. Not it: her . For the body’s chest rose and fell in the slow and faltering rhythm of natural breath.
    “Shai?” Xhea’s breath caught in her throat.
    It was only then that she realized that the room was unlit, curtains drawn tight over the narrow window on the far wall. It was Shai who lit the space: she glowed, her body laced with so many spells that her flesh was incandescent. The shadows shifted as she breathed. Looking at her, the shock wasn’t that Shai was dying; only that someone so wasted could live at all.
    Xhea walked to the bedside and knelt, and now nothing could stop her hands from trembling. “Shai,” she whispered again, and Shai opened her eyes.
    Xhea caught no more than a glimpse of pale irises before Shai’s eyelids fluttered closed. Cracked lips parted. Shai’s voice was faint and rough with pain, faltering as she struggled to say, “Hello, Xhea . . . I’m sorry for leaving.”
    “It’s okay. I found you anyway.”
    “Yes,” Shai said, the word a mere sigh. “Yes.”
    Carefully, Xhea examined Shai’s body, shifting her focus to see the magic more clearly. There were spells there—the spells that she must have seen reflected in the ghost—so many, so layered and so bright that Xhea struggled to find meaning in them at all. But it was Shai herself, she realized, that shone with that dazzling light. Shai was filled with magic, pure and strong. It rose seemingly from