THE JAY

Nikolai has spent his life watching skyships carve bright wakes between worlds, certain he was meant to sail among them. He was born a Vandal: an orphan of the war, without coin, crest, or name.

The Academy for Military Might and Exploration stands at the heart of Edendale, on Bacima's coast, and for six years it was his way out. He learned strategy and doctrine and bladework beside heirs and prodigies, and he trained for the day the Cauldron would reveal the power in his blood, praying that Nikolai the Vandal might die at its altar and someone worth remembering might rise in his place.

Instead, it finds nothing. No affinity, no house, no god who will claim him, and a contradiction the Academy cannot account for: he has risen among cadets born with powers he does not have.

Then the war reaches the gates, and the Academy's finest are handed an impossible mission. Board a skyship, cross the black between worlds, bring back relics older than any crown, said to be able to end a war a thousand years old. The farther they sail, the less that war resembles the history they were taught.

The Magistrates watch every move they make from behind gold masks with no eyes in them, and the Coalition has lied about what waits at the end of the crossing. The war has older ghosts than either. Trence, the floating city the Magistrates ruled from, fell out of the clouds before any of these cadets were born, and the Coalition says the cloaked figure who brought it down fell with it.