“I have something to show you,” Elani said, appearing at my door. I was eager to be out of bed, so she took my hand and we slipped out into the bright morning.

“Where are we going?”

She smiled at me but wouldn’t divulge any details. “How’s your chest?” she asked instead.

“Better. I don’t think it’ll ever be back to normal, though. It feels scarred.”

“I’m sorry.”

We walked barefoot along one of Forest’s End’s grassy roads. Graceful palms grew in clusters everywhere I looked, their slender stems holding aloft leafy crowns twice as tall as any I’d ever seen in the Pebblewood. A waterfall fell into a shallow pool at one end of the town, which drained away into a small river running between the town’s many flat-topped cliffs.

At one end of town, the pool collected in a pond where adults washed clothes and children splashed. The Keléri children were tiny enough to make Oman’s little sister look like an Isvir in comparison. Elani guided me away from the lower part of town and to a middle region where rocky, grass-topped ledges sheltered the wood, wicker, and hide structures of Forest’s End.

“Wait here,” Elani said. She ducked into a doorway in one of the cliffs.

I crossed my arms, then unfolded them again. A minute passed, then another.

Elani appeared in the doorway again, hurrying toward me with something wrapped in her arms. After a moment, I recognized the foliather baldric and matching belt of my sword.

“Ren,” Elani said. “I know you never officially earned your sword…” here she adopted a ceremonious gravitas, “but as your elder – ”

Oh please, I signed, and rolled my eyes.

“– I consider it within my ability to officially grant you this blade, in honor of your deeds in service of your Tribe and the island, so that none may mistake you for a child of fledgling wisdom. Step forward, Ren of …”

“Of the Eidenhall,” I offered.

“Ren of the Eidenhall, and accept this sword. May it represent your new status as a…”

“Man?” I shrugged.

“…as a man of marrying age.”

My hand paused over the leather-wrapped hilt of the weapon. “What?”

“I don’t know, isn’t that the whole point of the ceremony? It’s not like you’re an adult yet, but you’re not a kid anymore, either. ‘Adolescent’? Look, you can marry people now! That’s cool, right?”

“You’re kind of bad at this,” I laughed.

“Just take the spitting sword.”

I pulled the blade from its sheath and gasped. Elani had it restored to perfect condition. The dented, chipped blade looked better than it had on that first night in my family’s room, the sunlight giving the burnished bronze a luster like gold.

“Wait. It’s different.”

“I hope that’s okay?” She shifted from one foot to the other. “I showed the brownsmith a drawing of the bluemoths for the, um, part there where the blade meets the grip. I thought it would be a good reminder of everything”

The weapon’s guard had been reshaped from a simple, round stop to two pairs of flared “wings” jutting out perpendicular to the blade. A small rainguard decorated to look like a moth’s face completed the effect. The brownsmith had even etched two feathery “antennae” to curve away from the rainguard.

“Elani, I – ” I shook my head. “This is incredible. I don’t know what to say.”

“So you like it?”

“I love it.” I took the baldric from her hands and dropped the sword into it, then pulled Elani into a hug. “Thank you. I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”

Elani suffered the hug for a second before squirming. “I just thought a sword that’s killed two kro’daka in less than a week probably needs to look the part. Think your father will be mad he didn’t get to present it to you himself?”

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“I think at this point he’d just be glad to have me back home.”

I strapped the baldric to my hips and shifted the sword so it rested at my lower back as we strolled down one of the narrow roads.

“You never finished telling me what your next move is going to be,” Elani said.

I took a breath, almost forgetting I didn’t have to cut it short anymore. “Well. Yesterday I told you about how I think I figured out the kavi, right?”

“Instead of telling me why you can’t go home, yes.”

“I was building up to that. But I thought some more about it all, too. I’m still not sure what the purple flash was, but I think I know the exact moment I did use the spirit.”

Go on, she signed. We followed the path around a dense thicket of bamboo cultivated in a perfect circle and continued toward the top of the waterfall.

“See, the passive effect was that I could sense and talk to spirits, and we established that Verdegath was controlled, somehow, by a warped spirit, which is how I could talk to him.

“After the flash, though, I thought the kavi had vanished. It disappeared, anyway, so at first I assumed I had used it. But Verdegath was about to kill me, and I shouted at it – thinking Verdegath was simply reading my mind – and he obeyed.”

“He obeyed? What did you do, tell him to kill me, instead?”

“I told him no, and he actually stopped. He was about to kill me, Elani, and he paused.”

The path steepened. It was little more than a hill, yet I started panting anyway even though less than two weeks ago I could run up mountains. To our left, the ground abruptly fell away, forming one of the cliff walls that wrapped around the waterfall pool like a C. We were hardly more than two dozen strides up.

“You’re sure it’s not because I distracted him?” Elani asked.

“I’m certain. He stopped mid-lunge. I commanded him to.”

“Okay, so your spirit can also be used to control other spirits. Pretty good for monster-slaying, I guess, but not much else. You’re just going on a weird tangent again, though. What does this have to do with you going home?”

We reached the top of the cliffs surrounding the pool. Ahead and to our left the river meandered across the top of the plateau before hurtling over the edge.

“Well,” I said, and took a deep breath. I peered over the edge of the waterfall, then stepped out of view from the swimmers below. “That’s the thing. The spirit never left.”

I lifted a palm and the purple spirit materialized from it. A kiwi-sized orb of deep, majestic purple covered in a faint layer of swirling, lavender mist. It took its place near my shoulder and started to orbit like a tiny moon.

Elani’s eyes lit up with surprise, awe, and violet.

“Ren,” she breathed. “Do you have any idea what that means?”

“Yeah. It means I’m a lot more like Vazira the Flame than I thought. It means I’m a Paragon.”

“It means you just became instrumental to Akor Shi’kai’s plans.”

“Exactly. I can’t return home, not yet. News that a purple kavi has finally been found is already spreading, and sooner or later someone is going to let slip it belongs to a person from Eiden.”

I pulled on the little spider’s silk tether binding me to the spirit – to the Familiar – and it vanished once more.

Elani sat down heavily on one of the stone shelves dotting the top of the cliff. “It makes a lot more sense now why you couldn’t just bottle the thing,” she said after a moment.

“And why I was never any good at catching other spirits. They say all the other Paragons were the same way. Do I really need to wear this all the time, though?” I lifted a hand up, shaking the bracelet on my wrist. The crystal had dimmed since I’d first discovered it.

“All the Paragons needed to, as far as I know. To own a Familiar does not come without cost.”

“Wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I could at least detach from the spirit to sleep, or something.”

Elani stood back up. “Speaking of which, it seems you’ve defaulted on our deal, son of the Eidenhall.”

I snorted. “That makes me sound like some adventurer out of The Ballad of Tanamari and Ru. Son of Nora, how about that? Or Gerek.”

Elani grinned. “Jazeya. Elani Jazeya.”

“Well, Ms. Jazeya,” I said, testing the sound of her family name, “I think you and I are not going to be going home for a little while longer.”

“You can’t hide forever, you know. Not this. It’s too big.”

“Not forever. Just until the danger of Akor Shi’kai and his fanatics dies down. Eventually someone’s going to catch another violet kavi. Besides, if he truly is using them to awaken the gods, he’s going to need a lot more than one.”

“Unless he finds you, Ren.”

I remembered the figure in sleeveless silk robes standing in the trade street. I remembered it all, from the prophecies of doom to the fabled purple spirit of midnight. But I remembered my father as well, and his wisdom.

No matter the wonders he promised, I knew I could not trust the Stranger.