The battle that followed was brief, brutal, and entirely unlike anything Sable's force had clearly prepared for. Whatever intelligence she had gathered during her reconnaissance, it had evidently failed to account for exactly how far the twins' training had progressed in the weeks since her scouts first observed the fortress.

Elara moved first, channeling the raw, ferocious power she'd spent weeks learning to control into a focused burst that scattered three of Sable's fighters without causing the kind of lasting harm her earlier, untrained fury might have inflicted — precise, deliberate, exactly the mastery Liora's training had demanded of her. Her small face carried fierce concentration rather than fear, the...