Excerpt from Strike the Zither by Joan He, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She's not the sister from my dream.

"Steady, Zephyr," she coaches as I lunge against her grip.

Gasp by gasp, I release my disappointment. Tourmaline, in turn, releases me. She hands me a waterskin. I clutch it, hesitating. Water will wash the name from my tongue, the name I haven't spoken in six years.

Ku.

But the dream wasn't real, and when Tourmaline says, "Drink," I do.

Tourmaline sits back. Dried mud cakes her silver armor. "You, Zephyr, are god-blessed," she says, and I cough on a mouthful of water. "That, or you did something good in a previous life."

Reincarnation and gods are both the stuff of peasant myths.

"I reached you seconds before the wheels of a wagon did," Tourmaline continues, stoic. I could have done without the image, but if anyone had to find me on the ground, better it be Tourmaline than Lotus or Cloud. Those two would have squawked about it to everyone and their mothers. On the subject of everyone—

My gaze darts to my surroundings. We're in a tent; it's night; something gamey is roasting outside. All good signs we weren't decimated by Miasma.

Still, I need to hear it to be sure. "We made it to Hewan?"

Tourmaline nods. "Exactly ten li, a mountain, and a river away from Miasma's forces. The rain came just as you said it would. It'll take them at least a day to clear a path, four to go around."

"Lotus?"

"Will be the talk of the empire. Think lots of drums and bellowing. Miasma's generals ran so fast, you'd think we had a hidden force of ten thousand."

I choke down some more water. Good. Miasma is the paranoid type. She'll hear the war sounds, see the difficult terrain, and think ambush. A maneuver like that requires more forces than we actually have, but as long as Miasma believes in Lotus's illusion, we've bought ourselves however long it'll take for her to gather reinforcements—a day, by my estimates.

Then I remember the limping man, the groaning woman, the crying sisters. If they're alive—"They are," Tourmaline confirms—they owe it to the ideals of one person. "And Ren?"

"She was meeting with the Hewan governor, last I checked," says Tourmaline.

She steadies me as I rise. Hands braced against my lower back, I eye the scant pile of belongings that survived the journey with me. My white robes are muddied beyond salvaging, and I wrinkle my nose at the replacement set. Beige. Blech.

Tourmaline breaks the quiet. "You shouldn't ride off on your own like that."

"I can ride fine. It's the horse. Your turnip-and-fig trick didn't work." Or I was the fool, for taking a warrior's advice.

Tourmaline blinks, once and slow. "I found no turnips or figs on your person."

"I promised them as rewards." Obviously, the horse did not earn them.

Another drawn-out blink.

"I'll let you dress," Tourmaline finally says.

She leaves the tent. Alone, I groan and put on the beige robes. I fasten my broadbelt, reach down—hand hovering over the wrapped bundle that is my zither—and pick up my fan. I beat the crane feathers clean and smooth out the kinks, fingers slowing to trace over the single kingfisher feather. A gift from my last mentor, who'd lived longer than the rest. One star cannot light a galaxy, he'd said as he'd sewn on the feather.

I'm not a star, I'd countered. I am the universe itself.

But even the universe is subject to unseen forces. The next night, a meteorite punched my mentor and his outhouse clean into the ground.

I can predict meteors now. Trace the paths of all stars, foretell weather patterns nine times out of ten. The environment, as it stands, is our only ally. Using it to our advantage has earned me the sobriquet of Fate Changer. But the work I do isn't magic. It's memorization and analysis and application. It's limiting the factors I can't control, and reducing our reliance on miracles.

Excerpted from Strike the Zither by Joan He. Copyright © 2022 by Joan He. Excerpted by permission of Roaring Brook Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.