Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
They wheel out the pyre like a parade float, its weight groaning on iron wheels that squeal against the wooden planks. A team of guards strains at the ropes. “Heave! Pull!” they shout, shoulders bowed, boots skidding as they drag the monstrosity onto the stage.
The pyre rises in a pyramid of thick wooden beams stacked and bound tight, the gaps stuffed with bundles of herbs meant to catch fast and burn sweet.
The scents roll over me even before the fire touches it—rosemary, cinnamon bark, something bitter and leaf green underneath that coats the back of my throat like bile.
This was always the ending they wanted—our ashes carried off on desert winds.
Zephara leaps to her feet, clapping and jumping up and down like a schoolgirl, her painted flames shimmering in the torchlight. “A pyre at last!”
Solara approaches the edge of the dais, chin lifted high. “These flames shall entertain the kingdom, and in their rising smoke, order shall be restored.”
Declan squeezes my hand, and my gaze finds his.
His eyes are midnight-black, pulling me in with an intensity that feels like the only real thing in this nightmare of fire and spectacle.
This kingdom, the crowd, the scent of herbs, the groan of the wheels, all of it is staged and hollow, but his gaze holds me steady, an anchor in the storm.
His mouth forms the shapes of words, but the sound never reaches me. The lumbering thud of my pulse drowns him out, matched beat for beat by the creak and protest of the pyre’s old iron wheels.
The Player, arms wide, drinks in the crowd’s roar and smiles. She plucks a torch from its holder, and the firelight catches the red slash of paint across her face. Her beaded necklace sways as she moves—a metronome ticking down the last minutes of my life.
“Take them to the pyre!” she shouts above another wave of cheers and applause.
Tarek jerks forward with a shout. “You must not see this through!”
The reaction is immediate. His fellow guards are on him, their hands clamping around his shoulders. Tarek thrashes like a man possessed.
“They do not deserve this! They have not lied! Go out into the dunes. See for yourself!” His words ride above the roar of the crowd.
Tarek slams his heels down as he moves forward, dragging the men who hold him and nearly breaking free. More guards swarm him, locking his arms, forcing him down.
“Traitor,” Dav snarls, stepping in close, blade flashing as he presses it to Tarek’s throat. “Do not make me add you to the fire. There would be no pleasure in watching you burn.”
Guards descend upon Declan and me, grabbing each of us and forcing us to the pyramid of wood. Declan’s grip tightens in a final, desperate squeeze before they pry our clasped fingers apart and wrench him away.
This is it.
We’re going to die.
It’s embarrassingly ordinary, the way my chest folds in on itself—an old, familiar collapse I’ve rehearsed so many times it feels like muscle memory.
I’ve lived here before, in this suffocating corner where hope shrivels and self-pity takes root.
Every failure, every betrayal, every door slammed in my face always seems to end with me curled around the ache, whispering that this is what I deserve.
I am too much, not enough, too loud, too quiet.
Always the problem, always the punchline.
I can summon a thousand reasons why the universe delights in watching me break, and I cradle them like proof that my suffering is earned.
The universe has never been on my side. That isn’t news.
What stings now is that I let myself forget it.
The burning brilliance of my own naivete blocked out the shadows and let me believe that maybe I was finally on the cusp of change.
That maybe this once the wheel would turn in my favor.
When we first landed here, I should’ve just gone limp, rolled over, played dead, let the Kingdom of Wands take what it wanted.
Every act of resistance since has been nothing more than stalling, a doomed performance delaying the inevitable.
The pyre’s shadow stretches like a beast across the stage, long-limbed and ravenous. Hands clamp down on my arms, bruising in their certainty, and I’m shoved forward so hard my knees slam against the beams. Splinters catch in my palms as they force me to climb onto the wood.
Every staggered step feels less like moving and more like surrender. Just as the last shred of fight drains from my body, the world itself starts to slow.
The air changes. Everything around me gives way to that placid, syrupy hush—the telltale sign Fortune is near.
Sound lengthens into vibrating ribbons, motion smears like wet paint.
The guards’ rough pushes move forward in frames rather than smooth assaults.
The Player’s laugh hangs in the air, broken into bubbles of sound.
Fortune’s magick sparks in my chest. This is her. It has to be. She’s bending time, freezing it, swooping in to save us at the last possible second.
I spin around to Declan. He’s frozen in time, his arms outstretched toward me, a promise that might as well be a map to a country I no longer belong in.
His eyes are wet, shining in the firelight, and his mouth forms words that stretch soft and thick as taffy.
The words stick before they can spill across his lips, but I hear them in my head as clearly as if he’s speaking.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
“No!” My voice rips out of me, clanging through the frozen silence. I twist hard, wrenching against the guard’s petrified grip. My gaze sweeps the crowd, the tents, the shadows. “Fortune! You came to save us! Tell me what to do.”
She doesn’t answer. No ribbon of smoke, no scorched earth marking her arrival, no shadow slipping between the cracks of time. Just silence and the acrid bite of herbs waiting to burn.
I scream again, my throat tearing with it. “Where are you?!”
Silence.
Fortune isn’t coming.
The realization knocks the wind from my chest. Despair swells so fast it drowns me, filling every hollow place inside until I’m choking on it.
I was obtuse enough to believe Fortune had stepped out of the dark to hand me a miracle.
But the truth is cruel and simple—there is no miracle.
Not for me. No matter where I am, the universe will always let me down.
If I wasn’t so broken, a single tarot card wouldn’t have been enough to end our lives. If I wasn’t so hopeless, so fucking chaotic, I would’ve already figured out how to get us home. I have real magick here. But even that doesn’t matter with how broken I am.
The world is syrup and glass as I inch around the pyre until I’m face-to-face with Declan.
My fingers tremble when they close on his.
I squeeze like I mean it—hard enough to make the skin at his palm blanch—because if I let go I’ll lose the only thing I have left that matters.
And he does matter. We matter. There’s still a wedge between us—his confession like a cold pebble pressed into my heart—but even with that, I can feel what we’ve shared, what we still share.
It doesn’t erase what he did, and it won’t be fixed with a single apology, but maybe, if we ever get the luxury of time, we could untangle it, stitch the edges back together.
His hand is warm in mine, and for a breath I think maybe we’ll get out of this.
Maybe this is why Fortune came but isn’t revealing herself—to give us time, a seam in the world to slip through.
The hope tastes like smoke and copper, fragile as spun sugar.
It arrives and flees in the same heartbeat, but in that small, precious moment it’s everything.
But Declan is still frozen, reaching for me. There’s a limit to what I can pull free. Towerfall’s magick hums in my chest, coursing through me in fiery currents, but it flinches away when I try to tug him out of the spell.
“Why can’t you just do it?” I roar at myself in a voice that sounds like someone else’s. “What are you waiting for, Amanda? You have the power. Use it. Save him!”
I’m furious at myself for letting his admission fester and rot within me.
My pride, my doubt, my need to be right.
How selfish I am. Petty. A coward. I pummel myself with the thoughts, with names that sting because they’re true.
I hate that I’m thinking about being hurt when he’s the one who might burn.
I hate that my righteous pain is a chain around both our throats.
I hate that this magick bows to feeling and that my feelings are messy and loud and useless.
Of all the ironies, the cruelest is that I have the power to save him, to save us, but the thing that’s actually blocking me is not the kingdom or the queens or the pyre.
It’s this bright, ratty heap of emotion tangled around my heart.
Pain and fury knotted around the mechanism this realm’s magick needs to work.
I suck in a breath, set my jaw, and stop hoping for miracles and feeling sorry for myself. This isn’t the end. Time’s frozen. Great. I’ll use the pause to find a way out.
My fingers slip away from Declan’s—my own unformed apology.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
I climb down off the pyre and jump off the stage. My lungs squeeze, and tears threaten to form, but I keep my spine straight and push through the statues of the crowd and away from the stage before I can memorize the shape of him reaching for me.
I don’t look back. I know myself well enough to know that if I do, I’ll stay.
I’ll stand here, watching him while I replay everything I could have done differently, until the memory of his hands is the only thing keeping me alive.
I’ll rewrite my story as the woman who froze instead of fought.
I will become a martyr of my own indecision.
And when Fortune releases her hold and time undoubtedly starts again, I won’t let my grief be this kingdom’s show.