Chapter 28
Then, all at once, I stopped hard, as if I’d been flung into a wall. I swayed, my head ringing, and groped through the thick darkness for something to grab on to. I felt the heat first, then heard the roar of the flames. For a moment I just stood there, knees wobbling, trying to understand how what I saw was possible.
It was a place I would’ve known anywhere—my old music room on the second floor of Ivyhill. And underneath the piano, curled up in a pile of quilts, was a sleeping girl. She was eleven years old, with golden-brown hair like her father’s and a black kitten on the pillow beside her. The air was hot and the windows glowed orange. Fingers of smoke crawled under the door.
I watched Osmund wake up and start hissing, the hair on his spine standing up in fear. My blood roared in my ears. I felt as if I were floating, a particle of dust caught on the wind and watching the world from a great distance.
“What in the name of the gods?” Father whispered. His face was slack with horror. “What is this? Farrin, is this the night…”
He couldn’t even finish the sentence. He started to go to her, to the child—to me —but I clutched his arm and held him back. I sang quietly, a wordless melody. Calm , I thought, though I felt anything but calm. My tears blurred the room. I had to keep breathing, I told myself. Without breath, there would be no song, and with no song, I would surely lose my mind, or else lose my father to whatever trick was unfolding before us.
My song soothed Father enough to keep him where he stood beside me, though he was desperate, practically pawing at the floor. “Farrin!” he called out over and over, his voice cracking. But the girl didn’t wake, not until it was time for her to. I saw her shift and open her eyes, saw her fingers press against her thigh one at a time: Farrin. Mara. Gemma. Gideon. Philippa.
No, I wanted to tell her. No, it’s not a nightmare. You’re awake. Run. Run. I stopped singing and tried to scream at her. But my voice caught in my throat, and a pressure clamped over my mouth, silencing me.
Anger roiled in me, steadying me. I resumed my song, and the pressure yielded. So, I could sing—Kilraith, it seemed, couldn’t tamp down my power—but I couldn’t otherwise interfere. I would have to stand back and watch.
Fine, I thought. Fine. I gritted my teeth and watched myself choke and cough, then scramble for the door with Osmund clinging to my chest. My heart broke to see her, this girl—nightgown sweeping the floor, hair in a messy braid. She threw a desperately sad look at her towering shelves of music before bursting out into the hallway. I ached for her, and I envied her. What a terrible night, but at least she didn’t know how many more terrible nights were to come, how eventually she would look back at even the days just after the fire with perverse nostalgia.
I followed her through the house in a daze, remembering every step as she took them. There, the long corridor that led to the art gallery. No, that way was fire. There, the collapsing stairs, the smoky hallway. The girl staggered, clutching the kitten she’d tucked under her nightgown.
“Farrin!” Father roared. He clawed futilely at the air between us. “ Farrin , over here! I’m here, darling!”
But he hadn’t been there that night, and he wasn’t now. He was already safely outside with the others—Gemma, Mara, Mother, the staff. The thought came to me, for the first time in my life, that perhaps that had been the point. The fire had been engineered to burn down the house, yes, but maybe also to take me with it. A sick feeling rose inside me as I watched my younger self crawl desperately toward the parlor wall and its window. Yes, I could see things clearly. Alaster Bask would have noticed Ryder’s fascination with me and seen the danger in it. He would not have been satisfied with simply destroying our house and our things; he would also have wanted to kill the Ashbourne girl who’d somehow ensnared his son and planted ideas of peace in his head.
Suddenly Ryder appeared—his younger self, the shining boy—as if I’d summoned him with my thoughts. Masked and gangly, bony elbows and knees, dark hair slick on his neck. Around him hummed a dazzling aura—Lady Enid’s work, I now knew. A spell to persuade me to trust him. My heart leaped.
“Who is that?” Father looked at me in astonishment, then back at Ryder. “The shining boy? He’s real?”
“It was Ryder,” I said thickly, watching him pull the girl up from the floor and press a damp cloth over her nose and mouth. “He saved me.”
They ran through the house hand in hand, dodging flames and falling debris, and I glided after them in amazement, unable to tear my eyes from them even to ensure that Father was still with me, though every now and then I heard his hoarse cries of dismay, the choke of furious sobs. Being here, I realized, was more of a torment for him than it was for me. A savage gladness swept through me. It was his war, after all, that had nearly killed me; his and Alaster’s, and all their foolish fathers’. None of them, even with all their Anointed might and power, had been strong enough in heart or mind to resist Kilraith’s machinations. It was only right that Father should be forced to watch.
Then I nearly fell. She nearly fell, the child Farrin, her skin glistening with soot and sweat. But Ryder caught her, caught me , and lifted me into his arms and ran with me. My heart twisted; I knew so well, now, how it felt to be held by him, and my body ached with yearning for the Ryder I knew, the man I hoped with all my might was still alive. I watched our child selves, tears in my eyes. I was small, but he was only a boy. He labored a bit under my weight and let out a terrible hacking cough. I knew what happened next. Eagerly I followed them outside, waiting for the fresh air, the damp cool grass, the waxing moon. Ryder’s hand on my cheek. Star of my life.
He ran with me into one of the receiving rooms on the house’s northern side and reached for the door. I held my breath, and he flung it open. But on the other side was not the veranda that should have been there, nor the moonlit grounds beyond. Instead a wall of pale brick blocked the exit.
Ryder froze, blinking, then turned back and looked at me. He ripped off his mask, and I wanted to cry. There he was—a beardless boy with messy dark hair and fierce blue eyes.
“How do we get out?” he shouted at me. He staggered over, my unconscious child self still in his arms. “What’s happened to the doors?”
I flushed hot-cold with dread. Again there was the feeling of being outside of myself, watching the world below from a great distance.
“But that didn’t happen,” Father said dully, his expression blank with shock. He pointed at the brick wall. “The night of the fire, you escaped. You both escaped.”
My growing panic made me livid. I wanted to kick him. “Take her,” I told him, gesturing at my younger self. “Give him a rest.”
But Ryder backed away from us, turning away slightly as if to protect his burden. His scowl was fearsome, furious. He looked at me with new suspicion.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
I bent down to look him in the eyes. “We’re friends. You can trust us. We want to help you get out.” An idea came to me. “We’re a new sort of ward magic, spelled to activate in times of disaster and keep the family safe. You want to get out, don’t you?” I glanced at my younger self’s soot-stained face; I heard her labored breathing. “You want to save her?”
Ryder looked closely at me. I thought I saw recognition flash in his eyes. “Yes. All right.” He shifted my body into Father’s arms. I couldn’t look at my father, couldn’t bear the devastation on his face. He cradled the girl’s body to him as if it were the most precious thing in the world.
I grappled for what was left of my courage. “Quickly, now. We’ll try the other doors.” But I knew even as I ran for them what we would find, and indeed, past each door stood a solid brick wall. At every window, I tore away the burning drapes, but that only revealed more walls of brick. We were trapped.
I stood before the last of them on the first floor, clenched my fists, planted my feet firmly, and started to sing. Fall , I commanded. I imagined a tower of children’s blocks collapsing, a felled tree crashing to the ground with a groan. I thought of my own bed, how marvelous it felt to plop down on it at the end of a long day. Surrender. Capitulation. Relief.
“Farrin,” Father said warningly. I glanced back at him and saw the flames leaping closer. Soon we would lose the ability to go back upstairs. My mind raced. What was Kilraith trying to prove?
I tried singing down the wall for a moment longer, and just as I saw the stones begin to tremble, my younger self screamed. I whirled to see her awake and clinging to Father, her eyes wide with horror.
“Papa!” she cried. Her voice was hoarse, terrible. “Where do we go?”
He held her to him, looking desperately at me as a huge slab of ceiling caved in. Ryder grabbed my hand and yanked me forward out of its path.
“This way,” I said breathlessly, and then I raced toward the entrance hall. It was a pit of smoke and fire; through the mess, I saw one of the great staircases still standing. I scrambled up it, fear bolting through me like lightning. The others followed me, Father’s boots heavy on each step. My mind spun with panic. Where to go? This was some sort of game. I didn’t think Kilraith would have created this whole thing just to kill us. No, that would come later; this was a torment. A display of his power, of Jaetris’s power.
On the second floor, I ran for the closest door—one of the guest bedrooms—and threw it open, remembering the hysterical logic of my child self. Try every room, every window. A courtyard, a balcony, anywhere there was fresh air.
But on the other side of the door was not a bedroom. It wasn’t even Ivyhill. It was the Green House. It was Mother’s parlor. And there was my younger self, a little older now. Twelve years old and stone-faced, glassy-eyed. Osmund on her lap, she stared out the windows at the gardens beyond, where Gemma wandered in her nightgown, bawling piteously.
My stomach dropped. I knew this night. In truth, it could have been any number of nights after Mother left, all of them bleak and endless. Father had deposited us at the palace and gone to the city to drown his feelings in drink, in rich food, in anonymous arms he would soon forget. In defiance of his instructions, I’d taken Gemma to the Green House. There we would stay until he finally regained enough of his senses to come find us. There we would stay, I remembered thinking, until Mother returned.
As I stared at twelve-year-old Farrin—her rigid posture, the stubborn set of her jaw—I felt unspeakably sad. I remembered that feeling. The determination not to cry. The loneliness opening like an abyss under my feet. Every shadow was a monster, every small sound a leaping hope.
As if responding to the frantic thrum of my thoughts, the scene before me began to change. The shadows were monsters, suddenly, toothy and reaching. The proportions of the furniture became grotesque, surreal, looming. My mouth went dry as I watched the shadows wrap around young Farrin. She didn’t move; she just sat there in silent acceptance. And then the floor dropped out from under my feet, and I was falling. An abyss indeed. Utter blackness, the air so stifling I couldn’t breathe, my pounding heart threatening to crack me open. I tried to look for Father and Ryder, for the soot-stained Farrin, but the force of my fall had me tight in its grip.
I squeezed my eyes shut and forced out a quiet song. Real , I thought shakily. I pictured the ground solid beneath me, the impossible hugeness of the northern mountains, the warm weight of Ryder’s body. Safety. Shelter.
Abruptly I juddered to a halt, and when I opened my eyes, gasping, swaying a bit on my feet, I was in one of the second-floor guest rooms at Ivyhill, staring at bricked-up windows and a burning bed.
Father was pulling at me, desperate, as my younger self screamed in his arms. Ryder was stamping furiously at the burning carpet.
“What are you doing?” Father cried. “This is not the way out!”
I turned to stare at him. “Did you not see the Green House? Didn’t you fall?”
“What? No!” His grip was iron. “Move, Farrin!”
I did, staggering out into the hallway after him just as the bedroom floor collapsed. The door slammed shut on my heels.
Ryder glared at me. “You’re not doing a very good job of helping us. Do you know the way or don’t you?”
I ran clumsily down the hall after Father. For a moment I locked eyes with my younger self, and her mouth curled into a sly smile. “Oh dear,” she said quietly, looking around us at the burning house. “What a shame.”
Kilraith.
I set my jaw and moved past them, ignoring the feeling of the little girl’s eyes boring into my back. The next door led to another bedroom. I had no choice. The air was cloying, darkening. I threw open the door.
And there was Gareth’s bedroom at his family home in Big Deep. And there we both were, young and naked and embarrassed, awkwardly detaching from each other amid damp, tangled sheets as the sunset poured through his windows.
Numb with shock, I watched myself totter out of bed and toward his bathing room. I remembered with breathtaking clarity the slight sting between my legs, and the nervous curiosity I’d felt upon noticing the spot of blood on the bed.
But then Gareth swung his legs over to sit on the edge of the bed and watch me leave. There was a terrible expression on his face, one of disgust and disappointment. He assessed my body coldly; his lip curled. He scrubbed his hands on the sheets and then stood and tore them off his bed in a fury.
I watched him in horror. No. That wasn’t what had happened. I had cleaned myself in the bathing room and then come back to bed, and Gareth had been standing there waiting for me, flushed and bashful, dressed in his rumpled clothes. He had held out his arms to me. “Please hug me,” he’d said, “and tell me you still love me.” And I had, and I did.
But this Gareth before me looked nothing like mine, until suddenly he did. My younger self came out of the bathing room, and he stood, flushed and bashful, holding out his arms. “Please hug me,” I heard him say, and I watched fifteen-year-old Farrin laugh through her confused tears and lean into his embrace, a warm hug of relief that I remembered well. But now it seemed different. Gareth’s shoulders were tense and square. He held me gingerly. Reluctantly?
Slowly I stepped back from them, tears burning behind my eyes. Was that what he’d done while I was in the bathing room? Wiped himself clean of me, scorning me, despising me? And then he’d schooled his features to look like the friend I knew and pretended away his true feelings?
I staggered out of the room, blindly pushing Father and Ryder out ahead of me. I yanked the door shut and leaned on it, my throat aching with trapped sobs.
“Did you see any of that?” I asked hoarsely.
Ryder was bewildered, exasperated. “See what ?”
Father, I thought, was beginning to understand. “It was only one of the guest bedrooms to us,” he said. “With bricked-up windows like all the others.”
I was relieved, of course. I wanted neither of them to see Gareth or me in such a state.
“It’s a game,” I breathed. “We’ll have to go through every room to find the way out, and each one of them will hurt me.”
“Hurt you how?” Father demanded. He looked ready to tear down the house with his bare hands.
I shook my head. I couldn’t bear the thought of describing anything I’d seen. I pushed past Father with a choked laugh, cursing our ancestors for building such a stupidly grand house—two hundred and fifty rooms. If we ever got home, I decided, I would seriously consider hiring an elemental with a talent for stonework to remake the whole thing.
The next room was one of the guest parlors. I grabbed the brass knob and threw the door open, secretly hoping it would knock flat some smirking past version of myself who stood on the other side, waiting for me.
But I had no such luck. On the other side of the door was a stage I knew well, a stage built specifically for me in the town of Derryndell. My parents had decided that for my first public performance, a smaller location would be ideal, instead of the crowded capital or one of the bustling coastal cities. But hundreds of people had come anyway, from all over the continent. They’d heard of the Ashbourne girl with the voice sweeter than an Olden siren, with fingers more dexterous than any of the great master pianists.
I stood frozen at the threshold, watching my fourteen-year-old self sit down at the piano—my own piano, my lovely cherrywood girl. I saw that Farrin take a deep breath and square her young shoulders, and panic bolted through me like a spooked horse, just as fresh and terrible as it had been that day.
“No, wait!” I cried, rushing across the stage. I tried pulling her from the piano bench, and when that didn’t work, I tried pushing her, ramming against her side. It did nothing. She began to play; her small fingers danced across the keys with precision, grace, confidence. I could feel her little heart pounding, the delight and nerves bubbling inside her. Her first performance outside of Ivyhill, and there were so many prestigious figures in the audience—the queen’s court composers, members of the royal orchestra, soloists and singers and revered instructors from as far as Aidurra and Vauzanne.
And then, only a few minutes into her performance, it happened. The listening crowd grew restless. They whispered, they sighed, they burst into euphoric laughter. I couldn’t stop myself from watching them as they rose from their seats and surged toward the stage—a whole wave of them, confused and blubbering, reaching for the girl at the piano. She didn’t notice them at first, content in the cocoon of her power.
I screamed at them and threw myself in front of her. But they raced past me, through me, and lunged at her, at her instrument. They pawed at her and pleaded with her. Old men and young men, women and grandmothers and children, all of them desperate, adoring, insatiable. They would tear her apart if it meant keeping a piece of that music with them forever.
It happened so quickly and was such a shock that our house guard didn’t respond right away. Father was the first one to reach her, Gareth just behind him. Gareth swept her away, sheltering her against his body, and Father pounded twenty people flat before the guards were able to push through the teeming masses and join him. A hundred brawls broke out; the music hadn’t driven everyone mad with ardent devotion. Some desperately fought for order. Soon the stage was swarmed, and I watched in horror as those grasping hands began to tear bits of flesh from Father’s body, from Gareth’s, from mine. My admirers trapped us in the wings, and their cries were fervent, wet prayers.
I backed away, tripping over my own feet. I stumbled into Father and turned to hide my face in his sleeve. No , I thought frantically. Real. I gasped out a fragment of song, fighting hard to steady it.
Father held me with his free arm. Little Farrin, in his other arm, was crying.
“What do you see?” I whispered.
“A guest parlor,” Father answered. “What do you see?”
I looked up at him, and I thought he might have seen the answer in my eyes. Surely he remembered that day as vividly as I did.
His face was a stony mask, but his eyes burned. “Shut the door,” he barked at Ryder, and the boy obeyed, closing the bricked-up room away from us.
In the next room, what awaited us stopped me cold and tore an angry sob from my throat. It was a pleasant spring day at Ivyhill, full of birdsong and tender blooms, and all of us stood at the house’s open doors, watching the Warden take Mara away. Gemma wailed, Mother cried behind her hand, and so desperately sad, so shocked, that she couldn’t find her tears. I remembered that feeling of the world closing in on me, could feel it tightening my throat even now. And then there was Father, trying in vain to comfort us all. “It’s an honor,” he told us, standing tall, dry-eyed. “The Warden thinks she will pass the trials more quickly than any Rose before her.” But he couldn’t fool me even then. I heard that gruff note in his voice and saw the hard set of his mouth.
I stared after the departing carriage, watching in horror as the Warden crawled out the window, spiderlike, and crouched on the roof. Our eyes met across the growing distance between us. She smiled and stood, and then the severe dark shape of her bloomed into a winged shadow with round yellow eyes, stern and staring. She was no longer the Warden, but instead an owl with gleaming talons and a shrieking cry, looming with huge dark wings over the carriage that took my sister away from me.
I turned away furiously, snapped the door closed, and sang the cheeriest tune I could think of. No , I thought. You won’t beat me. That isn’t real. This isn’t real. I would not be trapped in a maze of my own home. It was my home, our home, not his.
I thought I heard a curl of laughter at the back of my mind. I wasn’t convinced by my own trembling bravado, and neither was he.
On we went through the house, each room a nightmare of memory. In another bedroom, the artificer worked to stifle Gemma’s power—power that I now knew had been unstable because it came from a woman with an awakening god living inside her. Mara and I were in my bedroom, holding on to each other tightly as Gemma’s screams rang through the house. Father had wanted to send us away while it happened, but Mother had begged him not to. If she had to sit and watch one daughter be cut open, he would not deprive her of knowing that her other daughters were safe and unhurt and right upstairs. Young Farrin’s and Mara’s bodies began to peel open before my eyes, as if the artificer’s knives of magic were carving into them too. I turned away from their screams and shut the door behind me.
The art gallery, my father’s study, every guest room, every parlor. Myself at every age, at every moment of humiliation. Every day of anguish I’d ever known unfurled before me, each one wounding me anew. I pushed my power to its limits, singing desperately through each plunge of dread and embarrassment. Real , I thought. Truth. Clarity. Midmorning sunlight burning away a damp fog. A single drop of clear water clinging to a trembling leaf. My piano’s keys under my fingers, Osmund pressing his silken head against my neck before settling down beside me to sleep. Gemma’s summer-blue eyes. Mara’s warm hand, worn and rough from her years of service.
And then, without warning, came Ryder.
I stumbled into the room in a state of numb terror, my song pouring automatically from my tired lungs. Then I saw what awaited me and my voice died in my throat.
It was the little room in Ryder’s stable— his room, his haven. There were my clothes hanging to dry; there was the glowing stove, the little bed. And there I was, naked, my back to Ryder as he assessed me with cold appraising eyes. Every lump on my body, every dip and imperfection—he saw them all, and so did I.
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. I watched myself step away, shivering, and reach for Ryder’s clothes that lay abandoned on the floor.
“I can’t,” I told him, my voice small and frightened.
He caught my wrist and pulled me back against him. He kicked the clothes away, then shoved me toward the wall, where a mirror stood. A distant part of me knew such a mirror didn’t actually exist in that room, and yet as I stared at it, I believed it. Ryder made me look at it, holding my face hard in his hands. I struggled, I kicked him. He pulled back my arms and held them, grinned meanly at me in the mirror.
“Farrin in the forest light,” he said mockingly. “Cold and strange. Doesn’t even know how to fuck herself properly. And you thought I found you beautiful. You. ” He laughed. “Lucky for you that you were born into an Anointed family. Without that power you have, you’d be nothing. No one in their right mind would want this .”
I felt I was going to be sick. I wrenched myself free and ducked away from his reaching arms, away from the mortifying sight of my body in the mirror. I stumbled out of the room and slammed the door shut behind me. I couldn’t sing, couldn’t breathe. I ignored Father calling after me, young Ryder’s bewildered questions, the gleeful laughter of the little girl in Father’s arms. I found the last door in the hallway—the door to my own bedroom.
I sagged against it, pressing my hands flat to the wood. The air was scorching, my sweat-drenched hair was plastered to my neck, and my fine dress of blue silk had turned black and clinging. I hummed through my tears, pushing aside the horrible image of Ryder leering cruelly at me in the mirror. Real , I thought. I scrabbled through my mind and poured every true memory of him, of us, into my song. Ryder teaching me how to fight. Ryder holding me after I’d sung the Devenmere chimaera into submission, the shelter of his strength. His hands on my skin, his kisses in my hair, his hard, hot weight pinning me to the bed in the Citadel, in the Torch and Thorn, in his cozy stable room. His voice breaking on my name as he moved in me, tender, slow. His words falling on me like soft rain. To love you, Farrin. All I want is to love you.
I pushed open the door to my room and saw the moonlit grounds of Ivyhill stretching out before me. The air was cool and fresh. I gulped it down as little Farrin gleefully ran past me, pulling young Ryder after her. They turned back and waved at me. “Come on, hurry!” Ryder cried. “This is the way out!”
And I very nearly did. The breeze was delicious, and my skin crawled from everything the house had done to me. I wanted to walk away from it and never look back. But when I turned back to find Father, I saw him standing not far from me, wrapped in chains of shadow. There was a shadowed clamped over his mouth, and another wrapped around his throat. For a frozen second, his terrified eyes found mine. Then the shadows yanked him away from me, pulling him back into the flames as if he were a mere cloth doll. The speed with which they took him was brutal. His neck bent horribly.
“Hurry up!” young Farrin called. I looked back once to see her standing in the safe moonlit night, her face sparkling with happiness, Ryder now grown and standing tall beside her. And this was not the cruel Ryder from the house’s nightmares; it was my Ryder, his eyes soft.
He held out his hand to me, a smile on his face. “Come here, love,” he said. “It’s time to go.”
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t . I turned back into the flames and ran after my father, a scream stuck in my throat. I tore through the burning hallways, shielding my eyes against the glare. I would not leave him as Philippa had left me, as he had left Gemma and me on all those long, lonely nights of grief. As often as I’d wished that same pain on him, prayed viciously that he would someday feel it and understand, I couldn’t abandon him to it now. No, that pain, that legacy of hatred and war, cowardice and abandonment—it ended here. It ended with me.
Suddenly, the house and all its fire disappeared into blackness, and I stood in a field strewn with ashes. It was Ivyhill, now in ruins, the estate utterly devastated. Not even my piano had survived. There was only rubble and embers, and in the midst of it stood a grinning man made of shadows. He held a golden bow, its arrow trained on another man who sat bound on an opulent gilded throne. This man was ancient—white beard to his knees, his brown skin ashen and wrinkled. His eyes were sad, coated with yellow film.
“Jaetris” came a whisper beside me.
I turned and nearly fell with relief. There were Mara and Nesset, and on the other side of me, Gemma and Talan. All of them were haggard, the echoes of terrible things on their faces and in their eyes, my sisters’ shimmering gowns torn and mud spattered. But whatever they had seen, whatever nightmares Kilraith had thrown at them, they had pushed through, as I had. They were alive.
Nesset gaped at the old man on the throne. “It can’t be,” she whispered.
But I agreed with Mara. The man on the throne was indeed Jaetris, god of the mind. My heart, my bones, my very breath knew it as soon as I looked at him. He appeared to me, in all his rheumy disarray, with the same kind of bright clarity that Philippa had when she’d rescued Ryder, Alastrina, and me from Mhorghast. The ragged breaths he took made the ground tremble under my feet; the air pulled tight around us with each inhalation, each sputtering, pained gasp.
And Kilraith had an arrow pointed right at his heart.
Shapes shimmered all around us, and suddenly Jaetris wasn’t alone. Columns of shadow alit from the sky, curling like smug smiles against the ruined ground. And out of each of them tumbled a man bound with invisible chains that held him frozen, powerless. Their unblinking eyes stared at me, and for a moment I could only stare back at them, dread pounding a wicked rhythm against my ribs.
Gareth, thin and dressed in shabby finery, quite obviously ill, a pallid sheen to his skin.
Father, still covered in soot from the fire.
Ryder, raging in furious silence against the power that held him. His eyes found mine, bright and angry, that brilliant blue I knew and loved.
Fight , they told me. No matter what he does to us, you must fight him.
And in that moment when our gazes locked, the certainty of violence thick in the air around us, the memory of young Ryder fresh in my mind—precious boy, so brave and unafraid in that house full of smoke—I knew. I knew it in my deepest core. It didn’t matter if it was my song that had first drawn him to me. It didn’t matter if my power was the thing that had allowed something like love to begin unfurling in his heart.
What mattered was what that love had become, what we had shared—every touch of his hands, every moment of sameness, of rightness , that had passed between us. Two tired, angry hearts finding solace in each other. I could not doubt the truth of that. He had pressed it into me with his every kiss, his every caress, with every utterance of my name.
For one exquisite moment, that conviction was my entire world, Ryder’s blazing expression the only thing I could see. He would forgive me; he would help me learn to forgive myself. In that instant, I felt stronger and more at peace than I ever had.
Then the columns of darkness whirling behind each of the captive men took on the same shape as the grinning shadowed figure who leered beside Jaetris with his arrow. I returned to myself, to my racing heart and the dangerous, terrible present.
Before me stood four Kilraiths, three bound men, and one bound god.
“Such a fine, brave display,” said the four Kilraiths, their voices a perfect scornful chorus. “But now the game is nearly over, and it’s time for you to make the final move, little bird. Which arrow shall I let fly?”
I felt the bloom of Mara’s and Gemma’s power on either side of me—one quick and nimble as twining vines, the other solid and bright as steel. They had to be as tired as I was, and yet they still found some strength inside themselves. They were ready to fight, and so was I.
I didn’t dare glance at Talan. If I saw how tired he was, how completely it had taxed his demonic power to distract Kilraith from our final deadly secret all this time, I would lose my nerve.
“Come, now, we’re waiting,” Kilraith crooned. Above us, all around us, hissed a sea of excited whispers. “Which one will it be? The god, the friend, the father, or the lover? Quickly, or I’ll kill all of them. You know I will. Five seconds. Four. Three. Two…”
I moved faster than I ever had, humming the opening notes of a rondo to spur me on. From the ruined mess of my gown I withdrew the blazing feather—untouched, unhurt, bright as the sun—and held it high.
I stopped singing only long enough to draw a breath and cry out her name.
“Ankaret!”