The next two weeks fell into a pattern—enough that Matilda started to find comfort in it. There were no unexpected stumbles or turns or pitfalls, no deaths or betrayals or nightmares made flesh. In the mornings and evenings, she played scullery maid. Late morning until dinner she spent with Rowan, slowly, painfully exploring the well of magic inside her—a well that, to her horror, had no bottom in sight.The small things—lighting candles, putting out hearth fires, weaving a ribbon of flame through her fingers—were still the hardest. But Rowan pushed, dragging her from ruin to ruin, the only safe places for her to lose control. At least he brought food with him now, as she was constantly starving and could hardly go an hour without eating something. Magic gobbled up energy, and she was eating double or triple what she used to.Sometimes they would talk. Well, she would make him talk, because after telling him about Aedion and her own selfish wish for freedom, she decided that talking

Leonard’s animal eyes glowed as they fixed on her. “Why don’t you tell me?”“The king never said anything about this. He—he …” Had something gone wrong in Adarlan? Had Benjamin somehow told the king who and what she was, and the king sent these men here to … No, it had to have taken weeks, months, to get these creatures smuggled here. “Send word for Wendlyn’s forces—warn them right now.”“Even if I reached Varese tomorrow, it would take over a week to get here on foot. Most of the units have been deployed in the north all spring.”“We still need to warn them that they’re at risk.”“Use your head. There are endless caves and places to hide along the western coastline. And yet they pick here, this access point.”She visualized the map of the area. “The mountain road will take them past the fortress.” Her blood chilled, and even her magic, flickering in an attempt to soothe her, could not warm her as she said, “No—not past. To the fortress. They’re going after the demi-Fae.”A slow, grave

A cooling breeze kissed down Matilda ’s neck. The forest had gone silent, as if the birds and insects had been quieted by her assault on the invisible wall. The barrier had gobbled down every spark of magic she’d launched at it, and now seemed to hum with fresh power.The scent of pine and snow wrapped around her, and she turned to find Leonard standing against a nearby tree. He’d been there for some time now, giving her space to work herself into exhaustion.But she was not tired. And she was not done. There was still wildfire in her mind, writhing, endless, damning. She let it dim to embers, let the grief and horror die down, too.Leonard said, “Word just arrived from Wendlyn. Reinforcements aren’t coming.”“They didn’t come ten years ago,” she said, her throat raw though she had not spoken in hours. Cold, glittering calm was now flowing in her veins. “Why should they bother helping now?”His eyes flickered. “Alin .” When she only gazed into the darkening forest, he suddenly said,

There was blood everywhere.As before, Matilda stood between the two bloody beds, reeking breath caressing her ear, her neck, her spine. She could feel the Valiking princes roving around her, circling with predators’ gaits, devouring her misery and pain bit by bit, tasting and savoring.There was no way out, and she could not move as she looked from one bed to the other.Jeremiah ’s corpse, mangled and mutilated. Because she had been too late, and because she had been a coward.And her parents, throats slit from ear to ear, gray and lifeless. Dead from an attack they should have sensed. An attack she should have sensed. Maybe she had sensed it, and that was why she had crept in that night. But she had been too late then as well.Two beds. Two fractures in her soul, cracks through which the abyss had come pouring in long before the Valiking princes had ever seized her. A claw scraped along her neck and she jerked away, stumbling toward her parents’ corpses.The moment that darkness

The barrier fell.But the darkness did not advance over the ward-stones, and Leonard , who had been restrained by Gavriel and Lorcan in the grass outside the fortress, knew why.The creatures and Narrok had captured a prize far greater than the demi-Fae. The joy of feeding on her was something they planned to relish for a long, long while. Everything else was secondary—as if they’d forgotten to continue advancing, swept up in the frenzy of feasting.Behind them, the fighting continued, as it had for the past twenty minutes. Wind and ice were of no use against the darkness, though Leonard had hurled both against it the moment the barrier fell. Again and again, anything to pierce that eternal black and see what was left of the princess. Even as he started hearing a soft, warm female voice, beckoning to him from the darkness—that voice he had spent centuries forgetting, which now tore him to shreds.Leonard had hurled both against it the moment the barrier fell. Again and again, anythi