With that image in her mind, Emeline reached for the cold shaft of the blade, gripping it hard, as if she planned to take it. Grace’s eyes widened. She yanked the sword back, slicing Emeline’s palm.
Emeline winced at the sharp pain, then fisted her hand and held it out between them, letting her fingers slowly uncurl. Blood seeped up from the cut, illuminated by the starlight.
“Shadow skins don’t bleed,” she said softly.
Blood dripped onto the step between them. Grace sucked in a sharp breath, staring at the drops of red splattering the pale gray dust, then lowered the blade to her side. “Emeline … I’m so sorry.”
Emeline glanced behind her, checking to see if their voices had drawn trouble, before nudging Grace into the house. “It’s fine. Let’s get inside.”
Emeline bolted the door behind them as Grace sheathed the sword, propping it next to the window, then lifted a candelabra whose flames lit the way.
“Are you alone?”
Grace nodded, silent, moving through the darkened house to peer out the kitchen windows, which overlooked the garden and stables in the back. Checking for threats.
“There’s no one left. Sable, Rooke, Hawthorne … they’re gone. Even the king is gone.”
At these words, Emeline’s anger at Hawthorne paled in comparison to the wave of grief that crashed over her. The thought of never seeing him again, of never seeing any of them again, felt like gasping for air and finding none.
She was too late; she’d lost them.
Her fingers curled and uncurled. “Is there a way to, I don’t know,undoit?”
Grace stared blankly. Her normally bright eyes were leaden, and her mouth was pressed into a grim line.
“Well, you can’t stay here,” said Emeline, burying the horrible weight of it. “You might be able to manage one or two shadow skins, but what happens whengroupsof them come? When theyrealize you’re the last living thing in this city and they decide to swarm the house?”
Sable might have trained Grace to wield a sword, but one girl was no match for a horde of shadow skins. And this house couldn’t stand against the Vile and her curse forever.
“I’m taking you back to Edgewood with me.”
Grace’s brow furrowed. “And if Sable returns?” She shook her head. “I tithed that life. I’m not going back to it.Thisis my home.”
“But there’s nothing for you here.”
The silence following those words hung heavy as a stone between them. It was the same thing Hawthorne said two years ago. It was the reason he took her memories—thinking he knew better than she did.
“I didn’t mean that,” she said immediately. “But we can’t sit here and wait to be devoured.”
Grace jutted out her chin. “I wasn’t planning on it.” Spinning on her heel, she lifted the candelabra in her hand and walked into what looked like a dining room. Emeline followed behind.
Grace veered around a long dinner table circled by upholstered chairs, then stopped abruptly. Emeline came to stand on the opposite side. Between them, across the table’s oaken surface, lay the map they’d used to find the Song Mage’s house. Emeline, who hadn’t gotten a good look at it before, paused as a symbol caught the light of the candle flames. She bent over the map, her gaze trailing past Edgewood on the northern border, past the King’s City, to the symbol of a door nestled into the trunk of a giant tree.
Beneath it were the words:The Heartwood.
Her brow furrowed. “The Heartwood?”
“It’s where the king brings tithes from the borderlands,” Grace explained. “To strengthen the woods against the curse.”She reached for the map and started rolling it. “It’s where I tithed everything dear to me beyond the forest.”
“Okay,” said Emeline, not understanding.
“I have one thing left to tithe,” Grace explained.
“And what’s that?”
“My life,” she whispered, still rolling. “The breath in my lungs.”
A chill went through Emeline.“What?”
