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Far, far beneath what I had buried, I knew it was my fault what had happened to Gileon. I had vetted all their minds on the surface level, but I hadn’t dug deep enough in the fraud’s. I’d simply trusted him because Rayna had. If Wren wanted her revenge, I’d let her come, too.

But she surprised me with a sharp shake of her head and a finger rising to point at a random student beside her—a young woman with water droplets haloing her fingertips, as if prepared for another attack to rain down from the sky at any second.

“You,” Wren hissed at her. “You told me the Good Council exiled your older sister. The one who told you scary stories at bedtime and played shadow puppets on the wall with you and promised you she’d come back. But she never did.”

The woman cringed, like a bucket of festering grief had just been upended over her head. Wren was already turning to the next student, this time a Shape Shifter judging by how his muscles deflated under her gaze.

“And you. Your grandfather used his magic to make a bridge for the village children after a boy drowned in the stream beside Graycott. But it wasn’t a sanctioned use for his magic, was it? And when the local elite found out, he whipped your grandpa black and blue in front of everyone, claiming that unauthorized displays of power threatened the safety of the island.” The Shape Shifter began breathing heavily as Wren’s words drilled into him. “It took your grandpa seven days to succumb to his injuries afterward.”

I knew what she was doing now. Again, my fault. I’d told her and the Gileon fraud to seek out any potential rebels among the students of the Esholian Institute. To find out who had a reason to hate the Good Council as much as we did. Only now it felt like a waste of fucking time.

Rayna was in that prison now. The murder itching in my veins wanted—needed—me to act now.

“You want to talk about death?” Wren practically shrieked, and for a blood-curdling moment, I thought she’d somehow read my mind. But no, she had pivoted her glare to a pair of Object Summoners huddled together in front of their mansion. “You two both lost family in the village attacks last year! And even if you refuse to believe it was our own damned leader who set monsters upon them, you know the Good Council never stepped in to help. The elites who claim to keep us safe left your family to be. Ripped. Apart.”

Faster and faster, Wren screamed at the people in the crowd until their whispers turned to cries and shouts and several began stepping forward.

“I want to fight!”

“Me too! They can’t get away with this any longer!”

“We have to make them pay.” Mitzi was the one who trembled upright at that, two young men from Rayna’s class joining her on either side. She wiped at her face with a sleeve and stuttered out through a fresh wave of sobs, “f-for Cilia.”

Then the red-headed Balkersaff shoved to the front of the crowd.

A pre-elite. I’d been expecting one of them to foolishly try to stop me. My fingers twitched again, prepared to break bones, rip sinews from flesh, do whatever it took to squash anyone who still wanted to play for the Good Council. Especially someone who’d already hurt Rayna in so many different ways.

“I’m coming,” Balkersaff said instead, chin jutting up. The way she eyed me… she recognized me, I knew, as the thing she had faced beneath the Testing Center, even without my mask. Maybe she’d never quite believed that Rayna had killed me, or maybe she didn’t care. From the glance she threw at Mr. Gleekle’s body, it was clear she was merely relieved to be free of him and his pre-elite system.

Still, I sundered through her mind just to make absolutely certain her intentions weren’t to join us long enough to stab Rayna in the back again.

What I found made me blink and withdraw, just as another Mind Manipulator sidled up to her and grasped her hand.

“I’m coming with you, too,” he said.

And so it went, until nearly half of the Esholian Institute had stepped up to join Rayna’s friends, and even then there was one more surprise.

Soaring from the direction of the classrooms came a high-pitched cloud of whirring cicadas, carrying a single withered figure in their midst.

The swarm came floating to the ground in the middle of Bascite Boulevard, relinquishing their hold on the figure. When they buzzed away in all different directions like dissipating ash, it was Agathea Temberlein who gave me a toothy grin.

“Don’t forget about me!”

She wiggled her fingers at the groups of students around her, and their jaws fell open. From a few feet away, Rodhi crossed his arms and rolled his eyes.

I considered what I had before me. A bunch of humans, yes, but humans with magic and a reason to fight. One original Good Council faerie. Several ships of pirates who wanted to get their hands bloody after centuries bored at sea. And Jagaros’s people, all of whom had been waiting for this exact moment.

Up against us, the Good Council itself didn’t stand a chance. Not when I’d already picked off so many of their numbers over the last few months.

The real problem would be Dyonisia’s fucking antipower. And how the hell I was supposed to destroy her without laying eyes on Rayna now that Rayna had been dragged into her domain. She was sure to keep her niece close now that all pretenses had completely dissolved.

“Well?” Emelle asked quietly, her tears leaving stains on her cheeks.

I gave a curt nod. I’d need to contact Jagaros, brief Sasha and Sylvie and the other faeries on my ships, locate Dazmine and Terrin, and somehow get everyone up to Bascite Mountain with my Walking power. But first…

My eyes dragged up to Rayna’s Wild Whisperer window against my will. Like part of me still expected to see her slipping on her boots or sheathing her knives through the vine-framed glass. Still here.

Her absence pummeled me in the chest all over again, but another face peered down at me, clearly distraught. The face of a very familiar monkey.