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“What do you want?” the Countess demands. Her eyes widen. “Garnet?”

“At your service,” Garnet says, touching his cap.

“What is going on here?” Frederic demands, rising up from behind a sofa. “How did you—”

But Raven has stalked over to him and in one swift movement winds up and punches him hard in the face.

I can hear his nose break. Blood spurts out from between his fingers as he clutches his injured face, howling and stumbling backward.

Then she turns to the Countess.

“Hello, Ebony,” she says.

I love my friend. I saved her life once and I would do it again in a heartbeat. But the look on her face as she stares down the Countess of the Stone is frightening. It sends a chill up my spine and makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. There is a bruise swelling on Raven’s left cheek and several long scratches down her neck, giving her a slightly wild appearance.

The Countess looks, very appropriately, as though she is staring at a ghost. “You’re dead,” she gasps.

Raven gestures to herself. “No. I’m not.”

The Countess pulls herself together quickly. “When this whole thing is over, I am going to have you dismembered, 192.”

“My name,” Raven says, carefully enunciating each word, “is Raven Stirling. And your time of torture and mutilation and cruelty is at an end.”

I see Frederic move out of the corner of my eye and am about to cry out a warning. Garnet moves with me, raising his pistol, but Raven is faster than both of us, almost as if she anticipated this. She ducks and whirls, so that where once he was behind her, now she is behind him.

She grips his head between her hands. “Oh, Frederic,” she says. “I have been thinking about this reunion for such a very long time.”

Then with a sharp twist, she snaps his neck. He crumples to the floor like a rag doll, his head bent at an odd angle.

“No!” the Countess shrieks.

Raven steps over his corpse without giving it a second glance.

The Countess glares at her. “You don’t honestly think you’ll win this, do you?” She looks around the room. “What is your revolution made of, a handful of disgruntled servants, disgraced companions, and farmworkers? And one pathetic royal?”

“Have you looked out that window?” Raven says. “Your forces are scattered. Your wall is broken. The circles will be integrated. The people of this city will take it back from you tyrants.”

“The people of this city would be lost if it weren’t for the royalty,” the Countess says. “They need us to survive.”

“No,” Raven says. “We don’t.” She touches her scalp, feeling each scar one by one. “You gave me such a gift, Ebony. And you didn’t even realize it.”

“Do not call me by my given name,” the Countess snarls. Raven ignores her.

“I can hear things now, you see. I know you are afraid. More afraid than you were that time your mother starved you for a week because you still hadn’t lost weight. She locked you in the dungeon and wouldn’t let you out. You cried yourself to sleep every night.”

There is an evil gleam in Raven’s eyes at the look of terror on the Countess’s face. “Oh yes. I’ve heard your secrets. I know your thoughts. You can’t go digging around in someone’s brain and not expect there to be repercussions. Especially not a Paladin brain.” The Countess’s brow furrows and Raven cocks her head.

“That’s what we are,” she says. “Not surrogates. Not slaves. But you knew, didn’t you? That we were different. You were smart to fear us. Of course, you wouldn’t call it fear. You called it, what . . . curiosity? Experimentation? But deep down, you knew there was something about us, something about the Auguries, that was dangerous if unleashed.” She takes another step closer.

The Countess stumbles back toward the broken window. “I am not afraid of you.”

“Yes you are,” Raven says, her voice as deadly as a snake’s hiss. “And you should be.”

Another step forward for Raven. Another step back for the Countess.

Then she closes the distance between them in a flash. The Countess’s eyes widen in surprise, her large mouth dropping open as Raven shoves her out the window. She disappears with a shriek, falling to crash into the ground far below.

The room is silent except for the whimpering of the Count. Raven stands in the window, staring at the spot where the Countess vanished, her chest heaving.