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“Ana, it’s all coming apart!” Tyreste. Somewhere.
Screaming. Crashing. Tearing. Splitting. It was all she could hear, feel, or sense, and her control was slipping, slipping with the castle and the Ravenwoods who had trusted her when they’d had no reason to. Shehadto find her concentration.Hadto push him back into the shadows, into the nothingness he’d come from.
Your child will die, Anastazja, and you will be the one who murdered her.
“No, no one’s daughters have to die for you ever again,” Ana whispered into the maelstrom whipping her farther and farther away from the safety of solid ground. Tyreste screamed for her, but even if she’d wanted to find him, she was already gone. Lost. She grasped what was happening—that she had been building the ward from the moment she’d landed in the Courtyard of Regents, ripe with fresh doubts and a half-formed plan.
Ana’s feet left the ground just as the last of the ice fell away, disappearing into the storm and clouds. She envisioned a little girl, hair like spun gold, running through the village without a care in the world. That same girl, her eyes pointed toward a part of the sky she could never reach, no matter how strong her wings. Though the girl would dream of the ravens, they would remain a beautiful myth, a fanciful story to excite her colorful imagination. Ana envisioned the stories she would tell her grandchildren of the haven in the sky, where ravens thrived without fear, without darkness.
Higher and higher Ana swirled, deep in the cocoon of a future not yet realized. A beautiful life wove together, a daughter who would become a woman, who would grow old and eventually spend her promise, but not before she’d created more life, more beauty. She saw the threads Ludya always spoke of, and somewhere inside of Ana, she was laughing in delight, for she at last—as her soul was seized by the storm and turned inside out—understood one of her vedhma’s most perplexing riddles.
Ana breathed in the gale's violence, exalting in everything and nothing at once. She could no longer hear the screams or the desecration, not even her love. She’d gone somewhere no one could follow.
She held the air in her lungs, rising higher and higher. There was but one thing left to do: cut the thread.
By the wings of this life or the bones of the next,she sang in her mind as she tumbled through sky and stars. She turned her fingers to shears and ran them through every shimmering thread tethering her and her blood to a world that had never, ever belonged to them.
When Ana was done, she succumbed to the astonishing exaltation of complete and absolute release.
“She’s awake.” Tyr croaked the words, already half out of his chair. It fell backward and crashed to the floor of Ana’s bedchamber.
Ana’s eyes closed again, but her lips began to move.
“Ludya!”
Ludya approached leisurely, as though checking the dressing on a minor wound. She leaned down, pursed her mouth, and nodded. “So she is.”
“And?” Tyr demanded, widening and blinking his eyes at her.
“And she’s awake, as you said. I’ll leave you two alone.” She gathered her skirts and unceremoniously moved toward the door.
“Wait.Wait. What if she needs you?”
“It’s not me she needs. There is nothing wrong with her. Take your moments as they are given, for as soon as I advise the steward his daughter has awakened, there will be no shortage of visitors.” She nodded at him and left.
Tyr stared after her, dumbstruck. They’d found Ana, days later, huddled in a barn in a fugue. Ludya had said even before examining her that she would make a full recovery, that there was nothing left to fear except an overactive imagination spinning to life outcomes that wouldn’t come to pass. But Ludya didn’t understand the way Tyreste’s heart had broken and reformed while waiting for Ana to come back to him.
“Come here,” Ana beckoned, her voice cracking and distant. When he reached for the fallen chair, she grabbed his hand and tugged. “Nien. Lie with me.”
Tyr carefully peeled back the layers of blankets and slipped in beside her.
She frowned at the space he’d left and he inched closer, but the moment he felt her warmth press against him, he burst into tears.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he cried, burrowing his head into the pillow in shame. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Ana lifted herself and nudged him closer.
He fell into her arms, still sobbing.
“Everything will be fine now, Tyreste,” she said gently. Her whole body moved with the power of her nodding. Some of her golden hair—now streaked with silver, like those strange goats in the sky—brushed across his face. “Don’t ask me to explain how I know, just trust I do.”
“I trust you,” he said. He ducked his head to wipe his eyes on the pillow. “I would never have let you go up that mountain if I didn’t.”
“Let me?” Some of the spirit had returned to her tone. “And just how do you think you would have stopped me?”
“I seem to remember a woman who could be brought to her knees with the right flick of my tongue.” He smiled in her arms, grateful to be feeling something other than dread again.
“Are we speaking of me or you?” she asked, craning down to look at him with a mischief-filled grin. “BecauseIseem to remember a man who claimed to meet his so-called Guardians when his co—”
