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Using the book as a pillow, I lay down, refusing towant.
This was it. I was done.
Mother, I tried to be kind and true.
Somewhere inside me, she sang softly of dragons and flowers, of life and rain.
My mind drifted to Lumi and me as girls, how we told each other everything as we snuck away to watch the stars, how once we thought Mother only beautiful and knew none of the cost. We dressed up in her clothes when she was away, not understanding that they were costumes to make rich men part with their money. That her visitors were customers, not great romances.Had our father been any different?
Then how two years ago, I rushed homeknowingLumi was hurt. The spring floods had been tearing through Tal, Rivertown knee-deep in water and Lowtown almost as bad. Only one barge had remained open, partying through the torrents. Behind a curtain of rain, Stone and I shyly undressed each other. We had flirted through winter and thought it love. His mother owned another barge and his offer of free food and drink had seemed the truest proof of his feelings.
I never saw him again after that night.
Half dressed, I’d felt my sister disappear and a terror as cold as the deluge.
I had braved the weather, imagining her drowned in the torrents or bleeding out in an alley. Returning drenched and exhausted to Kirill’s, I found her unconscious in the courtyard, the skin on herface flapping open, lip split in two. The rest of her was blue with cold and bruises. The following morning, she had been too hot, delirious, and raging about death. I’d gone to Kirill and added to our debts, money we would never be able to pay back, because Popova was not cheap even for damaged girls.
When Lumi returned from the apothecary, I did not question her distance. Healing the body was not the same as healing the mind. Instead of talking, secrets had grown like weeds, pushing us apart. She never told me what happened that night. Now she never would.
Exhaustion and dreams interlaced with memories opened my mind, and despite the sigiled bars, magic slipped out to carry notes of life back to me. It found the guards, tired but alert, then the crowd on Palace Road, already preparing for King’s Change—the three-day-long funeral and coronation celebration.
It sang of a city of color, of life brighter because death was never forgotten. There was anger, but not the oppressive terror of the drawing in Dimitri’s journal. Notes spiraled high, carrying me until I flew without movement. A tornado like those on the steppes, promising only change in its wake.
Then there it was.
The bond.
Impossible and beautiful.Lumi.
I jolted awake, sitting up.
A memory—it must have been a memory—because I could not sense the dead, and in death we were all interchangeable. Everyone in Tal knew that Spirits retained nothing of who they had been in life. Despite what Ealhswip did to the dead, I had to believe that, so even if I could feel the dead, I would not be able to find Lumi.She was gone. They had surely burned her body and given her ashes to the mountain winds by now.
The sigils on the bars shone green like her eyes.
Reaching again, I found nothing.
The foolish hope, like an animal beaten and abandoned, shivered inside.
I did not sleep again.
Watching the minutes on the mechanical marvel Dimitri had left me with tick toward my death, the darkness pressed down. Only once did I flip it over and followed the red needle with my eyes as if I could pierce stone and find the palace.
Could I not dismiss him from my heart because he placed one of his three mage curses on me?Had he twisted me as he accused me of twisting him? Or was this hurtful, haunting, burning thinglove?
As I had known, this was too late for realizations.
They came when the sun shone in through the window at the end of the hallway. Four guards I did not recognize and Koshka, perhaps here to report back to my prince. Maybe carry away my last words if I had had any. Perhaps to mock me by surviving impossible odds.
The sun did not yet reach the walled courtyard where the hangman’s noose hung from a white tree, the same kind that grew in the Bone Grove. Maybe it would chain my Spirit with the other condemned killed here, then Ealhswip could come and collect it at her leisure.
Fear crept through the numbness. I pushed it back.
Lumi would not have balked from stepping up the wooden platform. I would keep my composure for both of us.
Each step was a mountain to conquer. My body refused to approach the gently swinging rope, like it knew this was an animalintending harm. Survival is the strongest instinct we have. You do not decide to pull your hand from a flame before it’s burned. The body protects itself.
The shaking started in my hands. I clenched them tight as I reached the final step. My knees locked.
