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Prologue

Farrin opened her eyes to a strange world full of smoke.

She didn’t recognize the walls around her, or the ceiling above her, and she didn’t understand why the air was so choked and bitter. For a moment, she lay frozen in her cocoon of quilts—yes, these were quilts around her, the ones from her bed: one white with tiny green leaves, one a soft gray like morning in winter, both decorated with her mother’s embroidery—and she thought to herself, as she always did when waking from a nightmare,My name is Farrin Ashbourne. I am eleven years old. I am safe at home, at Ivyhill. My sisters are Mara and Gemma. My parents are Gideon and Philippa. My name is Farrin Ashbourne.

She pressed a finger to her thigh with each name:Farrin. Mara. Gemma. Gideon. Philippa.Five names, five fingers. The familiar recitation cleared her mind. Rooted once again in the waking world, she was finally able to understand that she was not in her bedroom but in her music room on the second floor, lying underneath the piano in a nest of pillows.

The room had been hers since she could remember, and she loved it with every ounce of her being. It boasted soaring ceilings, and littlestone birds that perched on the ivied rafters, and huge windows of rippled glass. She liked to push those open on pleasant days and imagine her music drifting across the grounds to greet the earth, the flowers, the tenant farmers in their tidy fields. Long curtains flanked each window—creamy, delicate, fluttery in breezes—and all along the far side of the room, organized neatly on gleaming mahogany shelves, were her collections of sheet music and composer biographies and treatises on bowing technique, and near the windows, on a fancy little pedestal, was a tasseled velvet bed for her kitten, Osmund.

In the middle of the night, Farrin often left her bedroom to creep up to the second floor and make a nest under the piano, which felt secretive and wonderful, as if under the piano was a whole other cozy world to which only she had the key. In her safe, pretty house, in her own safe, private room, in the safe, hidden world under the piano: this was Farrin’s favorite place in the whole world.

And it was on fire.

That was the reason for the smoke, and the orange glow at the windows, and the feeling, everywhere, of terrible, encroaching heat.

Ivyhill was on fire.

Panic tore away the lingering fog of sleep, panic like nothing Farrin had ever known. Her heart hammering, horrible coughs seizing her all at once, she scooped up Osmund, who was cowering beside her in the pillows, his black hair standing on end, hissing at something—perhaps at the smoke, or the fire itself. With Osmund cradled to her chest, Farrin ran for the door in bare feet, her braid swinging, and threw it open.

The hallway beyond was black and seething, and the smell of the smoke was terrible—nothing like the sweet, piney scent of wood crackling in the hearth, nothing like the warm breadiness of Mrs. Rathmont’s ovens downstairs. Itstung, lashing at Farrin’s throat and nostrils with every breath she sucked into her lungs. She threw anarm over her mouth, eyes watering, Osmund clawing frantically at her nightgown. She could hardly breathe; the smoke was vile, unstoppable, and it was laced with somethingelse, something biting and brittle, like the charge of a coming storm.

A chill swept through Farrin, even as she stood there sweating in the sweltering heat. She knew that smell. It was the smell of magic, searing and furious. A spell, she suspected—a spell crafted with wicked intent.

Ivyhill hadn’t simply caught fire. No, someone had set fire to it. And Farrin knew only one family equal to such a task, a family with power and resources to rival her own, a family that hated the Ashbournes as much as the Ashbournes hated them.

The House of Bask.

Something crashed downstairs, something huge and groaning that made the floor shake under Farrin’s feet. She staggered back into her music room, quaking with fear, coughing so hard it hurt. Tears streamed down her face as she peered down the hallway to the right, then the left. The left, she thought, looked a bit dimmer than the right, which she hoped meant fewer flames. She prayed to Caiathos, god of the earth and all its elements, though something in her heart told her the prayer was useless.

If the Basks had indeed set this fire—if they had found spellcrafters clever enough to break through Ivyhill’s protective wards—then the long-dead gods couldn’t help her. They were all going to burn. All of them. Mama and Papa. Mara. Gemma. Gilroy. Mrs. Rathmont. Madame Baines. Every maid, every cook.

The Basks wanted only one thing. Farrin had learned this at her father’s knee.

The Basks wanted to destroy her family.

She tucked Osmund into her nightgown and pressed his tiny head against her breastbone, hoping the thin fabric would somehowprotect him from the smoke. Then she ran left down the hallway, hardly noticing when Osmund lodged his claws in her skin. At the hallway’s end stood two staircases. One led upstairs; the other would take her down to the first floor.

Farrin paused, wiped the tears from her eyes. Her hand came away wet and black with smoke. Was the fire upstairs or downstairs? Which way should she go?

She sucked in a breath and tried to yell for her parents, for her sisters, but she couldn’t get out a word, only a sort of rasping sound, desperate and frightening. Had the smoke taken away her voice? Would she ever get it back? What if she chose the wrong stairs? Having no voice would then, perhaps, be the least of her problems.

Farrin let out a sob. Her chest drew tight with a primal despair. Was she going to die? She was. Her house was going to kill her.

Osmund had gone still under her nightgown, though Farrin could still feel the frantic beat of his heart under her palm. She gave him a tender squeeze—it will be all right, precious—and decided that no, she wasnotgoing to die. She needed to get Osmund out. He was small and helpless, an innocent, grumpy little fluff goblin, and she was his only chance of salvation.

She squinted upstairs. The air was strange and shimmery with heat. Yes. That way, upstairs. It had to be. The stairs going down to the first floor looked brighter to her blurry eyes, and the air felt hotter. So the fire had begun downstairs.

As she raced up to the third floor, she felt a little twist of hope. If the fire was downstairs, then that meant upstairs could still be safe. Maybe the flames hadn’t yet reached that part of the house. She could scuttle through one of the windows in the long hallway that led to the art gallery, then crawl out onto the roof and use the glossy, crisscrossed carpet of her mother’s ivy vines to climb down to safety.

But when Farrin reached the top of the stairs, she stopped short and froze.

The long corridor stretching out before her ended in flames. That was the art gallery, there past that roaring mouth of fire. All her parents’ sculptures and paintings, all the dimly lit nooks where Mara would sit with her sketch papers and study the play of light on stone faces, the texture of brushstrokes on canvas.

All that beauty, turned to ashes.

Dazed, reeling, Farrin turned to run back downstairs, but just then the whole staircase buckled with a horrible groan, like the house itself had given up. She lurched back with a scream, nearly teetering over the edge into that pit of singed carpet and splintered wood. Below, down the same set of stairs she’d run up only moments before, fresh flames licked up the walls, showing her their tongues.

There was nowhere else to go. Farrin turned left, away from the art gallery and the stairs-that-weren’t, and hurried down another hallway so thick with smoke she could barely see her feet. Down this corridor was a series of little parlors and studies meant for guests, and each one had windows, and windows meant fresh air. That was all Farrin could think of as she ran: air, windows,out. Those rooms looked out over an inner courtyard, which wasn’t ideal, but if she could only stick her head out some window, any window, andbreathefor a few moments, she would be able to think more clearly and come up with a better plan.