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It was like receiving permission I didn’t know I was asking for. My eyes snapped open, a strange calm flooding through me. The last time we were in Mhorghast, I’d tried this very thing—holding multiple songs in my heart and mind and voice all at once. It hadn’t worked; I’d been overcome, my body unable to withstand the disarray of confused magic. But now, a certainty rose in me like the sun. What I had tried before was possible. It was necessary. Maybe it was desperation that urged me to try, or perhaps it was simply the presence of Gemma and Mara fighting so close to me. My precious, brave sisters. I watchedthem and drew a fresh breath, no longer afraid to attempt this mad thing. Five songs at once was what I needed. And I could do it. I could sing them all and hold them fast. I could trust my power; I could trust myself.

Hold strong, to give Gemma and Mara endurance.Protection, to keep the others safe: Ryder, Gareth, Father, Talan, Nesset, all fighting bravely, lost somewhere in the flame and shadows.Release, to coax Jaetris’s battered body to release the treasure it held.Confusion, to divert and deflect the swarming Olden attackers.Love, for Ankaret, for Yvaine.

My voice split open into five parts, as if my single song were the work of an entire chorus. Each shining branch of it connected me to my purpose, my dearest ones. Gemma and Mara—hold strong. Ryder, Gareth, Father, Talan, Nesset—protection.

Tears streamed down my face. Slowly I stood, allowing my column of breath a clearer passage. I watched Jaetris’s body unfold.Release, I sang to it, to the memory of the man it had been.Be at peace. Give us the egg, and all your suffering will not be in vain.

Past the body roiled a dark sea of enemies. The citizens of Mhorghast—some Olden, some human—fought for Kilraith, fought each other.Confusion.I glared at them with unfocused eyes, directing my song to wash over them like a tidal wave. Brutal. Relentless. Driving. Unfeeling. An arm of nature sweeping coldly over them, leaving ruin in its wake.

I didn’t dare turn to look at Ankaret, but I could feel the heat of her—a bloom of warmth that should have burned me, should have flayed me to my bones, but didn’t. I heard Kilraith’s distant roars and imagined what she looked like just behind me. An impossible creature, all fire and feathers and light, holding back the tide of death for us. Shielding us.

Love.This branch of my song called out to her, tender, seeking.I felt the moment when the soaring notes reached her; I felt her take them into herself and receive them as an audience might, with wonderment, with delight.

A horrible cracking sound met my ears; Jaetris’s body was a mess of shattered bones and ruined flesh. The roots that held him to his throne dripped gold with his blood. Mara released the throne and sped off into the shadows with a fierce warrior cry. Now she could properly fight, as she was no doubt desperate to.

Gemma, shaking, turned to me. She held in her bloody hands a large gleaming egg—a cousin of the Three-Eyed Crown, with the same metal body and elaborate carvings, rimmed with round-cut topaz jewels.

“Farrin?” Her voice was in shreds, her face gray. “Can you?”

I ended the part of my song that had been for Jaetris and began a new one to replace it:destroy. It was like holding in my mind a jewel with five facets, constantly aware of every sharp turn, every gleaming surface, the size and weight of the jewel, how to direct and refract its light. And all the while, I stood on a stone in the middle of a rushing river, struggling to keep my balance.

The egg began to glow in Gemma’s hands. She cried out in pain and set it quickly on the ground at her feet, then cradled her hands against her stomach. One of my feet lost its purchase on the slick rock of my mind. The jewel of my song flew out of my hands and into the roaring water.

I fell to my knees beside the egg and reached desperately for it, choking on the dregs of the song I’d lost. My throat was raw, my lungs burning. I dragged the egg toward me and curled my body around it.

And then, suddenly, there was a snap of roaring fire behind me, a fresh rush of heat, and a single steady flame came into view. My vision was blurry. At first she was only a column of white fire stepping out of Ankaret’s larger inferno. Then she knelt before me, and I sawher clearly—Yvaine, her hair glinting with feathers and fire, her eyes bright as gold and violet stars.

“I know how to destroy it,” she told me. She held out one small white hand covered in a thousand glinting sparks. White and gold feathers encased her slender arm.

Despite her remarkable appearance and sheer spectacular impossibility of everything that was happening, her voice was so familiar, so her own, that I started to cry. “Yvaine, I saw… Jaetris showed me…” I couldn’t finish, overwhelmed by the pounding pain in my head. I didn’t yet know how to explain what I’d seen—the comet plunging into the dark sea, the other coming to Gallinor and becoming a human. A queen.

Yvaine’s face flickered with brilliant light. Diamond tears gathered at her lashes. “I know,” she said softly. She touched my throat, and the pain there eased. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. For a long time, I hardly knew myself. I’ve been awakening slowly, you see, for a very long time. Ankaret has, I mean. My first true heart. I didn’t understand what was happening until after he attacked Fairhaven. Farrin, I’m so sorry.”

Then she leaned close to me, touched my cheek, kissed my forehead. She held me to her for a moment, her eyes closed, and then said, “We’re running out of time. Can I have it, Farrin?” She drew in a shaky breath. “I can’t hold him off for much longer. I know how to destroy it. I promise you.”

I shook my head, sobbing, understanding that something terrible was about to happen. “No.Please.”

But I held out the egg to her nonetheless, hating the rough carved feel of it in my palms. It was heavy, slick with Jaetris’s blood. Yvaine took it from me, and it immediately lit up in her hands, too bright to look at. My arm flew up instinctively to shield my eyes, and by the time I managed to look up again, she was gone, stepping back into the enormous wave of Ankaret’s fire.

Beyond that shield of light, Kilraith raged. His anger was like mountains crashing down. “Ankaret, look at me!” he howled. “Don’t you understand me? I know you do! It’s what they deserve! Don’t do this!Look at me!”

In the visions Jaetris had gifted me—an entire history of an entire world—one particular story flickered brightly, one among millions. I held my breath and let the current of memory sweep over me. Two beings—confused and chaotic and bright as comets, created by irresponsible gods in a thoughtless dying instant—had fallen to the earth from their birthplace in the ravaged skies. In the few blazing seconds it had taken to fall, they had known each other, and loved each other, as fiercely as anyone ever had. And then they had crashed to the ground—the unfeeling ground of a nascent human world—and been separated.

I was in love once, Yvaine had told me in the Green House, her gaze distant and sad.It was a very long time ago, I think, years and years before any of you were born.

I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to. Kilraith and Ankaret. Kilraith andYvaine. And yet I could not shake myself free of that truth; it was too real, too huge. It clung to me like a bramble and always would.

Kilraith’s furious roars pulled me back to the warring waves of flame and shadow crashing into each other above my head. Despite all his raging thunder, Ankaret’s fire was unwavering, unfading. The tiny white form inside that blistering inferno—the form that wore Yvaine’s dear face, the face of my impossible friend—turned back once and found me shivering on the ground, miserable in my shock and fear. Somewhere in the brilliant glare, I thought I saw her smile.

“Come and find me,” she said gently. The world was crashing apart around us, and yet her words were clear as rain.

Then she turned away from me and disappeared completely into Ankaret’s flames. The wave of her fire surged hard against Kilraith.Light and darkness crashed together like stars colliding—blinding, booming—and then, all at once, Ankaret disappeared. Her blazing light shrank and coalesced into a single glowing shape: Yvaine, alone, unprotected, her shield of fire gone. Serene in a cloak of white-gold feathers, the egg a glowing star in her hands. Kilraith was already diving for her, raising one huge shadowed wing to swipe. He was expecting Ankaret, a firebird as monstrous as his own storming self. And he couldn’t stop in time; he was too large, too fast. I heard his cry of horror the instant before he crashed into her, but it was too late. Yvaine was ashes, and so was the egg. White as snow, they were a flurry in the air, and then they were gone.

Kilraith fell from the sky, the vast might of his shadow self collapsing. When the darkness cleared, his human form knelt at its epicenter—pale as Yvaine had been, tall and beautiful, shadows clinging to him like shredded skin. He clutched ashes in his hands and howled out his grief. The sound was like a roaring wind ready to carve the world to pieces.

I watched him in disbelief, and through my tears, I choked out a small song of hope.Are you there?But nothing answered. The notes skipped weakly across the ashen ruin before me and quickly sputtered out. I tried again, and again, vaguely noticing the world shifting and turning all around me. A distant part of my mind understood that Mhorghast was collapsing, folding in on itself. Erratic, short-lived moonlight roads shot out in all directions. The city was shrinking, brought to ruin by the grief of its creator, and soon it would crush me.

I closed my eyes, too tired to move, too heartbroken to run.Let it crush me, I thought.Let me die as she did.