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“That’s the interesting thing,” Gareth replied eagerly. “These carvings on the crown, they’re words from hundreds of different languages. Arcane, holy, bestial. Some are so obscure I can only guess at their translations because I have no official dictionaries to use as references. But the ones Icantranslate all say essentially the same thing.”

“Three,” Talan murmured. “They all saythree.”

I felt myself growing impatient. I’d never liked riddles, and suddenly they were everywhere. “What does that mean? Three what? Three jewels on the crown?”

“Three curses?” Gemma mused. “Three different ways of binding servants to Kilraith?”

“Or is it a label?” Ryder said. “There are multiple crowns, and this is the third one?”

Then I saw Gareth’s expression, how eager he was to tell us the answer, and my skin turned to ice.

“You thinkthreerefers to theytheliad,” I said quietly. “The curse that bound Talan to Kilraith, the curse powerful enough to transcendthe boundary between our world and the Old Country. The curse so dangerous that the gods themselves wanted to destroy all knowledge of it. And it’s…”

I trailed off, too horrified by my own theory to voice it aloud.

Gareth did it for me.

“What I believe,” he said slowly, “is that this iteration of theytheliadis far larger than a single curse that existed only to bind Talan to Kilraith. The crown served as a magical anchor, as we suspected, allowing Kilraith a dependable servant who could travel from one world to another and carry out his bidding. But I think it was onlyonesuch anchor, and theytheliadKilraith has created is vast. A curse with many parts, many functions.”

“You think there are multiple anchors,” Talan murmured, looking sick, “all of them linked to create a nexus of power for him, all of them scattered gods know where.”

“Across this world and the Old Country?” Gemma asked faintly.

“And you think this is only the third of them,” Ryder said. His frown was fearsome, his voice grave.

“Three of how many?” I whispered.

Gareth shook his head. “That’s what Heldine and I are working to find out, though the images and words she’s uncovered through her spellwork are mere fragments, like pieces of glass you’d find after something massive has shattered.” He glanced at Gemma’s gloved left hand, no doubt thinking of how her whole body had been pocked with glass not so long ago. “When you pick up a piece of glass at the site of a disaster, you don’t immediately know how many others there are, how big a thing was broken. It will take time to decipher what she’s found and to find more. But…”

“But howmuchtime, you can’t say,” Gemma finished for him.

“No,” he agreed, and then looked up at me, and I knew at once what he would say.

I felt so tired it hurt. “But it would take less time if you had access to the royal archives.”

“We’re going to the queen anyway,” he pointed out, “and shehasgiven us access before, whether she meant to or not. Remember that book that appeared in my hands the day the chimaera invaded the palace? The book that told us about theytheliad, the book without which I might not have ever known this particular curseexisted—”

“Yes, yes, I hear you,” I snapped, cutting him off.

An expectant silence fell. I knew they were waiting for me to say something, that what happened next depended entirely on me—and knowing that filled me with such a sudden seething anger that I had to stand there for a moment and bite down against a dozen petulant instincts, all of them telling me to run away or refuse to act or insult people who didn’t deserve it.

I felt Ryder’s eyes on me and remembered his words from the day before.You’re allowed to be frightened, but you’re not allowed to be a coward. You’re better than that.

And he was right. Iwasbetter than that. Or at least I would try to be, no matter how angry it made me that I had to try at all. I was tired of trying so hard to be everything, to do everything. So often, trying felt like climbing a distant northern mountain that never ended.

But if I didn’t climb, then what? I’d sit in the freezing snow and let it kill me?

The thought was appealing. I shook myself a little, frightened of my own mind and its capacity to conjure up all manner of dangerous fantasies.

“Well, then,” I said briskly, ignoring Ryder with extraordinary effort, “we can’t waste any more time. We’ll go to the Citadel at once. If they’ll let us through the gates, that is.”

I turned and left the room, and the others hurried to follow me.

Chapter 12

They did not let us into the Citadel.

It was madness there. Hundreds of people were gathered at the northern gates, which stood nearest the university. They shouted for the queen, for the Senate. They grabbed the iron gates and shook them, waved flaming torches, threw rotten food. Those who attempted to scale the great perimeter wall were turned back with almost comical politeness by the guards who stood atop it. And everywhere we looked, the protesters held up portraits of people I assumed were the abducted—children and adults, young and old. Many faces repeated themselves, and some had been hung on the wall above shrines of coins and candles and flowers.