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I drag my attention back to my brother and feel my face twitching. I hate this so much, hate that he’s the one who’s petrified of cages, hate that I’m leaving him to face a living nightmare.

“Fuck,” I mutter, then reach out to grip his hand. “If you don’t stay alive, I’ll kill the shit out of you.”

His lips flex into a half-smirk. He squeezes me back. “Go well and be swift.”

Juniper fishes into her cloak pocket and presses a small flask and jar into Cerulean’s palm. “Water,” she says, her voice cracking. “And ointment I stole from Cypress’s reserves when I left. It’s supposed to alleviate pain and injuries quickly. And…jvjalp mun joma.”

Help is coming.

Cerulean’s gaze swerves from the containers to Juniper. A grin slips across his face. “You’re a fast learner.”

Juniper swallows. “They’re coming. I promise.”

But what happens until then is the problem. While the ointment will nourish his wings, the iron will still be an issue. The longer he’s here, the worse it’ll get.

If that happens, my brother will deteriorate to the point where he’ll permanently lose his ability to fly, healed feathers or not. Cerulean will relapse to his fledgling years, unable to remember how to use his wings or other powers, assuming he gets his magic back, all while trapped in the one place he fears most.

Neither Cerulean, nor I need to tell Juniper this. She knows, but each of us pretends that isn’t a probability.

Juniper offers Cove’s makeshift key to Cerulean, but he refuses. It’ll do him no good if he can’t haul himself to a standing position. Whoever comes to his aid will need the key more.

Instead, my brother tucks Scorpio’s knife deeper into his wings, and we refasten the bolt. The humans will assume I found a way to pry open the padlock, then latched my brother inside and left him behind. With Cerulean still caged, hopefully they’ll think he was abandoned, and they won’t take their rage out on him.

But if the humans suspect I’ve gone for help, they might question him the hard way. In which case, Cerulean will need to exercise his devious silver tongue more than ever.

I cast him another glance. “Keep playing the game. Keep thinking of memories that’ll rattle me. You’ll need them when we see each other again. You’ll need them to win. Understand?”

Cerulean puffs through his pain. “Tell her I love her.”

I won’t have to because he’ll live to tell Lark himself. Nevertheless, I nod before Juniper hoists me out of the cage.

My arm hooks over her shoulder. With each lopsided step, my back and shoulder rage, and I sink my teeth into my lower lip, muffling the noises grating from my lungs.

We hobble down the vale until a gash appears in the briers, then slip through and scale the incline. Once we clear the slope and put enough distance between the cage and ourselves, Juniper starts multitasking. She balances my weight as best she can while trying to distract me from the wounds by listing a bunch of details.

Cypress and Foxglove are still infected by the iron. Although my best friend had been as stubborn as Juniper, wanting to return for me and Cerulean, he had been temporarily immobilized. Moreover, he’d known I would massacre him if he left Juniper before she got better.

Meanwhile, our band had been plotting a rescue once everyone recovered. Until then, they’d insisted Juniper stay put.

Because we’d talked about sending her father a letter, Juniper tamed her panic by writing one with her sisters and dispatching Lark’s nightingale to deliver it.

As for Tímien, he still isn’t back from wherever he’d gone. No one has seen or heard from the raptor, and at this point, that isn’t like him. Even The Parliament are in an uproar searching every crevice of the mountain for him, which explains why the owl hasn’t come to his son’s rescue.

Anyway, the second she had regained her strength, my woman took off on her own. For the first leg of the journey, she’d hitched a ride with Sylvan, who fared better from the iron than everyone else. Once they got far enough, fast enough, Juniper sent the deer back to centaur territory, needing to make the final trek by herself.

Pure and simple, she had disagreed with the band’s plot. As we’d already learned, a team of humans and Faeries are too loud, easier to ferret out.

By comparison, Juniper’s light on her feet, can fit through crawlspaces, and knows the forest’s shortcuts well enough now, in addition to how fluent she is in her homeland. She’d needed to move deftly, without being seen or heard, because that’s what a huntress does.

But make no mistake, Elixir and the rest won’t be far behind.

And when it comes to the mortals, their next move is anyone’s guess.

Juniper theorizes. Sometime during these last months, the trade poachers had ridden back into town—once their balls grew back after the scare my brothers and I gave them when Lark first rode into Faerie, just before the sisters’ games had started.

Back then, the poachers had followed Lark and stalled outside the border. Cerulean, Elixir, and I had enjoyed terrorizing those men, giving them a taste of trauma.

But who cares if they hadn’t actually crossed The Triad? We should have done worse to them. Dammit, we should have let Elixir blind those fuckers like he’d originally wanted to.