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‘Don’t go mad,’ she told herself. ‘Keep walking, keep walking,’ she chanted, feeling her feet move beneath her but unable to process the distance covered. She didn’t know if she was closer to or further away from the centre of the maze, but she couldn’t stand there and watch the nightmare versions of herself unfold.

Everything was distorted. Her regrets, her fears, everything she thought she knew about Althea Zoltaire, Guardian of Thezmarr.

A soft crackling sounded.

At first, Thea thought it might be her magic, and wondered if she could sweep herself away in a storm of lightning and thunder.

But no storm whispered at her fingertips.

Instead, she saw frost form on the edges of the mirrors, ice crystallising out of nowhere around her many reflections.

Like a sailor to a cyren’s song, in a trance she was lured closer to the glass, staring at what unfolded there.

It was the scene Anya had shown her: they were children, hiding in the cellar with Audra and Farissa at the helm, keeping them safe from whatever darkness consumed Thezmarr’s courtyard above. Only this time, Thea was whispering to Anya.

‘I dare you,’ she said softly, her eyes eager and bright. ‘I dare you to see what’s happening outside.’

Anya fidgeted. ‘Audra said we needed —’

Even at just four years old, Thea’s smile was smug. ‘I knew you wouldn’t.’

Anya’s eyes flashed. ‘Fine!’

Thea’s expression was pure triumph. ‘Get as close as you can. You want to see everything.’

Wren was too little to play with, but Thea was a keen adventurer, brave and always getting into trouble. Even at such a young age, she knew it irked her older sister to be left behind, which made Anya all the more determined to solidify her place as the trailblazer of the orphaned Zoltaire girls.

‘Hurry or you’ll miss it,’ little Thea taunted.

‘I’m going!’ Anya hissed.

Thea watched her sister go, watched as she skirted Audra’s hawk eyes and ducked past Farissa, who was distracted with one of the infants.

It was only when Thea heard the screams from above that she realised what she’d done.

Thea staggered back from the mirror with a gasp. ‘It’s not true,’ she wheezed, pressing her hand to her chest, where the weight was nearly unbearable. ‘I didn’t… I couldn’t have…’

Illusion or reality?That was the game at play here.Illusion, illusion, Thea told herself.

But her reflection answered her horror with a cruel twist of her lips.

With a cry, Thea staggered down another winding path of mirrors, boneless beneath the weight of the events she’d set in motion for her older sister. The scars she bore, the eye she’d lost, the shadows that had nearly devoured her. It was all Thea’s fault.

The Daughter of Darkness had been her creation after all.

Letting out a scream of anguish, Thea lurched into a sprint, ignoring the movement of her mirror selves, slamming mentalwalls down around her against the shouts of her own voice echoing through the maze.

It was Anya’s words from the Singing Hare that she clung to, words she knew without a shadow of a doubt her sister had truly spoken.

‘The tides of fate are as they always intended…’

Anya had been at her side, with Dratos, Marise and Everard… and Wilder.

Wilder…His name crashed through her like a wave over fire, and in the distance, she heard glass shattering.

‘We don’t say those words again until we’re on the other side. Until we can say them Warsword to Warsword.’

She realised that amid everything they’d been through together, and of all the times before where theyhaduttered those unutterable words to one another, she had never been the one to say it first. It had always been him. He had always taken the leap for them. He had always risked his heart first. For her.