Page 99

And then she remembered the woman in the tower, her wrist chained to the bed. She remembered Milo and Katu—Katu was only twelve and yet found himself surrounded by all those children who needed him.

She kneeled on the ground.

Asher crouched next to her. “Harness your power, Lore. You can do this. Break the wards.”

She thrust her hands out, searching for any weakness in the threads of the spell.

Some things were worth taking a risk. Things like freeing those she loved and setting those responsible for their pain on fire.

Chapter31

The entrance to the tower was on the other side of the forest path.

Two winged fae stood on either side of thick metal doors. Unlike the sleepy guards outside the royal wing of the castle, these stood at attention, alert in their gleaming golden armor.

Asher was right. The Royal Guard consisted of a different class of soldier.

The pair stood in front of the guards, hidden within the tower’s shadow. The guards might have been bigger than them, with long staffs as weapons and bracketed by powerful, all-black feathered wings that could lift them high into the sky, but Lore and Asher had the element of surprise.

If Lore hadn’t been cloaking them with her magic, Asher’s knife would have gleamed as he thrust it out, slitting the throat of one and then the other in a single breath. Neither of the guards even knew what hit them as they clawed at their throats, trying and failing to keep their lifeblood from gushing through their fingers.

They might have been of the winged station, but they could die like any other.

Lore stood in front of the door with her hands splayed out inches from the wards on the doors. She could feel Asher’s vinescreeping forward, wrapping around the guards’ golden boots and dragging them to the tree line, where they disappeared into the ground.

She couldn’t find a hole in the network of wards here. She needed to think of this another way. She could feel the heat coming off the wards and, with her second sight, she could pass through them, but she couldn’t figure out how to get her physical body through.

She and Asher were running out of time, but perhaps her earlier thought of setting people aflame hadn’t been too far off.

Maybe fire was the answer.

She pulled her pack off her back and searched through it, eventually pulling out a small vial of glowing liquid. She held it up for a moment; it looked like she’d bottled moonlight.

Weeks ago, she’d ground up the flowers she’d plucked from the canopy in the wildwood, the ones that had made Finndryl’s hands burn, bubble, and blister as a child. Back then, she’d thought that, maybe, she could use it as a weapon when she was in a tight spot.

But maybe, if she filled it with her intentions and entwined them withSource, it could becomemore.

“Step back,” she told Asher, not wanting to splash him with the glowing liquid.

She twisted the stopper out of the vial and placed it on the ground before her. She closed her eyes, focusing on the contents, and began chanting under her breath, using bits and pieces of spells she’d learned in the circle of clovers alongside Finn.

She weaved them together: a spell for unlocking, another for unraveling, and a third for movement of an element. She rotated her hands, sweat dripping down her back, and put all her intentions into the spell.

She felt the liquid float up and out of the vial, spinning in midair.

Through Lore, it defied the laws of the world.

She twirled her hands and pushed them out, willing the liquid to do as she bid.

She chanted her new spell, imagining the liquid rushing toward the metal door and eating through the wards there, burning through them as if they were nothing. When it frayed the fabric of spells, she pushed it inward, toward the locks, until it ate through those, too.

“Lore, somebody is coming.”

She opened her eyes at Asher’s hushed whisper.

“Let’s go. Stay behind me. Do not veer from my steps.”

She’d made a rupture in the wards, just big enough for her and Asher to slip through. They didn’t hesitate to enter.