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Another pause for a silent response, then she nodded. “Yes, they’re both here.”

By the skies. If I had the ability to move, I would have toppled back. She was speaking of theskallkrönor. My mother . . . had she been the one to hide them away?

This couldn’t be real. As if her presence summoned me, I looked across the room. Adira, trembling, and gnawing on her thumbnail between her teeth, met my gaze.

“Wildling,” I said, voice low.

“Wake up, Kage,” she whispered. “Kage, wake up.Dammit.Wake. Up.”

With a jolt, I drew in a sharp gasp. My eyes were heavy with fatigue and my skull ached with feverish heat.

A hand was pressed to my chest. Slender and pale, marked inbeautiful lines of ink. I covered Adira’s hand with my sweaty palm and turned my head. She lay beside me, half on my bed, half off. Her own face was flushed and damp.

“I remember a dream again,” I whispered, throat scratchy as though I’d devoured sand.

“Who was she?”

“My mother. She was my mother.”

Adira’s lashes fluttered. “She hid them, didn’t she?”

I stared at the rafters overhead, reliving everything I’d seen in the dream. “I think so.”

“Kage.” Adira’s fingertips traced along my ribs. “Look.” Smoky veins split over my middle and side, like a gnarled, deadened tree. “It gets worse when you dream. This is the degeneration curse, isn’t it? It’s taking you.”

Her voice was thick and weary. No mistake, she’d been summoned here through pain and anguish. I moved aside and leveraged her onto my mattress. With ease, Adira placed her head on my shoulder, her palm still over my heart.

“Rest, Wildling. There isn’t anything to fret about tonight.”

She let out a sigh I took as an exhausted scoff. “We’re not done speaking of this, Thief.”

By the time I dared let my arm wrap around her shoulders, pulled her close against my side, Adira’s soft breaths had already lulled her off to sleep.

CHAPTER 18

Adira

I letmy forehead fall to the musty, rough parchment pages and cursed under my breath. “I’m never going to get this.”

“That’s the sort of attitude that’ll be sure to get you nowhere.”

I lifted my head, some of the parchment sticking to my brow, and met the scrutiny of Gwyn as she folded a new linen night dress and returned it to a drawer. The sleepwear in Magiaria was about as sexy as a pin, but this little number had a bit more lace and was more diaphanous.

“Where did you get that?”

Gwyn paused closing the drawer halfway. “I heard you grumbling about the style of some bulkier night shifts, which I wholly agree with, so I took the liberty to give you a bit more room to breathe.”

I dropped the messy, too-slender quill. My ball point pen from my bag had long since runout of ink. Now, the tyrants—namely Hugo and Destin—said I’d be able to use mymortal penif I could simply summon the ink with my supposed magic that had yet to rear its stubborn head.

No ink. No magic since I’d slashed at Asger, and I was growing more aggravated by the day.

Three weeks I’d been staying at Briar Keep. Three heads werenow piked outside on the gates from my assailants, and I was horrified I did not feel more guilt at the sight. Truth be told, I made a point to pass the window each day.

Kage had not forgotten his promise of brutality against them. Destin was the gentler of the two princes, but even he’d sat like a dark statue in his throne as his brother, Asger, and Cy requested the opportunity to land the killing blows.

Since then, Kage—I was almost certain—was avoiding me.

He’d not even had another suffocating nightmare, so I had no excuses to seek him out. Not really.