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Cold goosebumps rose over my back and shoulders. She shouldn’t be here. Shecouldn’tpossibly be here … not unless …

‘Finn?’ I breathed.

A swollen, purple-green eye opened.

‘Finn.’ My voice broke. She looked like someone had made earnest attempts to bludgeon her to death for hours, and yet that stubborn fury in her gaze remained – meeting my eyes with instant recognition and something almost like relief.

Chapped lips parted, releasing a hoarse croak. ‘The city …’

‘What happened?’ I was close to shrieking now. ‘Who hurt you like this? Did you—’

‘The White City,’ she rasped, interrupting me with the urgency of a dying plea. Her bloodied, claw-like hands came up to grab the front of my dress, holding on for dear life. ‘Emelin, the Mother … the Mother has taken thecity.’

Chapter 28

‘That's impossible,’ I heardmyself say.

The words had left my mouth before I could think twice about them, blunt and brusque in the soft morning air. I hadn't meant to call her a liar, the girl who’d once risked her life to help me free Creon from the Mother’s clutches. I hadn't meant to doubt her sanity. But my mind heard the words and failed, utterly and completely, to connect them to the realm of reality as I knew it …

The Mother.

Taking the city.

But the city wassafe. Wasn't that the one thing we could be sure of – that those walls, built and protected by gods, had kept all traces of magic outside for hundreds of years? So unless theconsuls had opened the gates to her, it couldn’t be. And the two men we had left behind wouldn't bethatdesperate, would they?

Would they?

‘Isawthem,’ Finn defiantly rasped, her eyes wide with horror. ‘She made me go on that ship to take care of the horses – she broke my binding to the island to put me on that ship – and then when they finally let us out, I saw the walls of the city and all of them flying right over them. They sent me after them with the carts and when I got there …’

She choked up, hands clutching my dress as if she was trying to tear it in half.

‘Good gods,’ Agenor muttered behind me. ‘Goodgods.’

I stared at the wounded girl in front of me, mind not so much spinning in thought as spinning out of control – unable to turn my shock into a coherent line of reasoning, to hear her and believe her andunderstand.So Norris and Halbert hadn’t opened the gates. A relief, in a way, and yet it was worse, too – because if it hadn’t been the gates, then what in hell had happened?

Right over the walls.Which the Mother had tried before, hadn’t she? Tried it and never managed – so why would those god-forged defences suddenly give in now, at the worst possible moment, if they’d held fast for hundreds and hundreds of years?

The only thing that had changed in the meantime …

The breath stopped dead in my throat, frozen in absolute certainty.

‘How did you get here?’ Agenor was asking, his deep voice incomprehensibly calm behind me. ‘Did they let you go?’

‘I tried to escape,’ she whispered. ‘Tried to sneak out with one of the horses. And then they caught me.’

I stared at her injuries, the purple contusions on her face and the bloody scrapes covering her hands and wrists, and wanted to throw up.

‘They were going to kill me.’ An audible memory of pain and fear haunted her rough voice. ‘But then the Mother made them stop and told them I could be useful. And then she sent me here to tell you … to tell you …’

Her damaged lips moved, not a sound coming out.

‘Finn?’ Agenor said, and I vaguely realised he must have learned her name from me. Had she even been born yet when he left the Crimson Court some twenty years ago?

And hell, did it matter?

‘I have to tell you …’ She aimed her gaze back at me, voice faltering to a barely audible whisper. ‘I have to tell you that if you surrender yourself to her, she will let the people in the city go. Alive and unharmed.’

Behind me, Agenor cursed.