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Someone shouted my name, and even that sound had a crimson edge to it.My fault. My fault. They were all dying, children and elders and those two people whose faces I couldn't even bear to think of, who had to know by now, who had to realise that they would die and I was the reason, that the curse on their household had come to haunt them yet again …

And just as abruptly, with a cold sting of metal against my wrist, it was over.

I came to my senses in a world nothing like the one in which I’d stood a moment before – no more pine trees, no more piles of boulders, no more ferns and moss and knee-high grass. We were standing in a wasteland, nothing but splintered wood and shattered stone as far as the eye could see, and the colours …

Creon’s skin had paled against mine. So had his scars. The red had bled from his shirt, leaving a muddy green behind; the locks of hair curling over my shoulders had turned an even sicklier greenish brown.

The blade of his alf steel dagger lay pressed flat against my arm, gleaming whiter than anything else around us.

Slowly, ever so slowly, reality stitched itself back together in my mind.

‘No.’ A breathless, powerless plea. ‘No … no, I didn't mean to …’

Creon’s rough breath behind me was enough to interrupt that sorry excuse for a sentence – not a laugh, not a sigh, not a groan of despair. ‘In control again, cactus?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered, unable to look away from the devastation around us – the devastationIhad caused. Trees that had witnessed centuries, snapped like twigs. Solid stones, cracked like hearts. The firestorm of red had washed my anger away with it. And now that broken, agonised monster below was rising tothe surface after all, demanding to be seen, demanding to be felt – worming its way into the tips of my toes and fingers until there was nowhere left for me to hide …

‘It's alright, Em,’ Creon muttered against the crown of my head, slipping his dagger back into its sheath. His voice, that rough, golden voice, was like a caress, like the softest woolen blanket around my shoulders. ‘It's alright.’

A first tear broke free.

Then a second one.

I sagged against his chest and crumpled as the last of my shields disintegrated – folded into some helpless, powerless creature, all grown up and still so very small, godsworn mage and still not good enough. He scooped me into his arms without another word. I curled up against his shoulder and bawled like a baby into his shirt – cried for every wound I couldn't heal, for every gap I couldn't fill, for every heart I couldn't force to beat again. For the hours counting down. For all I had lost and all I stood to lose.

‘Em …’ Creon whispered.

‘What is the bloody use of it?’ I sobbed, words a snotty, indistinguishable mess. ‘Why do I have these bloody powers if I can't even save people with them – if I can't even save … save …’

He carefully sat down, arms cradling me, lowering me into his lap. ‘Even if you can't be everyone's hero, that doesn't make you a villain, cactus.’

‘I don't feel like a villain,’ I blubbered. ‘I just feel like a failure.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ His lips brushed the crown of my head, tender and chastising at once. ‘Emelin Thenessa, love of my life, you’re farther from a failure than anyone I’ve ever met in this world. Don't try to argue. It will win you nothing but more declarations of my heartfelt admiration, and they will beelaborate.’

But it was easy for him to admire me, wasn't it? He wasn't living between those corrupted walls, waiting for the end to come. He hadn't fed and raised a child through twenty years of near-starvation, only for the wretched creature to come back and kill him.

‘You keep trying to be perfect, Em.’ As if he had read the thoughts playing through my mind. ‘You keep trying to be the flawless hero. But I truly don’t think it’s perfection that will save us in the end. It’s persistence. It’s digging your heels in the sand and refusing to give up until things are finally as they are supposed to be – and mistakes or no, you’ve always been frighteningly good at being stubborn.’

A small whimper escaped me, pressed against his shirt. ‘She controls the entire known world now. Things couldn't belesslike they are supposed to be.’

‘And so you give up?’

A challenge, that question. I was too exhausted to accept it – too exhausted to do the hard work of hoping and having faith when there was so very little left in the world to have faith in.

‘Our army is too small,’ I whispered.

He sighed. ‘I know.’

Not what I had expected him to say – not the obligatory optimism I thought one was supposed to feign under these circumstances. The surprise made my next sentence come out more defensive than I’d planned. ‘And we still can't use our magic properly, either.’

‘Absolutely true,’ he admitted, with not a moment of hesitation, and somehow he sounded almost … amused about it?

That didn’t make sense. I tilted up my head to look him in the eye, forgetting for a moment to feel lost and defeated – but good gods, he reallywassmiling, brightly and mischievously, as if the persistent existence of the bindings was a wry joke rather than a disadvantage that might kill us.

Madman.

There was something annoyingly alluring about that smile.