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‘I’m pretty sure there are no labels anywhere,’ an alf said on the other side of the circle – one of Valdora’s people. He must have visited the hall before with one of the groups she’d sent out to keep an eye on the treasures. ‘We would have noticed.’

‘You can’t evenread,’ an alf next to him mumbled, and again some nervous chuckles went around the group. They were sounding significantly more doubtful this time, though.

‘No, of course there are no labels,’ Naxi said impatiently, ‘because they were first inscribed and then wiped off again with red magic. You see? The trick to making them visible is to usejustenough blue magic to heal the wood that was destroyed around the inscription, but not so much blue magic that you’ll undo the inscription itself, too – so we need some decent mages. I hope all of you fae are decent mages?’

Good gods.

Creon couldn’t have seenthatcoming, could he?

It appeared that he hadn’t, as the discussion continued for another few minutes: the gathered fae had received no instructions on what they were supposed to do exactly, just a warning that they would likely be needed and ought to be available. Still …

Why hadn’t he justtoldme?

He still hadn’t shown up by the time the alves started fading us all towards the Cobalt Court. I was too befuddled to object to leaving.

The old halls of the ruins were significantly less gloomy by full daylight; with the sun streaking in around the rows and rows of shelves, the thousands of crystal orbs twinkled in a way a happier person may have called cheerful. But I wasn’t in the mood for pretty sights, and I wasn’t given time for them anyway. Someone found me a chair, someone else brought me a table with a mother-of-pearl top, and it was there that they instructed me to stay and wait for the people to come to me.

‘But—’ I started.

‘Hytherion’s instructions!’ an alf bellowed over his shoulder before fading out again.

Godsdamnit.

The worst part was that it worked flawlessly, the system he’d devised even without any idea of the mechanism that would identify the bindings. Agenor’s fae slowly walked down the aisles, restoring inscriptions. Behind them, members of all magical peoples followed – members it turned out Creon had selected specifically for their outgoing social nature, because it was their task to read the newly revealed names and sound the alarm if they recognised anyone they knew to be among our army. Finally, alves faded back and forth between the camp and the ruins in order to pick up the happy individuals who had been found, hand them their binding, and send them my way.

Within minutes, a timid queue of magical creatures had formed before my chair, clutching glass orbs like they were holding their newborn children. Behind them, blue flashes and cries of recognition went up through the giant hall at irregular intervals.

One fae female sat next to me to restore the table surface to mother-of-pearl every other minute –iridescence for magic.And so I went to work, pulling binding after binding from fragile glass and returning the magic to its rightful owner – a satisfying process at first, blurring into monotone routine before I’d reached my first hundred unbound creatures.

I stopped seeing faces after a while. Just glass and pearly silver. Just the ephemeral shimmers of magic no one else was able to see, thin threads soaking back into the bodies they had come from over and over again.

Creon, they informed me, was still nowhere to be found.

I resolved to stop thinking about him and failed miserably. There was nothingwrongwith the fae female by my side – sheappeared to be a capable mage for all intents and purposes – but she was not Creon, and she never read my mind the way he would so easily have done. Several times, she was just a fraction too slow refreshing the magic in the table surface. Whenever I had a request for her, I had to complete my whole explanation; she never picked up my intentions within three words or fewer. She handed me food and water when I was in deep concentration, but had to be asked for them when I was granting myself a break – none of them valid reasons for complaints, but all of them jarring reminders that I was not in the company of the one person who would never have started chatting to me while I was in the middle of extracting a particularly challenging bit of magic from its binding.

We reached two hundred unbound people. Through the cracked windows and the holes in the walls, I could see the sky darkening to a peachy pink, then a soft violet; by that time, I had lost all sense of the passing hours.

Agenor showed up in my queue, turning faintly green the moment his magic and the memories of Korok’s death were returned to him. Not much later, Tared followed. The next time I saw him, his eyes were a fraction red; the memory of his parents, I recalled, and that little triumph got me through another hour of Creon-less routine.

Lynn appeared for no other reason than to tell me I should be eating more. When I asked her about Creon, she admitted he had still not been found but reassured me he had to be in the campsomewhere: there were alves and fae keeping an eye on the hills and sky, just to make sure the Mother didn’t show up for any surprises, and if Creon had tried to go anywhere, surely they would have noticed him?

I didn't ask her if she really believed that a handful of guards could keep Creon from sneaking out whenever he wanted. Shewas making an effort to make me feel better, and the answer to the question wouldn't cheer me up anyway.

When night fell, torches were lit around the halls, and somehow the flickering firelight turned the sight of those endless glass balls into a far eerier view – like maliciously gleaming eyes, glaring at me from all sides. My fae assistant let out a nervous laugh when I remarked upon it, but failed to make the sort of leisurely joke that I needed to hear; once again, I had to push a sting of longing away.

I had just unbound my four hundredth individual – Nenya was number three hundred and ninety-seven – when Agenor appeared again, in Rosalind’s company this time. They had, it turned out, decided it was about time to send me to bed.

‘I’m a little old for that, don’t you think?’ I said.

‘You could be nearing the end of your fifth century,’ Agenor wryly said, ‘and that doesn't change anything about the fact that we need you to win a war tomorrow. You can't fight the Mother on three hours of sleep, Em.’

‘But—’ I tried.

Rosalind was already instructing the fae working in the aisles that it was time to cease their activities.

So I finished unbinding those who had already been waiting with their bindings, bringing the total of the day to four hundred and thirty-seven – a significant difference from an army in which Lord Khailan and I were the only ones able to wield magic against the Mother’s forces, and yet it was hard to feel any triumph at the sight of the tens of thousands of bindings still waiting for me. Against an opponent of the empire’s size, it seemed not unlike dropping a bucket of water onto a wildfire.

‘There's always more that you could have done,’ Rosalind said philosophically, helping me out of the chair in which I'd spent the last six hours. ‘At some point you need to stop beating yourself up over it.’