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‘In a few decades,’ I interrupted, ‘we might all be dead if you continue like this.’

A scoff. ‘And that is how you hope to convince us to join your desperate war? A war you don’t even believe you will win yourself?’

An echoing silence fell, his dulcet voice reverberating back from the colourful mosaic walls around us. Drusa sat stiff as a disapproving grandmother. Mydhar, the short man between them, cleared his throat and cleared it again. On the right side of the semi-circle, the red-haired girl called Thyvle and the bald old man who had to be the much younger Evrun I’d seen on portraits sat watching me with obvious hostility in their eyes.

‘I can win this war,’ I slowly said.

‘You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re up against,’ Drusa said, a trace of shrill laughter in her voice. ‘The war won’t be won until the Mother is dead, and one little girl will never be able to—’

For fuck’s sake. ‘Did you notice what I was doing with that chair a moment ago, Lady Drusa?’

She abruptly snapped her mouth shut.

‘Here’s what none of you understands,’ I added, and hell take me, it was hard not to make that sentence the sneer they deserved. ‘While you were sitting here and making impossible demands, I was travelling the continent. I was looking for the gods. Ifoundthem – Zera, that is, but I know at least Inika and Orin are still alive as well.’

Five pairs of eyes shot to Alyra on my shoulder. She huffed, pretending to be extraordinarily busy scratching her neck.

‘Are you saying …’ willowy Thyvle started, eyes widening.

‘This is ridiculous,’ Drusa snapped. ‘The gods are dead. And even if they aren’t, are we supposed to believe Zera would swear in achild?’

‘No,’ I said, beaming at her. ‘Excellent point. I think the core of the matter is that Zera would not swear in a child at all.’

‘Any halfwit can put a tame bird on her shoulder and claim to be sent by the gods themselves,’ the bald Evrun to my right said brusquely. His voice was a low, rumbling drone. ‘Are some tricks with gravity the only evidence you are bringing us, young lady?’

‘Not at all,’ I said and pressed my left fingers to the mother-of-pearl bracelet around my right wrist.

A bracelet, more specifically, that had been a fragile glass orb twenty-four hours ago.

Creon had changed its shape and material after we’d taken it from the shelf Thysandra had given us and returned to the Underground – but it was still the same binding, and it still contained the magic and sacrifice the Mother had forced Lord Khailan to give up all those years ago. Those things I pulled out now, using the iridescence I drew from the mother-of-pearl surface. Those things I swept back into their former owner’s chest with a single offhand turn of my wrist.

Fire roared.

Blinding light split my field of vision in two.

In an explosion of flames, two giant wings burst from Khailan’s shoulders – blazing towards the ceiling in the blink of an eye, burning with a heat that sent the mosaic tiles cracking on the wall behind him. Drusa screamed. Mydhar and Thyvle scrambled backwards, away from the fire. At the heart of their semicircle, dollops of fragrant wax began dripping down as the incense candles melted from the chandelier above, leaving scorch marks on the gilded stage.

‘Khailan!’ Evrun bellowed. ‘Restrain yourself!’

I wasn’t sure if Khailan even heard, eyes rolling up in their sockets with almost orgasmic bliss as he burned and burned and burned. His wings unfolded wider, sending out twirls of smoke into the dusty room. Six feet on either side of him – a magnificence Lyn’s smaller, child-sized wings had nowhere near prepared me for.

Rooted to my spot, I finally understood why Agenor had insisted time and time again that we needed these forces.

‘Khailan!’ Drusa shrieked.

Finally, the fiery feathers began sizzling out, sparks dwindling to the golden platform and dying there. Khailan still didn’t move. Against the background of cracked and blackened tiles, he merely continued to stare at me with wide and unseeing amber eyes – as if the fire had not just reduced his objections to ashes, but his good senses, too.

Around him, the four other elders in their smoke-stained robes took their first cautious steps back towards their chairs, like survivors returning to the homes they’d fled.

‘You …’ Drusa began breathlessly, looking from Khailan to me to the chair she’d kicked back in her hurry to get away from the blazing inferno. ‘You can unbind people?’

I smiled at her. ‘As you see.’

‘Oh, gods.’ Her wrinkled hand flew to her chest. ‘Oh,gods.’

It wasn’t relief, the undertone below those gasped words. It certainly wasn’t gratitude either. Fear, perhaps … but fear tempered by something far uglier, something I knew we needed but couldn’t help but hate all the same.

Greed.