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“I choose you, Little Rose,” he whispered. “I always have. Fate be damned. I would choose you even if the Norns told me it was the wrong path.”

I stroked his cheek, the cruel scar that twisted one side of his face. I kissed the raised skin from one end to the next, then kissed his mouth for good measure.

“I choose you. You’ve always been my Whisper, the song of my heart.”

He brushed my damp hair off my brow, kissing me there, then looked at me without a shadow in his eye. I hooked my leg around his waist, and opened my lips to tell him the thoughts in my head, the rampant need to tell him that my heart was his, that I felt it more than I felt the urge to breathe.

I didn’t get the chance.

All at once, the ground shifted. The palace walls shook.

“What . . . is that?”

Silas clutched me to his chest but looked toward the window. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Wait.” He sat up and looked to me. “Stay here.”

He hurried to the window and seemed to freeze there.

I snatched my discarded tunic and scrambled to my feet. “What is it?”

My voice strangled in the back of my throat.

Against the black night a light, like a golden flame, had burst around Hus Rose. From us. In the distance, the shape of the land seemed to be crumbling, breaking, changing.

I clung to Silas’s arm. “What’s happening?”

“Accept the first bond,” he whispered, brow furrowed. All at once, he tugged me against his side, eyes dark. “We’ve accepted it and found our way back to each other, and I think the tale we started has ended. The kingdom is going back to the beginning. That was where our fated tale was always meant to conclude. Where all our fates were meant to meet.”

“Wait, what do you mean, all our fates?”

Silas didn’t answer, merely looked to the strange crumble of land in the distance, then looked to me, waiting for me to understand.

“All hells,” I whispered when the realization struck me like a blow to the head. The world had once been one. “The kingdoms. They’re breaking once again.”

My kings and queens, my thieves and crooks. Their lands were shattering.

Silas took my hand. “The words. Calista, the words you wrote in the cellar. This is how we help them, how we can help them.”

All gods. The tale that came had something to do with the crowns of fate. We hurried to my discarded trousers. I fumbled with the two pieces of parchment and selected the second one.

“When shields fall, a heart will call.”

Silas muttered under his breath, pacing. “What shields have fallen?”

It was unexpected, such a swift, coherent thought. “Mine.”

He faced me, confused.

“My shields.” I touched the scar on his face. “I’ve accepted my path, I’ve stopped resisting the past, and . . . you. I chose you.” I studied the other words. “As the land of your enemy restores. Silas, this is the final step, as you said, our tale is ending. From here, fate is unwritten. We need to lead them. We’re supposed to be a beacon to the fated crowns. They’re crumbling, but . . . this might mean we can lead them to us before that bleeding snake returns to his land.”

Silas blinked, then pressed a furious kiss to my forehead. “Then, sing with me. Sing that first tale, Little Rose. The tale of four gifts and four queens. It is time they stand as one.”

So rarely did I create a twist of fate without my quill and parchment, but there was something burning within me, like an ability I’d long forgotten.

Wrapped in his arms, the heat of seidr flooded my veins. His voice, my words, it tangled in one burning flame between us. Like in Ari’s dream, it was as if those golden bursts of light were splitting in brilliant ribbons from our hearts to distant lands.

Hidden from us, perhaps, but there was an unmistakable fire igniting between us as we fought through the push and pull of fate to weave a final ending of a centuries-long story.

To bring four crowns of fate to the final battlefield.