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Seph shouldn’t have been surprised. She knew the depraved were no longer the mindless demons they used to be, but this was another level entirely. “Did they know who you were?”

A dark laugh escaped him. “Oh, yes. It’s why they did it. I was to be a bargaining chip for their master—the witch, I am certain of it now. I was to be a creature she could control. Some heinous blend of man and monster, able to take both forms. Rys figured it out soon enough. He took pity on me, and I hated him for it. I didn’t want pity. I deserved every horror they bestowed.”

“Because of your life before?” Seph asked, wanting to understand all the pieces completely. Wanting to understandhim.

“Yes.” He hesitated. His jaw flexed as he continued, “I was spoiled, and foolish, and I hurt people that I cared deeply about. Serinbor included. Every name you’ve ever called me, I’ve deserved ten times over, and I was prepared to accept the depraved’s torture as my due, but your brother…he was as damned tenacious as you are. Whenever possible, he didn’t leave my side. He took it upon himself as his singular mission to help me hold on to my sense of self so the corruption would not root.”

Here, Alder stopped, and a crease formed between his brows. He seemed to be having a difficult time revisiting this place where the truth haunted him.

Butsaints, what he’d said…it was so like Rys.

“He told me…he said he had a young sister,” Alder continued. “Someone who suffered. Who was constantly plagued by illness, and that his oldest sister—you, his little lion heart—had been indefatigable in her compassion and servitude. It wasyourexample that inspired his persistence with me.”

A tear leaked over Seph’s cheek.

“Rys found a way out,” Alder said after a moment. “He said that he wouldn’t leave without me. He wanted me to find help, a way to rid myself of this evil that…keeps trying to take over my person. Our escape wasn’t much different from what you heard before the elders, only that I changed into my other form to give us a good lead.”

Understanding filled Seph. “The stag.”

“Yes.” He held her gaze. “And it was while he was on my back that we intercepted depraved. I tried to get us to safety, but…”

Seph had been about to ask him to elaborate on his stag form, but he looked sharply aside, and she was so stricken by the brokenness in his expression—brokenness over Rys—that she decided to ask him about the stag later. For now, she wanted to hear the rest of Rys’s story. It was clear that Alder had cared for her brother very much—everyone who knew Rys did—and for Seph’s part, she felt as though she were losing Rys all over again. Because this time—this story—was true.

“Did they take him?” she asked through her tears.

“No, not like that,” Alder said with a subtle shake of his head. “Your brother was an exceptional archer, like you.” He cast her a sideways glance. “He shot down most of them, but one still managed to mangle his arm, and by the time I changed back…Rys had lost too much blood and the infection was already taking hold.”

Seph’s next breath shuddered.

“He gave me his ring to return to your family,” Alder continued quietly, “and he asked…he begged that I put a swift end to his suffering so that he could die a mortal man, and so I did. I took his blade, and I ran it through his heart. That much was true, and, Josephine, I…It should have been me. I knew it then; I know it now. I needed to take that ring to his family, but I couldn’t do it because I was a coward. That’s it. Cowardice kept me from returning to Asra Domm, and cowardice kept me from taking the ring back to you. Yes, Rys told me the story of a coat in the mines, but that damned coat couldn’t have been further from my mind when I ran through the Rift and into mortal lands. I was just trying to get away frommyself. Who I’d been and what I was…becoming.”

Alder raked a hand through his hair again. One clump fell free and curled upon his forehead.

“Did the ring not help you?” Seph asked.

“Actually, it did. It seemed to keep my affliction from taking root and sending me over. Still, nothing held off the darkness as effectively as when I was a stag, and so I eventually tucked the ring away and wandered in that form. Formonths. I even contemplated remaining a stag, but then I started confusing my kith and animal forms, and it…it frightened me too.”

Seph remembered the Alder she’d met. The boor and lack of humanity. It made sense now. He’d spent too much time as an animal, and he lived in fear of the monster.

“I eventually made my way south,” he said in Seph’s silence. “Toward Harran, with the intent of fulfilling my promise to your brother, and when I was just outside of Harran, that’s when I first saw Massie.”

Seph recalled that day in the woods when she’d seen the stag. When Massie and his bone-masked kith had arrived. “And Massie saw you.”

Alder’s lips thinned and he nodded once. “I had no idea what he could be doing there, but I took refuge in your woods. I risked the crowds to find out why he’d come. What you heard in that square was as much a surprise to me as it was to you—I’d completely forgotten about Rys’s story of the coat until that moment—and when I went to your home to deliver the ring, Massie was there. I waited. I tried to listen. I saw you walk up to your front door. I didn’t intend to be so abrupt with all of you, but I needed to follow Massie. To know what he was up to.” He stopped and dipped his head a little as he looked straight into her eyes. Seph was struck by how clear his were.

“I apologize for what you saw as callousness,” he said with barely contained emotion, “but Iswearto you that could not be further from the truth. It was unworthiness that strangled my words, it was too much time as a stag that stole any sense of propriety, and it was a need to follow Massie that cut short my time. And when I found you in that pit with therealcoat…” He chewed on his bottom lip and flexed his hands. “I realized Rys’s tale was so much more than just a story, and that Massie would eventually come back for you.”

Seph ingested all his words in silence, her face wet with tears. “But you were going to leave me for dead.”

Alder’s grin was rueful. “That was just to get you to cooperate. I was mostly trying to figure out what to do with you, because I owed it to Rys to keep you safe, at the very least, and I thought keeping you safe meant keeping you far away from me.”

Seph glanced down.

“Also, if you’ll recall, I never asked you to pass the coat’s powers on to me,” Alder said.

Seph’s gaze darted back to him.That’s right!He never had asked her to pass on those powers as Massie and the baron—and even the depraved—had done.

Suffice it to say that anything of interest to Massie is of interest to me.