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“No.” Thorn pulled hard on Noro’s mane. He skidded to a halt with an indignant snort. “We go east, Noro. We’re going into the Break.”

After a slight pause, Noro said gently, “Thorn, I understand you’re grieving their loss, and I am too, but we can’t possibly—”

“Zaf’s kiss spoke to me,” Thorn said, showing him the faint light lingering on her palm. “She told me to hurry, and you’re my only chance of getting down there fast enough. Unicorns always land on their feet.” A tiny finger of doubt poked her throat. “Right?”

“Usually. But I’ve never tried jumping into the Break before.”

The gleaming shell of black spreading inside Thorn prickled her every bone.

“Well, you’ll try it now,” she snapped.

A slammed door. An angry shout.

Thorn looked over her shoulder. Six soldiers were barreling down the hallway, swords out and capes flying.

Noro leaped down a flight of stairs into a grand hall ofindoor courtyards bursting with flowers. Squares of moonlight poured through skylights in the high white ceiling.

“Thorn,” said Noro as he ran, “I don’t know what light you think you saw, or what that is on your hand, but it can’t possibly—”

“Youcoward.”

The shell of Thorn’s insides pinched her chest and the crooks of her elbows and the crown of her scalp.

She dug her fingernails too hard into Noro’s coat. She considered striking him.

“You’d leave Brier lost down there in the dark?” she hissed. “She’d be ashamed, if she could see you now. She’d be embarrassed she ever knew you.”

Noro said nothing else.

A line of four soldiers ran at them through the square patches of moonslight. Their swords flashed. One whipped a chain over his head, and it sliced through the air with a sharp crack.

Another soldier, his dark eyes wide, his brown skin slick with sweat, tugged hard on the other’s arm and shouted, “No need tohurtthem, for thunder’s sake! What iswrongwith all of you?”

The chain struck Noro on his back leg. He stumbled, then galloped on.

“Faster!” Thorn growled, even as tears stung her eyes.

She didn’t want to yell at Noro.

But she didn’t know how to stop. She didn’t know how to stop the Gulgot’s darkness from growing inside her.

Noro crashed through an east-facing window, horn first. He ran along a narrow stone terrace framing the castle wall, glass crunching under his feet.

Then he called out, “Hold on!” and jumped.

Thorn clung to him with all the strength she possessed, her eyes squeezed shut—until the wind forced them open.

Below them, the Break was a grinning black mouth with jagged stone teeth, smiling wider and wider and widest of all—

Darkness swallowed them whole.

.40.

Two Curls Bright as Blood

Celestyna Hightower the Twelfth, Queen of the Vale, Master of the Realm, Daughter of Westlin, and Mender of the Break, huddled on the floor in her sister’s bedroom, her head in her sister’s lap, her hands clutching her sister’s skirts.

Around them, Castle Stratiara trembled as though it rode a lumbering beast. Which, Celestyna supposed, it mostly did. She hadn’t clenched her fist for a few hours, not since ordering that Thorn Skystone and the Star Lands witches be locked in her dungeon. She hadn’t pulled at the Gulgot, hadn’t made him fall.