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Thorn turned away from his sharp blue gaze. She didn’t know what he was looking for, but she didn’t want him to find it.

“I’m just... I don’t know.” She shook her head. She felt like her skin might burst, and something new and frightening would come out. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then a second, then a third.

“I’m scared,” she said at last, and moved the goggles so she could wipe her eyes. “I’m scared for the Vale.”

Which was true, but not the whole truth.

This angry fist in her gut, this restlessness, like her body was roiling and crawling—she was also scared of that.

Zaf touched Thorn’s wrist. “I’m frightened too, and that’s why we’re here, remember? To ask for help.”

Zaf’s soft hand washed Thorn’s thoughts clean like a fresh breeze, and for a moment, she felt like herself again—familiar and small, wretchedly unremarkable.

How awful it was, to know the feeling of yourself so well, and be so thoroughly unimpressed by every inch of it.

Thorn stepped away from her friends. She ignored Zaf’shurt expression, and Noro’s worried dark blue gaze, and Bartos’s bewildered frown.

Instead she asked Quicksilver briskly, “Well? What do you think? Can you help us or not?”

And the look on Quicksilver’s face made Thorn’s heart plummet to her toes.

“I wish I could,” Quicksilver replied. “Truly, I do. But though I’m a witch in blood, I’m no longer a witch in practice.”

She touched Bear’s shaggy black coat. Sly Boots watched her sadly.

“My monster died years ago,” said Quicksilver, after a moment thick with silence. “I can therefore no longer work magic, and so I’m afraid I have none left to offer you.”

.25.

The Queen, Triumphant

Even though the Fetterwitch’s curse sawed at her bones, Celestyna strode back into Castle Stratiara with her head held high.

She had hidden in the wild for as long as she dared, testing how to speak and move and breathe with the entire curse now living inside her. Her soldiers had combed the mountains, searching for her, but the curse kept her hidden, the clever thing.

Now it was time to return home. It was time to show them all what their queen could do.

A small crowd met Celestyna at the rear entrance, near thecourtyards—Lord Dellier, Madame Berrie. Her personal guard. Her ladies-in-waiting, all clutching their handkerchiefs.

“Where have you been, child?” asked Madame Berrie, her white curls bouncing.

“We’ve been quite worried about you, Your Majesty,” added one of her ladies-in-waiting breathlessly. Her eyes were red from crying. “No one could find you, they’ve been searching for three days straight!”

Lord Dellier was the first one to notice Celestyna’s curse-blackened hand. His gray eyebrows shot up. He said nothing.

But the Fetterwitch’s curse was cunning, and through it Celestyna could feel every crack and fissure in the Break. They echoed the paths of her freshly darkened veins. And the Gulgot, forever climbing. Celestyna could feel him too.

As if the sensing hairs of her arms and her ears and her mind had been spliced open and multiplied, Celestyna could taste the fear of the people gathered before her.

She had snuck out of the castle, right under their noses. She hadrun awayand disappeared into the mountains for three days. And she had come back with a charred left hand.

“It isn’t polite to stare at your queen,” she told them coldly, taking in the sight of them with her new, all-seeing eyes. Howsmall and weak they looked to her now. Her knees bloomed hot with pain. Her hands twitched at her sides.

But as Celestyna glided past her people and entered her castle, she kept her face serene.

What had her mother taught her?

Don’t laugh too hard.