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“So that you may continue to serve the palace, of course.” Alvira smiled. “It is quite a prize, Yennes. Have you any idea what my people would do to you should they learn the truth? That you fucked a Glacian? That you bore its child? I ought to send you to the pyre now.” Alvira watched with an air of satisfaction as Yennes reared away. “I assure you, it is quite an allowance to let you live at all.”

Yennes’ eyes welled. The last of her resolve drawn away from its husk.

“So,” Alvira said. “Where will you go from here, iskra witch?”

Yennes stood on the bank of the river, holding a ring in her hand with a black stone at its centre. The tighter she held it, the more she felt the tug of her limbs, the one that led her through the Mecca, through the fields and forests and to the water’s edge. Without Baltisse’s ring, she would have wandered haplessly through the kingdom, unaware of how far she’d travelled.

She wondered if Alvira had snuck into the keep and bowled out her insides as she’d slept. It would explain the emptiness she felt now.

“Yennes?” a voice called, and she looked up to see someone familiar on the other side of the river. A woman with long, golden hair and beautiful clothes. There one moment, gone the next.

She reappeared beside Yennes, a small chain necklace woven tightly around her fingers. Yennes’ ring grew hot in her hand.

“Yennes,” Baltisse breathed, looking her over shrewdly, and then into her eyes, delving into her mind.

Yennes could only imagine what she saw.

The mage sighed heavily, sadly. But she did not insult Yennes with pity. It was understanding she exuded now. Tiredness. Anger. “Fucking crowns,” she muttered, taking Yennes’ hand.

“You tried to warn me.”

But the mage shook her head. “I cannot curb your course,” she said simply, though Yennes did not know what she meant. “It is not for me to decide what you will do.”

“You must teach me to fold,” she pronounced, tears dripping from her chin. When had she begun to cry?

“So that you can go to Glacia and find your boy? What did you say his name was?”

“Ryon,” Yennes whispered, swaying to one side.

Baltisse held her upright. “I meant what I said before, Yennes. You do not need to cling to what was left up there. Unburden yourself.”

“I cannot simply–”

“Youcan,”Baltisse pressed. “Because that boy? He belongs amongst his kind.”

“Vasteel… he said he would hurt him.”

“And how will you stop him, Yennes? What power could you wield that would thwart him? Thwart them all? And even if you could, what will you do with your son, when the Queen comes to call on you and learns that you brought him here? She is just as dangerous as them, Yennes. I suspect you know that now.”

Yennes teetered until she found her forehead pressed to the mage’s shoulder. Her body shuddered with the force of the past and present colliding.

“What is done, is done,” Baltisse told her, though her voice leaked with regret. Sorrow. “There is little we can change. We just live, Farra. That is how we defy our enemies, how we honour those we love. We live.”

CHAPTERFORTY-ONE

In the den of a mage clan, the former King of Glacia barely resembles that which fled his own palace months before. He is diminished. Sunken. The mage light casts shadows on his limbs where the bones all but protrude from his skin. His once lustrous hair and beard now hang sparsely. It is the first time Ryon has seen him without wings – he doubts his frame could support them.

Vasteel lifts his head, and the movement is not without immense effort. Indeed, he trembles with the weight of it. Ryon wonders if the iskra he consumed is eking out by degrees, slowly aging him. How long has it been since he last drank from the pool?

Despite the pain, the corners of Ryon’s mouth lift a little. “Mortality does not become you, Vasteel,” he murmurs, ignoring the sting of sweat trickling into his eyes. His breaths are short, but he can summon enough for this.

“No,” Vasteel says on a ragged exhale. His own breaths threaten to cave him in. “One of the many reasons I’ve avoided it.”

Ryon laughs darkly, though it sends spikes of pain through his chest. “I’ve always imagined what awaits the wicked in the underworld. Those in the Colony speak of many tortures there. Water that turns to acid in one’s throat, food that turns to dust. The ground made of spikes and sky of fire. They say there is a special circle saved for the most ruined of souls. A place where the skin is cut from the body until it lies unsheathed. One is healed instantly, only to be peeled again, over and over.” Ryon watches Vasteel closely. “We both know that you are promised to that circle, Vasteel. I think you avoid mortality for its reckoning, not for your vanity.”

Vasteel says nothing. Indeed, he may have slipped back to unconsciousness, the way his head hangs limply on his thin neck. But a quiet murmur still reaches Ryon across the cavern. “Alas, if only I could reach death sooner,” he says, a hint of dry mirth in the words. “I would face that reckoning humbly, deshun. But the iskra… it keeps me here, decaying whilst I still breathe, and it is torture enough.”

Ryon hopes not. He hopes the afterlife makes him suffer for an eternity. He hopes every soul he consumed awaits him, ready to cast their stone and take their share of his flesh.