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A reckless challenge, I could admit. Especially all these years later. And it felt even more dubious, after all I’d recently learned—that it wasn’t even the actual King of Elarith that I’d been aiming for. His face had been covered by an elaborate mask,with most of his ceremonial motions taking place while heavily surrounded and shielded by his Keepers, and now I understood why.

I still didn’t regret anything I’d done that night.

Because something had awakened in me the moment I fired my cannon. Something that had grown even stronger during the ensuing pandemonium.

I’d ruined the party. Had been branded an outcast and a menace more loudly than ever before. And so it was that night when I realized—or maybeadmitted—I’d entirely lost any claim to my kingdom. That my subjects were blinded by a foreign king’s light, his riches, by the celebrations he could conjure to cover up his atrocities, and they alwayswouldbe, unless I could come up with a better way to show them the truth.

Standing alone with the smoke and screams settling around me, I’d fully committed myself to my desperate plan of traveling into the Underworld to retrieve the sword that had ruined my life and kingdom.

Two years since that fateful decision.

It had all led to this—to the waves of impossible revelations and impending revolutions rising around me now.

All from a single strike of a cannon’s fuse.

The memory of igniting that cannon rekindled my sense of urgency.As interesting as my conversations with Thalia had been, I was eager to get back to the palace, to a relatively safer place where I could sit and make sense of all these new things before they slipped through my fingers.

And, as annoying as it was, Aleks was the only person I could imagine talking through all of these difficult things with.

I didn’t have a chance to track him down, though; we returned to the palace to find it abuzz with activity when we stepped inside, and we were immediately surrounded by a swarm of hurried servants and panicked guards.

“What’s going on?” Thalia demanded.

Before any of the guards could answer, my brother strode toward us, parting the crowd as he came. He breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of us, the tension in his features loosening for an instant.

“Bastian?” Thalia pressed.

He took a step closer, his eyes flicking over me as if searching for any signs of injury, before he took a deep breath and said, “Someone tried to break into the chamber where the swords are being kept, and they killed two of our guards in the process.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Nova

The bloodon the walls was dry by the time we reached the entrance to the swords’ chamber.

The doors to that chamber remained sealed. A handful of guards were examining the splatters of blood along with a section of one of the doors that appeared to have been burned; Bastian went to speak with them while I stood numbly, taking it all in, and Thalia mumbled curses to herself as she examined the bloody footprint closest to us. Phantom, in the form of a smaller-than-usual dog, darted between the guards and the walls, sniffing the bloodstains, his ears twitching with unease.

After a few minutes of discussion, Bastian opened the chamber doors at my request—just so I could see for myself that both swords were still in their proper places.

I exhaled a slow, relieved breath as their power rippled over me. I had no idea who would have tried to take them, but the thought of their power falling into the wrong hands numbed me straight to my core.

They had been safe in this chamber foryears. We’d only needed them to stay safe for a short time longer—long enoughfor me to prepare to properly wield Grimnor. I’d already felt as if I didn’t have enough time to manage it.

Now, it seemed our time was even shorter, and the situation even more precarious, than we’d feared.

“How could this happen?” I asked. “Whendid this happen?”

“It could have been hours ago,” my brother said. “The dead were only discovered when the next round of guards came to relieve them of duty.”

Hours ago.

Had they purposely waited until I was gone from the palace to attempt their heist?

“Somebody in this palace knowssomething,” Thalia said. “As secluded as this corner is, there are still plenty of curious eyes falling upon it every day. However sly the assassin and would-be thief was, unless they were invisible…”

An uncomfortable, uncertain silence fell over us, lasting for several minutes, until my brother grumbled something in the Noctarisan language and ushered us out of the chamber; too many curious servants and other palace dwellers were pressing too close, trying to peer inside.

We sealed the room shut once more. My brother ordered everyone else away from the hall, but he, Thalia, Phantom and I lingered in the space, still trying to make sense of it. There was a particularly large splatter of blood near the center of one of the doors; I couldn’t take my eyes off it.