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“ And? What do you suppose you can do about it? You’ve already decided to go against Lyall, the man who saved you and kept you alive.

” She pushed herself to her feet and came in front of me, her dark eyes so full —of fear and suspicion and disappointment.

“How do you suppose you’ll keep your father away? ”

All my thoughts came to a halt. “My father?”

“Yes, Rune. Your father. Because if she really looks anything like the Ice Queen, and your father finds out, he will be coming for her.”

Every drop of blood in my veins turned to stone.

I moved back, nearly lost my balance, then sat on the floor again before I fell. My knees had never been weaker, not even when I first arrived here.

“The prophecy is fulfilled,” I said, though I knew it didn’t mean much.

“Yes, it is. But that pig never managed to truly control the power left on him by the Ice Queen. The Frozen Court is in pieces, though he pretends.” I looked up at her in question. She raised a brow. “I have my ways. It’s smart to keep informed in times like these.”

“Raja, I killed the Ice Queen, and if Nilah now looks like her…”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Magic is a sneaky thing. It can appear to mean something when it means nothing at all. I’d be more worried about that pig of a king than a mortal’s resemblance to a dead queen.” Except she didn’t quite sound like she believed her own self when she said this.

“A mortal who can do fae magic. A mortal who is moonmarked but doesn’t shift.”

She looked up at me. “Maybe she did. I don’t trust her quite as much as you seem to.”

“She didn’t, Raja.”

She flinched. “Your father. If he finds out and if he comes for you—Rune, he will kill you first. When he put that seal on you and took you to that place, he did it because he was certain you would die. Don’t you understand how many of your brothers he’s killed?

He was going to kill you, too, and he hates that you survived.

He will take any excuse at all to try to end you again.

” Slowly, she shook her head. “Nobody could put a stop to him other than Lyall and his mother. And now you’ve turned against them as well. ”

An impossible situation.

My mind worked.

What Raja said was true. When the seer of the Frozen Court first prophesied that the Ice Queen would die at the hand of the Midnight King’s son, my father took advantage of the opportunity and went to make her a proposition: if she gave him control over her army and resources, basically her entire court, he would kill every male born child he ever fathered.

According to Raja, he killed seven of my brothers—that she knew of. That was why my mother kept her pregnancy and my birth a secret.

But one could never really escape a prophecy, so I somehow ended up killing the Ice Queen despite all that was done to prevent it.

My father truly was a monster. That, I would never argue with. But he had the Frozen Court in his hands now. The prophecy was fulfilled. There was no more need for him to want to go after Nilah regardless what she looked like…was there?

“Think about this, Rune. Be smart. It would be a shame to die now when you’ve made it this far,” Raja said, her voice a hushed whisper.

I couldn’t find a single thing to say to that.

There was this memory I had that I sometimes felt like it wasn’t mine at all. Maybe because it wasn’t a complete memory, only a flash.

Cold stone beneath my knees. Blood slick and fresh around me. A silhouette crumpled just feet away. The faintest scent of winter roses in my nostrils.

I always thought that that was the memory of when I killed the Ice Queen. It was proof, even if my full memory was locked. I never considered that I didn’t kill the Ice Queen—until Nilah. Until she looked me dead in the eye and told me with a hundred percent certainty that I hadn’t.

Doubt clouded my mind now.

The air smelled like burnt steel and storm-wet stone by the time Raja finished laying her powders and herbs on the rotten floor.

She worked fast, her fingers trembling just enough for me to notice but not enough for her to stop.

That was the thing about her—she’d do the impossible before she admitted fear.

Even when the impossible could kill her.

The dragon bone chain sat coiled at the center of the circle she’d made, waiting. Becoming paler and paler the more my guilt grew.

There was a chance that this would kill Raja. There was a chance it wouldn’t work, even with bones of dragons to amplify her magic and take the hit this seal inked into my skin would no doubt deliver before breaking.

“This is going to hurt,” Raja muttered, crouching low to smear a thick line of ash across the outer edge of the circle.

“And I don’t mean the kind of hurt you can grit your teeth through, Rune.

This is going to rip through every nerve you’ve got and keep going until it finds what’s left of your soul. ”

I stepped inside the circle without hesitation. “Just tell me what I need to do.”

She stood and looked at me—really looked at me—something between frustration and fierceness in her dark eyes. “Stay conscious. You pass out before it’s done, you die.”

I knew it was going to be easier said than done, but I nodded anyway. “Noted.”

Raja took her place in the circle opposite me, a small knife I’d made for her in her hand. The blade was made of what we called zemn, Verenthia’s lightest metal, and it was her favorite, laced with threads of shadow magic.

“This is the last time I’ll ask.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “You want me to stop, say it now.”

Drowning the guilt and the second guessing as best as I could, I said, “Do it.”

Raja slashed a line across her palm first, her blood dark and thick as it spilled over the dragon bone links. The chain snapped to life instantly, glowing bright enough to blind me.

That, I hadn’t expected, but Raja didn’t look surprised at all.

Then came my turn.

I didn’t flinch as the blade bit into my skin, a thin line on the side of my neck where it connected with my shoulder, right over the ink that reinforced the seal and the lock that had been put on me.

The very next second, fire ripped through my veins—no, not fire. Something worse.

Raw magic, untamed and wild, screaming through every sealed pathway my father’s curse had locked down for years.

I tasted blood on my tongue and my legs shook as the power tried to tear me apart from the inside.

Fuck, it was much worse than I’d expected.

“Stay with me, Rune…”

Raja’s voice came through the storm in my head, distant, like I was already in a different place. Like I’d already traveled worlds.

My vision blurred, tilting between light and infinite darkness.

I wasn’t sure how long I stood, and how long I tried to push through, how long Raja kept calling for me to stand, not fall, keep my mind awake at all costs.

I don’t know how long until, beyond it all, I heard the seal etched on my skin beginning to fracture.

It’s working.

I forced my lungs to drag in air, every breath a battle.

But in my mind, I’d already decided that I would not die here today, not with Nilah still in the Seelie Court.

Not with her life balanced on the edge of a blade.

One final push and I tried to cling to the weak sun rays barely slipping through the ruined windows, as if they were a concrete thing, rope that could pull me out of this madness.

One last breath and my body had turned completely numb.

I felt the push of Raja’s magic as it put pressure on the seal. I felt it now, going through me, wrapping around my entire body like invisible chains reinforced by the ink. It was there, and it was so fucking strong. Too strong.

Raja kept begging me to stay with her, to stay on my feet.

I couldn’t .

My body dissolved under the pressure of the magic that suddenly exploded inside me. I hit the ground on my side, felt the wood against my cheek, felt my mind shutting down faster than I could even think for one last time about trying to stay conscious.

But just before I forgot myself completely, I saw another flash in that darkness, heard another voice, one I hadn’t in such a long, long time…

Suddenly the Midnight King was in front of me, dark hair and thick beard, eyes cut out from the darkest parts of the Midnight sky.

“This is your price, boy. You will not remember. You will never rise to power.”

Then came the pain, white-hot and searing as his small blade pressed to my chest. From it came the ink, black and all-consuming nothingness at the command of a cold merciless man.

“Be forgotten. Be bound,” said the king. “ Die. ”

It didn’t much matter now what he’d said then, or if that memory was even true, if it had happened, or if I was making it up.

All that mattered was that I hadn’t been stronger than the darkness that claimed me before Raja was done.

All that mattered was that I’d fallen.