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B RIONY ’ S HEART WAS GOING TO EXPLODE out of her chest. She pounded down the stairs from the outdoor balcony, too fast for her to wonder if silence was key. Cordelia’s thick breath was only three paces behind her as they came to the fourth-floor open arcade.

She flew past an archway and stopped at the next, looking out to the lake.

The cloud of dust and bone had started floating away on a tilt, and the moon had left the sun behind with a kiss.

The dragon was nowhere in sight on the horizon.

She looked down into the courtyard, and her blood froze in her veins.

A river of deep-blue coats ran through the gates, spreading out like tributaries.

Mallow’s men were inside.

Cordelia gasped at the sight. Some of the Bomardi were engaging with the meager number of guards and servants left behind, but some were running straight inside as if their directive were as simple as capture the flag.

From a hundred feet up, Briony saw a man in a blue coat slash at the air with his fingers, and a maid grabbed for her throat, her blood spraying wide as she fell.

Briony wondered if that was Sofia, her own handmaid.

There was a wall inside her mind. As Cordelia choked on panicked sobs next to her, Briony felt a barricade between her brain and her eyes, not allowing her to cry yet. Perhaps it was a dam in her throat, refusing to let her body and her brain interact.

She watched that same man come at one of the footmen, and Briony leaned over the windowsill, reaching her arm toward a statue of Vindecci, the father of mind magic, on the tallest tower.

She slashed her arm, letting the magic follow her command, and watched as the sainted philosopher slid off its post at a slant.

As it fell, she pounded her palms together.

The marble statue exploded. She guided a large chunk toward the man just as he reached up to slice the footman’s neck.

The stone slammed into his shoulder. He yelled out and threw his head back in pain.

Briony recognized him. Reighven. One of Mallow’s most vicious soldiers, who had taken a personal interest in Briony since the day the war began at the Bomardi school. His face haunted so many of her anxious nights.

The other stone pieces landed around him, some knocking into other blue coats. Men halted either in their attack on the staff or in their steady stream inside. And then fifty pairs of eyes turned upward.

Briony pulled Cordelia back a moment too late.

They knew where to find them.

She grabbed Cordelia’s hand and ran. They had to get away from this floor, this side of the palace.

She twisted them through a maze of servants’ quarters and passageways that she had hazy memories of.

They ran up a half staircase, crossed over what she knew to be the kitchens below, and then ran back down into the lakeside corridor.

There was a narrow staircase hidden somewhere here, meant for the servants to come and go quickly between floors.

She needed to remember which wall it was behind.

They flew past so many places she and Rory had galloped like horses and taught each other magic meant for older kids.

That dam in her throat held fast as she thought of her brother.

Where was his body?

Why had the prophecy been wrong?

Why had she allowed him to think he was invincible?

There was a crash ahead of them, behind the door they were running for. The sound of exploding stone and splintering wood. Briony and Cordelia skidded to a halt. Something in her brain skipped a step. That was the direction they were going. That was the one direction she’d known to go.

And then it was Briony being dragged by Cordelia. She followed her friend’s steps backward, ducking into an alcove and jumping into a linen closet.

Their breathing was too loud.

That’s the only thing Briony could think of as the staircase doors banged open and the men who’d gotten into the castle first came barreling down the hallway.

She grasped the thread of magic in her mind and tugged, forcing her heart to slow. Taking Cordelia’s wrist, she rubbed her thumb over the vein, slowing her heart as well.

Their breathing was quiet, and now all she could hear was the slap of boots on the stone.

“Take Gains and check every room. Round them up.”

Briony swallowed at the voice. The rough crackle of it belonged to Caspar Quill. And she realized something terrible.

The Bomardi men who were in her father’s castle—

The men who watched her brother die—

The men who were hunting Eversuns—

They were the men to whom she grew up curtsying, the men she greeted at state affairs, the men who shook her father’s hand just weeks before Mallow took the Seat and struck him down.

She likely knew them all.

Liam Quill and Larissa Gains—two Bomardi she’d been in school with for five years. It was their fathers on the other side of the closet door.

And she wondered if they would have ever imagined their own children hiding from her father like this.

She listened as two pairs of footsteps receded down the hall. To the right, she could just make out the sounds of the room being torn apart. She thought it might have been the servants’ sitting room—

A scream broke across her ears.

“No! Please! Please, I’m just a maid!”

Cordelia gasped, and Briony pressed her fingers against her wrist to maintain their heartbeats and quiet breathing.

The girl yelped, and there was a crash.

“They sl—sleep upstairs! Fifth floor!” she cried.

Briony bit her lip. A lie. All the main chambers were on the third.

“Maybe it’s not their bedrooms we’re looking for,” a deep voice said, dripping with malicious intention. It was Gains. “Think we have a few minutes for a diversion?”

His partner said, “What’s the point of sacking the place if we can’t do any sacking ?”

The maid yelled out. There was a sound of a body hitting a wall. Fabric tore.

And Briony was out of the cupboard before Cordelia could turn pleading eyes on her.

The closet door banged against the stone wall as she darted forward. She skidded into the corridor, turning to stare into the room.

The adrenaline shook Briony’s body. Her breath rattled her chest as she saw a young woman thrown onto a small sofa, two men looming over her.

Briony reached with her magic toward the closet door that Cordelia was just stepping out of.

She lunged with her whole body and tugged.

The door popped off its hinges with a crack and flew toward her.

The wood splintered, and she lifted her hands to direct two pieces to rise into the air.

She shoved with the magic, and the sharp wood barreled into the sitting room.

There were two matching howls of pain as the wooden stakes pierced both men’s thighs.

Cordelia twisted her wrists to levitate two more sharp pieces. The men’s eyes were wide with recognition as Cordelia pushed, hurtling the wood toward their chests this time.

Gains batted the air, and the shard of wood changed path, but his partner got a stake to his shoulder.

Before Gains could retaliate, the maid was off the sofa, swinging at his head with a thick candlestick holder from the side table.

Gains stumbled, and Cordelia lifted the final piece of broken door into the air, sending it toward his stomach this time.

The squelch of penetrated organs was sure to haunt Briony’s dreams.

The maid dashed from the room, grabbing Briony’s and Cordelia’s hands and tugging.

“We have a passage! You have to go!” Her accent was thick with vowels from another land.

“That’s what I was trying to find,” Briony said, glancing back to make sure the men were down. Gains was alive, rolling in pain, but at least it would slow him. The other one … she wasn’t sure.

They followed the girl through a stone wall that disappeared when pressed upon, and suddenly Briony was tripping down wet stairs. Cordelia lit their path with a twitch of her fingers—a ball of light casting shadows over the back of the maid’s strawberry-blond head.

Briony remembered her now, a tumble of thoughts that came one per stone step. She had been here for only a few months, just over from Shurtarth. She and her brother both. Her brother volunteered yesterday to join Rory’s army, the only Shurtarthian non-magician willing to do so.

Her mind refocused as the staircase started to turn. The maid stopped at the door at the bottom.

“This is the third floor. There’s another passage down to the second floor—”

“Behind the portrait of my mother. I remember now,” Briony said. “We have to be quick.”

The maid nodded, and Briony vanished the limestone door with a flick of her wrist. She looked both ways, and then stepped out.

They found no one in the large hall, but someone had set fire to the flag of Evermore.

The fabric was falling to the floor in crackling pieces, her family’s rose burned to ash.

The maid led them on quick feet toward the portrait gallery, and in no time at all, Briony was peeling back the portrait of her mother—all dark eyes and a strong jaw that Briony hadn’t inherited.

She held the portrait frame open like a door, and the maid slipped in first, followed by Cordelia.

Briony turned to close the frame behind them, listening to the other women’s footsteps descend the stairs and—

BOOM!

The explosion rattled the very stone under her feet. Briony braced herself between the two walls of the passage as Cordelia turned, a dozen steps below, her eyes white in the dark.

And then the ceiling caved in, erasing Cordelia from Briony’s sight.