The woman jumped, grabbing her chest in shock. “Oh! Miss Rosewood!” Her eyes were wide and haunted. “My brother was sent for firewood and didn’t return. My family and I went looking for him and couldn’t find our way back.”

Briony searched behind the woman, the glow of the navigator flame revealing no one with her. “Did you find him?”

She shook her head tearfully. “I don’t know where any of them are. I lost them all.”

Briony cast a shield around the two of them. It wouldn’t make them undetectable like the one around the camp, but it would ward off magical attacks. “The woods can twist you around. I’ll help you find them.”

The woman sobbed grateful tears. “Thank you, Miss Rosewood!”

“You may call me Briony.”

“I’m Delilah,” the woman said and led them back the way she came. She moved fast, stumbling in the dark past the reach of Briony’s shield and looking at the trees.

“It’s your brother and who else? Your mother?” Briony sped up, trying to keep both of them under the bubble of protection.

“My mother, my father, and my uncle. We all spread out looking.”

Briony was about to tell her they should form a search party if the family was spread in different directions, but the caw of a bird above her head stopped her.

She looked up, finding the beady eye of a black bird watching them.

Magic sizzled the air, and Briony felt something bounce off her shield. She flinched and spun in a circle.

The man from the attack on the Bomardi school stood ten paces away, yellow teeth smiling at her from under a crooked nose.

Reighven.

Briony’s heart galloped. In the years since she’d seen him last, his name had become synonymous with terror and dark magic on the battlefields, and his face had taken up permanent residence in her nightmares.

“Stones, what luck we have tonight,” Reighven said, his voice like gravel. “The princess herself.”

Briony heard shifting in the trees. She reached for Delilah’s wrist to bring her into Briony’s protection shield, but before she could, Reighven cut his arm through the air. Blood blossomed across Delilah’s chest.

Briony gasped and stretched her shield further to cover them both as Reighven and whoever else was in the trees began an assault on her shield.

Briony lowered Delilah to the ground, pressing her fingers to the slice across her chest and trying to bring the skin back together as the magic ricocheted around them. Delilah’s eyes were wide in panic.

Briony gripped the thread in her mind and pushed with all her might.

Reighven and another man stumbled, their magic ceasing momentarily.

She reached for a tree and brought it down on them, the crack of the trunk heavy in the dark night.

As Reighven and the other man dove out of the way, she cast up purple sparks into the sky like a firecracker. A distress call for Finola.

She glanced at Reighven as he righted himself and saw the other man for the first time: Toven Hearst.

The world slowed and abruptly sped forward as his cold eyes met hers.

Briony refocused on her shield as they moved toward her, hoping she only had seconds until the Eversuns came to her aid. She turned back to Delilah as twigs snapped under hasty footsteps. Color was just returning to her cheeks now that her wounds had been sewn up.

A hand reached through the wall of Briony’s shield and grabbed the front of her dress. She gasped, eyes wide, as Reighven slammed her up against the nearest tree.

She hadn’t thought of physical violence, only magical. Her shield was useless against his hands.

“Princess, let’s go have a little talk. See if we can’t find out how to lure your brother out of that camp, huh?” Reighven grinned at her, and then cast a portal five feet to the left.

Briony panicked, her mind nothing but white noise and her skin trembling. Her eyes caught Toven’s as Reighven tugged on the front of her dress, as though to pull her toward the portal. His lips were pressed into a thin line, but he made no move to stop Reighven.

Briony kicked and clawed, screaming for the camp to hear her.

“Hey!” a voice called from the trees behind them. Reighven paused.

A man in Eversun merchant clothes stood in a clearing of trees. The woman who ran the fish market stood next to him, as well as two brawny men who looked like them. Delilah’s family. Briony thanked the waters for their timing.

“You can’t just take her!” the man yelled. “She’s coming with us!”

Briony had half a second to ponder his choice of words before Delilah came to her feet, hands raised to cast.

Delilah’s body flew into the trunk of a tree, and her head cracked on the bark. She crumpled.

Behind her, Toven Hearst lowered his hand, his eyes still cold. “She’s not going anywhere with you,” he said.

The mother screamed, and Briony barely had time to put up a shield before the magic sizzled around her, like being thrust into the center of a bonfire.

She ducked as Reighven let go of her to cast. Pulling herself around a tree, she caught her bearings on which way was back to camp as the screams and grunts of a battle broke out behind her. She couldn’t run back to the Eversun camp now. She couldn’t lead them there, shields or not.

A pale hand with strong fingers grabbed her wrist and tugged. Briony fell forward against Toven’s chest. She shoved him backward as he began to draw a portal.

“Don’t,” he warned her, voice deadly.

A spell flared over his shoulder, and he howled, curling over in pain and releasing her. One of Delilah’s relatives stood twenty paces away with his hands outstretched.

“Thank you! Run!” Briony screamed at him.

She took off to the north, running through the trees, leaping over roots and fallen branches.

The zip of a spell flew past and into the tree in front of her, and she curled in on herself, veering right.

There should be a river half a mile ahead. If she could get there, she could channel the water’s magic into a stronger shield.

A spell slammed into her back and she fell, cracking her chin on the ground. Stars spun in her head. She pulled herself up just as a knee pressed into her back, hot breath on her neck.

“This is fun, isn’t it?” Reighven growled, taking her wrists and pushing them into her back. “I think I’ll make you my new pet. We can chase each other for hours.”

Briony focused her mind on the earth beneath her. The fear and adrenaline spiked her magic, and the forest floor began to split apart underneath her.

Reighven rolled, taking her with him. She struggled under him until he was straddling her, pinning her wrists down.

Then Reighven screamed. He grabbed for his head, his fingers scrabbling across his skull, then his chest as he screeched in excruciating pain.

She didn’t delay. She slipped from under him and kept running, hoping she’d hear the river soon to help guide her direction.

She got her answer when one of the merchant men jumped into her path. She skidded to a halt.

“Miss Rosewood!” he said. “The camp is this way!”

Briony caught her breath, staring in the direction he was pointing. Was she really so turned around? If she had four guesses on which way was east, that would have been the last.

A spell sizzled past her ear, and the man was blown back off his feet. Briony ran for a nearby tree for cover. As she spun around it, Toven Hearst was advancing toward her.

She dragged her hands together, and two tall trees were pulled off their roots, crashing down in front of him. Toven jumped back, and she ran the way the man had pointed—toward camp.

By now Briony didn’t care who else was alerted to her location. She needed Finola and the army to find her and the merchants. She started lighting trees on fire as she ran past them.

A bush caught on fire to her left. She hadn’t lit it. Briony swerved around it, listening to a pair of heavy boots chasing behind her. A tree fell in her path, and she was forced to veer right.

Toven was running alongside her through the trees, twenty feet away, and Briony felt sick as she remembered how they used to race to the willow tree. How much faster he’d always been than her. How racing him used to thrill her. She shoved her magic at him to keep him away.

He brought another tree down in front of her, and she had to twist to avoid it.

He was playing with her. Herding her. Forcing her to go in the direction he chose.

She glanced over to him as he kept pace with her, and just before she could cast against him, a spell slammed into his shoulder, and he tripped and rolled.

The sounds of a magic fight hissed behind her as she kept running. She heard the merchant woman scream again, the same keening cry she’d made when Delilah’s body had crumpled to the forest floor.

Briony wanted to go back for them—the merchant family who was fighting off Toven and Reighven with her when they could have just run—but she needed Finola and the army to find them first.

A large twisted tree trunk was dead ahead of her. It was actually two trees grown into each other, with a hole at the base. She slid against it and caught her breath, taking stock of who was chasing her and where exactly she was.

The three trees she’d lit on fire were starting to light up the area. She could see the illumination of them fifty feet away.

She watched through the undergrowth as spells zipped past one another. There were five figures scattered throughout the trees, moving and casting.

And then suddenly it was quiet, without so much as a scream.

Briony blinked into the growing light of the forest, waiting for movement. When nothing came, she rose to her feet, casting a shield to protect against all kinds of violence this time, and crept to the edge the clearing.

One of the merchant men lay on his back, twenty feet in front of her. His eyes were open and glassy, and his hand was clenched over his heart. Heartstop.

Briony scanned the trees before moving forward again. In another ten feet, she found Delilah’s mother and the other two men on the ground in similar positions. Tears pricked her eyes, and her stomach churned, hating how cowardly she’d been to hide and wait while they died.

Briony’s hand covered her mouth as she knelt over the dead body of Delilah’s mother, remembering how she’d always sighed about her daughter’s blue hair.

She glanced through the trees. She had to get out of the forest.

A flare of purple sparks lit the sky to her left. Finola, guiding her in. Briony gasped to see just how close she was to the camp, wondering how she’d found her direction through the chaos.

She began to carve a path through the trees but stopped cold when she saw another body in the underbrush.

One with pale gray hair and long limbs.

Her feet moved to him before her brain could think.

Toven Hearst lay on his side, unmoving. Her ribs seized, and she choked on a gasp.

He’d hunted her, toyed with her, and still she shook as she approached, begging the waters for his heartbeat.

Coming around his body, she found his eyes open, staring straight ahead, past her.

When a breath rattled from his throat, and a tear slipped out of his eye, Briony almost sobbed in relief.

“Briony!” a voice called from a distance. Maybe half a mile away.

The Eversuns were coming for her, but Briony dropped to her knees at Toven’s side.

He was too exposed. That was the only thing Briony thought as she levitated a few fallen branches to cover him from her army.

Toven’s gaze was far away as she hid him. He fought for air, in intense pain.

She heard her name called again.

Briony took one last second to reach for his hand, pausing as she looked down.

Both of his hands were curled into fists. Both of his arms were outstretched in the direction she’d come from. In the direction of the four dead bodies in the grass.

Heartstop.

And not just Heartstop. A split casting, like his father. No. Worse than his father.

Briony scrambled away from him, coming to her feet. He’d killed four innocent people because they were in his way—because they were between himself and her.

And four lives in one breath? He was shivering and struggling for air because the Heartstop had torn his heart open four times over. And she’d coddled him for it.

Killing four people with two hands was utterly unheard of. Not even Orion had such talent.

Her legs shook as she stared down at possibly the most dangerous man in all Bomard.

One day, he’d be able to do it without blinking. Without a gasp for air.

She wondered if she should kill him now, before he had a chance to do it again. Before he learned to take six lives. Eight.

Toven Hearst shuddered on the ground, his eyes beginning to flicker.

Briony hardened her heart and ran into the night, hoping Toven Hearst would rot there under those branches.