“Don’t let him in!” she yelled at me, almost crying.
I leaned over the battlements. “Willow, who—?”
“I saw him, Talia,” she yelled at me, almost crying. “I saw him, Lyr, the seed boy. But his face was blurred, like water, like something was wearing his skin! And there was a door behind him. It wasn’t ours. It doesn’t belong to us.”
A chill cut through me, sharp as river-ice. I turned, drawn by a motion Darian had caught first. At the far end of the wall, the prince sat still as stone, legs still dangling recklessly over the edge, eyes locked on the orchard below.
I hurried to him, heart thudding in my eardrums. “Come behind the wall,” I said, already reaching.
He let me tug him gently away from the drop, rising in one fluid motion. When he stepped beside me, he curled an arm low around my waist. His hand rested against the small of my back, warm through the fabric.
He could have turned to face the enemy. He could have stepped forward like a prince. But he stepped toward me first. He could have faced the threat. He could have played the prince. But he chose me instead.
The bond between us didn’t spark or tense like it usually did during moments like this. It felt loose. Soft. Like it had been drugged with pipe weed and tucked under a blanket. It didn’t match what I felt at all.
I was terrified. Not of dying. I was terrified it would take him from me, and I wouldn’t know who he’d be when it gave him back. And still, I leaned into Darian enough to make it clear that I would shield him if it came to that. I loved him, and I didn’t care what ancient rot was staring at us from below. But gods, I was afraid.
The ash-man was there still. His companion still kneeled, drawing long and curling symbols, which dragged into the compacted mud. They vanished after he completed each one, as if the soil was drinking them. Like the world itself refused to remember what he was writing.
I didn’t wait. I ran. Down the wall stairs, across the upper courtyard, through the gate. My feet hit the mud, breath loud in my ears.
When I reached them, the ash-man stared forward, his eyes completely black, statue still. The old man remained kneeling calmly at his side, as if he hadn’t summoned fear from a girl with sunlight in her veins.
“Look at me,” I snapped to the kneeling old man who had only arrived two nights ago.
When he spoke, his eyes rolled up—clouded, electric blue like lit stormglass. His voice scraped out like wind across iron. “The spiral opens when the record turns.”
“What does that mean?” I demanded. “Who are you?”
Electric blue clouds smothered his eyes. “You already knew it once.”
I staggered forward. “What did you do to them? To the bond?” My blade throbbed at my hip, burning with heat, but I didn’t draw it.
The kneeling old man placed both palms flat on the earth. And then he vanished. No spell. No glamor. He sank. Skin, bones, robes—drawn down by the soil. Broken spirals widened beneath him, glowing, writhing, devouring his shape.
The three wolves howled before crying and squirming on the ground. The falcons landed beside them, then lay on their backs, feet kicking. Three fireflies pulsed red and white. One landed on the wolf’s heart.
The ground groaned. The coin in my pouch buzzed so hard it bruised my thigh. The bond screamed. I turned to shout for Darian—but the sky bent. Theair around the Keep shivered. Light warped at the edges of everything. Sound vanished. Silence swallowed every breath like snow before an avalanche.
People ran from the orchard, from the courtyards, from the walls. The marked. The Boundless. All of them drawn toward the broken spiraling scar that pulsed in the dirt where the old man had been.
Fen stumbled out of the courtyard, mouth open. “The bond feels—thick—like it’s breathing.”
I barely heard him, because Rainer… Willow’s mother stood solid and still, her limbs tense, and her fingers clawed. Her mouth fell open, but no sound came out. Her eyes flooded white, like moonlight poured into them. She swayed once and dropped to her knees.
Her sun over the rooted hill sigils turned gray before bleeding outward in threads of silver and black, as if her memories unraveled. Her back arched, her mouth was wide in a silent scream, and she collapsed into the mud.
Willow sobbed. “No! Mommy!”
Priestess Jinth dropped to her knees, clawing at her scalp with trembling hands. “He’s within me! I sense him. I can read his mind!”
Others were falling. Branwen. Lina. Nessa. Ruen. Fen. Their sigils bubbled and boiled before twisting and turning gray. Shapes they’d never been marked with bloomed across their skin: black skulls, dripping vines, rotted circles.
They weren’t sigils. They were scars, left by something that fed on remembrance.
The bond thrashed in my chest. It wasn’t magic anymore. It was an animal, panicking inside me, trying to claw free. The coin pulsed so hard I thought it might crack. The blade at my hip screamed.
And still, the ash-man stood. Only now… a cloak of shadow billowed around him. The darkness moving like smoke over his shoulders, the shape of it wrong. Too long. Too alive. Like a cloak worn by absence itself.
I prayed—silently, stupidly—that Darian would run. That for once, he wouldn’t stay for the storm.
The ash-man’s eyes—still bottomless black—locked on me. He held out the four wardstones from Oxford and whispered something to them. They turned to sand, which he let drift to the ground.
Darian was beside me. His chest heaved. His sword was out. I didn’t even see him draw it. He looked straight at the ash-man and roared, “That’s the demon from the orchard! He came through the portal!”
The ash-man tilted his head, as if he were trying to remember what we were. He opened his mouth.His voice was ancient, unbothered, and made of stone grinding on stone. “This world was not marked for you.”
The earth ruptured behind him. A broken spiral burned into the ground between the ring of memory stones, to the gate of the Keep, tearing open the ground in a widening ring of ultraviolet light.
And then the screaming began.
