But now, watching the hearth crackle in patterns far too deliberate, and the smoke twist in slow, serpentine ribbons—as though ferrying their secrets toward the ceiling—I realized Soren hadn’t merely been summoning flames before.
He’d been communicating with them.
When he inclined his head toward me, I realized I had spoken the words out loud.
“Amber-bonded mana carries farther than most fae realize,” he said. “Fire keeps secrets. Smoke carries them.”
Batty clicked in what sounded suspiciously like approval.
I leaned forward, every instinct screaming at me not to waste the opportunity.
“Soren,” I said, not caring that my tone belied every ounce of desperation I felt. “If you can reach other Courts this way… could you reach the Wilds? Can you reach my mother, or at least… see if she’s… reachable?” I stopped myself just short of sayingalive.
Soren’s eyebrows rose, but before he could answer, the door swung open.
Amias strode inside with purposeful steps, carrying a crystal case wrapped in a glimmering cloth. His expression was tight with focus, and the vine tattoos on his fingers writhed in anticipation, curling and uncurling as if they sensed the poison clinging to the air.
“Good,” he said briskly. “You’re both here. I have something new that I’m eager to try.”
Soren shifted aside at once, jaw clenched, and I rose from the chair, unable to steady my racing pulse. Amias set the crystal case on the bedside table with a delicate finality, peeling the cloth back to reveal a slender vial filled with an iridescent liquid that shimmered with soft pinks and golds, as though a sunrise had been coaxed into a bottle.
The tattoos along his fingers quickened, creeping like living roots hungry for whatever lay inside the vial.
“A friend at the Everbloom Sanctum sent this,” he explained, voice taut. “A distilled Spring essence designed to counteract venom with accelerated cellular repair. Risky. Volatile. But our options grow thinner by the hour.”
I swallowed hard as he uncorked the vial. A subtle scent of blooming petals cut through the cold. His hands remainedsteady as he injected the shimmering essence into a vein at Nevara’s wrist.
For several long seconds, the entire room held its collective breath, even the wind outside stilling to a muted whir. But nothing changed.
Then, miraculously, the black strands that had crept through her shimmering hair began to pale at the roots, softening from pitch to slate. The sickly discoloration clouding her nails lightened as well, shifting toward a dull gray. A fragile thread of hope tugged at my chest, and a shaky laugh escaped me before I could stop it. Relief pressed hot behind my eyes.
But the change faltered. The gray held, quivered, then deepened once more. The color in her hair darkened rapidly, strands turning ink-thick and glossy as oil spreading over water. Her nails hardened into obsidian, the discoloration racing from fingertip to fingertip with unnatural speed, as if the venom had been roused rather than soothed.
Amias froze, horror seizing his features. Soren cursed under his breath and gripped the bedframe. Batty pressed herself tight against my neck, a soft, frightened trill vibrating against my skin.
The truth hit all of us at once, cold and absolute. The Spring essence wasn’t healing her.
It was helping the venom along.
Chapter 30
Draven
Eryx stood with tight features in the war room, a faint sheen of ironfrost coating each of his knuckles, like he was ready to do battle.
From the news he had heard, or with his king?
For several tense minutes, he ran through reports, not bothering to hide the accusation in his tone when he spoke of attacks on the border towns.
Or worse, monsters that had ravaged the villages.
“The patrols managed to stumble upon one portal in the northern mountains,” he added in a terse voice. “But from all we can see, it led to the Thornhart territory. They destroyed it, in any event.”
The Thornharts lived their lives in peaceful herds, rarely drifting out of their territory. Their portal was the least of our threats, which Eryx knew as well.
Still, it was something that the soldiers had seen it at all, since all of Everly’s research had mentioned the many ways in which portals could be crafted with crystals that either helped to disguise them or actively repel people.
All we knew aside from that was that once, each dominion and Court had their own portals to one another’s lands for the emissaries to travel more freely. It was supposed to be for peace, before they were predictably used for ill.
