And then I woke to the sound of horns.
Not the musical horns I remembered from my father’s trading caravans, those bright brass notes that announced arrivals and departures, celebrations and feast days. These were deeper. Rougher.
They were war horns, or something close to them.
I sat up in the massive bed, furs sliding from my shoulders, and for a moment I didn’t know where I was.
Black silk sheets. Vaulted stone ceiling carved with ravens. A fire burned low in the hearth, casting long shadows across unfamiliar walls.
Cador’s chambers. I was in Cador’s chambers.
The blood feeding. The golden thread. The confession that had spilled out of me in the dark hours before dawn, every secret I’d been hoarding laid bare between us.
My fingers sought the reassuring thud against my ribs.
The warmth at my center hadn’t faded. I wasn’t burning with stolen heat or buzzing with petal-induced mania. I was simply...stable. Present. Anchored in a way I hadn’t been since I’d crawled out of that grave.
The horns sounded again.
I threw back the furs and stood. My legs held. My body obeyed. The gray hadn’t crept back into my skin overnight. When I looked at my hands, they were pale but not ashen. Cold but not frozen.
Cador wasn’t in the room.
His side of the bed was cold, the furs thrown back, a depression in the pillow where his head had rested. How long had he been gone? Minutes? Hours?
The fire had burned low, but someone had added fresh logs recently. The bark was still curling, smoke rising in lazy spirals.
The horns. I needed to know what the horns meant. I dressed quickly and slipped outside the room.
The corridor outside was empty. No servants, no guards. Everyone had gone somewhere else, drawn by whatever crisis the horns announced.
I followed the sound of distant voices, bare feet silent on the cold stone, until I reached a balcony that overlooked the main courtyard.
And stopped.
The gates were open.
Not all the way, just enough to frame the figures standing on the other side. A dozen men in maroon uniforms, their shoulders marked with the insignia of the Lawkeepers.
The peacekeeping force that operated across this section of Alia Terra, enforcing the fragile laws that governed trade and travel and the movement of people between monster lands.
And at their head, dressed in mourning black with a veil over her face, stood my aunt.
Mabyn.
The world went very still.
I gripped the balcony railing, but I couldn’t feel it properly.
Couldn’t feel anything except the sick lurch in my stomach, the way my newly anchored heart stuttered against my ribs.
She was here. She’d found me. Three months of running, of hiding, of pretending to be something I wasn’t, and she’d tracked me across half of Alia Terra to the one place I’d thought she couldn’t follow.
“You must understand our concern.” Mabyn’s voice carried across the courtyard, pitched to sound worried rather than demanding. The voice of a grieving guardian, not a murderer.
“My niece is very ill. She escaped from the sanatorium before her treatment was complete, and I fear the journey has worsened her condition. Did you think the auctioneer wouldn’t sell information? Gold opens every door, even into monster lands. I bought your trail from the Bride Market to this castle.”
Sanatorium.
