I scooped Neave into my arms and ran for the door, shouting Gareth’s name. But when I glanced back to find him, he wasn’t running after me. He’d found a candelabra on a side table with four lit candles, and as I watched, he tossed aside his burned jacket and thrust the darkened, oil-soaked torch into the flames.
As soon as the torch burst back to life, Gareth flung it toward Eldric and his shield of vines. The spinning flames ignited the bed’s canopy and then crashed into the spot where Eldric hid. The rest of the bed caught fire immediately, and the vines not long after, but Gareth was already racing toward the door. We ran down the stairs to the sound of Eldric’s screams.
I’d never loved Gareth more fiercely than I did in that moment.
The ballroom was empty; Griselda had abandoned her piano, but the door to the passage stood open. A wave of gratitude tore through me. She could have easily locked us in here if she’d wanted to.
Back in the main house, the hallways were quiet and empty, just as we’d left them, but the party had erupted into chaos. I heard it long before Gareth could—Aralinda Lemaire sobbing, her father calling for the doors to be locked, house guards shouting for everyone to present themselves for inspection. Someone had set fire to the house; someone had murdered Eldric Lemaire.
Griselda. I bit back a curse. This was a big house; the only way anyone could already know about the fire was if she had reported it to her parents. I stopped a few paces from the now-empty gambling rooms to listen more closely.
“She could have told them exactly where to find us,” muttered Gareth, who had obviously come to the same conclusion I had. “Butshe didn’t. They could’ve come for us, and no one at the party would have been the wiser.”
I nodded. “This chaos will be a welcome distraction.”
“Thank you, Griselda,” he said lightly. “As long as we can still get out, that is.”
I glanced down at the girl in my arms. Lily.Neave.I had to think of her as a god, not as a human girl, or else the horror of what had happened to her would fell me. She felt weightless in my arms, so still and quiet that if my senses hadn’t told me she was indeed breathing, that her tired heart still beat, I would have thought she was dead.
Suddenly the sound of breaking glass exploded from inside the ballroom—one crash after another, and then another, followed by shrieks both human and beastly.
I smiled. My hearing was so sharp that I could see the scene unfurling as clearly as I would with my eyes.
“Ryder has wilded creatures from the Knotwood,” I told Gareth. “Birds, raptors, stags, wolves. Hundreds of them. They’ve broken the windows. They’ve burst in through the doors. It’s havoc. Even the guards are running.”
“What an excellent whiskered ruffian he is,” Gareth said. Then he looked at me and added gravely, “You know what this means.”
I did, and I hated it. “I’ve got to take Neave and run.”
“And the rest of us will regroup outside and head for Kirsa’s house. And…” He trailed off.
“And I’ll meet all of you in Fairhaven,” I finished firmly. “In two weeks or less, I hope. If only you all weren’t such slowpokes.”
Gareth looked as wretched as I felt. I shifted Neave into one arm, tugged him close with my free hand, and kissed him hard. Then I held him to me and pressed my forehead against his.
“If you let yourself get hurt,” I said, “I’ll kill you. Right there in the Citadel before hundreds of witnesses.”
He smiled faintly. “Stay safe, darling,” he whispered, and then he kissed my cheek, and I turned with my heart in my throat and started to run.
Chapter 30
I’d run long distances before. I’d run so fast that to anyone I passed, I appeared as little more than a blur. And I’d done both at the same time on countless occasions while on missions for the Order.
But until the night I fled Briarcourt with a half-dead god in my arms, I’d never had to run so hard and so fast for so long. It was a good two hundred miles from the Knotwood’s mouth to Rithia, a port city on Vauzanne’s southeastern shore. I had Order contacts there; I would secure passage on the fastest ship I could find and hopefully make it across the Gloaming Sea to Fairhaven before anyone could catch up to me.
Kilraith, my mind whispered in Talan’s voice, then in my sisters’.BeforeKilraithcatches up to you.
He knows.
He’s coming.
No one tried to stop me as I raced out of Briarcourt. They were too busy flooding outside themselves, evading Ryder’s mad wilded beasts. Just as I ducked under a flowered arbor and into the Briarcourt gardens, an arrow whizzed past me and pierced the flank of a bounding stag. I dodged the poor bleating creature, leapt over a hedge, and torethrough the rest of the gardens—a sea of guests and guards, wolves and bears and hawks, sweaty finery and polished armor bearing the crest of the House of Lemaire.
The cry of a falcon pierced the chaos and made my heart seize. I wished desperately that I hadn’t ordered Freyda to stay at Rosewarren. The long road ahead would have felt much shorter if I’d had her with me. And with her tireless amber eyes overhead, scanning the horizon for Kilraith, I wouldn’t have had to worry quite so much about being ambushed.
“You run so fast,” murmured Neave, dreamy and half-awake in my arms. The sound of her voice startled me.
“Just stay put and relax,” I told her. “I’ve got you.”
