I follow them as best as I can, almost crying out with relief when I round a corner and realize a torch has been lit and placed into a sconce on the wall. Not willing to trust my own eyes, I dash up to it, lifting the torch free and drawing it close to my face. I can smell the burning wood, feel the heat of the flame, and my heart thuds with new hope. This is real, I think. Fortiss was here.
A hummerlet pops out of a side chamber, nearly scaring me to death, then trills at me with an attitude of clear irritation as she bobs up and down, belly glowing. She darts off down the corridor. Emboldened by my torch, I dash off after her, andtogether we wind our way deeper into the castle, heading up, not down. Not returning to the talonstone vault, then, but…where?
We reach the floor where our sleeping chambers were, but the hummerlets draw me away from those rooms and up a second set of stairs. I’m heartened to see another torch lit, and after pausing briefly to make sure that it, too, is real, I dash along the corridor, moving swiftly until the hummerlet in front of me suddenly stops midflight and poofs into nothingness. She’s gone.
I stare, mutely for a long second more, with nothing but the soft crackling of the torch for company, and then I hear it.
Weeping.
Swallowing hard, I move forward toward the large open door at the end of the corridor. Light plays out in a rosy glow from the chamber, and when I peek my head around the door, I’m hit with the eye-wateringly awful smell of rotting meat. Then I see a large grate with an oddly red flame, walls lined with books, a bulky pile of blankets stacked in a corner…
And Fortiss kneeling over a body.
“Fortiss!” I gasp, shoving my own torch into a holder just inside the door and rushing toward him. A large pool of dark liquid has stained the rug around the body, and the scent of death in the room is as thick as winter fog. “What are you doing?”
“It’s my father.” He hunches over the corpse, shielding the man’s face from my view. “Daggar said the truth was made plain to him in this chamber of prophecies, that all who entered would see what they couldn’t face. I had to see.”
“Fortiss…” I try again, edging closer to him. His shoulders are shaking, and the sight of his abject sorrow is nearly my undoing. I’ve never seen him so distraught.
I draw in a steadying breath. “That wasn’t actually Lord Daggar talking to you. It was an illusion created by the skrill todeceive us into spending the night in this place of death. Where they could kill us in the middle of the night, when our guards were down.”
“But he said—I—would know the truth,” Fortiss manages, his voice cracking. “And he was right.”
I bite my lip as he doubles over again, but he’s making no sense to me. I don’t want to startle him into attacking me, though, so I drop into a crouch, edging toward him bit by bit. “All right, so you came here to learn what you needed to learn. That’s good, then. That can help us.”
“My father didn’t die in a fall,” Fortiss moans. “Rihad killed him. He’s been planning this so much longer than we even realize.”
He pulls away from the body, and I see the telltale gray-flanged arrow sticking up out of the chest of what is clearly a great warrior—or was. Now the man is soaked in his own sticky blood. I reach out a shaky hand and grip Fortiss’s arm, gritting my teeth as I realize how violently he’s shivering. “He—he said Rihad needed Szonja for…for the winged crown, the one that was l-lost.”
Fortiss gasps, clearly struggling for breath. His gaze swings to mine, eyes ravaged by tears, and I jolt as something—magic? Emotion? Some combination of the two?—leaps between us, a cord that winds around my heart and binds me fast. In that moment, I am one thought with Fortiss, one breath, his aching well of sorrow so deep we both may drown in it. I feel his pain as surely as it is my own, the loss and devastation of a betrayal that has stretched from an orphaned boy to the man I hold today. “That’s why—Rihad kept her all those years in the caverns. My father told me that. And then he d-died in front of me.”
“Oh, Fortiss,” I whisper. I lean in even closer, wrapping my arm around him, intending only to draw him away. But I can’t resist the ghoulish urge to glance toward the face of the corpsein front of me—even though I know it’s an illusion, even though I know it’s…
My breath dies in my throat.
The man lying in the pool of blood hasn’t been pierced through with a flat gray arrow, but with an arrow of pure silver, whose feathers gleam with dyed flanges of silver struck through with the faintest brush of green. And the man whose mouth sags open, his eyes staring up sightlessly at the ceiling, isn’t some dead, hallowed warrior I’ve never met. It isn’t even Merritt—who, I realize, is what I most expected to find. Merritt, who I failed.
It’s Fortiss. A mirror image of the man trembling beside me, one whose eyes are filled with the past, and one who’s dead by my own hand.
He’s wearing the crown of wings.
“Stop it.” I yank Fortiss back so hard that we both go sprawling, and the image vanishes at my feet. I shake Fortiss roughly, slapping at him when he stares at me dumbly.
“Stopit,” I yell again in his face. “You came in here for a reason. What was it? What did you think you would find in these chambers? What was worth being trapped by an illusion?”
“Not trapped,” Fortiss insists, still dazed. “Not trapped.” But he’s shaking his head now, peering around wildly.
I haul myself to my feet and pull him up as well. “You looked trapped to me. What did you think was going to be in here?”
“The reason the Divhs came here in the first place. The crown of wings.”
I stare at him, hard, then back to where the illusion of his own dead father had so ensnared his attention. Now there’s nothing there, of course. No father, no Fortiss. Had I truly seen the crown of wings on Fortiss’s head? If so—what did that mean? I had won the winged crown, not him.
“I thought you said Daggar never indicated that the crown was here,” I say carefully. “Only the talonstones.”
“But ithasto be here.” Fortiss shakes me off him, finally seeming to come back to himself as he turns to glare at the walls of books. “Rihad can’t have been hiding it all these years. He’s too proud. He would never have missed an opportunity to display it at the First House. He would have wanted to study it, delve into its powers. You forget, in the past month since the tournament, I’ve read his books, I’ve memorized his notes. I know more about his research than I ever wanted to. Rihad wasn’t just looking to control Divhs. He was looking to command an army capable of helping him take over the Imperium. He wanted every scrap of power he could bend to his will. And he’s been planning this for far longer than I even realized, and at a much higher level than I would have thought possible.”
“Maybe—but maybe not,” I counter. “You don’t know if what you saw just now is anything but what the skrill wanted you to believe.”
