Lore promised Bronwen to stay put, yet two of his crows are out in the open! I don’t realize I’m trembling until I feel a comforting palm breeze across my forearm.
“Can you hear”—my lungs are so tight that I wheeze—“what they’re saying?”
Arin doesn’t grasp my question, so I point to the esplanade, then point to my ear.
Her lips form a soft,Oh. “The Fae kill one friend.”
My ribs squeeze around my heart. “Which friend?”
“The boy with dark hair.”
“Antoni?”
“No. Red eyes.”
“Riccio?”
Arin nods, her long, salt-and-pepper hair frolicking around her shoulders. “Tà. And girl, Giana—she . . . How you say it?”
“She arrested,” a grave voice completes Arin’s sentence.
Like a weathercock, I spin again, this time toward Aoife. “Arrested? By whom? For what?”
“By Dante. For crime against Fae Crown.”
The blood drains from my face. “What?”
“Gabriele reached Sybille and Mattia before they caught and guided horses up mountain for safety.”
Heart thudding in my jaw, in my cheeks, in my lids, I gape between Aoife and Arin.
Aoife’s throat dips. “Immy was with Vance, the Racoccin rebel. They vanish in tunnels last night.”
Last night, while I was in a state of bliss, my friends’ world was toppling. “And Lore isn’t able to get in touch with her?”
Aoife shakes her head, and although her face isn’t a mess of wild heart palpitations like my own, her eyes gleam with anger. “No.”
“Has he tried calling her?”
She nods.
“And?”
“She not come back.”
“How can that be?” I ask.
Aoife closes her eyes. “Forever-Crows lose power to communicate.”
The market’s noise vanishes as the whole world comes to a screeching standstill, every vendor frozen beside their stalls, every lit flame immobile, every conversation suspended in midair, never landing. My lips shape the word,No.
“Lorcan wants to fly in valley and over forest, but your father and uncle have told him that if he do that, they toss him in Shabbe.” I’m not sure how, but Aoife manages to raise a smile. It’s brittle but there.
There and gone.
Arin has gone as white as the linens I’d launder by hand when I still believed myself a halfling with, for only prospect, a small life in Tarelexo. How narrow my world was back then. How wide it’s become thanks to Lore.
Caws echo across the marketplace as black bird after black bird dives through the cupola and melts into skin and armor. Lore’s eyes find mine through the darkness and don’t let go as he pounds across the rapidly dimming cavern toward me. Whatever sun he’d let shine over Luce winks out of existence as woolen clouds flock over the blue like sheep.
