I turn my back on the square and hobble away, anger still burning inside me.
“Where are you going?” Thorne cries out. “Briony, where are you going?”
“I don’t even know,” I say, “except I can’t be here. I just can’t be.”
I hear Beaufort call after me too, and Fox, but I don’t stop. I keep walking through the destruction toward the other side of the square, barely seeing, barely hearing, no idea where I’m headed.
And then someone blocks my path.
I blink, my eyes focusing.
It’s Odessa.
Odessa.
My hands curl into tight fists at my sides. She’s the reason Clare’s dead. Clare, who tried to help her, who tried to save her.
“Briony,” Odessa says. Her voice is not full of its usual haughty arrogance. There are tears tracking down her face. She clutches an arm across her body, an injured arm, cut and bloody.
“You were telling the truth?” she asks. “About those monsters. About those demons. It was really the shadow weavers who created them?”
The anger inside me fizzles out as quickly as it had blazed.
“Yes. It was the shadow weavers. They killed the light wielders in order to gain control over this realm. They disturbed the balance of magic, and in doing so they created the demons.”
“And you can destroy them?”
The people around us are silent and still, so silent you could hear a pin drop in the large market square.
“I don’t know,” I say, my voice breaking in my throat as tears bubble into my eyes. “I don’t know if I can.” I don’t want anyone else to die. I don’t want to lose anyone else I love. The pain nearly tore me apart, and the pain I feel right now might do it again. And then how will I find the strength to do anything at all?
“She can,” a voice says from somewhere in the crowd.
A dirty face steps forward this time – Fox’s father.
“Fate has given her four chosen mates.” He gestures behind me, where I assume Fox, Beaufort, Dray, and Thorne are standing. “Four shadow weavers.”
“Shadow weavers,” someone scoffs.
“They’re not all bad,” I mutter. “Some want a better way. A better future as well.”
“Can you trust them after everything they’ve done?” Odessa asks. “After the way they’ve treated us?”
I look at her face and wonder if Kratos wasn’t the perfect protector she always made him out to be. After all, he was the one who put her up to attacking me in the forest. He was the one who stood by when she was carted off to Slate Quarter. And he was the one who replaced her in the blink of an eye.
“We can,” I say.
“And you really are fated mates?” the mayor says.
“Yes, we are,” I say, pushing up the sleeve of my coat and showing the marks that adorn my wrists.
“Then we’ll stand by you,” he says. “Although I’m not sure what good that will be to you, but we will.”
I stare at him, completely astonished. I thought there might be some among the Slate people who would be on our side, who might help us, but it never in a hundred years occurred to me that one of those people would be the mayor.
“I’ve seen too many people suffer and die out here in this Quarter,” he explains, as if he’s read my mind. “It’s never seemed fair, never seemed right. And if we can change things for the better, then we should. For all our sakes.”
“Thank you,” I say, as other voices murmur in agreement.
