“Do you not see?” she murmurs, voice low and searing. “Is it so cloaked in prettiness and hidden beneath spell and spectacle that you do not remember? You have chased signs when the answer lives in your blood.”
I swallow hard, throat tight. Her words thrum in my chest, pressing against my ribs, against the walls I’ve built to prop myself up.
Fortune is speaking to every moment I performed instead of listened. Every time I embodied the look of empowerment instead of learning to do the work to achieve it.
My fingers curl around the scroll crumpled in my hand. The paper is soft with age, singed at the edges like it barely survived whatever truth it carries.
“I don’t know how to fix any of it,” I whisper. Shame grows hot in my chest, presses against the backs of my eyes. “I don’t even know where to start.”
Her gaze drops to the parchment. “That was written in the days when flame bowed to truth.”
I glance down at the smeared ink of the poem, the spell that made the torches leap and the world tilt. The one that didn’t feel like performance. That felt like me.
“It was never meant for spectacle,” Fortune continues, her voice the dull roar of a bonfire. “It was meant to reveal. To remind. To rend the veil between what is true and what is merely…pleasing.”
She looks at me again, and in her eyes, the flames dance wild and ferocious. “You have already done it. You’re the echo and the origin, but you cannot burn for that by which you are unwilling to be consumed.”
Like smoke curling into the sky, she begins to vanish. Her body flickers at the edges, the outline of her softening, rippling like heat rising from pavement.
“No.” It escapes me rough and ragged. Then louder: “No!”
Declan’s fingers slip from mine as I lunge.
“Don’t go! Don’t leave me with these riddles.” I charge into the shimmer. Each step forward feels like moving through oil as her figure continues to blur, melting like wax into the night.
I reach out and catch the edge of her robe—hot silk that unravels in my hand. Ash spills through my fingers, but in that final flash of contact, voices come. They’re soft and layered, echoing over each other.
…the wheel turns…
…for the real…
…the willing…
…truth must be chosen…
…and the self…
…unmade…
The heat fades. The shimmer dissolves. The scorched ground beneath my feet returns to sand as the night settles back into its former shape.
Seventeen
The scroll is spread across my lap, the charred edges whispering ash against my thighs as I once again go over the faded script. My back aches from sitting hunched in the sand outside the caravan, and every few minutes I slap at another invisible tickle crawling up my leg.
I’ve been out here for hours, but I can’t stop. Fortune’s last words keep replaying in my mind, a needle stuck in a groove:
…you cannot burn for that by which you are unwilling to be consumed.
“There has to be something,” I mutter to the empty dunes. “Something that opens the portal. That fixes everything and gets us home.”
A sting snaps against my arm. I scratch without thinking. Then another. Then five more in quick succession. My legs itch. My arms itch. My freaking eyelids itch.
“I brought you some water.”
I start, squinting up at Declan against the gold-drenchedsky. His sun-kissed arms and tousled hair and concerned eyes—he’s too good-looking to be tracking my descent into Gollum territory.
He crouches beside me, gaze skating over the scroll and the scattered contents of my ritual pouch. “Everything going okay?”
