I spin around to Declan. He’s frozen in time, his arms outstretched toward me, a promise that might as well be a map to a country I no longer belong in. His eyes are wet, shining in the firelight, and his mouth forms words that stretch soft and thick as taffy. The words stick before they can spill across his lips, but I hear them in my head as clearly as if he’s speaking.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
“No!” My voice rips out of me, clanging through the frozen silence. I twist hard, wrenching against the guard’s petrified grip. My gaze sweeps the crowd, the tents, the shadows. “Fortune! You came to save us! Tell me what to do.”
She doesn’t answer. No ribbon of smoke, no scorched earth marking her arrival, no shadow slipping betweenthe cracks of time. Just silence and the acrid bite of herbs waiting to burn.
I scream again, my throat tearing with it. “Where are you?!”
Silence.
Fortune isn’t coming.
The realization knocks the wind from my chest. Despair swells so fast it drowns me, filling every hollow place inside until I’m choking on it. I was obtuse enough to believe Fortune had stepped out of the dark to hand me a miracle. But the truth is cruel and simple—there is no miracle. Not for me. No matter where I am, the universe will always let me down.
If I wasn’t so broken, a single tarot card wouldn’t have been enough to end our lives. If I wasn’t so hopeless, so fucking chaotic, I would’ve already figured out how to get us home. I have real magick here. But even that doesn’t matter with how broken I am.
The world is syrup and glass as I inch around the pyre until I’m face-to-face with Declan.
My fingers tremble when they close on his. I squeeze like I mean it—hard enough to make the skin at his palm blanch—because if I let go I’ll lose the only thing I have left that matters. And he does matter.Wematter. There’s still a wedge between us—his confession like a cold pebble pressed into my heart—but even with that, I can feel what we’ve shared, what we still share. It doesn’t erase what he did, and it won’t be fixed with a single apology, but maybe, if we ever get the luxury of time, we could untangle it, stitch the edges back together.
His hand is warm in mine, and for a breath I think maybe we’ll get out of this. Maybe this is why Fortunecame but isn’t revealing herself—to give us time, a seam in the world to slip through. The hope tastes like smoke and copper, fragile as spun sugar. It arrives and flees in the same heartbeat, but in that small, precious moment it’s everything.
But Declan is still frozen, reaching for me. There’s a limit to what I can pull free. Towerfall’s magick hums in my chest, coursing through me in fiery currents, but it flinches away when I try to tug him out of the spell.
“Why can’t you just do it?” I roar at myself in a voice that sounds like someone else’s. “What are you waiting for, Amanda? You have the power. Use it. Save him!”
I’m furious at myself for letting his admission fester and rot within me. My pride, my doubt, my need to be right. How selfish I am. Petty. A coward. I pummel myself with the thoughts, with names that sting because they’re true. I hate that I’m thinking about being hurt when he’s the one who might burn. I hate that my righteous pain is a chain around both our throats. I hate that this magick bows to feeling and that my feelings are messy and loud and useless.
Of all the ironies, the cruelest is that I have the power to save him, to save us, but the thing that’s actually blocking me is not the kingdom or the queens or the pyre. It’s this bright, ratty heap of emotion tangled around my heart. Pain and fury knotted around the mechanism this realm’s magick needs to work.
I suck in a breath, set my jaw, and stop hoping for miracles and feeling sorry for myself. This isn’t the end. Time’s frozen. Great. I’ll use the pause to find a way out.
My fingers slip away from Declan’s—my own unformed apology.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
I climb down off the pyre and jump off the stage. My lungs squeeze, and tears threaten to form, but I keep my spine straight and push through the statues of the crowd and away from the stage before I can memorize the shape of him reaching for me.
I don’t look back. I know myself well enough to know that if I do, I’ll stay. I’ll stand here, watching him while I replay everything I could have done differently, until the memory of his hands is the only thing keeping me alive. I’ll rewrite my story as the woman who froze instead of fought. I will become a martyr of my own indecision. And when Fortune releases her hold and time undoubtedly starts again, I won’t let my grief be this kingdom’s show.
Twenty-Three
Sand whips at my calves as I sprint away from the stage, the pyre, the court—away from the only person I almost let myself believe would stay. I don’t stop at the camp’s edge. I push into the moonlit dark, lungs burning, feet sinking into loose sand.
I run for the dunes because that’s where the Tower woke, because if anything in this place can help, it’s there. I run because I’m desperate and afraid, and desperation is a tool if it’s used the right way.
I crest the final dune, lungs raw, and the Tower rises out of the pit in the sand like broken matchsticks, its columns blackened, splintered, reaching for the sky. My hands go cold and clammy, and I have to close them into fists so they won’t shake.
“Shit. How am I supposed to get down?” My throat tightens at the thought.
I can’t climb down the way Declan and I came up. Not alone. The only reason I didn’t end up splattered onthe stone before is because he was there to catch me. He kept me from falling. He kept me from breaking.
Tears burn at the corners of my eyes, but I won’t cry.
“I’m fine,” I tell the dark as I shrug away the memories. I don’t have time to untangle them properly. Right now I have to find a way down, trust the magick on fire inside me that’s screaming that the Tower can help, or watch everything that matters go up in smoke.
“Whatever magick is here, Fortune or whatever energy brought the Tower back to life, I need your help. I was brought here for a reason. I can’t fix it from up here. Give me a way down. Please.”
