Page 51 of Burn of the Everflame

Sophos’s answer was too far, too muffled to hear. As the veil passed over his archway, he vanished with a silvery flash.

One by one, the Kindred drew back into their arches and disappeared. My head lolled toward Lumnos, pleading with the desperate words I couldn’t speak. But as with all my prayers, her answer never came. She pressed a palm to her heart, offered the last of her sad, sweet smiles, and vanished.

Once again, only Umbros remained. He knelt and slid his arms beneath Yrselle’s body, cradling her against his chest. He bowed his head and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

The veil surged forward, and he was gone.

I opened my eyes and immediately regretted it.

My head had its own painful heartbeat at the brightness of the maliciously sunny day. My stomach lurched with a wave of nausea, a familiar consequence of the morning after a night too well spent.

I pushed myself upright with a miserable groan. I was sprawled on the grass beside Perthe’s grave. Aside from the grime of weeks with nowhere to bathe, my hands were unmarred—no blood, no wounds, no blistered flesh.

I twisted to look over my shoulder. At the center of the island, the Kindred’s Temple was imposing as ever. The cauldrons still burned, the heartstone still sat on its pedestal, and Yrselle’s lifeless body still lay in the Umbros arch.

I scrubbed at my face. I’d sampled enough wild mushrooms while foraging to recognize what had happened. The rosebane I’d swallowed had apparently done its job. The Kindred, the heartstone—none of it had been real. Just the imaginings of a delirious, drug-addled woman.

“Never again, Perthe,” I muttered as I climbed to my feet. “I don’t care how bored I get. Let’s never, ever do that ag⁠—”

I froze.

With no one but me to disturb it, I’d come to know this island so well that even the smallest change to its landscape caught my eye.

And this was no small change.

Stabbed deep into the sandy soil, less than a foot from the Lumnos pier, was the gilded handle of a sword. My head whipped around, my vision lagging slightly behind. “Hello?” I called out. “Is anyone here?”

No sound but the wind through the brush.

I crept closer to the blade. “Hello?” I yelled again.

Silence.

I crouched beside the blade. Was I still under the rosebane’s effects? Was this another delusion? Sunlight gleamed off the golden scrollwork etched up and down its glittering black blade, and a glassy stone was embedded at the center of its shank.

The Kindred’s sword.

The one I’d fought with in Sophos after Stuart had fetched it from the archives—the same one I’d seen in the visions of me and Luther on a battlefield. I took a nervous glance around, then grabbed its handle and pulled it free. A whisper of ancient, powerful words carried to me on the breeze.

An older voice. Feminine and wise. Maternal.

Not the Kindred’s sword, I realized. Their mother’s.

Sorrow’s Edge—the weapon she’d forged to kill her son, only to die by its blade instead.

I squinted again at the Temple, and my heart dropped to my feet. It wasn’t Yrselle’s body at the foot of the Umbros arch—it was her clothing. A discarded dress, nothing more. A gust of wind caught the fabric and sent it whirling into the air and out of the Temple.

My heart pounded a frantic beat as I turned back to the Lumnos pier and slowly brought my feet to its edge. If the Kindred’s visit had been a delusion, one step further would kill me. But if it was real . . .

One step would set me free.

I tightened my grip on the sword and pressed my other hand to my mating mark. My boot slid forward past the shore and onto the wooden dock.

Nothing changed.

No flash of lethal light, no instant death.

I held my breath and took another step.