Page 104 of Veil of Night & Flames

“Kali had Whistler. She kept him in a cage. And do you know where that cage was?” I ask, then answer before he has the chance. “Her secret camp. Where she’s training her own little army. An army that Whistler saw firsthand.”

I watch his throat move as he swallows, then his chin rises ever so slightly as he slowly shakes his head.

“He says she has hundreds of soldiers,” I go on. “Maybe more. And her camp is somewhere in the desolate stretch south of the range. The site’s cloaked. And she has dragons, too. He thinks she’s been training them in secret for a long time.”

A dangerous kind of stillness settles into his body.

“South of the range,” he says, in a voice that could be discussing a dessert pastry.

“Whistler’s sure. But we’re not certain whether he actually escaped, or if she let him go to see whether he’d reach Chase. Or you.”

“Baiting an attack,” he says. “Which would mean she has left men loyal to her among the castle forces.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admit. “But it makes sense.” I shrug, then grimace. “It’s possible Whistler really did escape.”

“That changes nothing. She is still conspiring against me. And that, I cannot abide.”

He sighs and looks past me into the dark, and I can almost see it—his mind moving back through a thousand years of faces and rooms, turning over which of the people in his court were never what he thought.

“It explains the rebellion,” he says, mostly to himself.

“What rebellion?”

“The men I executed in the courtyard. Drakkar and the rest.” He meets my eyes. “I told myself they were a clean handful. Opportunists who had miscalculated. I cut them down because the threat was small and I wanted it gone before it grew.”

“But it had already grown.”

He nods. “Now I think they were one of her cells. Or a sacrifice—a piece she could spend, to see what I would do if I caught a thread.” He exhales slowly. “I did exactly what she wanted. I cut the thread and threw the cloth away, and while I admired my own swift hand, she finished the larger work somewhere I wasn’t looking.” He closes his eyes. “My love,” he murmurs. “How did I miss this?”

I want to put my arms around him and tell him it isn’t his fault. That she played him, because she knew he would see who he wanted to see. Not who was really standing in front of him.

I get that. I do.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because I wonder if that’s what Adric is to me. A man I want to be good and kind and just, who might be darker than I let myself believe.

I start to shove the thought away—I know better, after all, but Chase’s question is still sitting in my chest like a stone, and I can’t put it down—Does Adric care about the Real? Does it matter to him at all that my world is under attack? And will he stand back and watch it fall, knowing it would mean the death of people I love and the place I still call home?

I sigh. Maybe now’s the time to find out.

I sit in the sand and draw a lazy pattern with one finger. “It gets worse,” I tell him.

“Go on.”

“The cameras at the Widow Maker caught six crossings in two nights. Little things, at first, but tonight there was a Threnir.”

Everything about him goes quiet. “Are you sure?”

I nod. “Chase said it’s from Retribution.”

“It is. Was there just the one?”

“I think so. Why?”

“Because Threnir hunt in packs.” His voice goes quiet. “And a pack can be bought. If one is loose in the Real, Beloved, it did not wander there alone, and it did not wander there for free.”

“Kali,” I say.

“Considering everything you have told me tonight, she is my first best guess.”