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The woman kept looking at Lyra like she might be near tears, gentle and loving. But when she drew nearer and I stepped in her path, the woman’s glare turned so vicious that if I was not determined to keep my wife unharmed, it might’ve brought me to pause.

“Hmm. You have walked a trying fate, boy.” The woman tilted her head side to side, studying me. Memorizing me. “But those steps have been bold and brave. For you, I will always hold affection for how you have protected my elskan. But there is another fate you may yet alter by stepping through these gates.”

I’m not going anywhere without her. The woman would not understand me, no mistake, but I would speak it anyway.

To my stun, she laughed. “I have no doubt that if Lyra became a towering tree, you would join its roots.”

“You know hand speak?” Lyra asked.

“I know many things.” Gammal trapped her face between her wrinkled palms. “Forgive me for using your blood from all those seasons ago. But it was needed to prepare for days as this, elskan. We knew he would strike at us again. He would come looking for what he lost, and I could not risk my people. But I will remove them now so that you might enter.”

“What’s going on?” Thane spoke, one hand on the hilt of his sword. “You used Lyra’s blood to ward her out when she was a child?”

“Well, I could not get to the dark melder, now could I? He was not the one near me. Now, come.”

What was she even talking about? Lyra hesitated, then, with her hand still in mine, she took a step after the old woman.

Near one of the posts of the main gate, Gammal stopped. Her spine was crooked and bent, but she knelt as though her knees were spry as a child’s. Placed in front of her was a totem hanging over a clay bowl.

“I’ll be needing a drop of blood to reverse the ward, elskan.”

Lyra knelt beside the woman. “Are you a blood crafter?”

“No.” Gammal rested a palm on Lyra’s shoulder. “But I have met many who’ve crossed those ledges. Some have traded their blood casts in return for our hospitality. This, you see, is one such cast I requested when I returned over the Night Ledges. Now, just a drop.”

The others gathered close. Yrsa tilted her head. “I’ve seen blood wardings crafted before.”

And? I pressed when she did not go on.

The princess faced me, one brow arched, her voice a low whisper. “Roark, when someone’s blood is warded, it will shield against them and…their kin.”

Shit.

I watched Lyra wince when the seer woman pricked her fingertip. The drop of blood fell to the bottom of the bowl with a hiss, like it boiled against the surface. Across the gates a fleeting shock of white sliced down the wooden walls, gone before I was certain if it had been real.

With Lyra’s aid, Gammal rose again. “There. You shouldn’t be stopped now.”

A rosy flush filled Lyra’s cheeks. “Gammal, why does my blood ward against me and Fadey if craft has nothing to do with it?”

She suspected. The tremble of fear, of a desire to fall away into the cracks of the soil, was there in her question. Lyra had been raised sheltered from craft, but she’d learned to be suspicious, untrusting, and press for answers.

I feared the proclivity to yearn for knowledge would serve her too well now.

My palm slid across the small of her back, there for her should she need it. A vow to be the force to hold her upright if she should stumble.

The Unfettered seer looked between us, holding her response inside for a breath, then another. With a heavy sigh, the woman took Lyra’s hands in her own. “This dark melder who hunts you is your blood, elskan.”

Lyra stumbled backward, her shoulders striking my chest. “No. No, what do you mean, my blood? He…he can’t be—”

“You are his daughter, elskan.” Gammal’s voice hardened. “But he is no father.”

—

“Should we, I don’t know, make her speak?” Gunter, arms folded over his chest, stood at my side, watching Lyra pace near the river’s edge.

I shook my head.

“Would it help if we spoke to her?” Emi gnawed on her thumbnail.