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But Ember had survived ten years of the Barren without letting it hollow her or beat her down. She had trained as hard as the rest of us. I couldn’t survive the thought of failing her now.

The man looked past me, scanning the ruins. “You were followed?”

“Hunted.” I lifted my hand a fraction closer to the blade. “Barren Riders.”

At that, both of them exchanged a look too quick for me to read.

Then the woman stepped back. “Inside,” she said. “We have herbs to keep them off our scent, but if you bring Riders to our door, I’ll kill you myself. But if you don’t, you’re bleeding on my threshold for no reason.”

Only then did I look down at the sting on my calf where the rock had scraped my leg. I tried to smile at her, but it was such an Annatalian thing to say that all it did was make me remember the nights with Aster. I ducked through the opening and pushed away all thoughts of him.

The passage sloped steeply down before widening into an underground chamber carved directly into the old foundations. Lamps burned in niches along the walls, their light reflecting off blue-painted plaster and bits of polished tile. There were blankets folded in one corner, bundles of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, a low table set for two. The woman shut the hidden entrance behind me and only then lowered the knife.

“I’m Sera,” she said. “This is my husband, Tavin. Sit down before you fall. The eighth night is almost upon us. The silent night. We’ll eat together before the sky claims our voices. We don’t talk past nightfall. Do you still follow the ways?”

The Barren, for all its huff and puff about worshipping the Sky, didn’t truly follow the ways. They had the festivals and got drunk, but there was no adherence to Yule.

I sat, exhausted. Tavin poured water into a cup and handed it over without a word. It was cool and tasted faintly of stone. I drank too fast and coughed.

Sera crouched in front of me, her gaze flicking over the cuts on my hands, the state of my boots, the dirt ground into every seam of my clothes.

“You’ve come far,” she said. “For your friend?”

I nodded.

“What’s her name? What does she look like?”

“Red, and the hair is the same.”

That look passed between them again, but it was quicker this time.

“What?” I said, sitting forward. “What do you know?”

Neither answered straight away, which was answer enough to make my pulse spike.

Tavin sat opposite me, elbows braced on his knees. “Here, we go back and forth to the city. Helping people where we can. Helping those girls. And one girl found her way here some nights ago,” he said carefully. “Dark hair. Small. Not your friend, but she was frightened and trying not to show it. She told a very strange tale.”

I lurched forward. “And?”

Sera reached out, fingers firm on my wrist. “Listen, before you run yourself to death.”

Tavin’s expression tightened. “The Wilds have been restless for the last few years. Riders moving where they shouldn’t. Rogue phoenixes circling the old palace roads. And the girl talked of a flame-haired woman she met when in captivity. She was with some others who were being shipped to one of those nunneries.”

“Who?” My stomach knotted.

“One girl was being taken where no one should go.”

The room narrowed in on me.

“The palace,” Sera said quietly. “She said the flame-haired girl with violet eyes was some Annatalian royalty and was being taken to the palace’s phoenix tower.”

For a heartbeat, I couldn’t breathe.

If Ember were there, then she’d been captured. I was too late.

The Eighth Night of Yule

— The Silent World