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Safe, safe, safe. She was safe and she was alive and he had found her.

And by now she had to be safe in Elderglade, sleeping in a sylvan-crafted bed, with the knightling undoubtedly fretting over every breath she took.

The image made Kit want to laugh and cry at the same time. Because she wanted to be there too, cataloging every wince, tending to her sister’s recovery.

She had almost done it. The moment she’d finished reading Tenny’s letter, Kit had been a blur of motion—digging through drawers and trunks, pulling out her traveling cloak, lacing up her best boots, tossing a neat roll of underclothes and a spare tunic into her satchel. She imagined the look on Elyria’s face when she arrived, imagined sitting beneath the silveroaks and talking about everything and nothing, and how, for the first time in months, the world might not feel like it was tilted at some impossible angle.

But despite wanting to immediately fly for the Midlands, despite desperately needing to throw her arms around Elyria and then spend a full hour scolding her, Kit still had work to do here.

And so she had requested another audience with her uncle to update him on this blessed news and reiterate her request that he divert resources to help flush out Malakar and his cultists. And two days later, she had his response, and she was almost as mad at herself for having bothered to wait.

She should’ve known better. Should have known after that first conversation—if one could even call it that—that her uncle’s grief over Dentarius’s death had calcified into something hard and useless. Should have known that family meant nothing in the face of fear, and the king was a man ruled by fear now, even if he didn’t know to name it as such.

If there was one thing that Kit had learned in the past year, it was that family, one’s bloodline, was a chain as much as anything else. Her loyalty to Evander had sent her into the Crucible. Her uncle’s blood tied her to Aerithia and all the messy politics she’d never wanted anything to do with.

Elyria’s blood tied her to a man who had built a whole different kind of empire.

And Cedric’s blood . . . Well, that was a different issue entirely. One that Kit didn’t feel particularly well equipped to speak on. But as the door to the Gilded Gryphon swung open and late-afternoon sunlight streamed in from outside, it was one that she suspected would be coming up sooner rather than later.

Sephone grinned at Kit from the tavern entrance but did not approach, instead heading directly to the stairs next to the bar and gesturing for Kit to follow.

Kit rolled her eyes as she slid out of the booth, looped her satchel over her shoulder, and followed the fae upstairs to a small, sparsely appointed room at the end of the short second-floor hallway.

“Nice digs,” said Kit, closing the door behind her and leaning a shoulder against it.

Sephone crossed the room and took a seat in a chair set against the back wall, propping her boots up on the table in front of it. Her dark hair was braided back from her face today, showing off the line of piercings that ran up the edge of her pointed ear. They were capped off, of course, with that telltale beaded golden hoop.

“It’s about stars-damned time,” said Kit, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Cute. I appreciate the callback.”

“You’re late. Less cute.”

“My apologies, Princess. What’s the rush?”

Kit gestured to her bag. “I’m on my way out. Just wanted to let you know before I go.”

“Aww, you wanted to say goodbye. See, we are cute.” Sephone smirked. “But let me go ahead and take a wild guess as to the reason for your imminent departure. You finally got an official response from your uncle?”

Kit tapped her forefinger to the tip of her nose. “He ‘cannot justify committing our men to supposition and rumor.’ Always thinking of Nyrundelle, didn’t you know?”

“Mmm, of course he is. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. We know the man is scared, content to sit in his grief and pretend like the problem will go away so long as he continues to ignore it.”

Kit pinched the bridge of her nose. “That about sums it up.”

“I’m sorry,” Sephone added, and for once there was no hint of teasing in her tone. “I know you’d hoped⁠—”

“We all hope. Sometimes we are left . . . disappointed.”

Sephone clucked her tongue. “‘Supposition and rumor,’ huh? As though Elyria’s rescue from within Malakar’s stronghold, right in the heart of fucking Luminaria, is some tall tale.”

Kit blinked. “How did you—wait, why am I even bothering to ask how you know that. Of course you know. You hear everything, right?”

“I do,” Sephone said proudly. “But this time I actually received my information from a very specific source.”

“What source?” And it was only then that Kit’s eyes registered the door on the wall behind where Sephone sat.

The fae pounded her fist against it—once, twice—before it creaked open to reveal someone new standing in the doorway.