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My breath caught as the reality of his words fully set in. At the edge of the Blight, Eryx had told me about the skirmish that took his eyes. He told me about the centaurs who hunted him, the men he’d killed. For him, they had been shadows of a dark past. For me, they’d been distant strangers.

But Nessos had built his entire existence around it.

Looking back, I should have known. Nessos had told me about Rhoikos many times. But maybe I’d been blinder than Eryx, failing to see what was right in front of me.

Nessos seized on the crowd’s sudden hesitation. “You fools welcomed my father’s murderer into our woods!” he yelled, pointing his bound hands toward Eryx. “You handed him a maiden of the Forests and called it a treaty. Look at her! She bonded with the Blighted One! Kleitos sold his own daughter to a corpse, and she chose him over her own people. I brought the fire to burn the corruption from these woods. You should be thanking me.”

No one in the gathering spoke. Nessos wielded his father’s death like a shield. He was using a twenty-year-old blood feud to justify the slaughter of women and children.

“If your grudge was against me, Nessos,” Eryx said, “it is me you should have struck at. Not Thalia. And certainly not the people of Melia.”

He was right. No matter how Nessos justified this brutality to himself, he’d never even tried to attack his father’s killer.

“You didn’t bring the fire for the Wilds,” I said. “You brought the fire for yourself, Nessos. And you fought like a coward.”

He bared his teeth. “I fought for the living earth—”

I cut him off. “You murdered innocent people who had nothing to do with your anger. Your father rode to the border to hunt a Blighted One. He died in a skirmish with a weapon in his hand. My father was holding nothing. The children you burned in their beds did not kill Rhoikos. You sent an assassin into my home. And when that failed, you slaughtered my father in the dirt while he begged you to spare the innocent.”

I turned, sweeping my free hand toward the people of Melia standing behind the benches.

“You call my husband a monster. But you were the one driving spears through doors. Eryx is the one who stood between the flames you set and the people of the Forests. He tried to spare every life he could. The only reason anyone from Melia is breathing today is because Eryx chose to save them.”

The shrine elder bowed her head in agreement. Other representatives nodded. Even Lord Phaedrus, sitting among the satyr nobles, kept his mouth firmly shut, staring at the soot staining my skirt.

I turned back to Nessos. “As a shrine maiden who has lost her home, and a daughter who has lost her father, I have the right to demand your blood,” I told him. “But I won’t. I won’t make your death my private vengeance. I leave your judgment to the people of the Endless Forests.”

Nessos looked toward the centaur representatives standing at the edge of the crowd, searching for an ally.

The centaurs turned their faces away. The shrine elder looked to the other council members. Each gave their answer, spoken clearly enough for the survivors to hear.

“Nessos, for the crimes you have committed, you are sentenced to death.”

When the final judgment was complete, Nessos began pulling frantically at the cords around his wrists. The council members rose together from their benches. Iron-tipped spears were brought from outside the gathering and placed solemnly in their hands. The shrine elder took one. So did the village heads and the representatives of the dryad groves. Phaedrus reached out, his gold rings clinking against the wood as he accepted the weapon without a trace of hesitation. He was a creature of comfort, but he was still a satyr of the Wilds.

They had passed the judgment. They would have his blood on their own hands.

Two men stepped forward and kicked the wooden supports from beneath Nessos’s shoulders. His human torso struck the muddy earth. He struggled wildly to lift himself on his bound hands, but his petrified lower body anchored him in place.

“Wait,” he gasped, his voice cracking as he stared at the circle of iron points closing in around him.

The elder stopped right beside him, her spear pointed at his chest. “The testimony is heard. We return you to the earth.”

The council formed an inescapable ring around his fallen body. I gripped Eryx’s hand tightly as the first spear was driven forward. The iron entered deep beneath Nessos’s ribs.

His scream tore across the ruined square. He twisted toward the wound, but the movement only wrenched his human torso against his unyielding stone half. Another sharp point struck his shoulder, pinning him to the ground. Dark blood spread beneath him, soaking into the ash that had already received so much death.

I dug my nails into Eryx’s palm, forcing my eyes to stay open. I made myself watch.

He’d killed Father with the single snap of a bowstring. Now, his hands clawed uselessly at the spear shaft protruding from his chest. “Thalia!” he screamed.

For one agonizing moment, his voice reminded me of the boy from my childhood, the one who called out to me from the forest path. Then, he screamed again, and he was the man who’d killed my father.

The other men struck. Spears entered Nessos’s side and the soft flesh beneath his arm. His body jerked and twisted above the solid stone of his lower half, the iron tearing deep inside him. Blood welled thick and fast around the spear shafts. Eryx pulled me closer to his side and stood motionless, bearing witness in silence.

Nessos found Eryx through the ring of elders. “End this, gorgon. Let me die like my father did.”

Eryx didn’t answer. No one acknowledged Nessos’s pleas. They just let him suffer.