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At the far end of the hall, in its alcove beside the dais, the Beastglass stood where it always did, tall and black within its old carved frame.

I stopped when I saw it.

After a moment, I let go of Silas’s hand and walked toward it. My reflection waited in the dark surface: a short, soft woman in a damp sweater, with wet hair and a white streak running back from her forehead.

I raised my hand and pressed my palm against the cold black stone.

At first, nothing happened. It was the same blank darkness I remembered from my first morning, when I had stood there in front of a gallery full of beautiful people and given them something to laugh at.

Then something shifted deep inside the glass.

It was too indistinct to be called a shape. I caught a flicker of black fur, then a brief flash of gold. A large, dark form seemed to turn somewhere far beneath the surface before fading again. Near the edge of the glass, something golden and spotted appeared for less than a second, followed by the sharp gleam of an eye.

Then everything vanished, and the Beastglass went still.

Behind me, Silas let out a slow breath.

I lifted my hand and looked at the raw pink burns across my palm before turning back to the glass. My reflection had returned, unchanged except for the white streak standing out clearly in the dim light.

Named empty by fools.

Silas took my hand again, and we climbed the two hundred and twelve stairs to my House. I stepped over the ninth stair without thinking about it.

By the time we reached my room, dawn had begun to gray the windows. I fell asleep in his arms with my iron key beneath the pillow beside Kaelen’s handkerchief, Jax’s sun resting warm against my throat, and the last rose from a dead woman’s garden sitting in its jug on the sill beside the wren.

For once, I slept without wanting anything from the night.

It was great. Blissful.

Until it ended the next day.

25

Chapter 25

Ronan

The letter came on Monday at dusk, the day after the Solstice.

It had not arrived by ferry or courier, and no porter had carried it up the Archive steps. When I returned to my workshop after locking the reading room, it was simply there on my workbench between the cracked blue bowl and the glass hare with one missing ear. I had been in the room five minutes earlier, and the bench had been empty.

The paper was gray and folded once. Instead of wax, the fold was secured with a small disc of perfectly smooth mirrored glass that caught the lamplight when I moved.

I knew what it was before I touched it. In nine years, I had received eleven letters like it, and every one of them had contained a question, one which could not be answered by omission.

The person receiving it had to answer directly, and once the seal was closed again, the words written beneath it appeared on the matching sheet at the Iron Seat. The glass also carried an image of the person writing the answer, so the Council could watch his face while he gave it.

What they never seemed to consider was that the connection worked in both directions.

Every mirror-seal had a twin, and anyone who understood the mechanism could look through one into the room holding the other. The Council had always assumed no one on my end knew how.

I broke the seal.

The glass lifted cleanly into my fingers. Beneath it, written in a hand I knew immediately, was a single question.

Is Wren Hale a Wildheart?

The brand at my throat reacted as soon as I read the words. It did not burn, at least not yet, but the skin tightened beneath it, warning me that the terms of my oath had already engaged.