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Tears of rainwater stain the angel’s face. In one hand she holds a scythe. She extends the other.

“I don’t want to,” I say.

“Even if you could know why you’re special? Why the headmaster ordered us to protect you?” She shakes her head. “He believes you can heal all magic, Vesper . . .”

The pause at the end of her words says enough. It’s why we’re all here, why we train, why many have died. Magic is divided. And my bond with Galvin is meant to heal it. Why? I am no one special. No princess, no Saint. I am the orphaned girl of a soldier, a traitor king’s pawn. There is no reason for two kings and two princes to dedicate their lives to possessing me.

Yes, I want to know.

But I do not want to face my mother.

Even the thought is like poking an infected wound. She left. She abandoned her six-year-old child, and I was left to navigate the world with a broken heart. I learned to survive without her. And I have relied for so long on that adamantine shell around my heart that has helped me endure death and war and every terrible monster that finds its way to my threshold. I need that shell. I need my heartlessness.

And if I find my mother, that shell will break.

Poppy wraps an arm around my shoulders, rests her head against them.

I shake my head. I won’t look at the grave marker beneath the willow tree, the one for my mother, resting over ground that holds an empty coffin.

Poppy squeezes my fingers. “You don’t have to face this,” she whispers. “But if you do, you’ll know. She could have the answers.”

I swallow, staring up into the blank eyes of the angel. I don’t know where my mother went or why, but if she is part of this, if she could know more . . . about the story my father left behind, about why Lonan’s name appeared on my father’s scytale, about the bloodbond . . . how to end it . . .

Kill Galvin and die with him, save the others, forget my father’s story—that was my plan. Death and defiance, which seem to be the culmination of every one of my schemes. But if there is any chance that this night does not meet that end, I should take it. What do my feelings matter when my life and all magic are on the line?

I approach the angel and graze my fingers over her extended palm. I lift my timepiece over my head and fit it into the hand, its edges slotting perfectly into the stone.

I take the angel’s hand, and I am gone.

Chapter Fifty-Five

This magic has no theatrics—no glowing Light, no slithering Dark. I close my eyes, and when I open them again, I’m somewhere else.

The warmth hits me first. Before, the winter chill was hardening the rain into shards of sleet. Here, the sky is clear, and the air is full of springtime glow. There is no mud. Just soft grass, too perfect to be reality, like a blanket strewn over the earth. The angel is no longer crying. Her stone is bright and warm to the touch when I take the timepiece from her hand and place it back over my head.

This is a place outside time. A place of magic.

I follow the babble of water nearby. Something about it strikes me as odd, and then I realize . . . it’s the only sound. There are no birds whistling, no insects whirring, no breeze wafting through the grasses.

I find the river, its shallow, clear waters moving over smooth rocks at the bottom. And on a boulder beside the waters sits a woman.

An unwelcome flood of emotion rushes up my lungs and burns tears into my eyes at the sight of her. I’d thought I’d forgotten her face, but the moment I see her features again, they’re instantly familiar. A slightly upturned nose, wide-set eyes, long knobby arms, and fingers that remind me of the branches of a tree—they’re the same features I see in the mirror. Looking at her, I feel six years old again, the broken heart in my chest aching painfully.

She doesn’t notice me. I can hear her humming, the gentle sound of her voice on the wind like the notes themselves are made of magic.

I stop a few feet away, staring at her golden head of hair. Pollen and magic waft in the air, giving the whole place a dizzying, ethereal feel.

I know what words I’d meant to say coming here. I meant to ask for answers. But that isn’t what falls from my lips.

“You said you would never leave me.”

My broken heart speaks for me. My words are sharp and unforgiving, and I don’t care. She deserves to hear every one of them.

She turns her face to the side but doesn’t meet my eyes. Instead she watches the sway of a poppy flower at her feet. But she says nothing. And it sets my rage alight.

“I was a child,” I scream into the peace and the haze. “You left me!”

Her humming stops. “You are angry with me,” she says.