LOGINThe wounded wolf knelt in the snow with a Thorncroft arrow in his shoulder and Damien’s threat bleeding from his mouth.
No one moved.
Not the Queen’s Guard with their swords leveled at his throat.
Not the refugees inside the tower.
Not Garran, whose face had gone the color of old
The wounded wolf knelt in the snow with a Thorncroft arrow in his shoulder and Damien’s threat bleeding from his mouth.No one moved.Not the Queen’s Guard with their swords leveled at his throat.Not the refugees inside the tower.Not Garran, whose face had gone the color of old ash.Not me.For one strange second, all I could think was that the snow under the wolf’s knees looked too white.Then his blood hit it.Red spread slowly beneath him, soaking into the frozen crust.The image was too familiar.
The blood mirror collapsed at my feet.For one second, the tower stayed silent.Then Althea made a sound I would never forget.It was not a scream.Screams had force. Screams fought their way out.This was smaller. Older. The sound of grief finding one more room inside a body that should have been full already.She folded to her knees beside the blood.Mara caught her before she hit the stone too hard.“Mira,” Althea whispered.The blood from the mirror spread in a thin pool across the floor, too bright, too red, too alive. It slid b
Mira screamed like she already knew what I was supposed to be.The sound tore through the floating blood mirror and filled the watchtower, sharp enough to make Wren cover her ears and several of the Briar Glen villagers stumble backward.Mira pulled against the silver chains around her wrists.They cut into her skin.Fresh blood slid down her hands and dripped onto the black marble beneath her knees.Black marble.My stomach twisted.Thorncrest.She was in Thorncrest.Not near it.Not somewhere in th
The words sat in the tower like a second body no one knew where to put.Amara’s line had more than one surviving branch.For a moment, I heard nothing else.Not the crackle of the hearth fire.Not the groans of wounded people.Not Mara ordering someone to stop wasting clean water.Not Ben telling Eli that his bandage work was “less offensive than expected.”Not the Queen’s Guard shifting in the snow outside.Only that sentence.More than one branch.Another bloodline.
The pale hand pushed through Queen Amara’s carved mouth.For one horrible second, no one moved.The tower had survived wolves, corpses, cursed roads, a broken grave, an ancient army kneeling in the snow, and whatever nightmare still breathed beneath the sealed Blood Door.But a hand coming through stone was apparently where every mind in the room decided to quit.The fingers were long and white, nails painted the color of fresh blood.Selene.Even before the voice came again, I knew.Not because I had seen those hands resting on Damien’s arm in another life. Not because I remembered them brushing blood-soaked hair away from
The black blood on Queen Amara’s carved face kept dripping.Slow.Thick.Wrong.It slid down stone cheeks that looked too much like mine and pooled at the carved queen’s throat before falling to the tower floor in heavy drops.One.Two.Three.Each drop hit the stone with a sound too loud for something so small.The words beneath the carving still glistened black.HE REMEMBERS THE WAY UP.No one in the tower spoke.Even







