ログインThe darkness consumed me as soon as I entered the portal, then released me just as quickly.
I fell forward onto a stone.
At first I thought I had stepped into yet another trap, yet another deception meant to keep me busy for a while. But then I glanced upwards and all the breath left me.![]()
Rebecca’s POVI had always believed I was a woman who did things.I carried water. I hauled linen. I held lines in wars and stood in front of villages and lied for my daughter on the steps of a stranger’s house. I did not know how to lie still, and now I lay on a narrow cot in the healing wing with my left ankle bound to a board and could do nothing at all but listen.So I listened.The siege came through the walls in layers. The dull thud of bodies against stone. The roar of witch fire on the terraces, rising and falling like surf. Beneath it, in the gaps, a deeper hush, the silence of men who did not cry out. And around me the wounded, breathing in the dark, a hundred small sounds of pain that no one else had time to hear.There was no word of Mira. I had asked eleven times. Each answer had been gentler than the last, and I had stopped asking.
Mira’s POVI walked until my feet stopped hurting, which is the point at which a body understands that the pain is going to be permanent.The forest had no end. It was an ocean of dark trunks and wet ferns and branches that clawed at my cloak, and the only light was a thin silver moon that came and went between the leaves. I kept the stone clenched in my fist. It was warm, steady as a second pulse, and it was the only thing I trusted in all that dark.I did not know whether the mansion still stood. I did not know whether my mother was alive. I had seen her fall in the flowers with her hand stretched toward a sword she would never reach, and then the world had gone quiet and I had woken in the trees with a man I had spent ten years watching from windows. I had left them. I had not chosen to, but I had left them, and every step north was a step away from the only people I had ever belonged to.Walk forward, the Watcher had said. Som
Jeremy's POVThe commander stood outside. I gave him his orders in four sentences. A dozen of the silent men, the best trackers, the ones with the clearest lines on their wrists. They would take the Watcher with them as a living compass and walk north into the forest, and they would not stop until they found a girl in a gray cloak. I would follow."No," the witch said.I turned. She had stepped into the lamplight. There was a hard, strange look on her face that I had not seen before."You will not go tonight.""I beg your pardon.""You cannot." She nodded at my left arm, gray to the shoulder now, shedding dust in a thin steady rain onto the ground. "You have burned through two hands in one night. If you go into that forest tonight, you will fall apart before you find her." Her voice dropped. "Stay. Rest. Tak
Jeremy's POVI have interrogated a great many men. It is an art, and like all arts it begins with listening.The Watcher knelt on the packed earth of my tent with his hands bound in front of him and his head bowed, and I let him kneel. Outside, the siege went on, the dull thud of bodies against the wall, the roar of witch fire, the silence of men who did not need to shout. I paid it no attention. I was listening to him.Two hearts. The first was a small frightened thing, quick and familiar, a heart I had heard a thousand times at the edge of a thousand treelines. The second was something else. Slow, bright, and patient, like a bell rung in another room. It had stopped the moment I stepped out of the birches. It had not started again."Look at me," I said.He raised his head. His face was a map of years, hollow cheeked and gray, a man who looked sixty and co
Kael’s POVThe night I left, I stood over her cradle for the length of a held breath and tried to learn her face.The wedding hall had gone quiet. Somewhere below, Rohan was laughing in the way a man laughs when he has finally been given what he thought he would never deserve, and the sound reached me through the floor like warmth through a wall. I did not belong in it. I had stood at the back of the hall all evening with my arms folded and watched two people be happy, and I had felt nothing, which was worse than grief.The baby slept. Her fist was curled against her cheek and her hair was dark and fine and damp at the temples. Rebecca had named her in a ceremony I had survived by looking at the floor.
Mira’s POVI woke to the smell of wet leaves and the sound of nothing.For a long moment I lay still on my back with my eyes closed, trying to decide whether I was dead. The ground beneath me was cold and soft. Above me, I could hear wind moving through high branches, and far off, so faint it might have been imagination, the slow drum of the earth.I opened my eyes.Trees. A black ocean of them, trunks rising out of the dark like the pillars of a ruined hall, with a thin silver moon caught in the canopy. No torches. No walls. No flowers. Somewhere behind me, a long way off, I could see a smudge of orange on the sky that might have been a burning mansion or only the last of the sunset.
Rebecca’s POVIt was morning already. I could hear the chirping of the birds as they sang their melody. I just wanted to sleep today, and I can still remember the look on Tyler’s face.It is still as clear as day. I was relieved I finally got the words out, but that feeling was short-lived as a gen
Rebecca’s POV‘No, no, I see you stop!’ Another bad dream, I woke up drenched in sweat and with the urgent need to gulp a glass of water. This was the third time I had such a terrifying dream. It was the middle of the night, and everywhere was quiet. The only sound being made was the sound of a dis
Rebecca’s POV“Rebecca, wake up, you can sleep through a storm.” My mother opened up the curtains and exposed my room to sunlight. She wouldn't understand that I spent the whole night thinking about the mating proposal I got from Tyler.Tyler wanted to mate with me? Why? He bullied me when we were
Rebecca’s POVI couldn't stop staring at him. He was undoubtedly more handsome than the last time I saw him. His brown hair was wet, which gave off the fact that he had just taken a bath. His strong masculine scent was quite literally breathtaking. “Rebecca?” My thoughts halted, and I came right b







