LOGINJeremy'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.
Ezekiel's POVI watched my daughter vanish, and the numbers went silent.From the battlements I had seen it plainly. A girl in a gray cloak among white flowers, her hands open at her sides, and then, between one breath and the next, no one at all. No shimmer, no sound. The grass simply held no girl. I looked for her with every instrument I owned and found nothing, and the cold that went through me was not arithmetic.Jeremy had stopped turning. He stood alone among the flowers, and I saw his shoulders change.Fury, in a man like that, does not shout. It narrows. He looked down at the woman lying at his feet, and I saw him decide, with perfect clarity, that if he could not have the daughter, he would take what the daughter loved.He stepped toward Rebecca.I never saw Matthew leave the wall. One moment he stood beside me, the next he was through the gap and onto the flowers with fire pouring from both hands in a great roaring sheet. I felt the heat on my face from forty pa
Jeremy's POVThe village had burned to its bones by morning, and I walked through it the way a man walks through his own house after a party.My army was cleaning up the last holdouts in the lower fields. I could hear every one of them die. I had not asked for that. Since I woke I heard every heartbeat for a mile in all directions, a vast wet clatter like rain on a tin roof, and the only silences in it were my own soldiers and the dead.I paused at a puddle and looked down. The man in it had been six feet five and golden. Now the hair at his nape was the color of ash, tied back out of old habit, and the face under it was thinner than I remembered. The loan was eating me from the edges.I flexed my left hand. Two fingers did not answer.You held it well, I had told the wolf woman, and I had meant it. I had also meant the twist of my wrist, which had cost me more than I had planned. A bill, then. I did not mind being billed. I minded not being told the total.The witch fel
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
Alpha Kings POV“There are rumours about it,” One of the Advisers said. The Alpha Kings sat on their thrones listening to the report. “We need accurate information, not speculation,” Matthew said sternly.“The possibility of war happening is greater than it not happening,” another adviser said, a
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







