By the time she removed the last, his white cloak was streaked with fresh red. His spine slumped, and the only thing keeping him from falling headfirst into the water was Iseult’s iron grip upon his collar. With the last arrowhead removed, she dug her heels into the gravel shore and towed him back. She wanted him to be upright so they could move away from the growing pool together.

Instead, Aeduan toppled backward. She barely caught him before he hit the earth and her knees buckled beneath his weight. Her bottom hit the rocks, pain barking through her seat bones. Her back hit a boulder, and her head cracked hard.

The spring wavered. Her eyes burned with sudden tears.

“Aeduan,” she said, but her rasping words earned no response. His magic had finally dragged him into a sleep. He would not wake up until he was healed.

Meaning Iseult was trapped beneath him, while her chest swelled with … with something. “You’re heavy,” she said, trying to move him. But she had no energy left. Not enough to move his blood-slickened dead weight. His head, peaceful and still, rested on her shoulder.

He was so warm against her, even as the cold morning caressed her skin. Then there it was again, that swelling in her lungs. Warm. Fizzy. Until at last it burst forth in a shrill laugh that felt a thousand miles away. It was someone else’s panicked amusement. Someone else’s weary body and fire-kissed mind. Someone else’s burgeoning headache and bloating scalp bruise.

Iseult was countless miles from her home, pinned to the rocks by a man who’d once been her enemy, while a wren chirruped from the waking forest nearby—and while a little Earthwitch and her mountain bat slept inside the hollow hill below.

If only Safi could see me now.

Unable to fight it any longer, Iseult’s eyelids sank shut, and the world went quiet.

* * *

Heat roars. Wood cracks and embers fly.

“Run.” Blood drips from his mother’s mouth as she speaks.

It splatters his face.

With arms stained to red, she pushes herself up. She wants him to crawl out from beneath her. She wants him to escape. “Run, my child, run.”

He does not run. He does not move. He waits, as he always does, for the flames to overtake him and the world to burn alive.

* * *

Aeduan had been in this nightmare before. Trapped and bleeding while flames crowded closer. Heat fanned against him, smoke scorched his lungs. But instead of the fiery tent he was used to seeing, instead of the storm he knew would come coursing in, he found only blue sky and wispy clouds. Instead of the clotted stench of his mother’s blood, he smelled only the faint reek of his own.

The pain in his chest was the same, though. Agony that did not want him to move, that argued with his mother’s last words. Run, my child, run.

Aeduan tried to turn, as he always did in the dream to no avail. Except this time, his head swiveled easily. The arrows and death that usually pinned him down were not stacked atop him. Instead, he realized with a jolt of confusion, he was pinning down another.

He gaped, his fire-flecked vision swimming and swaying. A head rested upon his shoulder, and he found he knew this face. He knew this profile—but what was the Threadwitch doing in his dream? It was as if she’d been holding him while he slept, and the oddness of that thought sent all his usual dream terror funneling away.

Orange flame and black smoke flickered, giving color to her ice-white skin. She was so close; he could see the ash gathering on her eyelashes and the frizz that heat and rain had lifted from her fine black hair. She had changed so much since he’d met her: the teardrop scar from the Poisonwitch acid by her left eye, the frayed, uneven edge to her hair from the fires of the Contested Lands.

Aeduan found himself unable to look away. How much more damage would he cause her? This Threadwitch who was not a Threadwitch at all?

She should not be here, he thought. If she stayed in his dream, then she would die like he did. Over and over until the rain came and Evrane with it.

He did not want her to die. In his dream or in real life. Unlike him, she was not a monster. She would not heal from the flames. She would not revive.

“Iseult,” he tried to say, and to his surprise, the name actually tumbled from his tongue. Soft vowels. Hard consonants. A sound and taste that fit her so perfectly.

She stirred. Her hands, which were draped against Aeduan’s sides, furled inward. Her fingers dug into his hipbones.

And at that touch, his stomach froze over. His lungs tightened with cold. Fire might consume them, but her touch was made of winter.

“Aeduan,” she exhaled, and with that sigh, the flames around them shrank back. Then they shivered out completely, revealing a pond. A spring that Aeduan knew, surrounded by evergreens and boulders.

The ice inside him froze harder. No longer a comfort, but murderous in its intent.

This was no nightmare. Iseult truly held him; she truly breathed his name in sleep; they had truly been surrounded by flame.

Too much. It was too much for his pain-racked mind or body to handle, to comprehend. Iseult so near. Iseult’s fingers still pressed into his hipbones. Iseult razing the earth to ash.

Against his most desperate, frantic desire—against every instinct that screamed at him to awaken fully—Aeduan’s eyelids fell shut. A moan slipped over his tongue.

Then the darkness took hold, and the flames of his nightmare carried him away once more.

THREE

This was why Adders wore black.

Safiya fon Hasstrel understood now. Black did not show blood the way the white floors did.

The ease and speed of it all stunned her the most. One moment, she had been staring at the nobleman’s long, horse-like face, still attached to his body. The next moment, it was on the floor, bleeding, eyes blinking.

Vaness had invited the man to her throne room, as was proper when relatives visited. Cousin, second cousin, great-great-aunt’s wife—they were all met in the imperial throne room. This man was a third cousin on Vaness’s mother’s side.

After kneeling before the Empress, his purple robe rustling with the movement, he’d been so bold as to plant a sandaled foot on the lowest step of the marble dais. Mere paces from where Safi stood, dressed in a perfect sleeveless white gown exactly like the Empress’s.

He looked her up, he looked her down, obviously knowing exactly what Safi was. Vaness hadn’t kept her Truthwitch secret.

Clearly, though, the man also did not believe in Safi’s powers. His confident foot on the dais. The smile creasing through his jowled face, and even the unrushed nature of his bow, all belied skepticism.

Most people Safi had met in Azmir had been this way: so certain a Truthwitch was impossible. A story. A legend. Not a flesh-and-blood nineteen-year-old with the muscles and scars of a soldier.

Or perhaps the cousin had simply believed that, even if his lies were caught, the Empress of Marstok wouldn’t actually hurt him. Family relations and all that.

“This is my cousin Bayrum of the Shards,” Vaness said in that inflectionless, heavy way she had of speaking when at court. As if each word were carefully selected to not only express precisely what she intended, but also to convey how much thought she had put into the utterance.

Actually, now that Safi considered it, it wasn’t only at court that Vaness spoke this way.

Vaness sat upon an iron stool. No cushion, no decorative additions. Very simple, really, for a woman with as many titles as she held—Empress of the Flame Children, Chosen Daughter of the Fire Well, the Most Worshipped of the Marstoks, the Destroyer of Kendura Pass, and likely several more that Safi had forgotten.

White adorned the throne room, as it did most of the palace, and the iron sconces upon the walls held neither candles nor Firewitch flame. The domed glass ceiling overhead, crafted by Azmir’s famed Glasswitches, filled the room with more than enough morning light to see by.

A single wave of Vaness’s hand, and every iron fixture could shoot off the wall, molding into whatever shape the Empress might need.

Not that Vaness would need to defend herself with her Adders nearby. Twelve of them flanked the dais at all times, clad in black so dark it seemed to suck in the sunlight. Gloves, headscarves, and soft, silent boots—the only skin Adders ever showed was the narrowest streak of their eyes.

The black sentries were never far from their Empress, and these days, never far from Safi either. One in particular, named Rokesh, had been appointed the lead guard for Safi. He followed her everywhere, though to protect her or to keep her in line, Safi wasn’t entirely sure. She had taken to calling him Nursemaid, and surprisingly, he chuckled every time.

Safi had been exceptionally well behaved since arriving in Azmir two weeks ago. She went where she was told to go; she listened when she was told to listen; she searched for lies when she was told to search for lies. And when noblemen eyed her up and down as openly as Bayrum of the Shards was doing, then she offered a polite curtsy in return—even though she wanted to break their arms.

Habim would be very impressed by her self-control.