And suddenly, Tal wanted nothing more than to confess everything. “I left my home to do something very important,” he said instead, his throat constricting. “And I left behind someone I love.”

“Why couldn’t they come with you?”

Miren’s face flashed before him—sharp-chinned and mischievous. A dense field of freckles across pale cheeks. Soft red curls that gleamed like molten copper in the candlelight of their bedroom.

And then, the last night he had seen her, in the gardens behind Baingarde—her face hard and solemn, her eyes bright but full of resolve. She had stayed behind in the capital to be Audric’s eyes. A loyal spy for the deposed king.

Be brave, she had whispered against his mouth under the garden pines, and then hurried back to the castle before he could even begin to craft the goodbye she deserved.

“Because,” he said at last, rubbing his forehead, “she has an important thing to do as well. Too important to abandon her post, as it were.”

“Quite significant people you two must be,” Rosette mused, a single finger tapping against her lips. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what these grave tasks are?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“You’ve been sworn to secrecy, have you?”

He placed a hand on his chest and bowed his head. “Sworn to secrecy and bound with gilded chains of honor.”

Rosette’s smile widened. “I do love when brooding men laden with noble secrets enter my establishment.”

Tal’s tired mind struggled for a reply. He had drunk too much cider; his thoughts were clouded and sloppy. Miren’s face and Rielle’s face collided and combined—short red curls and long dark waves. Rielle’s echo once again touched his shoulder, sharp and sudden as a gust of wind, and he clenched all his muscles against it.

“I know you’re not really there,” he muttered, pressing his fingertips hard against his temples.

“Aiden? Are you ill?” Rosette touched his arm. “You’ve gone so pale. I like you, but you had better not get sick on my counter.”

The door to the tavern hall slammed open.

A desperate shout rang out. “The pale mark! They’re here! The pale mark! My daughter! Someone, please, they’re here! Someone’s here!”

Rosette stepped back with a choked cry.

Tal turned, his vision pulsing with the rhythm of his headache, and saw a man standing at the open door, the storm raging at his back. In his arms was the body of a young woman, her limbs rigid, her face twisted into a grotesque, bone-white mask of horror.

Panic snapped through the Glittering Mare like spitting flames. Those nearest the man staggered back as if the girl in his arms carried a foul sickness. Others cried out and hurried for the doors, the windows, the stairs leading up to the boarding rooms.

Tal stood, hot-cold dread flooding down his arms.

He had heard of this “pale mark.” King Ilmaire of Borsvall had written to Audric about it, and reports of it from their own soldiers had arrived in the capital week after week in recent months. At the borders of both Celdaria and Borsvall, villages and military outposts alike had been plagued by these unexplained deaths—people killed swiftly in the night. By shadows, was the rumor. There were whispers of beasts, though none of the reports on Tal’s desk had managed to describe anything comprehensible.

Some of the dead had been massacred, their bones scattered and their flesh in shreds; others were left lifeless with no wounds on their bodies. The only clue as to what had happened to those mysterious corpses, report after report noted, was their unnaturally pale faces, each and every one of them distorted in horror as if, in their last moments, they had been unmade from the inside out.

A cold hand touched Tal’s arm. He turned to see Rosette staring at him, her eyes glazed over with a gray film and a smug smile splitting her face. Tal lost his breath.

She cocked her head sharply to one side. “Too late, Tal.”

Her neck snapped with a horrible crack; her eyes cleared. She collapsed, smacking her head against the countertop.

Tal staggered back. Those nearest him screamed and fled. He knew very little about angelic behavior, but Rielle had told him everything that had happened to the late King Hallvard of Borsvall just before he died, and as he stared at Rosette’s frozen eyes, her bone-white face twisted in agony, a horrible chill swept across his skin.

Angels.

Corien.

Rielle.

“Too late, Tal!” A new, male voice crowed the words, and by the time Tal found the source, the man—bearded, gray-eyed, smiling madly—was already falling, his neck broken, his face bleached and twisted.

“Too late, Tal!” A serving boy, hardly older than fifteen.

“Too late, Tal!” A woman trying to calm her crying children.

The trail of their broken bodies taunted him, monstrous white faces leading him toward the door. Tal shoved past the panicking crowd and the poor sobbing man falling to his knees at the threshold. His daughter’s body tumbled to the floor.

Outside, the storm sucked the air from Tal’s throat. Black rain battered him like needles. He unbuckled the straps across his chest and withdrew his shield, then used it to scoop up a broad plate of flame from the oil-soaked torches sputtering at the tavern door. Several people cried out and jumped back, but he ignored them, racing through the crowded, muddy yard. The terrified cries of the horses stabled in the inn’s barn pierced the air. Their hooves pounded against their stalls. There was no fire, besides that of his shield; they were afraid of something else.

Only when he reached the trees at the yard’s edge did he stop to listen. Not to the cries of those back at the inn. Not to the storm.

Instead, he listened for Rielle.

His body trembling with rage, he closed his eyes, gripped his shield hard, and called upon the empirium with more desperation than he ever had before.

The empirium is in every living thing, and every living thing is of the empirium, he prayed.

Burn steady and burn true. The flames lining his shield grew, snapping and hungry.

Burn clean and burn bright.

Rielle had uttered those same words the day of the fire trial. They had recited them together, again and again, as the burning replica of her parents’ house spewed ash and sparks at their feet.

But then…feathers had fallen instead of flames. Brilliant and fire-colored, all of Rielle’s making.

Rielle, where are you?

Her echo skipped past him, almost playful. A cold snap across his abdomen.

He ran after it through the dark woods, sodden branches whipping at him, the only light that of his blazing shield, and when he emerged into the clearing where she stood—he knew it, he knew she was there even before he saw her, he could feel it, he could feel her; he had begged the empirium to find her, and it had, for once, cleanly and completely obeyed him—the pulsing pain in his head exploded.