RAELYN AND HER soldiers smile, the only people in the room not rocked by disbelief. They’re pleased by this chaos.
My body stiffens with shock, that single emotion shoving the others away so that all I am, all I feel, is action. I rear my knee up and hit Theron in the gut, shoving him off me, and dive at Raelyn. Angra isn’t here, and that lingering fact makes me dizzy, because if he’s causing this much pain and he isn’t even present, what’s happening to the rest of the world? I may not be able to fight him now, but Raelyn—Raelyn will die. Someone will suffer for this—
I leap for her, but the ballroom shifts, retracts, and before my feet connect with the stage, a wicked force sweeps my legs out from under me. I crash onto my elbows, pain reverberating up my already bruised arms from my earlier chase across the rooftops of Rintiero.
Dazed, my mind swirls with the wrongness of soldiers lowering Noam’s body to the ground and taking Cordell’s conduit out of his belt. The wrongness of Mather and his Thaw trying to get to me but struggling against soldiers, of Conall and Nessa kneeling over Garrigan, Nessa cradling his head in her lap and mumbling a lullaby through the turmoil.
“Lay your head upon the snow,” she sobs, stumbling over the words, and the more she tries to force them out, the more my body wells with misery.
The force that yanked me to the ground pulls my attention, but I can’t get it to make sense with everything else. I only see that word pulsing through me, wrong, wrong, wrong, and the numbing, empty blanket of shock that clings to me, becomes me.
Theron tips his head and surveys me like I’m an animal he brought down in the hunt, some prized trophy he’s deciding how to skin. The expression itself isn’t what makes me tremble—it’s seeing that expression on Theron, who has never in all the time I’ve known him looked at me with such possession.
“My king!”
The voice precedes an object thrown into the air. Theron catches it, his eyes never leaving mine, his fingers tightening around the hilt of the dagger through the purple haze it emits. Cordell’s conduit—his conduit.
He’s the king of Cordell now.
That thought alone would be enough to cripple me, but when another sight catches my eyes, I dissolve entirely. Every bit of fight, every last flicker of drive—it all evaporates as someone else emerges from the door beside the stage, stepping out of the shadows and into the light as if he’d been lingering there all along.
I could almost dismiss him as another vision or something in my own head, except for the way Raelyn looks at him too. And Jesse, and my Winterians, everyone staring with either joy or horror at the king of Spring.
“Convincing, King Theron,” Angra purrs, meeting his eyes. “Convincing indeed.”
I can’t look back up at Theron. For once, I choose to focus on Angra, to keep gaping at him rather than face the horrifying reality that Theron is just as possessed by Angra’s Decay as Raelyn. And now that Angra is his conduit too, the Decay is limitless.
Without thought, I reach for the magic within me and will it into the Winterians in the room, filling them up in a burst of icy chill. That was what stopped the Decay so long ago—the protection of pure conduit magic.
But Angra took Theron. Started working on him long ago, in Abril, when he used the Decay to worm into Theron’s mind and pinpoint his weaknesses. Those weaknesses are all Theron is now, has been, for months. I should have seen the change in him . . . I should have pressed him more about why he was so hurt, should have helped him. . . .
But does he even know the Decay has him? Does he realize that’s what it is? He is the wielder of Cordell’s Royal Conduit now, but if the Decay is already planted deep in his mind and he doesn’t know to use the magic to block it or fight . . .
The magic is all about choice. It won’t save him unless he wants it to.
I scream again and try to claw my way up the stage to Angra. There’s nothing left inside of me but desperate, pure instinct, fingers curved in deadly hooks and teeth gnashing like a rabid wolf. I will stop this, I can still fix this, I can still—
Someone grabs me, fingers tight over the fabric of my shirt, and I wither, knowing whose hands they are, how very, abominably different this is to all the other times he held me. I catch a glimpse of Cordell’s dagger tucked into his belt as Theron pulls me to my feet and Raelyn turns to Jesse, who watches all this happen with the empty eyes of a man in complete disbelief.
“Please stop this,” Jesse murmurs, his voice sad and brittle.
“If you want your soldiers to obey you, make them.” Raelyn’s statement is a dare. “But you won’t, because you are weak. And we will not stand for weak rulers anymore.”
She signals one of her men to rip Ventralli’s conduit off Jesse’s belt. The soldier tosses the crown to Raelyn, who catches it. It’s powerless in her hands, though—this object-conduit only reacts to Jesse. But she doesn’t need object-conduits anymore. She has Angra’s Decay.
“Such a pretty bauble,” she coos, lacing her fingers through its spires. “And so fragile too.”
I gape. She can’t mean what I think she does—Angra wouldn’t let her break it. Jesse would become like us, endlessly powerful.
Raelyn squares her shoulders. “Something awfully fantastic happens when a Royal Conduit is broken in defense of a kingdom, I’ve been told. But if it were to break by accident . . .”
Jesse dips forward, watching his wife in numb terror.
She turns to him and steps closer. Before anyone can intervene, she cuffs him over the jaw with the crown. Jesse rears back, blood exploding around his face as the ballroom resonates with the delicate sound of two of the crown’s spires snapping off and hitting the floor.
It broke. His conduit broke.
The gray glow instantly snuffs out.
I stare at Jesse, waiting, hoping Raelyn was wrong. His conduit wasn’t broken in defense of his kingdom, because he hangs there, not reacting at all, but maybe the magic still sought him out . . .
He looks from his conduit’s broken spires up to Raelyn, blood dripping in ruby tendrils from his mouth. This is a man who wasn’t defending anything, caring about anything, when his conduit broke. No emotion to spur the magic on.
What happens to magic when a conduit is broken carelessly? When the conduit-wielder has no emotion in his eyes, no act of selflessness or sacrifice in the way he stares up at his wife, his eyes glazed with aching defeat?
The magic is all about choice. And if Jesse chose not to care, maybe the magic is just . . . gone.
My body sags in Theron’s hands.
Angra’s control is widening.
A crack slithers up my mind, letting a single question slip through.
Why?
Why now? If Angra has been planning this takeover since he fell in Abril, why wait so long to enact it? Why not just sweep through the world immediately?
Angra steps off the stage, smiling at me like a long-separated friend. “Why now, indeed, Highness?” he taunts, and I jerk with disbelief, slamming into Theron.
Angra heard me. He heard my thoughts. We possess—we are—the same type of magic now, though, so maybe we’re connected? The thought is too disturbing to consider.
He leans closer to me. “You have such flimsy control of that magic, don’t you? I expected more from you after the chaos you unleashed in Abril. But no matter.”
“Meira!” Mather’s pained shout comes from the ranks of the soldiers who have him and the rest of the Winterians. A clanking of armor follows as he thrashes to break free.
“You have a plan now, don’t you, Winter queen?” Angra purrs. He reaches up, running one finger down my cheek, and I brace for an onslaught of visions—
But nothing comes.
He grins. “Yes, such lofty plans.”
Angra saw something, but I didn’t?
He . . . blocked me.
I tremble, every muscle in my body an earthquake of horror.
He can control his magic more than I can.
This—the carnage of death at my feet, the victorious smirk of Angra before me—is everything I’ve feared my entire life.
And I can’t move, can’t fight him, every nerve limp with the knowledge that despite everything I’ve done, everything we’ve endured, we still failed.
I still failed Winter.
“I’ve always been more powerful than you,” Angra spits. Theron adjusts his grip on my arms, fingers tight. “But you think you have a way to defeat me—by getting yourself killed, hmm? No, Highness. I’ll make sure you stay alive for a long, long time, enough to watch me kill everyone else in your kingdom. Once everyone in Winter is dead, once I own every flake of snow in that miserable land—” He pauses, reaches into my pocket, and yanks out the key, wrapped in the square of cloth. He keeps his eyes on me as he reaches into Theron’s coat pocket and takes out the one he had, holding them triumphantly before my face. “I will make you watch me destroy your mines once and for all. I will bring those mountains crumbling down.”
My mouth pops open, a flicker of clarity pushing through my dismay. Our mines?
Angra’s green eyes tighten on mine and all the questions break around the one answer I’ve been wanting for years.
When Spring overtook Winter, Angra never used our mines. He boarded them up and let them rot despite the riches they held.
Any time another kingdom tried to take the mines from Angra—whether by force, as Yakim and Ventralli attempted, or by treaty, as Noam did—he retaliated. Violent, destructive retaliation, slaughtering the armies that invaded or marching into the kingdom that dared negotiate with him.
Angra seized the one person in the world who wanted to give pure magic to everyone—Theron, who in turn killed the one other person who wanted to open the chasm—Noam.
The mines. The magic chasm.
That was the reason for the whole war. That was why Angra slaughtered Winter for centuries—because he knew one day we’d find it. Angra even let Theron continue on his quest for the keys, waiting to overtake the world so he’d be in thorough possession of the one way to open the chasm.
That’s his weakness. That’s what he fears.
Pure conduit magic as a counter to the Decay.
Angra catches my revelation—I see it in the way his face tenses with fury before smoothing into a forced grin. He flashes his eyes to Theron and leans in, hissing words just for me.
He doesn’t want Theron to hear whatever he’s going to say.
I beat down the thought, not wanting Angra to see any more revelations I might have.
“You will never defeat me,” Angra whispers. “I will destroy everything long before you get that chance. You are nothing in this war, no matter how high you think yourself, but I will gladly let you be the one I blame for every moment I had to wait for this future. You are unable to stop this, Highness—you see that now. No matter what path you take, it will end the same for you—death and failure.”
I yank against Theron’s grip, unexpected strength leaching into my veins. Angra has a weakness, still. He fears something. “What you offer is evil. The world will know that—they won’t fall to your control.”
Angra’s sickening grin returns. “King Theron,” he announces, eyes still on mine. “Restrain our guests. They may need time to learn what you have.”
“Theron.” I writhe against him as he takes a step back, pulling me on. “Theron, stop. You’ve seen what Angra has done to the world! You can fight it—you have magic now!”
My voice crashes out over the ballroom, everyone holding still as if they’re just as desperate for Theron’s response as I am.
He looks down at me, his expression flashing with a rapid array of emotions. Resolve, grief, hope.
“You’ll see,” he tells me. “This is the best way to unite the world. I’ve spent months going over it, Meira—I’ve spent months searching for other options. Angra is offering this power to everyone. No more conduits—no more limitations. You’ll see. You have to understand.”
I’d feel better if he sounded insane. If his words came angry and harsh, babbling of plans to make the world bow to him, like Angra. But Theron sounds like . . . himself.
Angra watches Theron as he tries to convince me, his smile softening. It catches me so off guard that I almost miss it. But no, Angra actually smiled at Theron.
Is there more happening here? Did I miss something in the visions of Theron’s memory in Abril?
On the edge of my mind, I’m aware of Cordellan soldiers dragging Nessa and Conall away from Garrigan’s body, Nessa’s piercing scream when they kick his corpse in passing.
“You’ll see,” Theron says again, absently, and hauls me toward the door. The rest of the soldiers follow the unspoken command, the men holding Jesse taking him toward the other end of the ballroom, presumably to be dealt with by Raelyn later.
Theron drags me away, the rest of my party in the hands of his soldiers. I can’t even bring myself to offer some encouragement to them, my mind caught on how everything collapsed so quickly. Why didn’t I see it happening? Why didn’t I feel Angra’s evil infiltrate one of my closest allies—one of my closest friends?
And now Angra has both keys. Theron had the key from Summer; Angra took the one from Yakim, and the one in Ventralli . . .
I jolt in Theron’s hands.
Where is the third key?
Theron pulls me down the palace’s gilded halls until we reach a door. Alongside every other beautiful thing in Ventralli, this one stands plain and blank, just a simple iron door with simple iron bolts, hovering in an alcove. The door to the palace’s dungeon.
The colorful brilliance of the palace vanishes in favor of heavy gray stones that spasm in the dancing sconce light. A staircase shoots down, taking us deep beneath the palace, farther from any chance at escape. We reach a long, straight hall lined with doors, each one the same heavy iron as the one above. But these have windows, small, barred openings. Cells.
“Lock them up,” Theron commands.
Nessa’s screams die as a door slams on her, Conall, and Dendera. The Children of the Thaw are corralled into a cell beside them, Mather shoved in last. He fights the Cordellan soldiers, fights with every bit of strength I no longer have, kicking off the door and slamming the men holding him against the opposite wall. My body seizes in Theron’s grip as a soldier lands a blow to Mather’s cheek.
“Stop.” Theron opens a cell and shoves me in. “Put him in here, then leave us.”
I stumble forward, swinging around in time to catch Mather as the soldiers toss him in after me. He rights himself and spins in front of me, keeping one hand on my arm to hold me behind him as we both face the door. I cling to him, using him to ground me here, the way he crouches defensively, his cheek already red.
The Cordellan soldiers leave, as instructed, marching back up the long stairwell. Theron tips his head and the moment the door above slams shut, he enters the cell.
“Touch her and I’ll kill you,” Mather growls, taking a step back toward me.
But Theron walks past us, stopping at the wall on our right.
Leaving the path to the door open.
Mather notices it when I do, and every one of his muscles formerly poised to attack uncoils, dragging me to the door without hesitation. We get halfway there, so close to being out, to some advantage, when a noise makes me stop.
The heavy, solid click of a lock.
I yank free of Mather’s grip. He whirls, panic tightening his features, but I turn to Theron, who faces the wall. Theron, whose hands hang by his sides, one wrist manacled to the chains that drape from the bricks.
He chained himself to the wall?
He slides onto his knees, face to the grimy stone floor. Tremors rock his body, make him sway forward and back.
“Theron?” I try, sure the desperation roiling through me makes my voice pinched.
His eyes pulse with the briefest, most fragile spark over his shoulder. “I can’t hold on like this for long.”
I fly forward as Mather launches at me. “Stop! What are you doing? We have to go!”
“No!” I shout, the word echoing off the empty walls. “I’m not leaving him here—”
“Yes, you are,” Theron snarls, his fingers digging into the mortar between the stones. His knuckles turn white, sweat beading on his forehead. Light from the hall flickers off him, painting him in jagged streaks of light. “I shouldn’t let you go. I should keep you here, but I—you need to go, now.”
I recognize this for what it is. One last burst of clarity from the Decay. A final gasp for breath before it yanks him under.
I step toward him.
“No, you’ll come with us.” I step closer. “You have a Royal Conduit now—you can use its magic to get the Decay out of you. You just have to want it, Theron, you just have to—”
“I don’t want it.” He pulls the dagger out of his belt and tosses it away from him like it’s a live flame and he a stack of dry wood. “I—I agree with him. I want his magic, not the conduits. No more conduits. I want the world to be free, equal—but I don’t want . . . I won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you.” His strain releases in a sob that wracks his whole body. “I won’t hurt you like I hurt my . . .”
He crouches over, hands in his hair, sobs mingling with jagged moans.
I open my mouth, but nothing comes. What can I say? What can I do?
I kneel before him, my hand on his where he cups his head.
He’s a conduit-bearer now. And whenever I touch a conduit-bearer skin to skin, we’re connected, the inexplicable magic linking us. Scenes fly into my mind, and I watch them, muscles frozen in anguish.
Theron in Winter before we left, giving the order to his men to take over Cordell in my absence. Whatever Noam did, or thought he did, he wasn’t in control. It was Theron—and even Theron didn’t know he was doing it. Entire moments and orders and wishes struck out and snuffed away, flames that lit, burned brightly, and extinguished.
Theron in Summer, talking to a man in the wine cellar. A Ventrallan slave with a snide, unnatural smile that spoke of a deeper possession.
“You remember what happened, don’t you?” the man asks, easing out of the shadows. “You remember what he showed you?”
The wine cellar flashes away, a spurt of memory taking its place.
“Father, stop!”
Angra, barely older than I am, screams at his father, a man who looks similar to how Angra himself does now, only taller and heavier. They stand in the entryway of the Abril Palace, shadows and flickering light making the scene hard to grab. An arm raises, falls, bone cracks on stone, Angra screams. His father storms away, stumbling across the darkness, leaving Angra crouched over a body on the floor.
Blond hair cascades down the woman’s shoulders, one side of her head a mess of congealed blood. I recognize her from the paintings that hung in the Abril Palace, portraits of a little boy—Angra—and this woman.
She gazes up at Angra the same way Hannah gazed at me—this woman is his mother.
The scene fades and Theron teeters back, slamming into the shelves of the Summerian wine cellar, hands on his temples. “No . . .”
But his voice is uncertain, weak, like part of him does remember. Like part of him throbs with the memory, revels in it.
Angra’s father killed his mother—and Angra used this similarity to break Theron.
“No!” Theron screams.
“You’re the same,” the slave encourages. “He’s coming. He’ll always come for you.”
The flash of a blade. Theron stands over the man, the corpse, blood pulsing through a wound across the man’s neck.
Theron didn’t remember it any of it, the Decay tugging him this way and that as it tried to eat away at his mind. Some of it he wanted—like a power strong enough to spread through the world. Some of it he didn’t dare admit he wanted—like overtaking Winter, forcing my kingdom into a path he thought would make it safe. For me.
He remembers it all now, though. He sees it as I see it, my connection to the magic linked to his blood drawing out the memories as, moment by moment, heartbeat by heartbeat, the Decay crawled into his mind and settled inside of him like a dream he could feel but couldn’t recall.
And now, after weeks of unconscious games, Theron can’t fight anymore. He resisted—he fought it almost as much as he wanted the chasm opened. But one desire trumped all others, one Angra latched on to, wrestled into submission.
Theron’s desire for a unified, equalized world.
He groans and I pull back from him, my throat raw.
“I need you here,” he mumbles. “This is right. This is right, this will save everyone . . .”
“Theron?”
He turns to Mather, his voice deep and resonant. “Get her out of here!”
Mather obeys. He grabs me under the arms and lifts me, sweeping Cordell’s dagger into his belt as he does. I kick against him, surrounded by the uncontainable certainty that I’ll never see Theron again. Angra will consume him, the Decay will destroy anything good in him. Gone, like everything else Angra took, all the other parts of our lives that have been cleaved away.
Unless I save everyone.
I cannot live in a world where Theron is Angra’s toy. And that’s my only other option, isn’t it? To not live in this world.
Mather shoves me out into the hall and slams the door on Theron, throwing the heavy bolt to lock him inside. As soon as it’s in place, Theron’s groans turn to shouts, the chain rattling in a cacophony of noise.
“Release me!” Theron screams. “Soldiers! The prisoners escaped—release me!”
I collapse against the door to his cell, listening to him shout, lost to the madness of Angra’s Decay. Detachment consumes me, clouds every part of me, and all I can do is blankly gape at the hall.
Mather runs to the cells across from us. The soldiers didn’t lock the doors with keys, merely shoved bolts that can’t be opened from the inside. He tugs at those bolts now, and they groan but only budge a little as he snaps panicked words at me. “We don’t have much time! We need—”
He stops.
A man stands at the bottom of the staircase. Thin black hair twists atop his head in loose coils, golden patterns swirl along the thick maroon fabric of his cloak, the collar rising high around his ears.
And a scar stretches from his temple down to his chin.
When the man steps forward, Mather flies toward him, raising the only weapon he has: Cordell’s conduit. I fling my hand out to stop Mather before I even know why.
Rares. The librarian in residence from Yakim.
“You . . .” is all I can manage. His presence here makes no sense, clogging my mind with details that don’t fit.
Like the way he watched me in Yakim, studious, amused. Like the outfit he wears now and how similar it is to something else, something that—
The tapestry in the Donati Palace’s gallery. The heavy robes, the dark skin.
He isn’t Yakimian.
Rares is Paislian.
He smiles, a quick flash of recognition. “The lie was necessary, dear heart. I didn’t know you; you didn’t know me. Of course, you still don’t know me, but if you want my help, we must hurry.” He swings toward the stairs, leaving me gawking after him, Mather staring with a wrinkled brow, and Theron shouting for freedom from his cell.
I leap forward. “Wait! What are you—”
Rares whirls back. “You wanted help,” he states as if he’s telling me winter is cold.
I shake my head. Mather’s eyes flick to the staircase, waiting for the door to open, waiting for us to be caught and Theron’s sacrifice will mean nothing.
“I—why you?” I gasp.
Rares reaches into his robes and pulls out a key. The key. The last one.
He was what the tapestry wanted us to find?
He steps forward and places a palm on my cheek.
Mather lurches and Rares would be dead if I had blinked instead of waving him off.
I can’t breathe as I look into Rares’s eyes, his skin warming my face. An image flies at me, a mountain, brilliantly gray and purple, bathed in a beam of yellow light.
The symbol of the Order of the Lustrate.
Rares pulls his hand back. “I had to make sure you could be trusted.”
“How—” I croak through my shock.
He grins. “I’ll explain all, dear heart, I promise. You will come with me now?”
My brows pinch as I feebly try to connect everything. This only happens with conduit-bearers, seeing images when I touch them skin to skin. No one else in Primoria has magic, and not even the Decay inhabiting someone could cause the same reaction, or I would have known something was wrong with Theron much sooner. But Rares has a key—so maybe the key’s magic showed me an image again? But no, that only works when I’m touching the key.
Whoever this man is, he has magic. He’s a member of the Order. And he’s Paislian.
The Order is Paislian?
My mind flashes to that mysterious kingdom, the Paisel Mountains surrounding it.
Ventralli, Yakim, Summer.
Our Klaryn Mountains.
The kingdoms where the keys were hidden were the ones leading from Paisly to the Klaryns. The Order to the magic chasm. Was that why the keys were there? But why were they so easily found? So many whys—
But I know how to get answers.
And I know where the keys were leading me, all this time.
“Meira,” Mather says, a warning.
My arms tremble. I’ve known all along the right things to do. If I had made better choices, if I had listened to my heart instead of my head and done what I knew my kingdom needed from the start, I could have stopped all of this.
So I nod to Rares. If he has magic, if he’s part of the Order of the Lustrate, if there’s even a chance that he knows things that can help me stop this horrible, deadly mess around me, I have to go with him. Whatever threat he might harbor, whatever danger the Order might possess—I need answers.
Staying would ensure the world’s enslavement at Angra’s hands. Leaving at least gives a possibility of hope.
Mather balks, Cordell’s dagger going limp in his hand. “What?”
I spin to him. “You have to free them and get as far away from here as possible. And Ceridwen—the Summerian princess, you have to free her from Raelyn and—”
“Are you insane? I’m not letting—”
“I’m not asking you, Mather.” I’m absolutely out of my mind to be doing this. “I’m ordering you. As your queen.”
That undoes him. Whatever strength he’d been clinging to shatters, his eyes shaded with the glaze that broke me weeks ago when he stood in my room in the Jannuari Palace and cut the bonds that kept us together; when he left, shedding tears that hollowed every part of who I had once been.
But I’m the one leaving this time.
That difference doesn’t make this any easier. I stumble forward, my arms going around his neck, a remnant of the hug when I first saw him on the rooftop. Touching him—it had been like coming home. Even now, holding him for this one short moment . . .
He’ll keep my kingdom safe. He’ll keep our kingdom safe, and knowing that, feeling that, makes me cling to him all the tighter.
He was a choice I should have made too.
Mather’s fingers dig into my back, gripping me just as fervently, and for this one moment, we’re us again. Meira and Mather, uncomplicated.
Determination chases away my sorrow, leaving nothing but pure, unmarred resolve. Rares rushes up the stairs without another word and I pull away as Mather works to open the cells again and Theron still screams for someone to free him. Chaos, just chaos, and I’m running away from it all.
No—I’m not running away. I’m running toward something, toward help.
I will fix this, I promise them. Whatever it takes. Whoever I have to be.
I will not let this world fall.