They stumbled back into Fen, exhausted, hungry, and full of questions.

But they were greeted with unparalleled fury and despair.

“Caldreva Anamarya!” a woman cried, rushing through their group to grasp her daughter in her arms. She hugged her tight. “You’re alive. Oh Creator, you’re alive!”

“Mom!” Cal grumbled. “Of course I’m alive.”

“You told me you would be gone for fifteen minutes!” she shrieked. “You have been gone for hours! Hours! Do you know what I thought? What your nana thought? What the whole village thought?”

“Yeah,” she said, shuffling her feet.

“That you were dead! That a wraith had attacked and killed you. All of you,” she said, looking up at their group. “You should be ashamed, taking a fourteen-year-old girl into the woods without letting anyone know where she was or how long you would be gone. At times like this!”

“Mom, I’m fine!” Cal said. She pushed her off of her. “I was gone for half a day! The wolves go out for a whole week! I was with the bravest, smartest, most Creator-blessed group of people I’d ever seen. You should have had faith in me.”

“I will hear none of this. Go home right this instant. You’re grounded.”

Cal opened her mouth to argue, but her mother gave her the look, and she dragged her feet back to the house. Her mother followed at her heels.

“I hope our reception is a bit less…exciting,” Ahlvie said.

Cyrene watched Cal the entire time, feeling bad that she’d gotten her in trouble. She didn’t regret it though. Even though they had been attacked by a wraith. Creator forbid she ever told her mother that!

When Cyrene finally ducked back into Avniella’s home, she found their reception not much better than Cal’s. Avniella and Lace berated them for leaving without warning and for taking Cal with them.

Ahlvie finally kissed them each on the cheeks and said, “We picked up a stray.” He nodded his head at Ceis’f.

“Oh, dear. We’ll get you an extra bed for the night,” Lace said.

Ceis’f stood tall and proud in the corner, completely uncomfortable with being in human dwellings. Matilde and Vera curiously eyed him when they came out of the bedroom but just grinned.

“Welcome back, Ceis’f,” Vera said.

He grunted.

Then, Reeve and Aubron burst into the room.

Reeve grabbed Cyrene around the middle and held her to him. “I thought something had happened to you. I can’t lose you, too.”

Cyrene patted his shoulder and sighed. “I know. I love you.”

Dean collapsed into the corner and promptly passed out, drawing everyone’s attention once more.

Vera put her hand on his forehead for a few minutes and then frowned. “I feel as if you all have a lot of explaining to do.”

“Start talking,” Matilde said, taking a seat of her own.

And so, they did. They told them of tracking the wraith to Aonia and finding Ceis’f, only to discover that the wraith was a Nokkin.

“Impossible,” Matilde said.

Vera shrugged. “I believed they were dead.”

“Do you know how to kill them?” Avoca asked.

Matilde frowned. “There were very few Nokkin. It was never clear exactly who they worked for, so information on them was scarce. Let us look into it.”

“In the meantime,” Vera said, “it might be possible to put a barrier around the town to prevent these attacks. I believe Fen is small enough to endure one, if your ancient ones will assist us.”

“Let me convene with Mana,” Lace said before rising and leaving the room.

“While we were there,” Cyrene said, “Dean looked into what Avoca called the Mirror of Truth.”

Matilde hissed between her teeth. “What truth was he looking for?”

“What actually happened to his home and his family.”

“That is likely only a part of what he saw.”

“Is there anything we can do for him?” Cyrene begged.

“Time,” Vera said. “When I tried to heal him, there was nothing amiss. Whatever he is enduring, he will have to find his own way back.”

Cyrene frowned. She had been afraid of that.

“This is all well and good,” Orden said, finally speaking up, “but I believe we have more pressing matters to consider than the threat against this town.”

“Yes,” Vera said.

“Indeed,” Matilde agreed.

“We almost lost Cyrene, but now that we have her back, we need to figure out where to go next. The Nokkin clearly wants Cyrene for her magic,” Orden said. “It’s the thing no one wants to talk about, but she used blood magic and survived. She needs to train. She needs to figure out what she is capable of.”

Cyrene colored slightly but met Orden’s hardened eyes head-on. Somehow, coming from Orden, the statement felt right. Anyone else might have said it as a joke or tried to lessen the blow, but the truth was, Cyrene was something different, and she couldn’t hide from it.

“You’re right,” she said, pushing off the wall and walking into the center of their circle. “For the last couple of months, I have been anything but myself. Maelia’s death…wrecked me. No, destroyed me. It turned me inside out and made me not want to care about anything. Add Daufina and my parent’s deaths to that toll and I’ve been a shell. I have done some things that I am not proud of, but the only blood magic I ever took was after a Braj slaughtered my parents in front of my brother and sister. I used the power to save the life of the king. It might have been wrong, but I saw no alternative. So, if you want to judge me, then go ahead.”

The room was silent at her declaration. No one even averted their gaze from her.

“I might not be the person that everyone wanted to fulfill the damn prophecy, but I’m all you have. I want to bring back magic. I want the entire world to be like Fen! No one here shuns anyone for having powers. Everyone is accepted—maybe not exactly for who they want to be, but they are not murdered because they have magic. It is like the world that used to be before Viktor Dremylon. And…I believe I know the next steps to bring it back.”

“Oh?” Vera asked.

Cyrene smiled. “As you know, I have had visions of the Domina Serafina for almost a year. She has shown me glimpses of her past, but when I was unconscious and high on blood magic, she was able to break the barrier between her world and ours. She said that, when I master my spirit magic, I should be able to speak to her myself. That I wouldn’t need to black out to reach her.”

Matilde leaned forward, and Vera placed her hand on her mouth.

“This way, I was able to personally speak with her rather than just getting stuck in her visions. She told me that I needed to use the coin and not be blinded because there were bigger forces at play. She mentioned a woman but could not speak her name.”

“The coin,” Avoca whispered.

“Yes, yes,” Matilde said. “What else?”

“A woman?” Vera asked softly.

“Yes, sometimes, I would get ripped from my dream with Serafina and find myself trapped in a world of darkness where this woman, I have to assume they are one and the same, told me to come to her. I don’t know what it means, but she handed me a coin.” Cyrene held her hand out. “It felt so real. So, even though she may be dangerous, it’s too much of a coincidence. The first step is that we need to find that coin.”

Vera stood and retrieved something from her pocket. “Did it look like this?”

Cyrene gasped. “Where…where did you get that?”

“You were clenching it in your hand,” Avoca said.

“But where had it come from?”

Avoca shook her head. “I’d been holding your hand, and you had nothing. Then, when I left to get a drink of water, I came back, and you were holding it.”

“It truly came from my dream?” Cyrene’s mind reeled. “What is it? How does it work?”

Vera flipped it between her fingers. “It’s a talisman. It is used to harness intense energy. Depending on the talisman, it can be used to store power or amplify power or recall memories or any number of other things. They have many functions.”

“What does this one do?”

Matilde shook her head. “We don’t know. To our knowledge, a coin has never been used for a talisman.”

“Yet we have two,” Vera said, retrieving a second coin.

Cyrene put her hand out, and Vera dropped it into her palm. It was exactly the same as the one she had held in her dream. About half the size of her palm, gold with smooth edges, and a female profile carved into the center with three words traced around the outside in a language Cyrene had never seen. It looked like Doma but…not.

“A second talisman?” Cyrene asked, tracing her finger over the text. She felt as if she should know what it said, but it eluded her. “Where did you get this one?”

“Maelia had it in her rooms,” Avoca explained.

“So, let me get this straight,” Ahlvie said. “We have two talismans. One from Maelia. One from Cyrene’s dream. And we don’t know how either of them works. But a dead Doma told you to use it? Sounds about right.”

“Sounds ludicrous,” Ceis’f said. “Your plans are always so shoddy.”

“It fits together,” Avoca said, chiming in.

“There’s more,” Orden said. “What did you leave out?”

“How did you—” Cyrene began.

“I have spent a long time learning and observing people, girl. You always have crazy ideas, but they work. Tell us the rest.”

Cyrene sighed. “Serafina said she knew the reason that I had magic.”

Reeve stood up at that. “That is something I would like to know the answer to. Why you and not me? Not Aralyn or Elea?”

“It doesn’t always go straight down bloodlines,” Matilde told him. “It has nothing to do with you or your sisters. It has something to do with the right combination of power at the right time.”

“What did she say, Cyrene?” Avoca asked gently.

“She said that she had a child.”

“Sera had a child?” Vera gasped.

“So…I must be her ancestor.”

Everyone stilled at that. To be descended from the Domina Serafina. That was beyond anything she had ever imagined.

“No wonder she has such a strong connection to you,” Vera said. “It explains much.”

“Though I don’t know how she got it past us,” Matilde muttered in frustration.

“Oh, and one more thing,” Cyrene said, just remembering. “She didn’t just say to use the coin. She said to use the coin to find the lost ones. Not that I know who the lost ones are.”

“She said, the lost ones?” Vera asked breathily.

“Yes. Do you know what she means?”

Matilde’s and Vera’s eyes met, and tears gleamed in them.

“Dragons,” they said as one.