And yet.

Walking on hands and feet, forgetting the civilized walk of a man, I found myself once more lurking outside the Tower of Spring.

Surely she was in the upper tower with the door locked, biding her time before she had to face me and my bloodstained hands again.

I crouched outside her door, clearing my throat, and debated what to say.

My mind was blank, still glazed with the odd terror that she would never want to see me again. She would shut her door to me forever.

But she hadn’t locked this one.

I fumbled the latch in my haste to be inside, creeping in on silent feet.

“Cirri?” I asked, my voice hoarse. “Cirri, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you…”

There was no answer. Twilight had fallen, the sky outside the windows studded with stars and a column of black smoke—the Ark, sending Ellena’s final remnants into the open air.

I frowned at them, creeping in further, and saw what I had missed in my first chaotic search.

Her dresser’s mirror reflected an empty expanse of wood. The velvet-lined boxes containing her jewels were gone; her wardrobe door was askew, several dresses torn down and puddled on the floor.

I inhaled sharply, still smelling nothing but ash, and tasting the sharp terror that built in me.

“Where?” I breathed, my eyes grazing her desk and seeing nothing. Would she really leave without a word? With nothing to say?

But the jewels were gone, her cloak was gone…

I turned blindly, striding until I reached the Tower of Winter, and my first footstep was onto paper.

A single page of it, slid under the door.

Fear was a tight restriction in my throat, an ache in my gums; the ungodly taste sickening in my mouth as I bent to pick it up.

It was her writing, her lovely, neat hand.

Fiends and wargs come from the same dark place, she had written, and beneath it was her letter.

I cannot live here another moment. You are just the same as them—a monster. I refuse to live on your leash. I’d rather be dead than the wife of a warg. 

Let me go. If you really love me, don’t come after me.

Cirrien lai Darran

The ice in my spine hardened, crystallizing into something new and awful.

The terrible sensation that I had been hollowed out, that an unseen hand had reached inside me and ripped all the color out of the world.

There was only silence, the chill crawling over my skin, the sucking abyss in the center of my being.

I had done this. I was a terrible thing, something that shouldn’t exist, and I had driven the warmth and light out of my world.

I couldn’t tear my eyes from the letter, from the words of her soul, openly condemning me.

To become a fiend is a dark and twisted thing…

I’d rather be dead. 

Had she been coming to tell me that she was leaving, that this was a cage she couldn’t abide? My love, a leash she was desperate to slip?

Of course she had been. I should never have told her of the ritual.

I would rather she had told me herself. Said goodbye so I could look into her eyes one last time and fully understand that I was the one who had done this. I had made this happen.

I exhaled, wanting to tear the letter to pieces and throw them in the Ark, unable to so much as pierce it with my claws.

My love’s last words to me. This was all I had left. This, and the portrait I’d torn apart in front of her.

She’d watched me rend her face in effigy. That would be her last memory of me, destroying her, shouting at her.

I had broken… everything.

As night fell, I remained in the darkness, holding her final words to me close. Smelling the reek of blood from above. Listening to the change of guards, the soft call that all was well, and not hearing anything at all. Eyes unseeing, the words on the page becoming a blur.

Sometime later, beyond my reckoning, there was a soft knock on the door. The light of dawn was coming through the window; Cirri was gone.

I had obeyed her last wishes. I would let her go.

Visca stepped in, her face hard and frowning, her nostrils flaring as she smelled the blood.

“Good ancestors, Bane, what are you doing, crouching in here like that?” She wrinkled her nose. “Didn’t you let someone in to clean the body up? We’ve got warg-sign in the southwest, and as I was planning to pay a visit to Coran regardless, I’m going to direct two of the legions to the south. We’re riding out today.”

I blinked, the words swimming back into focus.

I imagined eyes like the deep forest, but hard and cold. Her hands forming irrevocable words: You are just the same as them. Monster. 

“Bane?” Visca’s voice, growing sharper. “What is it? Where’s Cirri?”

Wroth had been right. My brother had told me… and I had not listened.

I shook my head, wondering how I could ache inside when I was hollowed out into nothing.

Strange, how calm I sounded. A far cry from the fiend screaming inside my head. “My wife has… Cirri has left me. She’s gone.”

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Chapter 39 Cirri

The world was swaying. My bed was not the warm, deep softness I’d grown accustomed to but a bundle of hard sticks, jabbing into my shoulder, side, and hips.

A headache gnawed at my temples as I cracked my eyelids open. They felt dry and gummy, my mouth sour, and the swaying of my bed made my stomach churn.

I expected to see Bane, or the inside of a carriage I’d inadvertently fallen asleep in, not a wall of wood. I squinted at the boards, picking out a whorl in the grain, several sharp splinters jutting precariously close to my eye.

With an internal groan, I shifted in place, wondering where Bane had put me. What was this? The sticks were iron hard, poking into sore muscles.

There was a canvas tarp above me, lashed down tight to the wooden wall. I frowned at it, then shifted again, alarm replacing my sleepy confusion.

I’d been laying on another canvas. Craning my head, I followed my line of sight upwards, finding a bundle of spearpoints poking from beneath the canvas bedding, and… velvet boxes. Blinking, I lifted a shaking hand to pry a lid open. The gleam of jewelry, dull in the half-light, met my eyes.

The world lurched and swayed, making my bed of spears and canvas rattle, and I heard a soft voice call out. A male voice.

Miro’s voice.

I licked my cotton-dry lips, pulling a memory from the vague recesses of my mind. Bane, warped into a form more hideous than I’d ever imagined. Ellena, her eyes scarlet with burst veins. Miro… pulling the note from my hand, crushing a reeking cloth to my face.

Breathing rapidly, I took stock of my current situation: I recognized the inside of one of the supply wagons, and all I could see of it beyond the jewelry boxes above my head was several crates stacked to my right, and the spears beneath me. My leather bag had been tossed in carelessly, and I sorted through it. My journal, the ritual book, a pen… the hunting knife was gone.

But the pen might work. I held it up, testing the metal of the barrel. It was solid, sturdy… not as good as the knife, but any port in a storm.

There was no way of telling where we were, particularly under the canvas, but if I could slip out of the wagon and into the wilds of the Rift, there was a decent chance I’d come across a legion. I would have to be swift, silent, and hope I found the vampires before the wargs found me.

I swallowed hard, looping my bag’s strap over my shoulders and scooting down to the end of the wagon as quietly as possible—difficult to do with limp, weak muscles. My breathing was shallow, as though inflating my own lungs was too difficult.