Because of me, because of that tiny twist of fate when they’d chosen to give up a child, they were all gone. I could picture the wargs in horrible clarity, juxtaposed against my fuzzy memory of the estate, and see those creatures tearing through the only blood relatives I had.

I wondered if the wargs were there now. If they’d torn them to pieces and spread them all over the fields.

Miro cleared his throat. “Sorry, I know it’s shocking to hear. But that’s also what I get out of this: you. Your estate. Your family name. Most of your gold goes to Hakkon, of course, and the wargs will be living there, but that’s a small price to pay to become high nobility.”

He had done all this for a lai in his name. It seemed incredible, almost unfathomable, that he could speak of destroying my entire family for a single syllable.

I shook my head, pushing that aside for now. I could mourn for them later, when my own situation was no longer a sword poised over my neck.

How did you take me from Ravenscry? What is corpseflower root powder? Are you sure it’ll wear off?

Selfishly, I was more concerned about the lingering malaise and the nauseating pounding in my skull, than I was about the deaths of blood-kin.

His smile returned. “Just a little something to keep you compliant. Too much isn’t great for your health—there’s a reason it’s called corpseflower—but the muscle spasms and weakness should be gone by tomorrow. Agripin, my Forian contact, arranged for one of the wargs to leave a cache in Tristone.”

So that’s why you were so determined to go. You’re allergic to work otherwise.

“Obviously. I picked it up while searching for bodies. The rest of it was on me to get you out, but no one thought twice about their Forian slave labor running a supply route, and it was good luck for me that you showed up in the stables, with a gloriously incriminating statement, to boot. A little corpseflower root, and I just threw you in the back of the wagon.” He chuckled, pleased with himself. “Sometimes everything comes together. Or maybe that was Wargyr, giving me his blessing to ruin your loathsome husband.”

A muscle twitched in my jaw; annoyance, or the spasms he’d mentioned? Either way, the anger was eating me alive. You’ll be just as useless in Foria as you were here. No amount of plotting can save you from being a selfish waste of a human being.

“Better than being a dumb broodmare.”

I slowly closed my journal and gripped my pen, debating turning around and jamming it through his eye.

But even as I considered the limp weakness of my arm, Miro narrowed his gaze, and plucked the pen from my hand with ease. He tucked it deep in his waistcoat, shaking his head.

“You’ve really got to stop announcing your intentions with your face,” he said. “But, on second thought, it makes my life infinitely easier.”

I tucked my journal away, wanting nothing but silence, and to wait for my moment.

The trail led up through the mountains, but Miro guided the horse towards a gentle slope through the trees. The trail under its hooves was nearly invisible, the faintest indentation in the dirt, and he led us towards a steep slope of dark shale.

As the horse picked its way under the pine canopy, I saw a mine shaft looming ahead. At first, I simply blinked: thousands of cold iron charms had been nailed into the support timbers, old bits of braided primrose and holly dangling from the charms. But there was nothing silly about that enormous, dark mouth of a cavern waiting to swallow us up.

In a panic, I turned to look at Miro. Even he seemed paler than usual, his smirk gone.

“We cut through under the mountain,” he said softly. “Hakkon told me the way.”

I shook my head, not wanting to enter that darkness. For the first time, staring into that throat, breathing the musty, mineral tang of the air gusting out, I understood the fear the Rift-kin held of the Fae and the land below the earth. Like the eye of the dead warg, it was a terrible, primal terror, icing the marrow in my bones.

But Miro straightened his back, nudging the unhappy horse into a walk. As we drew closer to the entrance, he sighed in relief: standing out as an oddity among the charms was an old metal lantern hanging from a peg, filled with fresh oil.

“Thank Wargyr, he came through on this, too. Like I said, you’re valuable. Simply having you in his possession will be a blow against Bane.” Miro fumbled in his pockets, pulling out a pack of matches. The first two he dropped as soon as they lit, his fingers shaking ever so slightly, and on the third failure he looked at me. I smirked.

“Cirri,” he said, his gaze serious and calm. “If something comes for us in the dark, I’m leaving you while I run.”

My smile faded as I imagined what things might be in those shadows, and Miro got the fourth match lit. He held it to the wick, and when the light was burning steady and clear, he plucked it from the peg.

He tightened the arm around my waist, speaking low against my ear. “Good thing you’re mute. We need to be silent all the way through. Quick and quiet wins the race under here.”

The horse shook its head too, sending its mane flying, dancing from side to side as Miro guided it under the timbers dripping with charms. I reached out, plucking a piece of cold iron from a loose nail as we passed.

True to its name, it was icy against my palm. The metal itself was no more than a long blob, twisted and warped, but it was a comfort as the daylight faded.

The horse’s hooves clopped on the smooth floor, echoing in the silence, and I felt Miro flinch behind me. The mine shaft extended forward with the tiniest hint of a downwards slope, into darker places.

To hell with it. If Bane thought I’d left him, if he wasn’t going to come for me… then I’d rather be dead by ghosts or Fae than let Miro use me.

The lantern’s soft light made the shadows dance. I could feel Miro holding his breath, his palm clammy with anxiety against my belly.

I rubbed the cold iron charm in my sweaty palm, and dropped it. Probably to be forgotten in the dust for a thousand years, or taken and squirreled away by some fell creature of the night, but there was always a chance.

A thin, dim sliver of a chance that I hung all my hopes on.

Find me, Bane.

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Chapter 40 Bane

In the inner keep, I stared up at Cirri’s tower, at her empty window. Devoid of light, devoid of fire.

Wyn and Visca surrounded me, their mouths moving. Their voices traveled right through my head, leaving no mark.

I was not there, not really. My body remained, but my mind… that was elsewhere entirely.

Over and over, my final moments with her replayed—the rage that had boiled over, the hot glove of blood I’d worn, the horror that she was finally seeing me as I really was… and even as I envisioned it all going a different way, there was no changing the past.

I had destroyed everything with my own two hands.

Sometime in the midst of my imaginings—Cirri, staring wide-eyed at Ellena, Cirri flinching away as I roared at her to turn her eyes from the creature I was—something touched my arm.

Not softly. Not the one touch I wanted.

Wyn had smacked me with the back of her hand. “Well?” she asked waspishly.

I blinked at her, brought back to the screaming void of the current time and place. The place where my heart was nothing but a raw, gaping hole in my chest. “Well what?”

How could she have left? How could she have not left, after discovering the truth?

Had I given her any real choice?

Or perhaps I should have given her my blood the moment she asked. Then she could run… but she could never hide. Not from me.