For a while I laid there, twisting in pain around my bruised stomach, pulling air into pummeled lungs. The screaming was still audible, cutting like a knife through the howling of a thousand wargs.

I didn’t move until much later, when the sun crept through a narrow window to paint the walls red. It was a small room, with a tiny cot on the far wall from the door, and a small table and chairs under the window. All of it simple, crude; a tower for a prisoner.

I got to my feet, clutching my sore stomach, and tested the door as quietly as I could. It was locked, of course. I crept to the window next and looked down.

A long, long way down. The fields of Foria were muddy and churned, the wargs gone beneath the surface into their burrows.

There, in that slick and blackened patch of earth…

I hiccuped, choked, and closed my eyes. Miro was one of them now.

And with all those burrows, those thousand wargs lying in wait… there was no escape.

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Chapter 44 Bane

The others caught up, their horses drooping and tired, and no one said anything as they looked out over the ruins of Rose and Thorn, the smoldering ashes of the cabin set in the great deadened plain.

The golems and I had traversed the mine shaft with relative ease. The trail was clear, undisturbed by wind or water, the ground flat; only once had I smelled something other, something still living, but whatever it was, it hid itself away, vanishing deep beneath the mountain.

Beneath my determination pulsed the killing rage that Miro had brought Cirri through these tunnels, so close to Fae, but they had made it through to the other side, as I did.

Here and there were hints of her: where her hand brushed a wall, the soft salt scent of a tear that had splashed in the dirt.

On the other side, the trail led down the mountain, and a good distance into the Forian plain. Even now, a decade after the war had ended, I still smelled the blood soaked deep into the earth.

Their camp was an obvious blight on the vast expanse of nothing, sitting near a small muddy creek. Miro’s firepit was small and pathetic; I smelled where Cirri had been sitting, her fear-scent permeating the grass around it. The stripped, gnawed skeleton of one of the Ravenscry horses lay in the grass under a tree, its bones scattered.

Well beyond the creek, there was the cabin. Rose and Thorn had led me directly to it, an unerring path to the northeast, straight into the trap Hakkon had left behind.

I felt the vibrations in the ground well before it happened. Before I could call to the golems, ordering them to retreat. Before they reached the burned-out remains of the cabin, where Cirri’s scent clearly led.

The wargs had come boiling up from the earth itself, snapping jaws rising from loose holes, latching onto the golems’ legs with rabid vigor and tearing them apart.

I fell upon them, watering this thirsty ground with yet more blood, but the damage was done.

My compasses were down, torn into pieces. The cabin’s ruins continued to crumble, smoking in the twilight, embers flaring and winking out in the depths of its charred shell.

Cirri’s scent had been overwhelmed by ash and blood, and even as I left the golems and traversed the cabin, it ended there.

I waited until they came, staring at my failure and debating what to do next.

I would traverse all of Foria, but every moment I wasted was another moment Cirri could be tortured, traumatized, kept prisoner. If I erred in my search by one degree, it could be weeks, even months, before I saw her again.

Without the golems, I would have to continue northeast, into the unpopulated wilds of Foria. If Hakkon were underground in Fae tunnels…

He had burned the cabin only to destroy the trail. They were not aboveground; aside from the camp, the plains stank only of grass, blood, and wargs.

I would go Below if I must. There was no question of it.

Wyn dismounted first, striding through the grass and leaning over the ruins of Thorn. Vines straggled from his caved-in chest to his shredded arm, looking too much like human veins; the fingers twitched minutely.

“I will have to go Below,” I said hoarsely. The thirst had crept up on me, every cell in my body parched; I had used much of the blood in the fight to destroy the wargs left behind. Holding onto this form was becoming more difficult. Another fight like that, and I would need to hunt. “Her scent is gone from here. Without them, I can’t track her across the plains.”

Wyn probed at Thorn’s disembodied arm, frowning. “I can fix them.”

I stared up at her. “Gods, Wyn, please tell me you mean it.”

She gave me her most piercing look, pulling out a handkerchief to daintily scoop Thorn’s bloody arm from the grass. “I wouldn’t claim it if I didn’t mean it. Now help me put their pieces back together—as much as we can, anyway. They won’t be perfect, but they’ll hold together long enough to find her.”

The exhalation that tore from my lungs was painful, the relief almost agonizing. I would have gone Below without looking back, without a second thought… but finding Cirri in the warrens below the earth might have taken years.

I praised Wyn’s name to the ancestors as I gathered Thorn’s body, arranging it in the grass where she pointed. Visca set about making Miro and Cirri’s fire into a proper camp while I applied myself to laying the golems out.

Rose flaked away in my hands, petal by petal. It was a delicate operation, gathering as many as I could find, stuffing them into the general heap of her body, but when I was done and they looked like effigies of burials, Wyn hadn’t made a move to fix anything.

“What are you waiting for?” I looked up at her, my claws digging into the soil. “Fix them.”

She exchanged a glance with Visca; my commander stepped forward, taking her wife’s side.

“Bane. You will not want to hear this, lad, but it’s time to make contact with your brothers.”

My teeth ached; I could strike her down, force Wyn to fix the golems, my precious compasses; the only things that could find Cirri now.

But she was my creator, the closest thing I’d had to a mother in my second life, and I could not stand to raise a hand to her.

“Every second that passes is another second that she could die,” I snarled, and Wyn shook her head.

“She’s valuable, Bane,” the bloodwitch said. “Do try to remember that Hakkon would be overjoyed to bring you into his territory, and now we’re all here. As long as there’s a chance you’ll run after her, he won’t harm a hair on her precious head.”

I bared my fangs at her, rising to my full height, and Visca put her hands on her hips. “Think clearly,” she said, her voice low. “He wants you to come after her. How many wargs do you think he’s made in the meantime? We’ll be overrun, and Cirri will be just as dead in the end. There’s only one way to make this work.”

Horrible images flashed through my mind: Cirri broken, bleeding, sobbing. Waiting for help that never came, because her heroes were rotting in the bellies of wolves.

“Fine.” I tried to clear the snarl from my voice. “Call upon them. Tell them we’ve broken the treaty, and that I don’t give a damn. You have tonight to fix them, and then I’m going alone.”

But Wyn wasted no time. The second she had my blessing, she left the golems, digging in one of the packs on the horses.

She brought out a gilded hand-mirror and a small box, carrying them to the fire and settling before its flames. I crouched behind her, watching as she withdrew a leaf-shaped blade from the box and scored it across her wrists without preamble.

The firelight flickered across her face as she worked, holding her wrist above the mirror and letting the blood drip onto the polished silver, tipping the mirror and whispering under her breath until the blood coated the silver in a thin, even sheen of red.