The fingers on Thorn’s left hand twitched; I leaned forward to watch, ears swiveling to catch the slightest sound of movement. “If I thought that way, I would never have found meaning in my life,” I murmured.

The fingers came to a rest. The disappointment weighed on my shoulders, heavier than any mountain. The relentless crush of it stole the breath from my lungs.

“And there you have it,” Andrus said to Voryan. “You have covered your eyes and ears. Your trial will pass you by, and you will be none the wiser—you have learned nothing.”

Voryan’s sharp snout wrinkled, giving him a rabid mien. “Don’t you keep your woman in a poppy sleep?”

Andrus was quiet for a long moment. “Only by her request. I would have given her freedom instead, if I could.”

“And what if the Mother thinks, ‘oh, I did it because it was written on this piece of paper’ isn’t a good enough excuse?”

The Heartpiercer lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “Then I will have failed, as I have failed at so much else.”

“By the ancestors, shut up.” Wroth rubbed his temple. “For fuck’s sake. I shouldn’t have asked.”

The argument devolved into silence, but it was a comfortable, familiar one.

“Just like old times,” Voryan said in his dead man’s voice, arranging the rabbit’s severed paws in the anatomically correct places. “I miss those days. Things were so simple.”

Wroth shrugged, nodded, and Andrus tipped his horned head. “I miss these times, speaking to my brothers. Amari… doesn’t speak. Only sleeps.”

“You mean you miss proselytizing to a captive audience,” Wroth growled, and despite himself, Andrus’s long face twisted into something that could’ve been a smile.

“That, too,” he said.

I tore my eyes from the motionless golems and looked up at them. “Those were good days at times, weren’t they?”

I had missed them, more than I could say. There was something to be said for brotherhood, for the simple days where we fought, argued, jabbed and poked, but at the end of the day, I knew every one of them had my back, and I had theirs.

To be on the throne was lonelier than I’d ever imagined, and only Cirri was my light; I wished that they could have the same, a person who made them feel that life was not a trial or a test, nor a burden to be endured, but a true joy to experience.

I turned to look at them once, remembering what they used to be: Wroth and his wild mane of pale braids, shining with bones, wearing the furs of a northern savage; Andrus, a tall, pale priest who delivered salvation only with death; Voryan, dark-haired and scarred, those coal black eyes that only lit when he was up to his elbows in gore.

And now I looked at them and saw men who had all gotten what they deserved, myself included.

Now our skins reflected the interiors.

Monsters, one and all. Brothers wrought by war and pain.

But it had been worth it, because it took a monster to destroy a monster. That was the only way she was coming home.

“Better than these days.” Wroth shook his head, tail flicking.

Andrus took a breath to speak, and fell silent.

The golems shivered, their bodies convulsing in the grass, and went still again. But it wasn’t the stillness of death; there was something aware, watchful, about their limp limbs. Like they were waking up.

Then, with eerie silence, they rose to their feet, statues that shouldn’t exist rising from Foria’s dry grass.

They were still diminished, still bruised and damaged, but they stood upright without swaying. Wyn rushed to them, limping slightly on older limbs, her pure white hair a wild corona around her head.

“They seem… as they were, physically,” she said, with only the slightest hesitance in her voice. “But they weren’t designed for outright warfare, Bane. The damage the wargs caused was too great, and their bodies will fail sooner rather than later. The odds of them living another week are minuscule, but they should last long enough to find her, I would hope.”

The golems tipped their heads as she spoke, then ‘looked’ at each other; there was something disquieting in their silent communication and assessment, though they signed nothing of their thoughts.

I wondered what minds existed in those skulls of thorns and roses, if they were disturbed at the thought that their artificial lifespans had dropped to something near zero.

There was no telling, and the golems weren’t speaking of it. Moving as one again, they turned to the northeast, adjusting and searching until they faced true north.

Gods. If I had left on my own… I would have been wrong.

My vampire advisors mounted up, and Visca wheeled her horse around, well away from the three of us fiends.

My brothers shifted, eyes on the golems.

“Lead on, Bane. We’re with you.” Andrus tossed his horned head; even as he burned his fingers on the silver pendant, he too craved bloodshed. It was the lot of a fiend to always want more.

The golems trembled, eager to run.

“What are we waiting for?” Wroth growled. “Let’s not let the lady down.”

“Find her,” I ordered Thorn, and they both burst into a quick stride, rounding the burned-out cabin in a split and meeting again on the opposite side.

The three of us followed at their heels, following the path. Below our feet were tunnels, warrens of the Below, but the golems, following Cirri’s blood-call, didn’t need to maneuver in such things to follow her. If they halted at nothing, that would mean she was beneath us, and I would find a way under when that time came.

I thought of the rumors that Hakkon had tunneled deep beneath Foria, excavating Fae ruins; if we were to fight in that territory, we would require Voryan and the legions.

I hoped he was above ground, not only because the terrain would make our lives much easier, but because the thought of Cirri being trapped Below in the endless dark was a terrible one.

But the golems kept running north. North into the cold, into the empty expanse. Rose pulled ahead, her form lighter and more lithe than Thorn’s, until she was so far ahead she was nothing but a bright point on the plains. Even with her dark, bruised petals, she stood out brilliantly against the dreary backdrop of the ruined plains.

The rest of us followed, numb to all thought but the hunt, tasting the air and finding nothing, and despite myself, despite my brothers’ presence, my hope began to dwindle.

If the golems would die, sooner rather than later… what if they died before they found her? Wyn had never made them before; she had no idea if they would survive the coming night. There was every chance they would fall apart into their base components, and leave me with nothing but a direction—a direction that might be very wrong, if Hakkon were to move Cirri again.

Don’t think of it. Think of nothing but the hunt, nothing but finding her scent.

I ran mindlessly, driven only by desperation, the night crawling minute by minute as my four limbs ate the miles.

But Rose came back. Now a shadow against the night as she came to a halt in front of me, unwinded from the run but petals trembling, hands moving frantically.

Hope leaped in my heart as I read her words, the fire in my soul returning—not only because she was there, she was in sight, only a breath away, but because… it seemed there was a chance my Cirri had not been imprisoned in darkness.

I found her, the golem said. In the sky. A princess in the tower. I found her. 

The tower itself loomed on the horizon, a lonely behemoth on these vast plains. It was slumped and ancient, a colossus left to rot and ruin, forgotten from a time when humankind, newly freed of the Fae, began their expansion into the wilds.

There was nothing left of the keep that had once been around it, but for the odd stone crushed into the muddy fields; it stood alone, wargs camping at its base, their pungent carrion reek carried on the wind.