Her frown, carved through a web of wrinkles, was even more alarming than usual, but the verdict she delivered was comforting. Wyn rocked back on her heels. “She’s healing well. The spinal damage has repaired itself, and her vital organs might feel rather tender for a while, but she should get up and walk around, get the blood flowing.”

Hurts, I tried to mouth, and Wyn gave me a beady-eyed glare. “Of course it hurts. You threw yourself from a tower window.”

Had to.

She gazed down at me, expression unreadable, and finally her mouth settled into a smile. “Indeed. It’s as they say, with extreme actions come great innovations. It’s a shame you’re not a bloodwitch with an attitude like that.”

“Nobody says that,” Bane growled, nudging the bloodwitch aside. “Stop encouraging her. Let me help you, Cirri. You have to move, or…”

He trailed off, carefully sliding his hands under my arms and picking me up like a doll.

I staggered as my feet hit the ground, blood prickling painfully in unused extremities. With my hands bound so tightly, all I could do was try to jerk upright, but Bane kept a careful grip on me. He slid one hand around my waist, holding me close.

“You have to move or you won’t heal, and you can say goodbye to your legs as well as your hands,” Wyn said bluntly. “I admire the conviction it takes to fling yourself sixty feet to the ground, but Bane’s blood can only do so much without your cooperation. You’re not a vampire, dear, you’re a human thrall, and you need to get the blood flowing.”

I closed my eyes, trying to pull deep breaths into sore lungs. Everything ached or screamed, but… I was alive, and Bane was here.

I would force myself to handle the pain.

With my husband’s help, I tottered about the tent several times, until the prickling had faded from my feet.

And then I noticed what I walked upon: heavily trodden Forian grass, the same dry, yellowed grass that covered the plains around Hakkon’s tower. I stiffened, and Bane held me tighter.

“What is it, love?”

We were still in Foria. That should have been obvious, this being the same red canvas tent as the one she’d set up in Tristone, but my knees had begun to shake at the sight of the grass trampled underfoot.

We were still here, on the ground the wargs tunneled beneath. One might be under me right now, crouching in the darkness, eyes pinpricks of white light and ear cocked to hear every step I took…

I lurched towards the door, desperate to escape, to look out at that awful prison and be sure, absolutely sure, that Hakkon was dead.

But Bane didn’t release me, his claws tightening. “Cirri, wait.”

I shivered in his grasp, looking back over my shoulder pleadingly. I had to know. I had to see.

How were they alive after that? How were they so calm about standing on Forian soil? Did they not realize what lurked under us right this very moment?

“I’ll take you out, but walk slowly.”

Hakkon, I mouthed, still shivering. Hakkon.

Bane studied my mouth intently, and I knew I wasn’t forming the word quite right, but he finally nodded. “He’s dead, Cirri. I promise you that. Come now.”

Wyn sighed as she mixed something in a glass. “You might as well go look. It makes all my efforts with the wolfsbane look so… rustic.”

Despite myself, the grumpy scowl on her face brought a touch of a smile to my lips. I’d missed Wyn’s grumpiness.

Bane pulled the canvas door aside and another pained hiss slipped out of me, the light stabbing into my eyes after a week of sleep and darkness.

I blinked the tears away as I stepped out into the world, searching for the tower, expecting bodies and enough horror to fill my nightmares for years to come.

But the horizon had vanished. The Ravenscry encampment stood on the dry plains, the grass now well-trodden, tents placed in tidy rows, and where an endless sea of grass should have been was a wall.

I peered up at the wall’s rippling, sinuous surface, my eyes widening when I understood that it was a single enormous bramble swallowing the plains—countless vines woven together into a nearly solid organism, thorns like blackened spines warding off any outsiders. Myriad constellations of lush bloodroses dotted its shifting vines, accompanied by the tiniest of fresh green leaves.

I blinked as the vines shifted again, and a warg’s dead face slid past: eyes dull marbles, mouth lolling open, tongue pierced with thorns. It looked like something that had been mummified a thousand years ago.

And then the vines closed again, swallowing it whole.

“This is what you did,” Bane said softly. “I don’t know how, but where your blood touched this ground… this grew. Hakkon and his army were swallowed whole. Believe me, no warg that comes near it has lived to speak of it. It lives, and it hungers.”

Blood and tears. I had hoped for some small protection, perhaps a charm that would turn the tides of war in my people’s favor, but I hadn’t expected something of this magnitude.

Bane’s hand tightened on my shoulder, and I looked down, wanting to kiss his fingers, and saw them. The deep lines scored across his knuckles and forearm, pale and ragged, deep divots as though thorns had sunk into his flesh.

He felt me still, and looked down at his hand. He smiled, stretching it out and splaying his fingers so I could see the full extent of how the thorns and brambles had grasped and clawed at him.

“I can’t go into it, either,” he said quietly. “None of my brothers can. The thorns are just as hungry for us as they are for the wargs. Visca tried to enter, and made it a few feet. She came out with a single scratch. But if I go near…”

He released me, and stepped towards the thorny wall. He was still twenty feet away when the vines began to slither frantically, reminding me of a feeding frenzy in a fish pond, but they were nothing so pleasant.

Several creeping tendrils extended from the wall, crawling through the grass as Bane approached. He held out his hand to it, and they slithered faster, sprouting long, sharp needles.

The sound they made as they moved… raspy, hissing, the furious sound of a nest of snakes. It made me shudder to hear the fury and hunger in it.

Bane was still smiling crookedly as he backed away. The vines began to settle, and by the time he’d returned to my side, they were almost still again.

I stared at them, sickened, wondering what I’d created. But for once, there was no bitterness in Bane’s smile. “Because wargs and fiends must be the same. You could walk through unscathed, but it senses what we are.”

“It senses our sins,” a deep male voice said behind me, and I fell into Bane as I jumped, my heart throbbing so painfully I tasted copper.

The fiend had approached on silent, cloven feet. I gazed up at his long, skeletal face, at the rack of antlers spread wide and still stained red. I had a vague memory of those antlers draped with bodies, a face like a blooming flower full of needles, but he appeared about as monstrous as Bane, in a different way—something terrible that somehow didn’t frighten me much.

He was tall and broad, his claws curled dangerously, a strange pattern burned into his chest like a necklace. The fiend inclined his head to me.

“Andrus,” he said, touching a hand to his chest. “I’m glad to see you well.”

I smiled crookedly; my bandaged hands were hanging limp at my sides, useless to me. I was alive, certainly, and glad of it, but well… it might be some time before I could claim that.

“Sins,” Bane said, and to my surprise, shrugged carelessly. “I’ve spent years wallowing in guilt. If not for those sins, Cirri wouldn’t have lived through this. Now their weight seems so much lighter.”

Andrus tipped his head, silver eyes glimmering as he studied the thorns. He touched the silver pendant around his neck, the scorched darkness of his fingertips displaying how often he must do that. “Perhaps it is deliverance.”