The cave billows around me.

I have broken Blightsend’s most hallowed law in front of its own prince. With no wall between us. No tulle of shadows. He’s seen me. I’ve seen him.

Faces stare out from the walls. I don’t know why Bly spends time here — making eyes and hands, teeth and claws and hooked beaks. I don’t know why I thought I could ask him for help. The truth is, I can’t trust anyone.

Girls with singing throats are swallowed by the sea.

Waves might not have taken the Sea-Singer, but Mr. Crowwith could still persuade the Masters to push me over a cliff.

A singing turnaway girl.

Mother Nine will be proven right. Mother Nine has always been right.

I get to my feet. Bly takes my hand, but I pull out of his grip. I turn my back to him, hiding Mimm and Trick. The birds are still huddled inside my jacket, pinching my skin with their beaks.

“Wait,” he says. “You made them. I knew you made them.” He looks up at the golden birds, his mouth forming words he won’t say out loud.

He gives me a chink in time.

And I take it.

I whip around and open my jacket. Mimm and Trick burst out, panicked, flying at Bly with their sky-slicing wings. He jumps back, batting them away in a fury.

I run toward the mouth of the cave, whistling for the cloisterwings to follow me. I trip, grazing one hand on a hulk of rock, soaking my knees in a puddle. I bite my tongue, and that stings, too. I am a pit of pins.

I stagger to my feet. Golden birds fly over my head, swooping like shooting stars as I run out onto the beach.

The tide is coming in.

Water eddies, devouring peaks of rock. Waves lurch and bubble. The cold of the sea frizzles and snaps, splintering the wind, and Bly’s footsteps are pattering behind me. Mimm and Trick squawk nervously, a shield of black feathers at my back.

There’s nowhere to go, nowhere. The entire beach is swirling with water.

I wade into the thickening swell until I am wearing a necklace of foam. The cloisterwings caw above my head. The tide whips at my ankles, pulls me off my feet into the roiling of the sea. I think of the cloisterwings’ soaring and move my arms, but I cannot fly under water. The salt burns my eyes, and I am blind to feathers. I push up to taste the sky. A wave crashes over me. The world tips. I fight against the sea’s raging, but it won’t stop ripping at my clothes. For a moment, the water takes me in its hands — gently, gently — and I hang, suspended in the gray murk, opening my eyes, closing them, numb with cold. Little fish flicker around me.

The Sea-Singer’s voice is in my head. Sing. Don’t be silent. Sing. Don’t be silent. But I can’t sing — not here. I am voiceless.

The sea smooths my hair with its fingers. Finally, it seems to say.

Remember that and you’ll keep your lungs from tasting salt. Mother Nine’s words boom in my chest.

I have a singing throat. I have been swallowed by the sea. Girl meets prophecy.

I close my eyes. I close my heart. I close up all the drawers in me, shut away all sound and echo. I sink, sink, pulled down by soaked silk boots and drenched sleeves and bones bursting with music.

But then a rolling surge shoots up, pushing me toward air, lifting me the way the wind lifts a cloisterwing. I gasp at the surface, breathing in deep, hungry breaths, coughing up salt. The water makes a ladder of wave and wind and foam — and then it drops me, pummels me. My knee knocks against a rock, and I grab for it, but my fingers scrape fruitlessly —

And then I’m yanked out of the tunneling froth onto the spine of a bent-necked boulder. It hurts, but it’s land, and I’m still, and I’m not sinking. My throat is raw, but my lungs are full of air, air, air, and not salt. Not salt. Not salt. Not salt.

I am alive.

I breathe as though breathing is all I ever want to do. I’m too tired to run, to fight, to fall again.

I open my eyes.

Bly stares down at me, a cloisterwing perched on each of his shoulders.