She stood some distance before us on the road, and cast no shadow.

I had thought myself pale, but this woman was white, like clouds, paler than pearls, and she had hip-length hair that fell in columnar spirals the color of mist, gathering gray. Her body was an attenuated elegance, but there was strength in it, the strength of long durance, the patience of stone. She was beautiful in a way altogether untouchable, and she had gray eyes rimmed in black.

Like mine.

And I knew her, in the bone and the blood, where words are meaningless.

“Morgan,” Ivy whispered. “Your mother!”

“Are you the witch of Mother’s Stand, then?” Carrington asked. “And are you responsible for… that?” She waved a hand toward the dead.

“I keep the vigil,” the elf answered. Impossible to tell if she found the question offensive. Her reserve was glacial, and as impersonal. “And I am responsible for it, insofar as I watch it for any changes. But what you see has been here for centuries, and I did not create it, though I saw its genesis.”

I did not recall sliding from the drake, though my hands remembered steadying Amhric before I left him. I did not remember the footsteps I took to put me in front of the others. Seeing her close by made the throb of my heart rise into my ears. She had my lips along with my eyes. We were the same height. Her length of limb… now I knew where I’d derived my build, though she made it ethereal with her calm.

“You are my mother,” I said.

“I am. And I have been waiting for you.”

This surpassed all I could conceive, I who had been stretched so far already. And yet it was completely expected. Of course she was waiting for me. I swallowed. “Why?”

This question brought forth the first show of humanity I’d seen in her: she canted her head, as if for once a ready answer escaped her. “Why what? Why did I bear you? Why did I leave you? Why did I foster you among humans? Why am I waiting—why here?”

“Yes,” I said.

Her gaze skated off mine, encompassed the others.

“They should hear it,” I said. “They’ve come with me this far.”

She nodded. “Follow me. There is a place you can rest.”

It was not a comfortable procession. The dead ravened below us, close enough that the squeak and patter of their movements were easily discernable. Before us, enigma, in the form of an unlooked-for elf, the woman who’d borne me. And the wrongness that had been assailing those of us with the blood to feel it had now become so palpable that it affected everyone. Even Carrington, faced with the culmination of all her research, looked grim and sick.

I led the drake by a hand on its neck, and it caressed my face every few steps, as if to be sure of me. I was glad of it, for the fire scent of its breath was preferable to the fetor that lingered on any breeze that blew toward us from the gully. We climbed, and I averted my eyes from the edge of the road, and in this way we continued for long enough that I no longer counted time, until abruptly our guide stopped. The path broadened into an overlook, and to one side, set against the wall of the cliff, was a single-room shrine with a peaked roof, almost too small to lie down in.

My mother was standing at the rim of the overlook, and I knew, suddenly, that what her eyes rested on would overset my world. I stopped. The drake halted alongside me. Everyone behind me paused.

Looking at me with my gray eyes, the elf said, “Come and see.” Raising her gaze. “You as well.”

I helped Amhric down, ignoring the tremor in my arms. We went together and beheld the treasure toward which the dead were so desperately striving.

On an altar, a simple stone table watched by the missing skeletal vultures, a man slept, one hand on his chest, the other open, palm up, at his hip. His face was turned to one side, just enough to expose the slanted ear. He was lean, with a warrior’s scars, and in that countenance I could read more years of responsibility and power than I could number.

He had Amhric’s golden skin, and my black hair, and we shared his face.

I was shaking. Had Ivy not slipped her arm around me from behind, I might have fallen.

“Marne,” my mother said, in that voice of unearthly calm. “The King of Elves.”

“Is he... is he alive?” Ivy asked.

The woman’s voice was even, too tranquil. “Bespelled so, yes.”

“But how is that possible?” Eyre asked. “I thought there was only one king at a time?”

“There is.” She looked at Amhric. “You see a king-in-waiting, and his prince.”

I said what everyone thought, what I could not keep from saying. “I don’t understand.”

“This was Marne’s choice,” said she. “To save us from demons. He came here, leading the dead from the battlefield, and the angel allowed him to remain thus, in stasis, forever holding them to him through the divine light that was given him to attract them. All the magic on this continent has been raveled to this cause, to keep him thus, to hold that light to his flesh. So he has remained all the centuries of our exile, fulfilling that trust against the day when the ending comes. All those with royal gifts since have been slain or quelled as part of the rot of our society.” Her eyes rose to Amhric’s face, considered it. “I knew your mother. Henite e Aresset. A cunning woman... clever to keep you concealed from those who would have noted you. She sent you on a wanderjahr, did she not? A pilgrimage. Something that would allow you to strengthen your ties to the land while keeping you far from the strongholds of other elves. Something that would give you a chance to wait for the prince to complete you.” She nodded. “She would be gratified to hear how far you’ve come.”

The implication that Amhric’s mother had died... how? He was serene, so perhaps he’d known. “And me?” I asked, quiet.

“I had a dream.” She looked down at the king on the altar. “After humanity betrayed us. After Marne saved us. I prayed that we might find some answer, and though I long begged I received no visitation, nor guidance, and thought the cause lost. But centuries later, I dreamed of a youth come forth from my womb and knew he would be prince. I woke understanding that, were we ever to have a chance at redemption, he must be born and live to adulthood, be born and grow to be worthy of the gifts... which he certainly wouldn’t on the Archipelago. So I came here and begot that child on the king, and when you were born, I gave you to humans to raise.”

“You were the one who enchanted me,” I breathed.

She inclined her head.

“You almost killed him!” Chester said.

“A risk,” she said. “But he would certainly have died in Serala. And I could not leave him unconcealed among humans after what humanity did to us. His only chance lay in deception. I did my poor best.”

“It served,” I said, because what else could I say and speak truth? It had. “But if Marne lives, then Amhric is not yet king, and I am not yet prince—yes?”

She gave another of those nearly imperceptible nods.

“Does it work that way? Does a king have a particular prince, and only that prince?” Eyre asked.

“The king is bound to a prince. There is no recanting. That elf, and that elf only, is forever his shield or sword, and he forever will be that prince’s king. Neither can cleave to a new one. They are meant to be entwined. It is a sacred bond.” A flex of her mouth, just the corner, a smile so tiny and mirthless I almost missed it though I could not look away from her face. “They maintain one another’s sanity.”

“And Marne’s prince is gone,” Ivy murmured.

“The battle was dire,” my mother said. “They both made sacrifices.”

“For hundreds of years,” Chester murmured, staring down at the bier. “For hundreds of years these corpses have been here, trying to reach him. How many of them are there? A thousand?”

Last joined him, studying the tableau, and said, “At least thrice that.”

“And all trapped here!” Chester said. “Forever?”

“Until that light dies,” my mother said. “They will remain here. They are drawn to all that is good and living, and the stronger the source, the quicker they come and the faster they are held.” She nodded once, the curls around her waist bobbing. “The soldier is correct. The dead have been greatly winnowed since the battle, but there are at least so many left.”

Kelu sounded subdued. “What killed them?”

“The light does, eventually. It wears them down, until there is nothing left and a new rank takes their place.”

“And he volunteered for this?” Ivy sounded aghast.

“The angel came when he cried out. It was the choice he made.”

“The choice that saved us,” Amhric said, so soft I almost didn’t hear it.

As if hearing the thought he could not voice, the elf said, “You will be a worthy successor. Had I not seen it in dreams, I would not have chosen my own path. But we have made our choices, Marne and I. And you have as well, and it has brought you here.”

“Is there... is there a path down?” I asked.

“You must be crazy,” Chester said.

“There is. It leads behind the altar. The dead cannot reach you there... the light bars them.” She lifted her brows. “You wish to pay your respects.”

What I wished to do was wait, because as quickly as we had come, I knew Sedetnet was not far behind us. What he could do when presented with this scenario I couldn’t begin to guess, but all of it distressed. “I must.”

“If you go, we all go,” Chester said stubbornly. And added to the woman, “If there’s room.”

“There is,” she replied. “You will have to go single-file down the path at its end, however.”

“Then we will.” I glanced at my companions. “Though not everyone need come.”

“Need you ask?” Eyre said, quiet. “We will bear you company wherever you go, my student.”

I drew in a breath, settling it, then nodded to him. To the woman who had borne me, I said, “Lead the way.”

The path rose from the overlook and circled the altar, and if it had been difficult not to look at what awaited us below before, now it was nearly impossible. In folklore it was usually the woman who slept the enchanted sleep—but she slept, awaiting someone to quicken her.

I knew without being told there would be no quickening Marne. The woman guiding us down the trail had begotten me on him, somehow, and that had not raised him. How she’d found the strength to do so... was he even warm, or had it been like mounting a corpse? Or had there been some magic involved, as there had been with the genets and their sire? I could hope; the alternative was appalling and piteous, and I did all in my power to keep from imagining it.

This cold woman—I could imagine her doing all that she’d said. There was no malice or cruelty in her, but a great and ancient reserve. Having met Sedetnet I could tell that she was not like him. Nor was she like Thameis and the other elves like him I’d met on the Archipelago, who would have thought me some pawn in a game she wanted the elves to win. But she expressed for me none of the affection my foster mother had showered on me, and though I recognized her in every sinew still she was alien to me.

“Here,” she said. “From here you go one by one. I will remain and wait.”

I passed her then, and went to meet my father.

I would have thought, this close, that the presence of the dead would overwhelm all my other sensibilities; that the hundreds of vultures presiding from their perches and the wall of soldiers straining toward us would necessarily dominate all other impressions of the scene. And yet, when I stepped into the glade they faded from significance, receded like nightmares glimpsed from the distance of a waking mind. The only real thing before me was the altar, and the shining. The sacrifice made manifest.

Lifting a hand, I touched the light, and it was warm and tangible, and poured from my palm when I tilted it, and I shuddered. There was no disbelieving this. God was here, and I felt the promise of Love on my shoulders as I stepped to the side of the table.

Marne had long ago laid down his sword. It rested alongside the hand near his hip, clean and bright, like something eternally perfect. So too his face: tranquil, all its burdens addressed. He had gone willingly to this duty, and if it had been a durance one could not read it now on his brow. He did not breathe, but he was. He abided. And kept his faith and his word and all of us safe. Here was a king out of legend, and I wept in silence at the sight, not knowing whether for joy or heartbreak. But when I felt Amhric’s hand on my shoulder, I covered it with mine and was glad for company, because to be here alone was past bearing. That we should have made such mistakes, and that in the greatness of one heart, someone had chosen to pay for them!

“We will make it right,” Amhric said, low.

The others were behind me now. They spoke not at all, but their respectful attention was like a mantle, warming me. And there was a gift for their witness, for there was power here, and it lapped their hollowed spaces. Even Amhric seemed to exhale.

And then Almond squeaked, and it was not happiness but terror. I looked at her, followed her gaze... and found the sorcerer floating above us. Today he was a male, or perhaps an androgyne—impossible to tell since he wore robes that streamed like flags—but he’d chosen to wrap himself in golden skin and hair, as if in mockery of the king beneath him, and his eyes... his eyes were not mad this time. His eyes were very much present, and they were cold with a terrifying anger.

“Touching scene, isn’t it,” Sedetnet said. “The eternal martyr. I often wonder when he will decide he is done paying for our sins. Mm? What do you suppose, youth who would be prince?”

Behind me, Chester and Last drew their swords.

“Oh, no, that won’t do. This is between us, yes?” Sedetnet flicked a wrist and that was sufficient to raise a barrier between me and the others. They immediately flung themselves against it, but what would have sufficed against an elf of normal strength was nothing to a sorcerer. As they shouted, their voices dilute and distant, I stood with my king behind me, so close his rising chest brushed my back, and again, I was powerless.

And yet... and yet...

Stories whispered in my mind, reaching, raveling. All the secrets and hints, like treasure glinting, begging for light.

“It was kind of you to send a note warning me of your intentions,” I said, not knowing where the words hailed from but knowing they were the right ones. “I had not expected such courtesy.”

“Ah well. You have such promise, Morgan Locke.” Sedetnet lit on the opposite side of the altar and smiled at me over it, eyes hooding. The answer I had barely begun to apprehend drained away beneath the brunt of that gaze, leaving nothing I could understand. “I thought the game would be more interesting if you had a chance to win it.”

“And do I still?”

He laughed. “Don’t you?” He leaned forward, baring his teeth. “You know what I am here to do.”

There was an urgency to the workings of my mind now, as if I chased the rim of gold on the horizon of sunrise. “To summon demons. You said it yourself.”

“Mmm, yes. Because I am mad, of course.”

“You might have rolled a die,” I agreed.

He laughed. “I might have. Tell me, dear unkindled prince. Did I?”

Hearing him ask it, I knew: “No.”

“Good. So far you have not disappointed me, and I assure you, this situation is rare.” Sedetnet sat on the altar beside the king’s shoulders, stroked his hair back. I felt more than heard Amhric’s hiss, and yet in that touch I saw nothing but tenderness, remembered a time when a sorcerer had tumbled a virgin. He could have been cruel, but he hadn’t been. His hands had been gentle, until I had wanted them to be rough.

The knife was such a surprise that I didn’t lunge for it in time. Sedetnet had it at Marne’s throat and drew it across before I knew even to move. Blood sprayed, fine as lace, hung suspended in the air, in time, so that every separate bead glowed incarnadine in the divine light. Then it fell, hard and ugly, hot spatters that steamed.

The light around us flickered.

“What have you done!” Amhric cried.

“Yes,” Sedetnet said. “What have I done?” He looked at me. “Precisely what I said I would... yes?”

As the light around us began to fade, I saw what it had hidden before. The sorcerer, seen through my spectacles... was glowing.

And then I understood everything.

“My God,” I whispered, swaying. “My God!”

“Ahhhhh,” Sedetnet said, closing his eyes. There were droplets of blood on one of his cheeks, bright as garnets. “Yes. At last.” Opening them revealed that they had turned different colors, one gold, the other red as a cardinal’s wing. “Now you know. So go, before it’s too late.”

“Yes!” I cried, and flung myself around, grabbing Amhric by the arm. “God, oh God, we flee! To the horses, while we can!”

“Morgan!” Chester lunged toward the altar but I stayed him with my voice.

“To me, Chester! I need you now! Last, the rear! We have no time!”

We ran then, my mother before us, her gown a banner flowing, pale as pearls. My mind raced faster than our feet. How could I have not seen? I had been thrust into an alien society, certainly, but not so alien that my mind should just shut off, deny the evidence of my senses. I had gone to the Archipelago as student folklorist and collected accounts as if they were truth, forgetting that they were not equivalent. Had I apprehended the picture too late? But there were so many uncertainties yet!

Sedetnet had given us our best hope but we had to live to grasp it. I glanced over my shoulder once, saw the golden head bent against the dark, and wept for him, and even as I did I feared. Marne was a king of elves, and could not die quickly, but I had no idea how his bespelled sleep had affected him. How long could Sedetnet give us? Breaking the enchantment had begun the process, and the process was inexorable, but how much time did we have?

The overlook before us. Our restive mounts. My friends knew not why we fled, but they were clambering astride without taxing me for reasons, for explanations I could not yet give them. Amhric I guided up onto the drake, for I feared we would need one another when Marne finally slipped his shell and returned home. I glanced quickly at my people, saw them all together. Saw my mother, alone on foot.

“You,” I said.

“It is the Mother’s Stand,” she said. “Today. It has not yet been so.”

I swallowed. “There are thrice a thousand of the dead, Milady.”

“And one can hold them for longer than you believe, if she chooses her ground well.” Her chin went up. “I must finish what I began.”

“I will never know you,” I whispered.

“You were not meant to know me. But now, perhaps, you will remember me well.” She met my gaze with steady eyes. “Remember this, when you one day bear young, Prince of Elves. For our children we give everything, because in them is our hope of a future. Whether or not we see that future ourselves, it is our duty to be its guardians.”

“Mother,” I said, voice hoarse. “God with you.”

“My son.” She turned from us to her shrine, and I urged the drake on, blinking tears I hadn’t expected and yet knew would come. Carrington would have her place of legend at the last, and the blood of a woman would be its initiation.

I had no doubt she would die. An elf could withstand much, but they would eventually rend her limb from limb, and those pieces would be trampled. It would not be the fire, but it would be as permanent.

We sped down the high road and I begrudged every moment of it, even knowing we dare not urge the beasts faster until we reached someplace easier for the horses to find their footing. I heard the heaving of their breath in their long throats as they strove to equal the drake’s agility and surefootedness, the jingle of harnesses and bits, sensed the agitation of my friends and their speechlessness at the amputation of Marne’s life and my mother’s loss. But we reached the surface at last, and there Last reined back. I stopped the drake to face him, dread closing my throat.

“I, too, have dreamed,” said he. “It was from that dream that I took my name.”

My heart twisted in my chest. “Last—”

“Yes.” He drew his sword and waited for my blessing, and what could I do?

“Come back to us if you can,” I said, hoarse. “But if you cannot—I will return myself, and find your body, and take it home for the honors you will have earned.”

“My prince,” he said. “Morgan Locke.” To my brother: “And my King.” He inclined his head, then turned the horse and galloped into the defile.

One woman to hold the inner lock. One man to hold the outer. Sedetnet to nurse the king through his final failure.

Through tears, I said, “Fly!”

The trees and napped earth that gave us surcease on our way to the Stand now bedeviled us on the way out, for we could not ride through them at speed. I cared nothing for the concerns that had so fretted me then: whether we would have fire to warm us at night, or fresh food, or shelter from spying eyes. All that mattered was that we might break onto the plains and leave behind our danger. There was Vigil to warn, and beyond it, Troth... for the demon would come, and with it bring all the dead, not just those trammeling the shrine at Mother’s Stand, but all those waiting, sleeping in the earth at Threnody-Calling-Forward. And perhaps my own understood, for Chester surged ahead of me and went seeking quicker ways, and through providence or luck uncovered a route oblique to the one we’d used to enter. The slopes here were sparsely wooded, and seeing more clearly we made better time.

Now and then I looked behind us and sensed the flicker that attended a king’s decline. All the magic of the continent, my mother had said. What would it be to my beloveds when it was loosed? Amhric and I would not gain any of that bounty, for we were bound by the curse—for now—but they would be washed in the flood of it. They would burn with its brightness.

“Morgan, we have to stop,” Chester said at last. “The horses will founder.”

And to lose them... we would arrive too late. Stilling the drake I looked south toward the horizon, wondered if I should take the chance to ride ahead of them. But if they died, how would I manage with my heart lamed? How could I bear an angel with such bitterness trammeling my spirit?

“Even the drake needs rest,” Ivy said, drawing up alongside me. She rested a hand on its fevered side. “We don’t have to sleep all night. A few hours, then we can keep going.”

“And you can tell us,” Carrington said, subdued, “what the hell just happened.”

They needed to know. And they were right. A few hours I could countenance. I slid from the saddle, helped my brother dismount. “A few hours,” I said. “No more.”

The camp they made was a rude one, with neither fire nor shelter; rather they sat in a circle they sanctified with water passed from hand to hand, and dried meat. So they pledged their solidarity to one another, and to the cause.

They waited on me. I settled, reaching down into the land, sensed the wrongness in it still, and distantly, the fading light.

“There are no elven sorcerers,” I said without preamble. “Sedetnet is Sihret. Marne’s prince.”

Silence. Amhric inhaled, shuddered.

“Fine,” Chester said. “He’s the prince. He also killed Marne.”

“If you could call that alive,” Carrington murmured. When she won some arch looks at that, she said, “How else would you describe an enchantment like that? From which you can never wake? Would you want to be doomed to that forever?”

“If it saved a world!” Ivy cried.

“But it hasn’t,” Eyre murmured. “Has it.”

Another silence. Into it, tentatively, Almond said, “Master? Why did Sedetnet kill the king?”

“To summon a demon,” I said. “Or to allow a demon ingress by freeing the magic, and setting the elves and humans again at odds over its disposition. Either one suits. Because...” I halted, trembling, pushed my glasses up my nose and remembered the bright fire I’d seen in the heart of a madman. “Check me, please. When have there ever been angels, when there have not first been demons?”

“Oh,” Ivy whispered. “Oh... no.”

“You suggest there is no possibility of their summoning until the worst is already upon us?” Eyre was frowning, contemplative.

“Marne and Winifred received their visitations only after a human had called down a demon,” I said. “Before that, the book we saw in Vigil. This world was touched by demons first, before the angels were said to have made elvenkind as its guardian. This curse is made by demons, and if it can only be undone by angels—”

“Then you think we need to bring the demons first, and then the angels can come?” Carrington said.

I nodded.

“But... why? Why kill Marne at all?” Ivy asked.

“Because,” Kelu muttered. “All the magic here is bound up there. Along with the walking dead. You need an enemy, and a chance to win without help.”

“That makes it sound so... manipulative,” Ivy muttered.

“No.” Amhric roused himself, pulled the cloak I’d draped over his shoulder close by. He looked diminished; he had been weeping. We had seen our father, and lost him, and he had seen his king and lost him, and in him was all the grief and forgiveness I found so difficult to invoke in myself. “No. Ours is the destiny we create. If we create it so that demons may enter in, ours is the responsibility of attempting the resolution. Who invites demons can set them aside again. Only this time... it is not our chance.” He met Chester’s eyes. “Now it is for humanity to set their swords against the dead.”

“And if we succeed?” Chester asked, low. “What happens if we don’t need an angel?”

“Then perhaps our time here is over,” Amhric said.

The silence then was absolute, and each one of us hated it.

“No,” Ivy said. “If it is for us to make choices, then this path I will refuse. We will not claim our agency on the bodies of another species. That is truly the demon’s path.” She lifted her chin, and in that moment I saw my mother in her, and her grandmother, and every female warrior who had ever dared the dark in the future’s name. “We all stand to be saved, or all of us fall.”

“The sacrifice,” Eyre began.

“May be honored in myth and story,” Carrington murmured. “And there will be sacrifices. But it’s all wrong, John. The elves have to choose the altar. If they die here, like this, it will be because humanity trussed them up and threw them there. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

“I still don’t understand.” Chester’s hands were tight on his knees. “Why was Marne’s sacrifice necessary? Why did it resolve into... this? With him trapped for centuries that way? It wasn’t a solution, not a permanent one. Why didn’t the angel just kill the dead?”

“The books say that the angel offered a choice,” I said. “That it is the nature of angels to give choices, and for demons to take them away.”

“But what was the choice that earned him this?” Chester asked.

I shook my head. “Maybe only Marne will ever know.”

“And Sihret,” Ivy said.

Sedetnet. My counterpart, doomed to live apart from his king. And I had wondered at his madness? What would I be, if I had been tasked to stay so distant from Amhric, knowing what he suffered?

“Maybe we’ll get the chance to ask,” Eyre said.

“Maybe,” I said. “For now, though, we should rest for the little time we have.”

They consented to this only because I had given them too much to think about. Amhric, though, I saw to myself, tucking the cloak close around him. “Rest,” I whispered in the Gift, drawing his head to my lap.

“I hardly feel I can, knowing now what I do,” he answered in kind.

“But you must.” I set a hand on his shoulder. “When Marne dies, all his power will come to repose in you, and all the magic of this land will be free. You will have more to hand than you have had in your life—than any elf has now, or will until we are unencumbered of the curse. And I doubt that power will come to you easily.”

“And you?” He looked up at me, concerned, and my heart tightened. “When the mantle passes to me, Sihret’s will pass to you. How will you be ready?”

“In the way that all princes have been.” I set my hand on his shoulder. “By knowing why I wear it.”

With that he had to be content, and in that way of his of knowing too well another’s heart, he was. I kissed his temple and he slept, and I kept the watch, and this I found good. The others slept or didn’t, or slept poorly, as their natures dictated, but all of them wanted the quiet to nurse their scattered thoughts.

And I had company.

“Oh Master,” Almond said when I did not send her away. She curled up against my side, head tucked against my shoulder. “Your mother. And your father! And you with no time to grieve!”

“I knew neither of them.” I wrapped an arm around her and brought her close enough to breathe in the floral scent of her fur, and beneath it, the hint of power that was the magic bound into her for the use of her captors. Here was another mystery. Why had Sedetnet wrought the genets? What had been a prince’s purpose in creating them? Had it been as simple as the need to keep Amhric winnowed? Or had it been the solution he’d offered the elves to keep them from slaying the first candidate he’d found that hadn’t been an amoral monster?

Perhaps there had been no plan. Perhaps it had been as simple as Sihret being mad. I sighed against Almond’s fur. “I knew neither of them, and I do grieve, but it does not cripple me. Does that make me a terrible person?”

Beyond Almond, Kelu snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Ah, the repository of my common sense has arrived.” I smiled as she sat beside Almond, though her gaze was for the figures huddled under cloaks and coats and saddle blankets, not far from us. “Please, Kelu. Save me from my own puffery.”

She sighed. “You get more ridiculous the longer I know you.”

I chuckled, and if it was a low sound, and half-hearted, I made it all the same. “Come and rest,” I said. “Even genets must need it.”

“Almond can rest,” Kelu said. “I don’t have much longer on this world. I’d like to see it before it gets demon-blighted, before I die.”

Almond’s ears flattened. “You still have time—”

“I’m old.” Kelu shook her head. “I’ve lived too long as it is. It won’t be long for me. You’ll see.”

I reached for her hand and surprised her into letting me capture it. “Kelu,” I said, quiet. “You will live to see this world demon-blighted, and cleansed of demon blight. I swear it.”

Her ears flipped back, sealed to her head, and her nostrils flared. Her reply was slow in coming. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“I’m not,” I said. And to this, she said nothing more.

Less than two hours later, I chivvied everyone awake and back to the thankless task of preparing their mounts. The wind tore at us, too chill; there were clouds clinging to the edges of the horizon, and as I glanced at them, they broke and began to burgeon. I smelled something moist, but unclean; beneath me, the drake hissed, and the horses rolled their eyes and blew flecks of foam in their anxiety.

There was nothing for it but to ride on, over earth gone sinister, through air that now tingled with the anticipation of the magic to come, and the guttering of the light. That these things came attendant gave me some pale thread of hope: God gave power to deny the dark with the dark, and around me were the people I’d chosen to wield it. All humanity could now be a shield, thank Winifred and her covenant. I had shown them the way, but she had made them ready.

Before me, Amhric was tense, shoulders bowed inward. Now and then he looked back, and on the fourth time, I said, “What is it?”

“I feel it,” he whispered. “I feel it, Morgan. It’s coming.”

But when it came, none of us were ready.

It came in the ground, and in the sky. It was swifter than water flowing, more tempestuous than storms, and silent as the space between notes of music. It was brighter than lightning, and it came first: the magic, released in a great explosion that coruscated the length of the world and rolled on, scattering arabesques of eye-watering brilliance that shuddered over eyes that watered and blinked to behold it. All the land was blessed by it, and cried out to receive it, or those were our cries, of shock at the feel of it passing through us, thin as ghosts and great as the love of God.

Ivy pulled up her mount, which was caviling wildly, and how she didn’t fall I didn’t know. We all followed suit because there was no moving through so much joy, so much shock. The clouds had thickened into storms, surging toward us on a wet wind, pulling at hair, manes, coats, cloaks. But we did not move.

The earth beneath me was singing.

“Oh God,” Carrington whispered. “Is that what we’ve been missing all this time?”

Ivy and Chester were both weeping, unashamed. Eyre looked proud, a man greeting his destiny. In them all I could sense the wan candles that had been their impoverished magics flying like pennants, so bright, so strong. There were never elven sorcerers. But there were now human ones.

“That we should live to see this,” Eyre whispered, head up, facing the storm. “That we should be the ones! Winifred’s legacy, and the gift of angels!”

And then a spear of light transfixed Amhric, broadened into a column, and all of it fell into him as if filling a deep, deep well. The drake dug its claws into the earth, head down, as if it bore a weight too great for its back, and I hastily slid from it to leave the two of them.

The mantle came, flared into a rune around his body that shone so bright my eyes watered to witness it. When it died, it left a man that gleamed at every edge, and above his head a crown of light shimmered, the halo that had heralded the holy in icon and myth for as long as human hand could lift a brush. I recognized it anew, from some other lifetime: the elven sigil that had heralded the silver-eyed king in the Vigil manuscript that no doubt still reposed in my student flat.

“The King is dead,” Eyre said. “Long live the King!”

Amhric sighed out, soft, opened eyes gone molten amber. He reached a hand to me. We had played this scene out before, the two of us, when I had driven off our tormentors on a beach on Kesina. He had handed me my staff, and I had accepted, and with it my role in his life and in the myths that would be written long after we had gone to dust. Here, then, was my last chance to repudiate that future. Curls of light limned his fingers, rose from them in coils and sigils that doubled back into themselves in the infinite patterns that the elves had written down and called the Angel’s Gift. In his cupped palm, a pool of light, as if it could be captured and passed, from hand to hand to ailing heart.

Here was truth, and beauty, and all good things… and their inevitable companions, duty, and grief, and sacrifice.

I rested my hand on his, and took the mantle.

What was it like? How could I describe, save that it was intimate, and more personal than I’d expected? My studies had led me to believe that magic was a force of nature, some external power to be manipulated by the puissant. But it was the very opposite. Magic sprang from within, was created in the secret, sacred center… was the soul’s tears shed in its joy, the manifestation of all that was good and healthy and right. Did I wonder how blood might come to symbolize that transaction? I had only to feel the Prince’s power coming to me to know, because it came as wings, not chains.

And this, I realized in that moment of acceptance, was how Sihret had felt, joining himself to Marne. And what had been eating him from within ever since the exile. Sedetnet no less than Marne had been the sacrifice that deferred the judgment of that final battle. I extended a heart-rent prayer that he might find the peace his king had, dying at last.

But we were not done yet. I went to Carrington, who’d remained on her horse. It shied once at my approach, then settled as I rested a glowing hand on its nose. Looking up at her, I saw her, saw her and needed no spectacles to tell me of her allegiance. She was breathing quickly, with high color, and the storm wind had swept some of her hair from its habitual knot, straggling it over her brow. But her eyes were steady, if wild.

“Will you have the gift?” I asked.

It was a formality, the asking, but I saw her gratitude that I’d observed it. She licked her lips, then nodded once, and I reached into her and showed her where the magic lived in her. She groped blindly for the pommel of her saddle, and I gave her my hands instead, and held her steady until she was done—for now. I thought she and Ivy would have something to talk about, if time we had for talking.

“The storm’s coming,” Chester said. Behind him, Kelu’s face was unreadable. “We shouldn’t tarry.”

I pulled myself back up behind Amhric as the others wheeled their mounts away from the source of the magic. But I paused once to look backwards, and think of the dead, and for a moment because of that I thought I had summoned the noise. It began as a pressure in the ears, crested, transformed abruptly into a wail of grief and rage and desolation so unbearable that we all cried out, and the horses screamed, and even the land shivered beneath us, mute tremors of grief and shock. There was no sanity in that howl, and every one of us knew who had uttered it.

The drake leaped forward at my hissed command and the others streamed in my wake. We fled the storm that was, and the storm to come, and behind us Death was rising, a shadow gathered against the sky, an inverse of the light that had proclaimed a king. We had run, not out of time, but out of choices. All possible endings were narrowing to a single path, and we coursed it like foxes fleeing the hunt.