I woke Ivy, wishing she’d had longer than a few minutes to rest. She jerked awake with a tiny noise of startlement, then saw the weirdling shadows cast from the drake’s arms and pushed herself upright. She said nothing—did she have to? I helped her up, and the four of us watched as the darkness engulfed the horizon, spreading its cloak closer to the sun until at last it eclipsed it. The morning was snuffed like a candle, and this darkness was more complete than the gloaming we’d suffered beneath the clouds, the thick rain. Even the snapping bonfires seemed to dwindle, as if the darkness pressed on them, could smother them. Perhaps it could.

What the others sought when they stared north, I knew not. But I could sense the presence approaching, even as I hoped desperately that I might be wrong. That there might be redemption at the last, and an averted battle.

But I was not wrong, and as the darkness seeped past us, heading south, a figure lit on the northern battlements.

How could I recognize him, when he had had so many bodies? I had known him as a man and a woman, a protean sorcerer and a prince, a lover and an antagonist and a madman. But I knew him now, intimately enough to see that the soul of Sihret, Marne’s Red Prince, had been smothered just as surely as our bonfires had. He retained a body of epicene perfection, nude now and marmoreal in its pallor. But a deep shadow fell over his face, hiding all but eyes that glowed, with neither pupil nor iris... just a blank brilliance, cruel and blind.

And he had wings. Or, he had the frames upon which one could have stretched wings. They were skeletal limbs, drawn from too-taut skin, and they seemed as wide as the sky. But they had neither feather nor vane, and the skin frayed from them halfway down their lengths, leaving the bone exposed, and those dreadful fingers became clear, flattened shards where they rose into the dark. The wind that flowed past them shivered their joints, and they made a sound like broken glass, painful screeching scratches that put the hair up the back of my neck.

Had that been everything, perhaps we might have reacted. Perhaps we might have thrown ourselves on him, borne him down, and ended this before it could escalate into a war we could not win. But it was not everything, because the demon clung to him with tenuous fingertips, like spills of black blood down his throat and over the notch between collarbones, and from there wafted out into the shroud that had stolen the light from the world. It had form, and no form; it was given form by our terrors, and flickered into and out of those shapes, never settling. It was the wellspring of all the cruelties, fears, and anguishes that tore at a soul, and every single person in Vigil recognized it, and was struck numb as prey before a predator out of nightmare.

Amhric was right. The demon was not even fully seated in this world, and it did not need to kill. It could petrify us into a silent rigor that entrapped us until the dead tore us down and added us to their ranks. My heart raced uncontrollably, and I remembered too well the ugly whispers, the caress of tongues in one ear. The Red Prince lives, the Prince lives, the Red Prince lives and will release us all!

...save that I was not the Red Prince. And Sedetnet, I saw, was not fully consumed by the evil using his body to reach the world.

I forced a step, and my body answered. It did so without grace, as it had when wracked by the worst agonies I’d suffered. But it answered, and so I tried another. Step by step, I made my advance from the shadow of the drake, and looked up into the eyes of the man who was not my enemy, who was become our enemy, who had played so many roles he no longer remembered himself.

“Sihret!” I called. My voice was too thin, too small. I inhaled until my ribs hurt, and then I cried, “SIHRET!”

The elf who had been prince turned his head slowly toward me, as if the vertebrae had seized. My neck ached, watching the motion.

“Sihret!” I cried. If only I could win him down from his perch. If I could touch him....

His gaze was such that no one could tell any longer what he focused on. But his face was tilted toward me. I dared hope that I had distracted him from whatever course had drawn him here. Though I shook with the panic induced by the demonic presence, though sweat slicked my skin and made my hands tremble, I lifted them to him. “Come down,” I said. “Please. There’s so much I need to ask you.”

The eyes narrowed. Was he listening?

“You don’t want to be up there,” I said. “And we don’t want you to suffer alone. You don’t have to suffer alone.”

And it—it smiled. The demon, using Sedetnet’s face.

“No,” I said. “Sihret, no—”

It looked past me, at the ruined march of buildings lining the southern verge. Stretching wings with that broken glass shriek, it rose and glided over us, drawing the darkness deep over, and paused only to look down over the field of Threnody-Calling-Forward, which was calling forward now.

“Don’t!” I cried. “Sihret, please!”

It flashed a grin over its shoulder and dove from the walls, and in its wake a sound broke from the earth, a grinding moan that dragged matching cries from the survivors. With the thing flown past us we were free to move, could we bear to in the face of that unnatural sound, but some of us did; some of us ran for the southern edge of the city, and reached it in time to watch the demon drag its fell wake over the ancient battlefield, and see the soil rent asunder by skeletal hands. Barely three hours past our Pyrrhic victory, all of us sodden with fatigue and numb with grief, and I was watching our deaths claw themselves free of the earth as above them hovered an inverted angel, a corruption made manifest. I thought of Sedetnet’s heart, blackened and twisted in that cage, and I wept with frustration even as I sought the others.

I found them with Rose amid the chaos of our army in its panic. “Rose!” I cried. “Rose, we must retreat!”

She had blanched beneath her brown skin, but remained steadfast. “I know. We’ll fall back to the north, and come around westward and try for the road to Evertrue. They might cut us off, but if we’re quick enough....”

I knew now the source of that sickness in her eyes. There would be no time to arrange for the careful conveyance of the wounded. Even if we failed to abandon them, our haste would kill a great number of them. But we had no choice.

“Go,” she said. “Fetch forth your genets, and the people we left underground. The moment everyone’s mounted, we’re leaving. They’ll be off the main hall.”

I nodded and ran for the stairs. As I launched myself down them, I heard footsteps in my wake and paused.

“Go on,” Chester said, tense.

“Why—”

“The last time you were down here alone, someone slit your throat,” he growled.

What could I say to that, save that he was correct? I resumed my madcap descent, taking the stairs at a rate advisable only for someone enchanted against injury. Chester followed at a less precipitous speed, but once we reached the athenaeum he made up the distance, and was first on the ramp leading to the enormous hall. I passed him on it, and we reached the floor in tandem and sprinted for the first opening off the hall. I needed no other direction; even with the demon oppression clouding my senses, I still knew where the genets were by the glimmer of their magic. I was calling before we’d reached the room where they’d taken shelter, and in answer they were rising.

“Almond, Kelu,” I said. “Emily! Serendipity! Quickly, all of you. We must go.”

For once, I was grateful for their ingrained obedience, for they instantly filed out the room in orderly rows. Almond gave me the fleetest of embraces before parting from me to await direction. The only perturbation in this sea of submission was Kelu, who came a fraction off the beat, as if to stress the choice she made. Her eyes, when they met mine, were uneasy; unlike the others, she was willing to consider the ramifications of my haste. I shook my head, a minute twitch of chin, and she jogged past me. She would have questions later, I knew, but I was grateful she’d deferred them.

“This way,” I said, and with Chester at my side we retraced our steps.

The symmetry of the situation should have been sufficient warning. Had I not told Eyre we were writing the story of the elves’ redemption? And yet, I could not have known for that very reason. I had assumed that the story was mine.

We exited the corridor into the main hall where once a human king had betrayed an elven king, and there we were beset by human scholars intent on betraying an elven scholar. Chester drew his sword before I’d recognized the shadows parting from the enormous columns were more than a confused misperception, and to his credit he immediately targeted and slew the human I would have expected to be the greater threat: Roland, who’d been responsible for my near demise in the library. But Roland was only one of the armed men. Powlett, unconstrained by Chester’s attack, was at liberty to engage, and he lunged past my friend’s guard and into me. I saw the gleam of light on steel, aimed for my chest, and wondered if after an entire day of fighting I had anything left to heal a wound that critical.

But I was never to know the answer to this question, because a white blur intercepted the blow intended for me, and Almond died with Powlett’s blade below her collar.

For a very long moment, in that pregnant silence between heartbeats, I watched bright blood soaking white fur, spreading in pulsing gouts. My hands, I perceived, were reaching for her as she fell. I thought I was yelling—my throat hurt with it—but I heard nothing. Only that hush, and that pause that I wanted never to end, because I knew when time resumed the gentle heart that had devoted itself to my happiness would cease to beat, and mine would continue on, inexorable and pitiless, and leave me with the most senseless of deaths I could conceive.

I begged my heart to wait on hers, but inevitably, it squeezed again, and time lurched forth. I fell to my knees with Almond’s body in my arms. Powlett staggered back, began to turn as Chester sprang for him. The genets were crying out. I heard Kelu’s voice. I thought I heard Kelu’s voice. I felt as if the only noise in my ears was my heart beating endlessly, too fast, as I sank down over the genet’s body. If I could convey her to the surface quickly enough—if I could find Ivy, or Carrington—if I could just push the blood back into her body—

I cried out her name, and didn’t know my own voice. The silence spread with the abruptness of a lightning strike, and everything around me suspended, crystallized.

And the angel came.