THE WIZARD SLIPPED into a shadow and followed that ferocious light through the Quick Sunrise, and onto the ramshackle street outside. He kept sight of her bright hair as she determinedly pushed through celebratory crowds, up and up toward the palace, but he could’ve followed her over miles for the eddies and spikes she cast in her wake, churning the wind. That was why he followed, he told himself, that and the sword at her side, the whispering, eager sword whose name he remembered. Unlike the wizard, the sword still bore the same name it had known for a hundred years.

There was a third reason the wizard followed Lady Hotspur, the real reason: Choose better.

The wizard had heard such a command before. Lifetimes ago, during a storm.

Choose me, and everything, that other queen had said.

He hadn’t obeyed.

The more he remembered, the more he identified with his lion prince, and he wondered if somehow, this woman would help Hal more than he himself had been helped. Or if Hal could accept what he had not, before the end.

The wizard followed Lady Hotspur out of the city, then stopped. She rushed and raged away, setting off to the north, and his place was here, close to Hal. But he thought, as the woman pulsed and burned, that perhaps his lion did not carry her heart within her own chest.