Olwen, of course, sends trunks skewering five of them, sparing the one nose-diving for me.

Thankfully, magic really is easier here in the gardens, though the plants are already beginning to wilt now that the climate-controlled magic barrier has been broken.

Still, when I call, the plants answer, piercing the wyvern’s wings before dragging it to the ground. I spear it through its chest.

“You know,” I say to Olwen, wiping the blunt edge of my blade on my trousers, “some would consider refusing to protect your king treason.”

Olwen humphs. “Good thing I’ve already withdrawn my citizenship, then.”

I roll my eyes, but then someone else comes running around the corner of a hedge, a tall male with brown hair and tanned skin who’s vaguely familiar.

Olwen pierces an overhead wyvern with a jagged trunk before prancing over to the male, jumping into his arms, and planting a kiss on his cheek.

“Quill, Evander. Evander, Quill,” she says.

Ah. Desidarius Quill. Olwen’s old school rival.

I point the blade of my sword between the two of them. “Don’t the two of you hate each other or something?”

Before my little sister can explain how she’s gone from writing hate poems about this male over Solstice break to planting a kiss on his cheek, something shrieks overhead.

“Does that one seem bigger than the rest to you?” asks Quill, who sets Olwen down gently and stares at the massive wyvern above us.

The creature cranes its neck, sniffing at the wyvern carcasses Olwen and I slaughtered.

Then it bellows in rage. I have just enough time to throw my silver-coated shield over the three of us, as the wyvern sprays a pillar of flames into the sky and showers streams of acid down upon us.

The acid sizzles as it hits the shield.

But Ellie’s creation holds.

Olwen coughs through the smoke. “Is it just me, or do we think that’s the creatures’ mother?”

CHAPTER 104

BLAISE

When I wake, Nox is gone.

So is the wyvern.

I stretch out my neck, groaning, even as panic races through me.

Shadows no longer lick eagerly around my limbs, meaning it must have worked. The paldihv must have joined itself to Nox.

I find what relief I can in that, considering he’s gone.

When I scramble out of the alcove, careful to avoid the streams of sunlight that burst through the scattered holes in the ceiling, I can’t help but cry on the inside.

Nox is gone, the voice inside my head tells me. Except it’s not my voice at all, but the parasite’s, whispering to me through the adamant box strapped to my belt.

The wyvern skewered him straight through his beautiful abdominals. Took him off on a ride. I do wonder where it will drop him. Perhaps it’ll make a meal out of him instead.

Nausea rolls inside me, but I push the parasite’s voice out of my head.

A liar, that’s what she is.

But if it’s not true, then where is Nox, and why would he have abandoned me?

I shake my head, reminding myself that he probably ran off to lure the wyvern away.

That’s likely what happened.

That has to be what happened.

And you call me the liar, whispers the parasite, when you’re so proficient at lying to yourself. There’s no need for me to even try. You’d only outdo me.

I push it away, running through the halls, frantically searching. For who, I’m not sure. Nox? Asha? Kiran? Evander?

Evander.

He’s going to die here today, and it’s all my fault.

I’m going to have single-handedly wiped his name from the face of Alondria.

My footsteps pad against the ground, but I find they have no direction.

This is my fault, I realize, when another part of the roof collapses, a huddle of servants screaming out in terror as it comes crumbling atop them.

I race for them, grabbing one from the path of the oncoming ceiling, but she’s screaming, screaming out for her husband, who I was too slow to save as the falling stone crushes him.

The servant screams, clawing at my neck, cursing me for saving her and leaving her husband to die.

There’s a faint buzzing in my ears.

And something else.

The sound of a voice it’s taking me a second to recognize.

Because it’s the voice of a male shouting orders. The voice of one who protects.

The voice of a king.

I follow the voice down the hall, as if in a trance, and then I see him from the shadows where I lurk. Down, lower than the balcony, is a garden.

And in the garden is Evander.

He’s arrayed like royalty, bearing the blue of Dwellen on his armor, which glistens in the sunlight, coated with a material I don’t recognize.