Page 128 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

The third thing I’d never seen, but I felt a chill of recognition nonetheless. It was a black lake, huge and calm, the moon reflecting off its surface like light on glass. Thefullmoon.

A goblet, a key, an egg. A black lake under a full moon.

The others stood nearby in their finery, all of them frozen like I was. My sisters were breathtaking, each line of their bodies gilded from the inside out. Their hair was thick and streaming, streaked with starlight. Specks of gold made their eyes shine, and the air around them rippled softly, as if they moved through shallow water so clear it was impossible to see. Their gowns shone of moonlit silk, each pleat and fold casting soft starbursts of light across the road.

Seeing them, seeingme, Father took a stunned step back.

“Gods, it’s true,” he whispered.

“I don’t understand,” Gemma said unsteadily. “This is Mhorghast?”

They were all waiting for me to say something; I’d been here before, I’d drawn the map. But my shock at seeing Mhorghast so changed left me speechless. Everything I’d told them had been rendered useless the moment we arrived.

“Someone’s here,” Talan breathed. In the Olden air, he stood taller, his dramatic beauty startling. “Can’t you hear them?”

And suddenly, hardly daring to breathe, I could—faint whispers, a distant chorus of voices. I closed my eyes, straining to listen. Laughter, music, drums. A tambourine?

“It’s a trick,” Nesset growled. With her hard gray fingers, she pried loose a stone from the cobbled road and tossed it, fuming. A wave of laughter, whisper-soft, cascaded over us in response.

I remembered how the shape and breadth of Mhorghast had shifted when Ryder and I had last been here—how the towering palace had been itself one moment and the next a mountain had stood in its place—and struggled against my rising terror for composure. “Itisa trick. The city changed often when we were here. The shape andsubstance of the road, the size of the city, the placement of things. They shifted without warning.”

“Perhaps the whole thing is an illusion,” Father said, glaring around. “Not a true city at all, just a construction of magic.”

“Magic bolstered by Jaetris, no doubt,” Gemma whispered. She looked back at me. “We thought ourselves so clever, coming here dressed to celebrate, not to fight. But this is…” She gestured miserably at Talan’s house. “This is another kind of game entirely.”

“A game,” Talan suggested, his voice hard and angry, “or a show.”

My heart racing, I began to hum under my breath. As I did, I concentrated on the sensation of Ankaret’s feather against my skin and thought one word:truth. I infused every crystalline note with it, and as I sang, vague shapes shimmered into being. Each one was brief, disappearing as soon as I looked directly at it. But I saw enough. We were being watched by thousands of staring eyes situated hundreds of feet above us. It was like Alastrina’s arena, I realized with a cold twist of fear. We were on some grand stage for the entertainment of the entire city. I saw only fuzzy shapes, blurs of color, but I could guess who was there—every smiling vampyr I’d seen in Mhorghast, every glittering nymph, every desperate human. Somewhere in the crowd was Luthaes, Alastrina’s dazzling fae keeper with the burnished copper skin.

I stopped singing, my mouth suddenly dry. “They’re all watching us,” I whispered. “Thousands of them, seated above us.”

“Waiting for us to dowhat?” Nesset snapped. “Dance for them? Play your fiddle?”

“No,” Mara said quietly. She was staring at the lake, breathing hard. Seldom had I seen my warrior sister afraid, but the look on her face now was one of abject terror. “No, not again. No.No.”

A glint of light caught my eye, drawing my attention back to the silhouette of Ivyhill. My heart sank as I saw flames shooting out ofa first-floor window. At the same moment, the windows of Talan’s house lit up all at once, and a bonfire sprang to life on the shore of the lake—an odd one with an eerie, still light that was hard to look away from and seemed somehow to smile.

I turned to Mara, a question on my lips, but she was drifting away from us toward the lake, her gait stiff and strained. A faint path of moonlight unfurled at her feet.

“Nesset,” she said tightly. “Do you feel that?”

“Yes,” said the Vilia, her voice suddenly small. “What is that?”

I felt it too, my legs suddenly carrying me forward without my permission, some invisible force—an unignorable compulsion—crackling impatiently at the backs of my thighs.

“Father, dig in your heels,” I told him, taking the fiddle from my back. He obeyed, the stubborn force of his sentinel power rooting him in place—for now. “Hold on to my waist,” I said. “Keep me here for just a moment longer.” He obeyed, and I cradled the fiddle under my chin and began to play.

Wait, I thought, drawing the bow across the strings with ease.Hold.A mule refusing to move. Beautiful Jet, back home at Ivyhill, snapping at anyone who dared come close with a lead rope. A mountain, a wall of stone. My fingers knew what to do, even as they shook with terror. A lilting waltz, popular at weddings. Easy, cheerful.

“Everyone listen to me,” I called out. “Listen to the music and remember yourselves, no matter what he shows you. We’ve done this before. We’ve faced Kilraith, we’ve seen through his deceptions, and we survived. We can do it again.”

It was a desperate guess at what Kilraith intended. He liked games, and Jaetris was the master of illusions. What better way to torment us than to separate us and force us to relive our worst nightmares? A grand game for the spectators, and for Kilraith most of all. I watched helplessly as they staggered away from me—Gemma andTalan toward his lonesome seaside house, Mara and Nesset toward the lake. Warring noises pulled at me from both directions. From the house on the Far Sea came a crash of waves; from the lake, pounding drums. On the lake’s distant shores, I saw dark flittering shapes. As afraid as I was, I still felt a twinge of curiosity. What was Mara seeing? What memory had Kilraith conjured for her?

In the distance, Ivyhill’s fire was growing fast. Father blew out a furious breath. I could feel him fighting to hold on to me, fighting the force that commanded us to move.

“You’ve done this before!” I called out once more. “You can do it again. Trust yourselves, not him!”

A low rumble grew all around me, like the climb of a cresting wave. Its roar swallowed my voice. Ivyhill’s flames spilled orange and gold across the world. Father let out a pained grunt and released me. The fiddle and bow flew out of my hands and disappeared, and the world raced forward beneath me. I had to run to keep from falling, but I couldn’t run fast enough, and soon the ground reared up beneath me, bucking me off my feet. I flew forward into a yawning black void.

---