Page 132 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

“Farrin in the forest light,” he said mockingly. “Cold and strange. Doesn’t even know how to fuck herself properly. And you thought I found you beautiful.You.” He laughed. “Lucky for you that you were born into an Anointed family. Without that power you have, you’d be nothing. No one in their right mind would wantthis.”

I felt I was going to be sick. I wrenched myself free and ducked away from his reaching arms, away from the mortifying sight of my body in the mirror. I stumbled out of the room and slammed the door shut behind me. I couldn’t sing, couldn’t breathe. I ignored Father calling after me, young Ryder’s bewildered questions, the gleeful laughter of the little girl in Father’s arms. I found the last door in the hallway—the door to my own bedroom.

I sagged against it, pressing my hands flat to the wood. The air was scorching, my sweat-drenched hair was plastered to my neck, and my fine dress of blue silk had turned black and clinging. I hummed through my tears, pushing aside the horrible image of Ryder leering cruelly at me in the mirror.Real, I thought. I scrabbled through my mind and poured every true memory of him, of us, into my song. Ryder teaching me how to fight. Ryder holding me after I’d sung the Devenmere chimaera into submission, the shelter of his strength. His hands on my skin, his kisses in my hair, his hard, hot weight pinning me to the bed in the Citadel, in the Torch and Thorn, in his cozy stable room. His voice breaking on my name as he moved in me, tender, slow. His words falling on me like soft rain.To love you, Farrin. All I want is to love you.

I pushed open the door to my room and saw the moonlit grounds of Ivyhill stretching out before me. The air was cool and fresh. I gulped it down as little Farrin gleefully ran past me, pulling young Ryder after her. They turned back and waved at me. “Come on, hurry!” Ryder cried. “This is the way out!”

And I very nearly did. The breeze was delicious, and my skin crawled from everything the house had done to me. I wanted to walk away from it and never look back. But when I turned back to find Father, I saw him standing not far from me, wrapped in chains of shadow. There was a shadowed clamped over his mouth, and another wrapped around his throat. For a frozen second, his terrified eyes found mine. Then the shadows yanked him away from me, pulling him back into the flames as if he were a mere cloth doll. The speed with which they took him was brutal. His neck bent horribly.

“Hurry up!” young Farrin called. I looked back once to see her standing in the safe moonlit night, her face sparkling with happiness, Ryder now grown and standing tall beside her. And this was not the cruel Ryder from the house’s nightmares; it wasmyRyder, his eyes soft.

He held out his hand to me, a smile on his face. “Come here, love,” he said. “It’s time to go.”

But I couldn’t. Icouldn’t. I turned back into the flames and ran after my father, a scream stuck in my throat. I tore through the burning hallways, shielding my eyes against the glare. I would not leave him as Philippa had left me, ashehad left Gemma and me on all those long, lonely nights of grief. As often as I’d wished that same pain on him, prayed viciously that he would someday feel it and understand, I couldn’t abandon him to it now. No, that pain, that legacy of hatred and war, cowardice and abandonment—it ended here. It ended with me.

Suddenly, the house and all its fire disappeared into blackness, and I stood in a field strewn with ashes. It was Ivyhill, now in ruins,the estate utterly devastated. Not even my piano had survived. There was only rubble and embers, and in the midst of it stood a grinning man made of shadows. He held a golden bow, its arrow trained on another man who sat bound on an opulent gilded throne. This man was ancient—white beard to his knees, his brown skin ashen and wrinkled. His eyes were sad, coated with yellow film.

“Jaetris” came a whisper beside me.

I turned and nearly fell with relief. There were Mara and Nesset, and on the other side of me, Gemma and Talan. All of them were haggard, the echoes of terrible things on their faces and in their eyes, my sisters’ shimmering gowns torn and mud spattered. But whatever they had seen, whatever nightmares Kilraith had thrown at them, they had pushed through, as I had. They were alive.

Nesset gaped at the old man on the throne. “It can’t be,” she whispered.

But I agreed with Mara. The man on the throne was indeed Jaetris, god of the mind. My heart, my bones, my very breath knew it as soon as I looked at him. He appeared to me, in all his rheumy disarray, with the same kind of bright clarity that Philippa had when she’d rescued Ryder, Alastrina, and me from Mhorghast. The ragged breaths he took made the ground tremble under my feet; the air pulled tight around us with each inhalation, each sputtering, pained gasp.

And Kilraith had an arrow pointed right at his heart.

Shapes shimmered all around us, and suddenly Jaetris wasn’t alone. Columns of shadow alit from the sky, curling like smug smiles against the ruined ground. And out of each of them tumbled a man bound with invisible chains that held him frozen, powerless. Their unblinking eyes stared at me, and for a moment I could only stare back at them, dread pounding a wicked rhythm against my ribs.

Gareth, thin and dressed in shabby finery, quite obviously ill, a pallid sheen to his skin.

Father, still covered in soot from the fire.

Ryder, raging in furious silence against the power that held him. His eyes found mine, bright and angry, that brilliant blue I knew and loved.

Fight, they told me.No matter what he does to us, you must fight him.

And in that moment when our gazes locked, the certainty of violence thick in the air around us, the memory of young Ryder fresh in my mind—precious boy, so brave and unafraid in that house full of smoke—I knew. I knew it in my deepest core. It didn’t matter if it was my song that had first drawn him to me. It didn’t matter if my power was the thing that had allowed something like love to begin unfurling in his heart.

What mattered was what that love had become, what we had shared—every touch of his hands, every moment of sameness, ofrightness, that had passed between us. Two tired, angry hearts finding solace in each other. I could not doubt the truth of that. He had pressed it into me with his every kiss, his every caress, with every utterance of my name.

For one exquisite moment, that conviction was my entire world, Ryder’s blazing expression the only thing I could see. He would forgive me; he would help me learn to forgive myself. In that instant, I felt stronger and more at peace than I ever had.

Then the columns of darkness whirling behind each of the captive men took on the same shape as the grinning shadowed figure who leered beside Jaetris with his arrow. I returned to myself, to my racing heart and the dangerous, terrible present.

Before me stood four Kilraiths, three bound men, and one bound god.

“Such a fine, brave display,” said the four Kilraiths, their voices a perfect scornful chorus. “But now the game is nearly over, and it’s time for you to make the final move, little bird. Which arrow shall I let fly?”

I felt the bloom of Mara’s and Gemma’s power on either side ofme—one quick and nimble as twining vines, the other solid and bright as steel. They had to be as tired as I was, and yet they still found some strength inside themselves. They were ready to fight, and so was I.

I didn’t dare glance at Talan. If I saw how tired he was, how completely it had taxed his demonic power to distract Kilraith from our final deadly secret all this time, I would lose my nerve.

“Come, now, we’re waiting,” Kilraith crooned. Above us, all around us, hissed a sea of excited whispers. “Which one will it be? The god, the friend, the father, or the lover? Quickly, or I’ll kill all of them. You know I will. Five seconds. Four. Three. Two…”

I moved faster than I ever had, humming the opening notes of a rondo to spur me on. From the ruined mess of my gown I withdrew the blazing feather—untouched, unhurt, bright as the sun—and held it high.

I stopped singing only long enough to draw a breath and cry out her name.

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