The faerie healer Orchidspike, out foraging in the Deeps for night-blooming flowers, stopped suddenly and straightened up. She was the oldest faerie in Dreamdark, older by an entire lifetime than the next oldest, but her senses were creature-sharp and she knew the currents of the forest like no other. She looked around, feeling an alien chill riding the air, and shivered. Pulling her shawl tight around her, she picked up her basket of flowers and hurried home.

At the ruin of Issrin Ev, Talon Rathersting discovered what the search parties had failed to find: his kinsmen’s knives abandoned in a shadowed cleft in the cliff. He gathered them up and brought them out, laying them carefully on a flat rock. There were fourteen in all. That was all of them: Wick had been wearing only two; the others had worn four each. All were bare of their sheaths. They’d been drawn and thrown at something sunk in that crevice. The point of one blade was nicked off where it had met rock, hard and fast. None of the knives seemed to have hit flesh or drawn blood, and whatever had been in the crevice, it was gone now, as were the vultures and the warriors who’d gone hunting them.

When several hours had passed yesterday with no sign of their return, Talon had summoned the rest of the Rathersting warriors, his uncles, more cousins, and his sister, Nettle, and they’d sent out rotating search parties all through the day. Talon had stayed behind at the castle keeping the watch, his heart clenched like a fist in his chest as their wings flashed away over the treetops. The shame and yearning boiled into a kind of fury as he watched and waited, feeling the relentless tug of the sky as his feet stayed firmly on the rampart.

Days were long this near the summer solstice and there had been light well into the evening, but the search parties had returned with nothing but haggard faces. Talon and Nettle had stayed up in the tower watching owls hunt over the silent forest, and when the moon was high he’d turned to look at her. She was taller than he, being a half century older, but with nearly identical tattoos and the same royal circlet on the same pale hair. Her eyes were copies of his too, and her heart knew his heart, and she met his gaze evenly, understanding. She put a hand on his arm and said, “Be careful.”

And Talon went over the wall and into the woods, alone.

He stood now in the courtyard of Issrin Ev with the Rathersting daggers laid out at his feet and the moon-cast shadows of broken statues swaying around him. Headless, wingless, toppled, split, and shrouded in moss, the statues made the Magruwen’s temple seem like a monument to suffering and battles lost. It wasn’t. It had been a place of the highest glory until the very day the Djinn himself destroyed it. Bards and scribes and kings had hurried along these paths, their hearts and heads full of great magic. Now it was hard to imagine any but ghosts coming up the long, crumbling stair in the rock face or anything arriving on wing but vultures.