My grief may tear at my insides still, but the wounds and memories are mine. Mine.

‘They are weak.’

My head jerks back, and Lark’s head turns. “You all right?”

That voice. “Yeah…,” I whisper, but my stomach flips.

I send a silent prayer that my mind is only echoing what I think Arthur might say—not that he can come to me like this without asking. Speak to me without an invitation. That would be far more than the vague emotional resonances that the Legendborn say they feel from their knights. Speech, connection to what I’m seeing and thinking in real time… that is interaction on the cusp of possession. Leaks. Bleed-throughs. Mariah warned me. Smoke under a door, reaching for its host…

My knee begins to bounce.

“And now, a few words from the ancient texts to offer solace in this time of bereavement—” While I was distracted, Aldrich had produced a heavy tome, and began to read from it.

“How dare you!” A voice crackling with anger and grief interrupts his reading.

Beside me, Lark shifts, his body strung with tension.

But it’s not a demon at the service, staring down the Lord Regent. It’s a middle-aged woman.

Evan Cooper’s mother rises to her feet, shoulders trembling. Her seated husband grasps for her forearm, but she steps out of his reach and raises her head defiantly.

“How dare you suggest that we forget our children! Is that what you’d prefer?”

The crowd gasps, and even the aether barrier above ripples slightly, as if one of the Mageguard lost their focus.

Evan’s father is on his feet now, wrapping an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “Regent Aldrich, I apologize for my wife. We mean no disrespect. Bonnie—”

“No!” Bonnie Cooper wrenches away from her husband, thrusting her hand at the dais and the four urns wrapped in black satin ribbon. “We don’t even have a body to bury, John!”

“Bonnie—” Evan’s father protests, but even at this distance I can see his shoulders sag. John Cooper may not agree with his wife’s methods, but each word she says rocks his body like another blow. Pain, linked and compounded.

Aldrich holds his hand out. “No, Congressman Cooper. The only one who would be acting with disrespect is me if I did not answer the call of a grieving Legendborn parent.”

Evan’s parents’ faces are wracked with a mixture of brimming, sharp grief; confusion; and not a small amount of rage.

The Regent beckons Bonnie forward. “Please, speak.”

Evan’s mother pushes ahead. “Regent Aldrich, our Evan was taken from us by a… a monster.” Her voice cracks, tears at the edge of every breath. “We called Evan on his birthday last year, and he spoke to us on video chats from his room. At least, we think it was him—”