For the second time tonight, pain strikes me from within. Worse now, because I’d shoved it away earlier. The deep ache of losing Nick is not the obliterative wave of grief I still feel when I think of my mother, but something sharper. This grief slips between my ribs like a scalpel. A thing I gasp against but can’t prevent. The trees blur. My eyes sting. I stop walking.

Nick was right beside me when he was taken. He’d just lost his title and been betrayed by his father, and yet he chose to stay with me while I recovered in his bed. Sometimes, I think I remember the heat of his breath against my collarbone, the reassuring weight of his arm across my middle. Words, whispered into my shoulder: “You and me, B.”

“Bree.” William steps in my line of sight. His voice is low, to soothe. “We don’t have any reason to believe his father would harm him.”

I blink away the prick of tears. “Harm will find him. At this rate, well before we do.”

William chooses his words carefully. “It’s been two hundred and forty-five years since a Scion of Arthur was last Called. No one alive has ever witnessed the moment in which we are living. Everything I know of the High Council of Regents would support their being… measured. Careful in how they proceed when war is on the horizon and Onceborn lives are at stake—”

“Onceborn lives aren’t the only lives at stake,” I insist. “Nick was abducted by a murderer. His life is at stake too!”

William presses his lips into a patient line. “As is yours.”

I don’t usually argue with William, not really. But on this topic, we have gotten into a regular dance of point, counterpoint.

“Except that anyone who knows about the Order still believes that Nick is the Scion of Arthur.” I take a deep breath. “And his father and Isaac have him out there on the run with some unknown number of Shadowborn still hellbent on killing him. Which means his life is currently in far more danger than mine is.”

There is no arguing with this, and William doesn’t try to. Keeping my identity secret for my own safety was the very first order that the Regents handed down. Up until Arthur Called me in the ogof y ddraig, Nicholas Davis was the Scion of Arthur. To the Legendborn world, Nicholas Davis is still the Scion of Arthur. But in reality, he’s not. I am. Nick is not on a leave of absence from school to prepare to ascend the throne; he’s been kidnapped, and I am the one preparing. Right now, there are fewer than twenty people in the world who know that—and my life depends on that circle of trust remaining as small as possible.