“They’re the Blood who rule, Tersa,” Daemon says sadly. “Who is left to call in this debt? Bastard slaves like me?”

I’m slipping fast. My nails dig into his hands, drawing blood, but he doesn’t pull away. I lower my voice. He strains to hear me. “The Darkness has had a Prince for a long, long time. Now the Queen is coming. It may take decades, even centuries, but she is coming.” I point with my chin at the Lords and Ladies sitting at the tables. “They will be dust by then, but you and the Eyrien will be here to serve.”

Frustration fills his golden eyes. “What Queen? Who is coming?”

“The living myth,” I whisper. “Dreams made flesh.”

His shock is replaced instantly by a fierce hunger. “You’re sure?”

The room is a swirling mist. He’s the only thing still in sharp focus. He’s the only thing I need. “I saw her in the tangled web, Daemon. I saw her.”

I’m too tired to hang on to the real world, but I stubbornly cling to his hands to tell him one last thing. “The Eyrien, Daemon.”

He glances at Lucivar. “What about him?”

“He’s your brother. You are your father’s sons.”

I can’t hold on anymore and plunge into the madness that’s called the Twisted Kingdom. I fall and fall among the shards of myself. The world spins and shatters. In its fragments, I see my once-Sisters pouring around the tables, frightened and intent, and Daemon’s hand casually reaching out, as if by accident, destroying the fragile spidersilk of my tangled web.

It’s impossible to reconstruct a tangled web. Terreille’s Black Widows may spend year upon frightened year trying, but in the end it will be in vain. It will not be the same web, and they will not see what I saw.

In the gray world above, I hear myself howling with laughter. Far below me, in the psychic abyss that is part of the Darkness, I hear another howling, one full of joy and pain, rage and celebration.

Not just another witch coming, my foolish Sisters, but Witch.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

1 / Terreille

Lucivar Yaslana, the Eyrien half-breed, watched the guards drag the sobbing man to the boat. He felt no sympathy for the condemned man who had led the aborted slave revolt. In the Territory called Pruul, sympathy was a luxury no slave could afford.

He had refused to participate in the revolt. The ringleaders were good men, but they didn’t have the strength, the backbone, or the balls to do what was needed. They didn’t enjoy seeing blood run.

He had not participated. Zuultah, the Queen of Pruul, had punished him anyway.

The heavy shackles around his neck and wrists had already rubbed his skin raw, and his back was a throbbing ache from the lash. He spread his dark, membranous wings, trying to ease the ache in his back.

A guard immediately prodded him with a club, then retreated, skittish, at his soft hiss of anger.