“Just wondering if you have any grand plans to get us both out of this unscathed.” It sounded more hopeful and pathetic than Wren intended.

When Una met her gaze, it was steady as stone. “I’ll try.”

Although try was far from reassuring, it was all Wren could ask for.

A cacophonous sound rent open the silence as every clock struck ten. As the chime of the largest clock echoed through the hall and vibrated in Wren’s skull, Isabel’s straight-backed attendant materialized in the threshold of a stairwell. “Her Majesty will see you now.”

They followed the lacy train of the attendant’s skirt up a spiraling staircase and into a stone antechamber. At one end loomed a massive set of doors carved with the royal seal: a full moon flanked by a waxing and waning crescent. That symbol alone was enough to send Wren’s heart skittering off course.

Breathe. Wren squeezed her hands to flush blood into her deadened fingers. Breathe.

She still hadn’t found her nerve when Una pushed open the doors to the queen’s office. Cold air billowed into the hall and settled heavy on Wren’s shoulders. In five shaky strides, she crossed the antechamber and entered the room, where the middle-aged queen sat behind a mahogany writing desk. Rigid and imperious as a stone-carved icon, Isabel did not deign to lift her head as Wren took her place beside Una.

Wren never failed to be struck by the queen’s beauty, too sharp to look at straight on. No one would guess they were related, which was how Isabel preferred it. With her auburn hair and hazel eyes, Wren’s royal blood had been effectively diluted by her father’s common genes. Isabel, meanwhile, was a Southerland through and through: pale white skin, hair the color of a summer wine, eyes that gleamed like quartz. Myth had it that Danubian queens’ blood flowed right from the Goddess’s veins into theirs. Wren believed it. As beautiful and withholding as the moon, Isabel could be nothing less than the Goddess made mortal.

She was reading the notebook Una had confiscated from the boy. During the carriage ride to Knockaine, Wren had pored over it so many times, she’d burned Byers’s name behind her eyelids. It made his absence—and her failure—seem more real. She couldn’t bear losing anyone else. And Danu couldn’t afford to lose any more soldiers. During the last years of the war, the military had been decimated. Only the greenest, youngest recruits—and those like Una, already war heroes at eighteen—remained.

If war broke out, what would happen to the rest of them?