I stopped walking so I could face him. “No, Mr. Wolfe. Please, don’t apologize. The dream was mine. You are not at fault.”

He sighed, struggling to believe me. I imagined it was horrifying to see your daughter dragged into a room, crying and bleeding from a wound your phantom had given her.

“That may be, Miss Neven,” Mr. Wolfe said. “But there was truth within it.”

I wondered if he was hinting at my secret—the price for that bejeweled dagger. And then I recalled the armor.

“You forged the armor that Emrys used to walk the new moon,” I said.

He nodded. “I made it long ago. But the inspiration for it has always been betrayal. I began my service to the duchy as a guard, but my mind was given to other things, mainly the spells of metamara. Transforming one thing into another. My father was a smith, and as I held no other skill but to protect and guard, I began to learn how to craft armor and weapons. I soon joined Raven’s inner circle, only because her brother the duke wanted me to create more and more weapons that I felt were dangerous and wrong. And Raven was the only one who was powerful enough to protect me from her brother’s bloody whims.

“She asked me to make enchanted armor. The seven of us who desired to see the duke gone had formed an alliance, and we were to draw stones, to see who would give him the killing blow. Whoever was selected would wear the armor, as a way to protect their identity and themselves from any magic the duke might cast in defense. So I began to forge it, and I thought all would be well with the plan, but none of us realized how slow the armor would make us. And to kill the duke . . . one would have to be swift.

“I completed the armor, but we never used it. I left it in a storage closet in the castle armory, locked away. I forgot all about it when things fell apart, when I fled to Bardyllis.”

I was silent, thinking on his words. I envisioned the duke’s chamber, the bloodstain on the floor. The bones beneath the bed. And I wanted to know who had been the one to kill the duke.

“Who drew the stone?” I asked.

Mr. Wolfe glanced away from me, as if he could not bear to look me in the eye. “What do you mean?”

“Who drew the stone to assassinate the duke?”

“Emrys did.”

I retreated to my chambers. The sun streamed in through the arched windows, and the floor was bitterly cold beneath my feet as I removed my boots.

My mind whirled, thinking of stones and armor and what the wraiths must have been like before the curse had fallen.

I had just pulled the ribbon loose from my braid when a knock sounded on my door.