A gold-plated eye of Kavar.

My lungs collapse. The whispers are instant.

“Isn’t that one of those decorations on the Tarroux carriage?”

“Why has he brought it here? Did something happen?”

The guard takes the eye from the boy gingerly and grimly asks a quiet question of him. The boy’s answer is one word, louder than the guard, his voice cracking and hoarse.

“Witch.”

The crowd suddenly unravels, people touching their eyelids and invoking Kavar’s name, others turning green around the edges, and more than a few staggering back.

“Witches? Did witches kill them?”

“They left just last night. This can’t be happening!”

“The roads are supposed to be heavily guarded!”

“The war, oh New God, the war has truly come.”

My throat bobs. No. Lady Tarroux…I just talked to her yesterday. Hours ago. The crowd is so busy fearing for themselves that they leave a space between them just large enough for me to muscle through. I approach the boy as the guard tries to reassure everyone, maintain the peace.

“Please calm yourselves! We have no information—”

“How much more do you need?” someone in the crowd shouts back. “Look at his clothes! Look at the eye!”

My own eyes rivet to Kavar’s eye in the guard’s hand, the gold plating dented, scratched deeply and violently. Gold is a soft metal—it doesn’t take much to batter it, but the sheer jagged pattern of the scratches is familiar. I’ve seen these scratches before, but on flesh. Too small to be wildcat. Too big to be wolf.

Heartless claw marks.

The boy’s ashen face stares up at me, and now closer, I can finally discern on his jaw the fine spray of blood. Not his own. Someone else’s. Someone whom he was standing very close to when their arteries were cut open. My unheart twists for someone so young going through something so traumatic. But worry burns across my lips.

“All of them?” I ask, my voice cracking. The stableboy’s green eyes fog up, but having the eye taken from him seems to have jostled some of his shock loose in him. He’s quiet, but then, slowly and with great effort, he swallows and nods.

My ears ring with my thoughts as I walk woodenly away from the boy, from the hysterical crowd.

All of them. Lady Ania Tarroux. She’s dead.

We just spoke in the same spot I’m standing in right now as I flag down the carriage to South Gate. I watched her drive off, her milk-blond hair glimmering away into a mote of nothingness. I saw her blush when I brought up Lucien. Her hand was warm beneath mine.

Nothing about this moment feels real. The heat of the sun, the scent of the fresh grass—it all mutes to a dull nothingness.