“You,” Estelle snarled, and she raised her ram’s head cane high. “You vile, horrid little—” But she seemed too angry to finish her sentence as she sliced her arm through the air and the ram’s head came hurtling down.

A sickening crack resounded through the throne room as the ram’s head connected with bone and flesh. As Estelle pulled her arm back, the ram’s horns glittered darkly red. Claire, however, had seen the horns up close and knew they were not inlaid with rubies. That was blood, reflecting in the torchlight.

But it wasn’t Thorn’s blood.

Thorn still stood, his face white as he looked down at the body of Francis Green crumpled at his feet, a dark stain sprouting from where the ram’s horn had pierced the old man’s heart.

Chapter Twenty-One

CHAPTER

21

The stain on Francis’s chest grew, sprawling and spreading across his tunic like a wild vine. As Claire watched, the bloody vine seemed to grip everyone on the hilltop, wrapping around their feet so that they could not move, wrapping around their tongues so they could not shout. She—and the Forgers, Tillers, Spinners, and Estelle—stood still, seemingly rooted to the ground, until a cry cut the dark.

“Grandfather!”

A dark shadow stumbled out from behind a pillar and sprinted up the grass-patch aisle to where Francis lay. A low, mournful sound rattled against Claire’s skin, as though Nett’s pain had become a living thing. The sound vibrated through Claire like the bass of an unadjusted speaker. It didn’t seem human.

And then Claire realized: that sound—that wail—it wasn’t human. And it wasn’t coming from Nett but from beyond the garden wall.

Estelle understood a second before anyone else. “Royalists, at the ready!”

The foundation of the ruins shuddered a final time, and the crowd scattered to reveal an elderly woman gripping onto a lion chimera with her knees, as the Woven Root army sounded its golden trumpets and thundered into Hilltop Palace.

Claire’s breath caught at the sight. When she’d left Woven Root, there had been only a handful of the beasts unfrozen. But it seemed that with Nett and Sena and the Steeles’ journals, the alchemist handlers had brought life back into at least fifty of the creatures. Copper teeth, copper fangs, copper wings, all streamed through the throne room as easily as sunlight and just as bright. Here and there, though, Claire saw green patches that had not yet been polished, and one chimera—a wolf with a squirrel’s tail—still had moss hanging from its snout. It had clearly been wakened only recently, and as Claire watched, she saw its bushy tail wag furiously in sheer delight.

From somewhere far above Claire’s head, she heard an excited “Purr-ka!”