The ground—it was warm. And Claire felt a hum. But it didn’t originate from her. It came from the earth itself. Magic was swelling beneath her feet. And she could feel its thrum spread out and sink down, deep …

and deeper …

and deeper into the earth.

“GET OUT OF HERE!” Claire screamed to nobody and everybody as she leaped to her feet. She swayed as the hum rattled her knees. “OUT OF THE RUINS!”

But no one paid her any attention. They were too focused on their own battles. Claire began to run. As she sprinted past a group of huddled dancers hiding behind a fallen stone, she managed to scrape out, “It’s going to collapse! Out!” She didn’t wait for their response but kept running. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

Her cry was picked up, and she could feel people—Forgers, Tillers, Spinners—begin to rush for the open entryway, the wooden doors long ago rotted away. They spilled out into the courtyard. And still, Claire could feel the hum beneath her feet.

“KEEP RUNNING!” Claire shouted. Around her, she was aware of others fleeing into the night. Her feet pounded the cobblestones of the courtyard as she aimed for the crumbling garden wall. But no matter how fast she moved, she couldn’t seem to escape the thrum beneath her feet. The earth shuddered—

—Claire could picture what was happening: Estelle, inside, surrounded and protected by her Royalists, aided by the unicorn artifacts that would now be draped across her, raising the ram’s head cane high and slamming it down—

—and the world cracked open.

Screams and thumps filled the air as fissures and trenches suddenly laced the garden. Whole trees disappeared as the ground opened up beneath. Claire fell and grasped at the grass as the ground undulated, as though it were a trampoline and not solid at all. From the new cracks in the earth, shadows darker than the night rose up like a black fog and, with them, a cold as bitter as hate: wraiths.

Their queen had called them, and they had obeyed.

The wraiths rose up from the newly formed fissures, and Claire realized for the first time that the cracks in the earth’s surface weren’t natural but followed straight lines and sharp edges. The queen had collapsed the tunnels that must have crisscrossed beneath Hilltop Palace, just as they crisscrossed beneath Starscrape Citadel and the Drowning Fortress—all built by Gemmer architects.

Claire had wondered once before where wraiths dwelled during the daylight hours, and here was the answer: under the earth, away from the sun, the only thing that wraiths feared, aside from a unicorn’s horn.

But Sophie had no horn, and the sun was hours away.