A cold wind blew by, rattling the autumn leaves, lifeless and brown, around her feet. Claire took a breath as she considered his words. Thorn had lied, yes, but he’d also helped Sophie, Sena, and Nett escape from the Drowning Fortress. And he’d directed the other Royalists in the Historium away from her. And because of him, she hadn’t become a Claire-shaped smear across one of Needle Pointe’s townhouses.

Claire slipped a hand into her cloak’s pocket and felt the curve of her pink marble. “Thorn, do you know what happened to Unicorn Rock?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It was already destroyed by the time I got there.”

“And did you ever wonder if maybe Sophie and I beat you to the Sorrowful Plains?”

Though it was dark, she could practically feel the heat coming from his cheeks at the mention of his lie. He’d told them they could take a shortcut through Mount Rouge, when in truth, he’d hoped the twisting miners’ tunnels and cave-ins would slow them down. “I just—I never really thought—”

As he sputtered into the night, Claire pulled out her marble. With a quick brush against her sleeve, she set it aglow. Light pulsed in her palm, looking as though she’d fished a tiny pink star from the ocean of sky.

Thorn’s eyes bugged out. “Claire! You’re a Gemmer?”

“Did you know a wyvern lives in Mount Rouge?” Claire answered his question with a question. “I asked her for help, and she guided us out.”

“Guided you out?” Thorn repeated incredulously.

“Well,” Claire said, thinking a moment more, “we actually rode her out.”

“You—you rode a wyvern.” He shook his head. But though the tone of his voice was disbelieving, the expression in his eyes as he stared at the glowing marble was one of a hungering hope.

“I found my magic before you even got to the Sorrowful Plains. Before you woke Estelle,” Claire said and wrapped her fingers around the marble. Light streamed out from around her knuckles, sending rays of pink light to dance across Thorn’s tunic. “You’ve always had magic, Thorn. Estelle can’t take it away from you.”

Claire wasn’t a natural storyteller like Sophie or a trained one like Kleo or even an enthusiastic one like Lyric, but she’d gone over the events of that night so many times that the words came easily: the hours in the Petrified Forest, the truth behind the hunter, and Prince Martin’s great gamble to flee with the Great Unicorn Treasure until Arden was safe for unicorns again.

As she spoke, Thorn began to look like he had more in common with an empty seashell than a fourteen-year-old boy. And when she was done, he, too, was sitting on the grass, his head bent to his knees.