Tomas kept track of the days and nights that passed out of habit rather than as a way of keeping score, as some of his predecessors might have. After the first day, his stomach gurgled and cramped from lack of food. After the second, his mouth was so dry he couldn’t work up enough spit to swallow. After the third, his knees were so bruised and aching that he worried he might never be able to stand again.

More than any of that, however, was the weakness he could feel in his very bones, a weakness not driven by not eating or drinking or being prone in the same position for hours and days on end, but by having not consumed his medicine. The royal apothecary had attended him thrice a day, every day, thus far, even going so far as to press the vial and its glowing contents to his lips, but Tomas had ignored his pleadings, his admonitions, his demands, looking through him to a place in his past he knew he would never be able to see.

The day he was born. The Nightdawn, when the sun refused to complete its daily arc, when the moons and stars hid from its unrelenting light. When his mother stole her hale and healthy baby, Edward. When Tomas survived when fate might’ve had other plans for him.

He wanted to see that night, because something told him those events had been even more important than history could ever paint them, more important than a miracle baby like himself or a stolen one like his brother or a night passing without darkness.

Three days, seventeen hours, and forty-six minutes passed, the longest Time of Mourning ever recorded, before his body failed him. Shadows surrounded him as his slumped to the floor. Cries of servants and attendants who were already frightened by it all rang out amongst a stampede of feet, but they were quickly muffled in his ears, as though they’d been stuffed with cloth.

Finally, he saw what he’d been searching for. A sunlit night. A failed dusk. Not in Marchessault, but in some other small Finfallian town, a village that had probably never been noted in a single line in a single history book. A village that now burned.

Darkness fell, smothering the flames.

Thirty-Two

Ludo

Comman Dur, Finfalla

What happened next, to Ludo at least, was little more than a blur, the harried details of which he would have trouble recalling later.

The lion man said something about Bryony’s hair, which now had a second golden streak against the rest of her dark locks, but Ludo ignored it, because it meant nothing next to their dire situation.