“This will be a brief chapter in the history of the Imperishable Order,” Zara said. “Or whatever historians end up calling us. Anyway, the point is, when we see that the time is right to leave Idris and we have the whole world to set to rights, no one is going to bother recording that you missed olive loaf. They’re going to write about all the battles that we won, and how good we looked winning them, and how all our enemies like Emma Carstairs died pitifully choking on their own pleas for mercy.”

“Last time I looked, she was partying on a beach,” Manuel said. “As if she wasn’t thinking about us at all.”

“Good,” Zara said. “Let them not think about us. And then let us be the last thing they ever see. Come on. The wards are holding. Let’s get back before there’s nothing left for lunch.”

And like that, the voices were gone. Livvy was alone in the green meadow, Idris as inaccessible as ever. But she had succeeded, sort of, hadn’t she? She hadn’t gotten past the wards, but she had gathered information. She’d learned, what? That the Cohort was low on food, and just as unpleasant as ever. They had some sort of plan to emerge at some unknown date from Idris, in some kind of surprise attack. Most important, they seemed to be able to spy, somehow, on the outside world. She should go back to Ty and report what she had learned. All she had to do was tug on that strand of necromantical magic that connected her to Ty, and she would go flying back. This was the farthest she had ever gone from her twin, and it was not entirely a comfortable sensation. And yet it was a sensation and Livvy found herself savoring it. There was so little left to feel. For months now she had been less than a shadow at Ty’s heels. Now, stretched so far away from him, she felt both more and less solid than she had been.

She sank into the grassy meadow, feeling herself growing smaller and smaller until the blades of grass towered around her. The noise of the insects changed—where before it had been shrill, now it slowed and grew thunderous. Why could she hear and see but not touch anything? She stretched out her hand toward a towering stalk of grass and then drew it back with a gasp. There was a bead of blood on her palm as if she had cut herself on the green edge. And when she raised her hand to her mouth, her blood was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted. She closed her eyes, savoring the taste, and when she opened them again, she was floating above the placid black nothing of Dimmet Tarn.