There was a library in Yanna. Crier had never been; the sovereign had never allowed it. She’d never even seen the library in real life. But she had seen illustrations. A painting, once. The library was made of pale pink stone, same as the Old Palace at the heart of the city. It must have looked resplendent at sunrise and sunset, illuminated in pink and gold and ripe-peach orange. It was huge, the size of a city square, six stories tall, with a dome that, before the War of Kinds, had been painted with gold leaf. There were dozens of human poems about that golden dome: the half-sun, the harvest moon, fallen to earth. A golden fruit. A god’s golden eye. Inside, the library was open and airy, the walls lined with hundreds of thousands of books and scrolls, in the Zullan tongue and the language of the alchemists and a thousand others. Crier thought of that library often. She imagined herself walking through it slowly, trailing her fingers across all those dusty spines, selecting a book at random, reading it, memorizing it, selecting another. She didn’t need to sleep like humans did. She could have stayed awake in that library for days and days, just reading. Just breathing in the smell of sacred things. In another life, she could have done that. In this one, it felt impossible. As did kinship and Ayla and everything else she’d ever wanted.

“Ayla?”

Crier came back to herself.

“We won’t give up,” Hook told her, reassuring. He must have taken her silence for despair. “We never give up.”

Crier took a deep breath. Briny lake-smell in her lungs. “Never?”

“Never,” he said.

“Because . . .” She remembered Ayla standing over her. Ayla gripping a knife. The knife quivering in Ayla’s hand. The look on Ayla’s face: at the time, Crier had thought it was anger. Now, she thought perhaps it had been fear. “Because there are things worth dying for.”

“Nah,” said Hook, and he rolled his shoulders, twisted from side to side, stretched his arms up over his head, shook himself out. “Because there are still things worth living for.”

Crier had worried the rebels would hate her for leading them to a dead end, but it didn’t seem that way at all. They’d waited until dusk and then picked their way down the sloping shores to the beach, where Crier’s boots sank into the wet sand with every step. Finally she just took the boots off and went barefoot, thrilled with the sensation of cold wet sand between her toes. They found an overhang of rock and clay, a pocket deep enough to hide the light of a small fire, and set up camp for the night, tying the horses outside, close enough to the water that they could drink their fill. Bree and Mir made a driftwood fire, and Crier watched, fascinated, as the flames turned blue and green. It reminded her of the Reaper’s Moon celebration all those weeks ago, masked humans dancing around the bonfire, tossing in bits of algae. Cheering and drinking when the fire flashed blue. And Ayla in the midst of it all.