This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. When we prepared to fight d’Ambray, we always assumed we’d be together. We would be a team. I hadn’t realized how much stronger that belief had made me and how much I had leaned on it until he was gone. Now I felt like my crutch had been jerked out from under me. Well, fate had once again confirmed that when you assume, you make an ass of you and me.

I leaned back and rested my head on the chair’s back. It’d been twenty-four hours since I slept. My side hurt. My left arm was going numb. Breaking Hugh’s ward had cost me. My ribs hurt.

So tired . . .

The Keep would hold against anything Hugh would muster. Of course, it would hold. Even if Hugh had brought every vampire in the People’s stable, it would hold.

I needed to drag myself up and go down to the third floor to see if Doolittle had an update. Just another minute to rest and I would get up . . .

• • •

THE PLAIN ROLLED out before me, far into the distance. It looked like some magical giant had cut the world in half: the bottom was a vast field, the blades of dried grass frosted white with snow, and above it, endless, painted with the pink and orange of sunrise, the sky soared. A colossal tower rose from the grass, silhouetted against the sky, impossibly tall.

The wind stirred my hair. It smelled of wheat.

The clouds churned above the tower.

Anxiety drowned me. I gritted my teeth.

A man strode toward me through the grass. He wore black pants and a fisherman’s sweater of undyed gray wool. Ice crunched under his shoes. Magic shrouded his face. It emanated from him, controlled, but too powerful to be hidden, folded around him the way a condor might fold his wings when not in flight.

A voice rolled through the field, lifting the dead grass. “Child . . .”

I jerked upright.

The door of the room swung open and Doolittle rolled in. He looked the way he usually looked, a black man in his midfifties, his hair touched by gray, his eyes intelligent and kind.

“I told Jim not to bother you.”

“First, it’s not a bother, it’s my job. And with you, young lady, it’s also a challenge. Every time you return to the Keep I wonder what new and inventive way you’ve found to injure yourself.” Doolittle looked at me. “Unless you’re implying that my chair is somehow preventing me from doing my work. In that case, I can . . .”

“No, it’s not what I meant. I just thought stairs would be inconvenient.”

“That’s why I have interns. They carried me up here. I thought of commissioning a palanquin. Something understated.”

“With silk and crimson velvet?”