Where she now lay looking horrifyingly small, hair pooled in a black puddle around her ashen face.

Rowan was already huddled over her, his own face drawn with fear, while Gareth paced back and forth next to them with his hands clasped behind his head, muttering “fuck, fuck, fuck,” under his breath on loop. Maybe he was sincerely frightened for her, too; but my mind leapt immediately to the less kind conclusion that he was considering any possible consequences for himself.

Rowan and Talia might have made the antimagic ring, but Gareth was the one who’d wrested it apart so hard that its shards had shattered into her.

“There you are,” Rowan breathed in relief as I dropped to my knees beside him, person-sized once again. “I have no fucking clue what to do for her. She’s bad, Em. Nothing’s broken, or otherwise seriously damaged on a bio level, I can feel that much . . . but Emmy, look at her eyes.”

Gently, so gently, I tipped Talia’s head toward me, biting back a gasp. Her lovely eyes were open wide, but unseeing and pitch-black. No irises, no sclera, nothing clear or white showed through. Just the glistening swim of all that murk, as though she was filled to the brim with ectoplasm. The garnet at her throat shone dull and dead, not even a flicker of light still living in its facets; struck through with a starburst fracture as though it had been shattered.

For some reason this scared me most of all, my heart seizing up painfully in my chest. What happened to an Avramov, when their garnet broke?

“Is she going to be okay?” Gareth asked from behind me, voice strained. “I didn’t, I really didn’t mean—”

“I don’t know. We need Elder Avramov,” I said tightly, half mantle and half me, cutting him off. “We need—”

I heard a low whoosh, followed by the sharp rap of boot heels on stone—then Talia’s mother was at my shoulder, as if she’d heard me call for her.

“Let me see her,” she ordered, curls of ectoplasm still wisping around her body from whatever spell she’d used to get here so fast.

I nodded and moved aside without question; whatever this affliction was, there was nothing the mantle’s magic could do for Talia now.

With grim efficiency, Elena examined her eldest daughter, running her hands over her face, throat, and chest, peering into her mouth and those unnerving blackened eyes. As she worked, more people trickled into the courtyard, holding their conversations in a low, worried murmur to keep from distracting her. The elders had all gathered, along with their immediate families; in one corner stood Igraine with Lyonesse and Merritt, Gareth’s parents, his siblings Gawain and Nineve’s bright blond heads bobbing nervously around them. My parents and the Thorns clustered in their own tight group nearby, with Linden and Lark at its heart, their arms around each other. And Talia’s three siblings stood to their other side in a line, like ravens perching on telephone wire, close to each other but not quite touching.