Right above the case floated three feathers, wrought of delicate blue light; perfectly rendered down to the vane, the hollow shaft, and the downy barbs. Three, one for each of the combatants to collect.

And since all of them were here, that meant I was the first to decipher this particular clue.

Grinning, I reached to pluck one of the feathers from the air. As soon as I touched it, it absorbed into my palm with a tingling buzz. Surging with triumph, I turned in a tight little circle, rotating the rest of the clues in my mind. “Caelia’s dream” meant next to nothing to me, though there was the very faintest plink of recognition at the thought, like a drop falling from a leaky faucet several rooms over. Nagging and insistent, but not particularly enlightening.

But “Alastair’s heart” brought up something more concrete—a memory of a much younger Linden in spring, leading me by the hand to the copse behind Honeycake Cottage, where she rested her palm against the trunk of a tree blooming with pale pink flowers like pastel stars.

“This was my great-great-great-great-great-grandpa Alastair’s favorite tree,” she’d told me, patting the bark with something between reverence and fondness. I smiled at the memory, recalling how she’d always tacked on some arbitrary number of “greats” before his name. “The first one he planted on our land. If you fall asleep under it, you’ll dream of him. I always do.”

As the memory faded, I closed my eyes and thought myself toward Alastair’s ancient hawthorn.

When I opened them, I was standing beneath it, its branches bursting with scarlet berries like drops of heart’s blood crystallized. Just below one of the lower-reaching boughs hung a single glowing blue berry, like a ghost of the others, with two frilled leaves poised daintily to either side. I reached up to pluck it, my heart sinking a little; if there was only one left, that meant both Gareth and Rowan had managed to get here before me. Rowan, because of course he would have known where to look for Alastair’s heart; Gareth, because Linden had probably brought him here to introduce him to the tree, back when she still thought they were in love.

The thought of him using this ill-gotten inside information yanked brutally at my gut—yet another thing he’d stolen from Lin and turned to his advantage. But, with a fresh glow of excitement dawning inside me, I realized that I had some insider info up my own sleeve, too.

I happened to know an Avramov pretty well—and she had already shown me Margarita’s “eye.”

Moments later, I was in Talia’s blue-tinted room, her familiar perfume coiling up my noise. The scent sparked stinging memories of us together, rising from the dark like radiant specters, our opposite-of-shadow selves shedding all that remembered heat and light. As tears prickled in my eyes, I shunted all that aside; that was for later, once this thing was done and dusted. I couldn’t afford to be waylaid by emotion now.