He had been just down the hallway. Had someone managed to steal the old queen right from under his nose? Or did he somehow have even less knowledge and control than he thought? Could she have walked free herself somehow?

He had sent all those soldiers off searching and here was the breach right under his very eye. Where he slept and worked. Humiliation burned deep in his gut, and he charged toward the bed, pulling at the sheets as if he might find some clue there to how he had allowed such a blunder.

Could this be the Stormlord? Another prong in his plan? The meager resistance his brother had been cheerfully exterminating to impress their father? Or something else entirely? There were too many pieces on the board for him to win this game. The board was too damned big for him to even know what the game was sometimes.

Quickly, he searched the rest of the room, searching for any advantage, and he found it in the poorly closed balcony door. Outside, he discovered a peculiar crawling vine that had somehow made its way from the ground up to the queen’s balcony even though he had never seen it on any of his walks around the grounds. He touched the leaves, bright green and crisp—fresh. And something else about them—they were real, to be certain, but they hummed under his touch, as if they brimmed with something that was nearly familiar to him.

Cassius knew what he was seeing, knew it by heart from years of engrained warnings and fear. But his father had done such a thorough job of eradicating the practice and the people from Locke, it had often seemed more myth than malevolence.

But here before him was proof.

He rubbed a newly birthed leaf between the pads of his fingers, and plucked it free from the vine. He waited for it to wither or turn to dust, but it stayed—both a truth and a lie all at once.

There was a witch in Pavan.

And whoever they were, wherever they were, they had the Pavan queen.

There had been an itch somewhere beneath Kiran’s skin from the moment he’d left Aurora sprawled out and weeping before the palace gate, and he knew it would not go away until he saw her again. It distracted him throughout the entire mission, as they crept through the halls, each time they quietly dispatched an unsuspecting guard. He kept waiting for an attack to come out of nowhere, and for a sword to pierce him clean through, because he could do nothing but think of that look on her face. Try as he might to convince himself that he did not know this Aurora at all, he knew down to his bones that she had been terrified.

And he had left her there.