“‘We’re in Breych. It’s a small Helkyrisian city just on the border.’” Malachite pauses, making his own addendum. “And is full of boring things like books. ‘Varia’s alive,’” he continues. “‘I’m sure of it. Fione and I are fine—I’ve gone to speak with the sage, and she’s conferencing with the local polymaths. We’ll be back soon with a plan. In the meantime, please rest. Yours, Lucien.’”

“Is he really fine?” I press, zooming my face into the parchment. “Is Fione—”

“Don’t ask me how.” Malachite grunts as he crumples up the parchment and lobs it smoothly out the thin stone-cut window. “But he managed to cushion our fall with whatever scrap of magic he unbelievably had left. And by some stroke of rune-crusted luck, we ended up hitting one of Breych’s many safety nets.”

“Safety…nets?”

He sighs. “Knowing you, you won’t get it until you see it for yourself.”

He stands from the chair at my bedside and heads for the window, and my perfectly healed body follows him, the holes and tears in my clothes funneling cold air onto my skin. It’s so bitterly cold—far colder than Cavanos ever gets, even in the dead of winter. The beneather motions with one long hand to the window, and I stick my head out.

“Vachi-godsdamn-ayis.” I breathe a white-cloud swear.

It’s the city of towers I saw on my hike up to the Bone Tree, but real and eye level. It looked so small when I had Varia on my back, like a toy set for a child, and now it’s looming all around me, on every side. Towers. Dozens upon dozens of towers, built straight off the stone of three mountain ridges, stately and yet placed in chaotic, half-baked rows. Some towers are grand and huge, with gargoyles carved in bone-moth likenesses and steeples of gold and lapis lazuli, while others barely look sturdy at all, their wooden supports rickety and their stone sills sagging with thick beards of moss, the roofs gabled simply in green and purple tile. Between the three close ridges runs a dizzying spate of rope bridges back and forth, some wide, some thin, but all of them connecting the towers. Sunset peeks out from between two towers, catching the diamond glass of their roofs.