“Your prince, however, does not know how. It runs quite wild in him.”

“Can you teach him how to…you know.”

She shakes her mane of tawny hair. “Unfortunately, it’s something that requires years of practice. I could give him some basics, but I fear he doesn’t like me very much.”

“No, it’s not—”

“Rather, he doesn’t like the High Witches.” She interrupts me smoothly, without a hint of judgment. Her eyes crinkle. “Few do. They are leaders, not friends.”

“Why were they…” I swallow. “All that glass. Like it was growing. I saw it growing.” Nightsinger’s smile fades, and I press on. “What is that stuff? Magic? Why is it poking out of the ground all around the city—”

“I’m sorry, Zera,” she says, whirling away. “I have to go. But Crav and Peligli are having dinner at Y’shennria’s tonight. Her apartments are one level above you, facing south. Tell her I said hello, would you?”

“Nightsinger.”

She looks back over her shoulder ever so slightly.

“I’m sorry, Zera. But you are no longer mine. This divides us in spirit, but you will always be in my heart.”

She’s in a human shape one moment, and the next her sleeves elongate, her tawny mane wraps around and into her, covering her in white feathers as she shrinks, grows wings, and flies off into the night. I watch her until she’s a faint speck of snow spiraling down into the trees of Fox quarter.

There are so many stars up here, so completely free from cloud cover that they radiate their own light. Packed tight and close, like diamonds on a queen’s bodice, they glimmer among the silky darkness of the sky.

The queen. Queen Kolissa, Varia and Lucien’s mother. She’s dead, isn’t she? Ash, like most of Vetris.

She killed her mother.

She said she would carve the world anew, not raze it. But how much of her is her, anymore, and how much is the Bone Tree? Who destroyed Vetris? Varia or the Bone Tree demanding destruction inside her?

I breathe in and try to focus on anything else. The Red Twins peek over the horizon, rising equally as slow as the sunset, their crimson craniums bare, shy, and waning new. The starlight catches on the ground, radiating into and out of the chunks of glass jutting from Windonhigh’s grass, and the bad feeling in my stomach balloons like a child blowing a sheep’s kidney full of air. I can’t even pinpoint it—I can’t tell whether it’s fear or anger. All I know is this feeling is bad. Terrible. Something bad is here, around me. Or maybe in me. I don’t know anymore. But it only gets louder when I stare at those chunks of raw glass growing up from the dirt.

Something wrong.

Something terrible.