“And why should we believe anything you say?” the marquis asked her. “Why should we not take you down to the brandy cellars and let the men there extract the truth from all of you?”

She took a breath. Now that the moment had come, it was surprisingly difficult to put off the cloak of anonymity. “Because you would be torturing the daughter of one of your best and oldest allies, Lord Jino,” she said, straightening her spine, trying to will herself taller and more imposing. “My name is Briony te Meriel te Krisanthe M’Connord Eddon, daughter of King Olin of Southmarch, and I am the rightful princess regent of all the March Kingdoms.”

It’s my dream, he thought. I’m trapped in my own nightmare!

Shouts and screams surrounded him like strange music. The corridors were full of fire and smoke and some of the running, horribly charred shapes were as black and faceless as the men in his dream.

Is that what it meant, then? He staggered to a stop in a wide place at the junction of several tunnels and crouched beside an overturned ore cart. Every bone and sinew in his body had been battered until he could hardly walk, and his crippled arm felt like the bones were grinding together each time it moved. Was my dream telling me that this is where I die?

A small, clumsy shape staggered past him, keening in a shrill, mad voice. Barrick tried to rise, but couldn’t. His heart was shuddering and tripping like a bird’s, and his legs felt as though they would not support a sparrow, let alone his own weight. He let his head sag and tried to breathe.

I don’t want to die here. I won’t die here! But what was the sense of such foolish statements? Gyir hadn’t wanted to die here either but that hadn’t saved him—Barrick had felt the fairy’s dying moment. Ferras Vansen hadn’t wanted to die here either, yet he had still fallen down to certain destruction in the stony black depths. What made Barrick think he would be any different? He was lost in the deeps of an old, bad place, trapped in the dark, surrounded by enemies…

But I have to try. Must. I promised…!

He wasn’t even sure any more what he had promised or to whom: three faces hovered before his eyes, shifting and merging, dissolving and reforming—his sister with her fair hair and loving looks, the fairy-woman with her stony, ageless face, and the dark-haired girl from his dreams. The last was an utter stranger, perhaps not even real, and yet in some ways, at this moment, she seemed more real and familiar than the others.

Push against it, she had told him on that bridge between two nowheres. Escape it. Change it.

He had not understood—had not wanted to understand—but she had insisted he not give up, not surrender to pain.

This is what you have, she had told him, eyes wide and serious. All of it. You have to fight.