I stumble from the training room with my hand pressed to my mouth. Bile coats the back of my throat.

Bram is waiting in the corridor and his eyes go wide. “What’s wrong?”

Master Kyra is quick at my heels. “Oh good,” she says when she sees Bram. “Saskia needs a Healer. Can you walk with her? Tell Master Dina that she overextended herself during a reading and needs something for nausea.” But she’s wrong. There isn’t a medication in the world that can ease my rolling stomach.

Bram takes my elbow. “Yes, of course.”

I think of Norah saying she’d hand me off to Master Kyra. Did I just get handed off to Bram? I pull my arm away and his hand falls to his side. I ignore his wounded expression and hurry down the corridor.

He races to catch up with me. “What happened?”

But I don’t answer right away. Betrayal, as it turns out, feels a lot like grief. It comes in waves, nearly suffocating me, before receding into something manageable only to gather strength and pummel me all over me again. Norah sat in my home in Midwood. Her eyes welled with tears when I told her what had happened to my mother. She held my hand as she promised to help find Latham and get justice for my family. And yet she was working with him all along.

Just like Declan.

I wait until we’re far from the training wing before I dare speak. Then I spin to face Bram.

“Are you still spying for her?” I ask the question through clenched teeth.

“For who? For Norah? Of course not.”

“Then why were you waiting for me back there?”

“Because we left things in a weird place before. I wanted to talk to you.” He rubs a palm against his cheek. “Saskia, what’s going on? What happened back there?”

I lay a palm flat against my stomach. I feel like fate is mocking me. Using my life like a child’s toy—a quick turn of a kaleidoscope that keeps rearranging everything I think I know. All I can do is wait for a new image to appear.

“Latham didn’t leave the spell book in my room. Norah did.”

He goes very still, and then rage flashes across his expression so suddenly, I take a step back. His hands curl into fists at his sides. The air around him seems to crackle.

“I had nothing to do with this,” he says.

“I trusted her,” I say softly, as much to myself as to Bram.

“I did too. If I’d had any idea—” He takes a deep breath and pinches the bridge of his nose. “What do you want to do now?”

Thoughts whirl around my mind, spinning feverishly until they grow too weary to keep moving. Slowly, like exhausted puppies, they settle and grow still.