The guard sighed irritably. “I will show you the way out. Come with me.” She strode forward, and Tanvi followed.

Tanvi touched her pouch of dreamstones for reassurance.

The guard led her back the way she’d supposedly come, but Tanvi couldn’t recall a single detail about this corridor, not even the distinctive green marble floor with its wave motif like the sea. Pressing her lips together, she tried to memorize everything in case she needed to return here later.

As they reached the exit, screams ruptured the air, accompanied by the ring of metal on metal. The guard cursed. “Stay here,” she ordered, then unsheathed her sword and ran toward the noise.

Staring after her, Tanvi recognized the significance of the gray-scale sky, a thing normally never seen in Nagalok. The garudas had arrived.

Tanvi’s first instinct was to run, too, but she quashed it. Instead, she tiptoed forward. How weird that just days ago, every bone in her body had resisted going in public among the nagas. Now she couldn’t stay inside the palace a second longer.

Hadn’t Venkat said he had to present some gift he’d forged? What if he was out there, wounded? Or Asha?

Tanvi held her breath like the air in her lungs was a spell, an incantation to keep everything in stasis until she got outside. She froze when she spotted the guard from the hall, locked in combat with a gleeful garudi.

Bodies, too many, lay on the ground. Tanvi didn’t dare look closely enough to see which ones had quit breathing. The pools of blood, ironically the same color as auspicious wedding red, told her way more than she wanted to know.

Please, she prayed, drifting between the various battles in a daze. None of this felt real. Let them be all right.

Arms that might have been fallen tree trunks filled her vision. She registered the quills next, gold and deadly. Then the red face, the exceptionally long wingspan. Garuda.

Tanvi had never seen him before, but she still recognized him. He dwarfed even the garudas that had attacked at Nitya’s school. Power wafted from him like radiation from a supernova, altering everything it touched.

From somewhere far off, her brain shrieked at her to run. Her legs didn’t budge.

Garuda stood facing two equally colossal nagas who must have been the nagaraja and nagarani. The three of them were hulking monsters, far too big for all the people in the vicinity. Tanvi shuddered. All the people they would trample in their rage. She felt as tiny and exposed as a bug.