The healer bows low. She knows the grave reason as well as I. “Yes, Your Grace.”

The king dismisses the healers back to their duties, thanking them again for their discretion. Before she leaves, the Chief Healer’s gaze goes to a figure huddling in the corner, clinging to the shadows as if they provide some protection. Ah, I think. She’s seen him.

I wonder if she remembers him. The deserter’s name was on everybody’s lips when he abandoned his duties a little over a year ago. But no one knows his name more surely than I. He had been the Ninth Sentinel before me.

Now I am sitting in his former seat, having taken his place as part of the King’s Council.

No one gathered here would address him with a title anymore. He is only Noam, a deserter at best and a traitor at worst.

I desperately want to ask him what caused him to leave the proud city of the Heliana for Balmora—the continent that our people sometimes call the “lost land”—but I set my selfish curiosity aside for now. Such conversations can wait until after we receive the humans’ reply.

With the king’s permission, Sentinels Hammond and Renna flew to Balmora’s mountains last week in desperation, seeking Noam’s advice about the horrible illness spreading like a fire among the Leonodai children, some just a few years old. The healers were unable to treat it, and the scholars were baffled. Noam listened to the symptoms with a growing dread in his eyes, and Renna told me later that he asked right away if we’d found dead birds in our city. We had.

“The birds carry the disease wherever they go,” he had warned us. “If what you say is true, you have days to act. You must ask for aid from the human capital city, Ramsgate.”

Though he was technically exiled for desertion, ironically, we couldn’t have made an offer of peace without Noam. In the year since he’d left, Noam had learned much of the human language. While the king and council of sentinels had discussed our options, he alerted the humans in his village to what was happening. In a blur of days, each of the Four Kingdoms had agreed to offer peace, and the human leaders had agreed to meet our messenger at the Cliffs.

Back in the present, a flash of gold on the horizon stops time. I stifle a gasp, but not well enough. Other eyes follow where mine linger.

“My king—” starts Sentinel Renna when she sees.

“I see her,” the king replies. “Skies keep us. The humans have given their answer.”