“Just be safe, Bryn,” Ridley had said, his voice thick and far away.

“I will do my best,” I’d promised him.

He sighed. “I should be there with you.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” I said firmly. We’d already gone over this before I left. After the Kanin Civil War—and after Ridley had been tortured—he’d suffered very debilitating PTSD.

We all did, really—everyone in Doldastam—to varying degrees. But Ridley had been through things that left him unfit for combat. He panicked and froze if he heard certain things or when he smelled blood.

Coming here would have only made him a liability, plus I’d be way too busy worrying about him. So I asked him to stay in Doldastam to help coordinate and do what he could from there.

“I still hate that I’m not there with you,” Ridley said finally.

“I know.” Tears stung my eyes. “I love you, Ridley.”

“I love you too,” he said. “Come home safe.”

Now, in the underground greenhouse of the lost city of Áibmoráigi, I wondered if I could keep my promise to him.

Wendy surveyed the small group of us standing in a semicircle around her, in a humid room that smelled like lilacs and dirt. Her expression was grim, her clothes bloody and torn, and I realized that I’d never seen a Queen look so worried and disheveled.

“Does anybody have ideas about what to do?” she asked, and the silence that followed was deafening.

“We have enough food to stay here awhile,” Tove said, and absently played with a leafy vine from a plant hanging above.

“That’s not a permanent solution,” Wendy said.

“It might end up one,” Sumi said, sounding resigned as she looked around the room.

“No, it won’t,” Finn said with strong conviction. “I will get back to my children, or I will die trying.”

“I know,” Sumi said. “I’m saying that you’ll probably die.”

Finn bowed his head slightly and pinched the bridge of his nose. “We have to come up with something more than just sitting here.”

“Isn’t that docent Elof looking into the old scrolls?” Wendy asked. Her hands were clasped in front of her, twisting together. “Looking for an incantation or some way to fight this?”

Loki scoffed. “That’s how we got trapped in this snow globe from hell.”

“They trapped us in this mess before the wyrm could do more damage,” Sumi argued.

“That’s all well and good, but we should’ve evacuated everyone first,” Loki said, and cast a look over at his wife.

“Yeah, we should’ve done a lot of things differently, but here we are,” Tove muttered.

They went round and round like that, sniping at each other out of frustration. I don’t know how long they spent debating the merits of undoing the protection spell, but I had stopped contributing.