With a hand on her shoulder, Merritt gently eased her back against the trunk of the massive oak. Dark, crooked arms of branches stretched out overhead like some great monster about to embrace her in its clutches. The moon cast a cold, eerie light across the angular features of Merritt’s handsome face.

Magda heard a rustling sound and looked up to one of the great branches of the ancient oak. There, perched in a crook on the limb, a raven ruffled its feathers.

She looked into the raven’s black eyes as it sat quietly watching her. The last time she had seen a raven had been down in the maze when the dead man had been chasing her.

Merritt slowly drew the sword. The sound of the blade rang through the night, drawing her gaze back to him.

Magda wet her lips. “What are you going to do?”

“Use the Sword of Truth to help you be reborn a Confessor.”

Magda’s concern was growing by the second. “Reborn? How? What are you going to do with it?”

He almost seemed to be looking out at her from a distant world. “Do you trust me?”

She wished he wouldn’t keep asking her that. “I told you that I do.”

“Then please, Magda, don’t ask.”

She nodded. “I’m sorry. Tell me what you need me to do.”

With one hand, Merritt pressed her shoulders back against the tree. “I need you to let me do what I must.”

With the sword in his other hand, he placed the tip of the blade in the center of her chest.

She could see so much more in his hazel eyes than merely the glow of his gift. His eyes were gentle, yet at the same time they were charged with fierce intensity. More than that, though, she could see wisdom, integrity, competence, and the sort of rage she’d never seen before. Some of that, she knew, was coming from the Sword of Truth. Some, though, was all his.

She had seen the hint of that rage when she had first met him and told him that Isidore was dead. His was a temper that had the potential to be devastatingly violent, and yet at the same time he was also a man able to control it and focus it.

He was focusing it now.

Combined with the rage from the sword, such fury was frightening to behold.

Magda glanced down and saw the blade glowing white.

“Merritt . . .”

The blade turned from a white glow to an inky black that was like looking into the depths of the underworld. The air around her crackled with threads of light, both the pure white light of Additive Magic, and the sinister void of Subtractive. They wrapped her in a cocoon of magic that dimmed the world.

Magda couldn’t seem to stop herself from trembling.

“Merritt . . .”

“Are you sure about this, Magda? Are you certain?”