I stared into the elongated pupil, and suddenly, I was far above the ground. Soaring. Swooping. Flying. Beneath me raged a battle unlike anything I’d ever seen. A wave of gold and green crashed against a wall of frosted blackness, a chaos of creatures that defied description: man and beast, and everything in between. Fighting, warring, as far as the eye could see. It was dawn and dusk; the ebb and flow of the seasons. But as I circled above, there was no mistaking that the battle line was moving. That the dawn was being pushed back.

“Your world lured my people from me,” he said into my ear. “The iron bound them, and the witch locked them away, whole bloodlines lost. I would have them back.”

I lowered my hand, swaying as my vision was once again my own. “That’s impossible. The trolls are mortal – they cannot pass between worlds. And if there was a way to change that, they’d have found it.”

The orb disappeared, replaced by a book that was deeply familiar to me. “I lost this,” I said, letting the cover fall open. “It’s at the bottom of the lake.”

“Do you still need it?”

I didn’t. Not really. It had been in my possession long enough that I knew nearly all of the spells by heart. Well enough to know that none of them could do what he wanted.

“It will take someone or something more knowledgeable and powerful than I am to accomplish this task,” I pleaded, knowing what it meant to be dealt an impossible request. “I’m only a human witch.”

“You limit yourself,” he said. “Sometimes, one must become the unimaginable.”

I shook my head. “You ask too much.”

“Your debt has been called due, Cécile de Montigny,” he said, my name ringing in my ears like a bell. “I will have all my people back in Arcadia, and you will make it happen.”

And before I could press him as to how I might accomplish such a feat, my body was wrenched back into blackness.

“Breathe, you cursed weakling of a human!”

Sunlight burned into my retinas, and I heaved a mouthful of air into my lungs before knocking Angoulême’s hands away from my chest so that I could roll over and heave my guts out onto the damp earth. Shoving aside all thought of Summer, I propped myself up on one elbow, the water soaking into my sleeve warm, mist rising up in a ghostly cloud that partially obscured the broken statues surrounding the muddy lakebed. The Duke was crouched next to me, blood still pouring from the circular wound on his neck.

“Heal this,” he snarled, “or on my last breath, I’ll command Roland to destroy the world and everyone you love.”

“You could’ve asked nicely,” I whispered, my throat raw. Before he could respond, I slapped my hand against the wound, took hold of his magic, and bent it to my will. It was formidable, greater than all I’d used save that of Anaïs and Tristan, but it struggled at the task. Halting. Fluttering. Resisting. But slowly the injury closed beneath my hand.