On silent feet we picked our way down the stairs and through the streets, the anxious eyes peering from windows causing my heart to pound a rapid beat and making me glad we remained hidden under the cover of illusion. Marc avoided my family home, but the presence of magic only grew as we approached his family’s manor, and before we rounded the bend, he pushed me to a stop. “Stay here.”

My fingers did not want to let his go, but I satisfied them by gripping the wall, peering around the corner to see what – and who – awaited him. At the sight of Anaïs pacing before the gates, I almost followed, but there were other powers nearby, so I held my ground.

The magic concealing Marc vanished, and though her back was turned, Anaïs went still.

Too still.

“Where. Is. She?”

Each word was punctuated with a tremor in the earth, steam rising from the fountain in the center of the street.

“She’s safe,” Marc said, and I wanted to scream that his confidence was misplaced, that his belief she wouldn’t hurt him was wrong, wrong, wrong, because my sister wasn’t just angry. There was no doubt in my mind that my father had told Anaïs about me. And she believed she’d been betrayed.

I moved to intervene, but collided with something hard. A wall, invisible but strong as stone, blocking my path. I tried to backtrack, but came up against more of the same. “Bloody stones and sky,” I snapped, more panicked than angry at his attempts to keep me from harm. Because he was going to get us both killed.

“Safe?” Anaïs’s voice was so quiet, I barely made it out. But the tone of it turned my hands to ice. “You call what you’ve done to her keeping her safe?”

I hammered my fist against the magic, then lashed out at it with my own, screaming that he hadn’t done anything to me. That he’d done more to keep my life safe than anyone, including her. But Marc’s shield muted my voice, allowing only theirs to pass through.

“I asked you to protect her.” Anaïs’s hands balled into fists, and the ground shook again, tiny bits of rock and gravel raining down from above. “Instead you killed her!”

“Anaïs, she’s not dead. Pénélope’s f–”

“Murderer!” she shrieked, and the rocks above us groaned and shifted, the columns of the tree glowing faintly as the magic attempted to compensate. I had to stop this, or she was going to kill us all. Or be killed, I amended, as the King stepped out of the gates of the manor, followed by Marc’s parents.

I had to get through.

Holding up the sluag spear clutched in my hands, I backed up a few paces, then gripped the steel with my magic, ignoring the way it recoiled from the toxic metal. Then I threw every ounce of power in my possession behind thrusting it through the magic barricading me away from this disaster. The effort knocked me onto my bottom, but even as it bent and warped, the steel punctured through Marc’s magic and the wall fractured, then shattered.