Ash stared at the events unfolding with open-mouthed disgust. The winged general skidded back, ignoring the reevers as he moved for his fallen man. Ash and Malik remained motionless as the general offered his hand and helped Zaccai to his feet. The silence that resounded between them was so much louder than the sounds of battle, thicker than the tarlike blood of the beseul, and more painful than any cut of the sword.

Pain flashed between her companions, though it was from no physical wound. She didn’t know what to say, how to help, what to do.

The first noise was the snarl of her copper friend, his voice scratched with raw emotion. Ash’s words came out hoarse and feral.

“They’re demons, Ayla!” he gasped.

She used her eyes to silently plead with him as she fought against his loathing.

“No, that’s the demon,” she insisted, pointing to the still-gaping head of the beseul. The viscosity of its black blood stuck in weblike tendrils as it dripped from its severed head. Her voice stuck with her emotion. She couldn’t stand the way Ash was looking at her. She was desperate to make it go away, to make them understand, to heal what had broken between them. “The dark fae saved me from it. The beseul would have bested me.”

She saw it in the reevers’ faces: this was insanity. If their eyes were to be believed, Amaris’s actions spat in the face of everything for which the reevers fought and believed. They had trained with her. They had accepted her. They had loved her. They had trained against magical imbalance, against evil, against the forces that thwarted the world and sent the continent into chaos. And the first moment they were dispatched onto the road, she had turned on them. They had been wrong to let a witch in their walls.

“We were here to save you!” Malik insisted, the injury in his voice more prominent than whatever wound he had taken to his shoulder. An invisible knife twisted in her heart as she searched Malik’s face. What was he feeling at that moment? The panic she had caused with her single command was something she had never seen in a man.

“They’re ag’imni, Ayla,” Ash pleaded. He sounded like he might cry. She understood what he was asking: how could the girl he’d sparred with, the one he’d fought side by side with, the one he’d trusted, have chosen the demons over her brethren.

“She can see us.” The man’s voice was low, looking at his similarly winged friend. “She can see us,” he said again.

“The demon is slain,” Amaris said desperately, ignoring the winged fae as she focused on the reevers. “I need you to believe me.”