Chapters (64)
- Front Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Pronunciation Guide
- Prologue
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Part Two
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Part Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Part Four
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Epilogue
- Excerpt from The Sun and Its Shade
- The Night and Its Moon Playlist
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Back Cover
“I do not.”
“How can I find out?”
The priestess came to a full stop. They had finished their resolution, ending with the trunk of the tree exactly where they had begun. She brought her hands together, pressing her fingertips lightly in front of her as if in a relaxed, gentle prayer.
“May I ask you a question instead?”
Amaris blinked. Perhaps this would be a refreshing change of pace from their spinning evasion. “Yes,” she said.
The woman stared at the tree for so long that when her eyes found Amaris, she shrank under the weight of the priestess’s gaze. The woman asked, “Why do you seek to aid the kingdoms?”
“I’m a reever,” she responded. “We’ve taken an oath for magical balance, and this curse is an obvious imbalance in magic. I was trained at Uaimh Reev—”
The priestess moved her head once, a cut to the side. It was the most elegant way to slash a sentence where it landed. She repeated, “Why do you seek to aid the kingdoms?”
Amaris’s lashes fluttered her confusion. She found herself shrugging—like a child—at the holiest woman on the continent. She had no satisfying answer. Could she say it was because of her dispatch? Was it because a knife had been held to her throat and she’d been forced into a hasty alliance with the tenacious crow-fae of Raascot? Was she helping the kingdoms because she had been an orphan with no purpose who latched on to the first meaning her life had been given?
It was all of these, and it was none of them. Her final response was a weak one, her voice tilting upward at the end as if she were asking rather than telling. “Because it’s the right thing to do?”
Following the priestess’s steps, they began to walk away from the tree toward the entrance where four male silhouettes had not moved from their mark in an unknown length of time. Two reevers and two winged fae waited for her just beyond the palatial walls of the temple. Gesturing a long, elegant arm, the priestess bid Amaris adieu. “When you know the answer to my question, you will have the answer to yours.”
“Is that…” Amaris paused at the top of the stairs, looking out onto the glen. She looked back at the woman. “Is that everything?”
The priestess allowed herself the same softened emotion once more. “If I may… What were you named?”
“Amaris.”
Her face softened for the final time that night, eyes rimming appreciatively with another in a long string of strange, conflicting, distant, unreadable emotions. The priestess turned her head before any feeling might betray her, discovering her quiet once more. The flowering garden of secrets within her would remain impenetrable. She glided away from Amaris with slow reverence, returning to where she kept watch beside her tree.