He found a smile. “A witchling even in death.”

She returned the smirk. “Would you have it any other way?”

Whatever end they met, they would do it together.

Amaris bent her knees slightly in the readied stance of a warrior on a battlefield. The crowd around continued shouting, crying, repeating something. A word had started to form on their thousands of lips, taking on the consistency of a chant. The pockets of the chant were broken up enough that she couldn’t quite hear what three syllables the people were bleating in unison.

She looked to Gadriel through the sweat dripping off her brow to see if he could understand the people any better than she could, but the general seemed to be scanning for something else entirely. An exit strategy? Another weapon? A plan?

“Do you see?” roared the queen.

Farehold’s monarch had known precisely how this would play out. Of course Amaris—who had seen that there was no crowned prince, who knew of the curse at the border, who had exposed Moirai as a witch in front of her court—would never execute the northerner on whose behalf she’d come to Aubade to intercede. Letting Amaris die in her cell would have let the curse’s secrets die with her. Showing Amaris’s ag’imni sympathies to the people would rally the queen’s loyalists against the reevers, deepening their hatred for the north and uniting them against any hope of peace that might have come from the intercession of Uaimh Reev.

“And what should we do to our enemies? What do we do with those who consort with demons?”

The chant from the audience grew louder as more and more mouths joined in its feral chorus. Hundreds of people repeated the word over and over again—the same three sounds like a howling, wretched prayer to the old gods, or the All Mother herself. Sadistic screams garbled out the consistency of their chants as bloodlust unified the citizens of Aubade.

She and the general might as well have been alone in the stadium, for she looked at no one else. The sun burned her shoulders and their sounds hurt her ears, but there was only her, her sword, and Gadriel. Moirai wouldn’t get the satisfaction of her attention.

The queen continued her impassioned address to the bestial crowd, announcing, “We throw them to the monsters they worship, and we let hell reclaim them!”

Her sentence was punctuated by the cranking, metallic sound of gears. Wood groaned and chains strained. The audience lost its mind as the noise washed over the sand. Amaris turned her body to face its source, a blackened, rectangular shadow slowly spreading before her. The enormous door on the far side of the stadium began to open. The aching screeches of the mechanisms used to pry the door apart echoed throughout the coliseum. The ripping, ear-shredding roar of a monster tore from the inky darkness as the door continued its slow, mechanical opening. Amaris took a backward step, fighting off the dread that threatened her.