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Chapters (64)
  1. Front Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  6. Pronunciation Guide
  7. Prologue
  8. Part One
  9. One
  10. Two
  11. Three
  12. Four
  13. Five
  14. Six
  15. Seven
  16. Eight
  17. Nine
  18. Ten
  19. Eleven
  20. Twelve
  21. Thirteen
  22. Part Two
  23. Fourteen
  24. Fifteen
  25. Sixteen
  26. Seventeen
  27. Eighteen
  28. Nineteen
  29. Twenty
  30. Twenty-One
  31. Twenty-Two
  32. Twenty-Three
  33. Part Three
  34. Twenty-Four
  35. Twenty-Five
  36. Twenty-Six
  37. Twenty-Seven
  38. Twenty-Eight
  39. Twenty-Nine
  40. Thirty
  41. Thirty-One
  42. Thirty-Two
  43. Thirty-Three
  44. Thirty-Four
  45. Thirty-Five
  46. Part Four
  47. Thirty-Six
  48. Thirty-Seven
  49. Thirty-Eight
  50. Thirty-Nine
  51. Forty
  52. Forty-One
  53. Forty-Two
  54. Forty-Three
  55. Forty-Four
  56. Forty-Five
  57. Forty-Six
  58. Forty-Seven
  59. Epilogue
  60. Excerpt from The Sun and Its Shade
  61. The Night and Its Moon Playlist
  62. Acknowledgments
  63. About the Author
  64. Back Cover

Sleep didn’t visit her that night. She took to staring at the ceiling with crippling anxiety, envisioning her life as a dirty, penniless street urchin scavenging the alleys of Stone. Nox had often spoken of her insomnia, and Amaris had never been able to relate. Now vivid images of the children who had kicked the leather ball burned her eyes. She wondered if they would let her join their group of friends, though she supposed it would mean she’d have to learn how to play their sport, and she’d never been interested in kicking a ball.

Amaris did eventually rest, though only for an hour or two. If one had asked her, she would have sworn she hadn’t gotten a wink. She was up and dressed by the time the sky turned pink with dawn. Amaris tugged the fur from her bed and bundled it over her shoulders to stare out the window. The view was stunning, though its drop was too perilous to look beyond its panes for long before her stomach began to twist with the odd sensation of falling. She noticed that as she stared into the valley, the birds flew several hundred feet below. How high must they be in their fortress that even the hawks and crows wouldn’t alight on the windowsills of this keep.

Knowing her fate awaited her caused the day to pass with excruciating slowness. Every minute took an hour. The sun taunted her with its lethargic crossing of the sky. Breakfast came and went as she studied another boring text about herbs with medicinal properties. If they didn’t decide soon, she’d stay in these rooms forever and become the single most educated person on the names of dead warriors and the recitation of naturally growing healing plants.

Amaris scrunched her face in distaste as she looked through yet another book. This tome was a gruesome, anatomical text illustrating the inherent differences in a fae body and that of a human, from the fae’s enhanced hearing and vision and regenerative cells to the predatory, deadly lure of their beauty. It had been morbidly fascinating, but the ghastly trail of scholarship had led the text’s creator to recount every detail, whether for good or for evil. The morality of its author was called into serious question based on the nature of several of their entries.

She grimaced as she flipped through the text of autopsies. She landed on an image of something that might have been a man. It was a bipedal creature with arms, a torso, fingers and toes, but where humans had nails, the creature had talons. Where she had shoulder blades, it had membranous, batlike wings. Its lips were pulled back to reveal its elongated canines, and its irises were double the size of a human’s. A faint memory of a boy with too-large irises flitted somewhere between her ears, and then the memory was gone.