Aramis looked down at Ranka, her eyes wild, terrified, and angry.

You made a promise, those eyes said. You broke it, again.

There was so much Ranka wanted to say. That she was sorry. That she loved her. That she trusted her, more than anyone she’d ever known. That it was a gift, for Aramis’s face to be the last one she saw before she took her final rest at last.

Instead, Ranka mouthed, “Do it.”

Aramis slammed the syringe down.

The world went dark.

Overhead, the skies opened up, and the rain came down in one great sheet, putting out the fires at last.

79

IT WAS TWO WEEKS BEFORE Ranka left the healer’s tent.

It was a miracle, the attending healers whispered. They’d all heard the stories of the Bloodwinn falling to her death, the rumors of the sore-covered, screaming creature Ursay had dragged from the water, more monster than girl. When Aramis stabbed Ranka with the vaccine, they’d thought the coma she plunged into would kill her. Instead Ranka kept breathing, lost to the world as three separate powers warred inside her.

Instead, inexplicably, she survived.

She learned the rest in pieces. The healers injected her daily, whenever the sores surfaced, and now they surfaced less, and smaller each day. From the antibodies found in Ranka’s infected blood, Aramis and Percy had synthesized the early test stages of a new vaccine, one that—so far—seemed to be working on the winalin witches they’d captured. Every day they injected Ranka and drew more blood. Every day the winalin in her system dwindled—and with it, her blood-magic.

It was an irony of the cruelest sort. Winalin had been developed to re-create blood-witches. And so it would be cured, by a blood-witch it had sickened.

Aramis never visited her.

Piece by fragile piece, the survivors put the palace back together. The Sunra estate was like an ancient beast that had been left to rot. Now, hour by hour, the ants that had lived within and around it came to haul its flesh and bones away. None of the palace was livable. Army tents were erected amid the rubble. It would be years before the palace was restored to its previous splendor, if it ever was at all.

Galen spent his days on the grounds, calling wind to whip ash and wreckage far out to sea, stretching and testing the limits of his power. With one wave of his hand, he could clean away a mountain of debris that would have taken an entire team a full day to clear. Crowds started gathering to watch him work. His councilors didn’t dare approach him, not with the palace in shambles.

He had never seemed happier.