Double-woven ropes with hastily tied palace flags blocked off the end of the street. An old street sign lay crooked and broken on the ground. Galen picked it up, his brow wrinkling, his voice barely audible as he read, “Bell’s Corridor.”

Ranka ducked under the ropes and stopped.

Galen came to stand beside her. “Solomei’s light.”

Bell’s Corridor was painted in death.

Corpses lay in the street, their throats ripped open, their panicked stares wide and unseeing. Shattered windows gaped like broken teeth. Doors hung open on their hinges—the occupants had left in a hurry. Fresh blood streaked the fronts of buildings, swept across cobblestones where bodies had been thrown and dragged. Overhead, a lone cloud passed over the sun.

Galen’s eyes had a glassy, unfocused look to them. Gone was the prince, replaced by a child not yet eighteen, seeing the horror of his kingdom for the first time. He braced a hand against one of the buildings and immediately cringed away. Flecks of still-drying blood clung to his fingertips. “What happened here?”

“I don’t know.” Ranka scanned the street. A few of the homes had golden pins pressed into the doors, as if the mark of the Hands was a mark of pride.

Galen worked one free, turning it between his fingers with an uneasy frown. “Foldrey said the head priest was murdered the other day—found dead in an alley, with his throat slit, pins pressed into his eyes.” His next words were weak. “Maybe this is where it happened? And they retaliated?”

Ranka shook her head. The pins on the other doors were covered in a layer of grime—these people had believed in the Hands long before death visited their street. Aramis’s words rippled through her.

They are still protectors in the eyes of many.

So why a massacre? And why now?

A child’s shoe lay in the road, the once-white ribbon laces now stained crimson. Ranka knelt and picked it up, turning it over in her hand. That scent was familiar. It was not the reek of a blood-soaked, still-smoking battlefield, or the festering rot of sick bodies dying in the dank bowels of a prison.

It was the scent of terror—and of blood-magic, newly born, as brilliant and burning as the power now lurking in her veins.

It was the scent of Belren.

Ranka dropped the shoe as though it’d burned her. Belren was gone. Erased. The memory couldn’t touch her. She was safe and she needed to focus. Something about this wasn’t right. Where were the city guards? Why wasn’t Seaswept on lockdown? These bodies were fresh—whoever had killed them was still loose.

So why were they alone?

“Princeling, I think… I think there’s something you need to know,” Ranka said slowly. “I was hoping to find answers on my own. But if the sickness is getting worse, then your sister’s plan clearly isn’t—”