“What does Aramis have to do with this?”

She raised her head—and in the window behind him, something moved.

“Ranka?”

She put her finger to her lips.

The broken window gazed back, its jagged, blood-flecked glass winking in the afternoon light. From inside, a floorboard creaked.

“Princeling,” Ranka whispered, “get behind me.”

Her blood-magic begged to flood her muscles, her heart, her breath. Ranka heard Aramis’s voice, crystal clear in her mind, a balm to the power desperate to overwhelm her.

Breathe, the princess whispered. And control it.

Ranka inched toward the house. She tried the handle. The door swung open without protest, the lock long broken. A few flies zipped out, carrying the scent of fresh bodies already beginning to turn in the heat. She hesitated and breathed in. There it was—a flicker of life amid the carrion, a panicked heart, beating fast.

“Someone is here,” she whispered.

Galen blanched. “We should wait. I’ll get Foldrey, or—”

Something crashed inside the house.

“Stay outside,” Ranka warned. “And if you see anything—run.”

Ranka stepped across the threshold.

The house was dark. The first floor was a disaster—the kitchen table was cracked in half, chairs lying at awkward angles. A line of blood splashed over the wall, across the floor, and up the stairs. Childish drawings depicting parents and two children had been torn down from the wall and ripped in two. Ranka stepped over them and picked up one of the chair legs, snapping it over her knee to form a jagged edge. What she wouldn’t have given for her axe.

Something trembled behind torn curtains. She pulled them aside. A cat cowered on the floor, its white fur flecked with blood.

“You poor thing.” She poked it with her foot to break it from its shock.

The cat hissed, leapt up, and streaked out the door.

At least someone in this house would make it out all right.

A door slammed overhead.

“Hello?” Ranka called. “Is someone there?”

A sharp intake of breath, followed by a pause—and then a hoarse voice, filtering through the floorboards, weak with fear. “Go away.”

Ranka took the stairs carefully, eyeing the fingernail gouges on the wooden steps where someone had fought with everything in them not to be dragged upstairs. Sunlight filtered through a skylight, casting the house in an ethereal golden glow. The buzzing grew louder.

She stepped onto the second floor.

A long, narrow hallway greeted her. Bed frames, chairs, and bookshelves had been toppled over one another in a kind of barricade. Three bodies were strewn across the floor, eyes open, mouths already covered in flies. Ranka crouched in front of them. Their skin was covered in bite marks. She closed their terror-bright eyes and wiped her fingers clean.

None of the furniture was bloody. The witch must have barricaded herself after her blood-magic had risen.