Mot had never met Kiva’s father, but he would have heard all about Faran Meridan from some of the older prisoners, much of which was supposition, Kiva assumed. But still, tears crept to her eyes at his words, because he was right about one thing: her father never would have given up until he’d solved the problem, even if it killed him. Which, in this case, it had. But Mot wasn’t wrong—Kiva was just like her father. And she wouldn’t give up, either.

“Forget about the sick for now,” Mot went on. “What about yer next Ordeal? Any ideas what yeh’ll face? Do yeh have a plan?”

Kiva had been thinking about it all week. After much consideration, she’d come to the conclusion that the third Trial would likely involve Zalindov’s aquifer, the huge underground reservoir that the tunnels fed water into. Nothing else could offer the same kind of drama as the first two Ordeals—or the same kind of danger. Most prisoners couldn’t swim, so Kiva would be expected to drown. However, no one knew where she had grown up, with the swift, deep Aldon River running adjacent to her family’s cottage just outside of Riverfell. Nor did they know how many hours she and her siblings had spent honing their swimming skills. Granted, it had been a long time since Kiva had used hers, but her confidence was enough that she felt marginally less worried about the coming Trial than any of the others.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t still terrified.

In the first two Ordeals, she’d had the support of the Vallentis royals, the prince’s elemental power saving her life—twice. Kiva still couldn’t reconcile how she felt about that, how she felt about them, since their family was the reason she’d lost ten years of her life to Zalindov, the reason she’d been torn from her mother and older siblings, the reason her father and brother were dead.

And yet . . . Kiva would have perished by now if not for Prince Deverick saving her life—twice.

No matter how much she wanted to hate them, all of them, Kiva couldn’t. But she also couldn’t forgive them, not for all the elemental magic in the world.