Tears prickled her nose as realization swept over her, all that had just happened hitting her anew. Tilda’s death. Mot’s sacrifice. Everything that came before and after.

Glancing down, she rearranged Tipp in her lap, the young boy sleeping off what should have been a fatal wound, his gentle face at peace, oblivious to their escape. He had no idea that he wasn’t a prisoner anymore. When he woke up, he’d have a completely new life.

Just as Kiva would.

“What did you write to your family?” Jaren asked. He was sitting across from her, his hands holding his abdomen, his face deathly pale. But he was alive.

They both were.

Despite the odds, they’d survived.

And they were out.

“I let them know that I’m safe. That I’m free.” Kiva swallowed, looking down at Tipp, thinking of Tilda, whose body remained at the prison, and finished, “I told them where they can find me, if they want. That I’ll be in Vallenia. With you.”

The look Jaren sent her warmed the numbness that had overtaken her ever since she’d walked into the infirmary and found Tilda’s blood-soaked body.

Kiva would never recover from that moment, as long as she lived. But as the cold began to ease and she leaned back against the wagon, she called to mind the note she’d written, how she’d made sure it said everything her brother and sister needed to know. Even now, the code translated in her mind, repeating over and over:

Mother is dead.

I’m on my way to Vallenia.

It’s time to reclaim our kingdom.

And as Kiva combed her fingers through Tipp’s hair, the boy still fast asleep on her lap, she glanced up to meet Jaren’s blue-gold eyes once more, his gaze impossibly soft. She smiled shyly back, offering no indication as to who he was leading to his city . . . who he was welcoming into his home.

Kiva Meridan.

Born as Kiva Corentine.

The Rebel Queen may have perished at Zalindov, but her daughter was alive and well, and free of Zalindov after ten long years.

The Rebel Princess was finally ready to rise.

Acknowledgments

I don’t often use the word “marvel,” but that’s what I’ve been doing since the moment of The Prison Healer’s inception. I’ve marveled at how it’s come together, just as I’ve marveled over the people it has brought into my life.