“You idiot.” Lord Fox’s voice was no louder than a whisper. “To hell with magic. To hell with the asha and the Willows and the rest of the kingdoms. To hell with me. I don’t want you to die.”

She smiled and placed her palm against his cheek. “I am already dying. There is a limit to shadowglass. It is like a hundred silver heartsglass, a hundred more ways to draw deeply of the Dark. I will not last the year. I will create shadowglass, or I will die. Sometimes it is that easy.”

There were tears on his face. He moved to speak, failed, tried again. “Who is she, Tea? Who betrayed us?”

She bent her head and told her brother a name.

23

“Well,” Zoya said, as I groggily shifted into a sitting position. “That was quite a show you put on, Tea.”

My shoulder hurt. It was heavily bandaged. The rest of me was numb on lemon balm and lilybrew, and I wasn’t sure I could even feel my head. “How is everyone?” I mumbled.

“Doing fairly well, considering.” Zoya was the last person I wanted telling me what I’d done wrong, and she was probably at my bedside for that very reason. “Considering you woke every dead critter to have ever lived inside Mithra’s Wall. We had quite the time getting out of the cave with your dead weight while skeletal insects and bats flew all over the place. I reckon I’ll have nightmares of beetle corpses crawling up my hair after this.”

“Did I—?”

“Kill anyone? Oh, thankfully no. You did the exact opposite. We endured the half-formed bats and undead roaches and rats, and we fought our way out of the mountain only to discover that you’d also summoned the bones of every animal that had ever walked this part of the plains, including the Drychta we’d already killed.”

I tried to lurch out of the cot, ignoring my burning pain, but Wind held me in place.

“Stop that,” Zoya said impatiently, flicking another rune in my direction, “especially after all the trouble it took to get you here. Everything’s under control. I thought they’d remain dead after I knocked you out and after Althy destroyed the Seeking Stone, but I guess a few corpses had a bit more agency than we thought. You’ve made peaceful yogis out of the surviving Drychta soldiers though. I’d bet all my hua they’ll never lift a sword again. That’s one way to scare fighters into farmers.”

I touched my wound gingerly and flinched. “How did I get this?”

Zoya’s mirth faded. She looked worried. “You don’t remember?”

“Should I?”