I can feel tears building at the back of my throat, but I force the lump back. The fire in my hands goes out as they fall to my sides.

“You can’t do this,” Raze says hoarsely. But he’s just as frozen as I am.

Leira rolls her eyes at him. She turns, letting the gold brocade of her long, trailing skirt swirl behind her. “Say your goodbyes from over there. So long, Raze.” Her dragons close in behind her, an impenetrable wall of scales and twitching tails.

Everyone starts moving after that. It all happens so fast. Olani is only half-conscious, and they drag her away before any of us can say anything.

“Sol,” I manage to force out through the lump of tears.

They’re pulling at her now, dragging her to her feet. Isolde pulls away roughly, twisting and jerking. Not to escape, just to move on her own terms. In the flurry of movement, her gag comes loose. An exhausted half smile twists her bloodied face, just before a heavy hand claps around the back of her neck. “It’ll be okay,” she says, comforting me, even now. “I’ll see you soon. Promise.”

Something crunches under the boot of the person who drags her away. I manage to hold back my tears until they’re fully swallowed by the darkness, retreating to the horses and wagons they left on the distant mountain road. Until there isn’t even a pinprick of Aris’s light left to illuminate the crevice.

The sobs hit me like a wave, and I collapse under their force. It’s only when my knees hit the stone that I see something glittering on the ground where Isolde had been standing, where she’d fought before being taken captive.

My necklace, shattered into a thousand pieces.

The dried flowers—our parents’ memories of us, too blue to be real among the crystal shards—are slowly dissolving. They wither into dust, then smoke, and the wind carries them away.

Something shatters and withers within me, too.

chapter thirty-one

It feels like forever that I’m curled up on my side, trembling against the stone. Raze lets me cry myself out without speaking for what feels like forever, until I’m finally so dried-out and hollow I fall silent.

“Are you hurt?” he says, startling me. How long has he been sitting beside me? “Seelie?”

I look up just long enough to shake my head before burying my face in my arms again. I can’t face him right now. All the rules of human behavior I’ve worked so hard to learn feel wispy and impossible to grasp. I reach up automatically to fidget with my necklace, and my fingers slip through empty air.

I start crying again.

Raze doesn’t say anything else. His arm brushes mine, and then there’s the pressure of his hand on my shoulder trying to hold me.

I flinch back. “No.”

“Sorry,” he says, quickly. This afternoon I needed to be held; now I won’t even allow myself to be touched. I’m the girl who runs away, who sits on the ground and cries. He must think I’m a freak.