Plucking a piece of debris from my ebony locks, I frowned at him. “I didn’t. Lessa’s seen me work that spell before – she put two and two together.” I swiftly explained what happened. “I don’t know what we should do now. We aren’t going to get a second chance.”

“Which is why we’re going after Lessa’s lackeys,” Marc replied. “It may be that they know where Angoulême is hiding, and ultimately, it’s the Duke who Tristan wants us to catch. If your friend Chris survives his little stunt, I’ll have to thank him.”

“For what?” I snapped. “Ruining our plan?”

“Did he? Or did you with that stunt with the guard?” Marc didn’t wait to see his jab land, his cloaked form going to the corner of the building. “They’re starting to search the town. We need to be gone.”

I didn’t argue. If I hadn’t taken that extra step – a step that had been both unnecessary and cruel – Roland would’ve bitten into the candy, spilled the blood, and I would have performed the spell just in time for Chris’s arrow to find its way into his skull. All those corpses in the town square? Their deaths were as much my fault as his. More. I felt sick with guilt and grief. They’d been innocent.

And I knew they wouldn’t be the last.

Slipping out of the village was no trouble. For one, people, oath-sworn or not, were fleeing in all directions. Two, while Lessa had set her human soldiers to patrolling the town in search of a girl of my description, they were woefully unprepared for dealing with my friends. As was Lessa herself.

“How anyone can believe she’s Anaïs is beyond me,” Victoria muttered for the tenth time. “She doesn’t know a thing about setting up a perimeter or organizing troops or…” The list went on, but I stopped listening, because it didn’t matter if Lessa had a talent for any of these things. All she needed to do was keep Roland in check and corral as many humans into swearing fealty to him as she possibly could, and so far she seemed to be succeeding.

With Vincent carrying me for the sake of speed, we’d reached the tree line some time ago, following the tracks Chris’s horse had left in the snow, as well as the boot prints of the trolls in pursuit.

“Be quiet, Victoria,” Marc said from his position in the lead. “If they were going to catch him, they’d have done it by now and will be coming back this way. I’d rather not give them advance warning of our presence.” Then he stopped.

“Put me down,” I said to Vincent, and once my feet were firmly on the path I made my way over to where Marc stood at a fork.