Winton stood vigil on the other side of the platform, dressed in dark purple: composed, silent, and very pale. He shot her a wavering smile, and she noticed his fingers were trembling. She felt a stab of guilt as she remembered promising to visit him. Xander’s visit had … distracted her. All around the hall’s periphery, the city guard watched, short cloaks shifting in the subtle breeze from the open door. Weapons were forbidden at sacred ceremonies, and their belts looked curiously naked. Cryptlings in cowled gray habits waited at the entrance to the crypts, kneeling, their heads lowered.

The ceremony began, the mourners touching their heads, lips, and hearts in the old sign of reverence as they started to pray. The words sounded distantly familiar, but Constance remained silent and still. She was pledged to another kind of divinity. She followed, however, as the bearers lifted the Duke’s broken body on its plain wooden plank and carried him to the trapdoors. As the doors opened, the stale, cold air that had grown so familiar in the past five days rushed into her face. She looked at Winton. His eyes were brimming with tears as he faced the dark steps downward.

Below, the chamber was deep and cavernous, each duke’s resting place surrounded by gorgeously decorated screens, each wife and child laid out upon a sarcophagus. This was different somehow from the underworld she’d visited after the feast, alone and by the light of her magic—everything felt more alive now in the yellow torchlight. The warm flames danced over grimy statues, old clothing, elaborate carvings, and the rich and rotting carpets adorning the walls, blooming with color—the opposite of the monochrome world she’d entered by pale mage-light. The shadows leaped and multiplied, as if for every living soul at her father’s funeral there were another ten of the dead. The people of the castle shuffled into the wide chamber, each finding a place to kneel.

Constance knelt at the front of the procession, the cold floor hard against her knees, and watched with detachment as the cryptlings carried the Duke toward the long tomb reserved for him since birth. The family motto was prominently displayed across the arched screen: Without its roots the forest withers. The tree sigil on the screen doors was inlaid with gold leaf—and as the doors were opened, the metal glinted in the firelight. Within, her father’s last resting place: a bed of stone. The cryptlings laid him down with extreme gentleness, as if they were afraid to wake him.

On either side of the tomb, the Duke’s two wives—her own mother and Winton’s—lay in state, their bodies illuminated by the torches. As the old prayers wafted through the air, the incense burning to a thick and dizzying smoke, Constance felt her eyes drawn to her mother’s grave again; they flickered over her angular form. She’d been born in a land of sunlight and warmth, her family’s palazzo in Scarossa, a great island city at the southernmost point of Valorian, its lands stuttering into aquamarine. She remembered her mother dimly, remembered the brightly colored pictures, like jewels, in the atlas she’d kept in the secret place beneath her window. Remembered the other secret books she’d found after her mother’s death, the magical and the foreign, the glittering and the gorgeous. Had her mother truly wanted to spend eternity here in the dark and cold, among strangers?