A few men and women watched from doorways as they passed by—but quickly slipped inside, eyes wide, as they caught sight of Emris’s mask. The increasingly ramshackle houses eventually turned into the slums, where the very poorest scraped out a living.

“Why build a temple here?” Lena whispered.

“This place and these people are invisible to the rest of the city,” Emris said under his breath. “What better place to hide a temple that does not want to be found?”

The dwellings extended nearly to the hilltop but grew hunched and shadowed, petering out as the slope got steeper and rockier. As Lena reached the top, breathing heavily, she stopped at the sight of the view beyond. The hill dropped off sharply, a steep slope tufted with grass. At the bottom, the gray starlit land stretched into a long, uncultivated field, yawning into the distance.

Emris drew to a halt. “Are you ready for this?”

Lena looked back. A strange peacefulness had settled over the city, like the calm before a storm. Lights glowed in the darkness, sharp and real. And yet … after everything that had happened since she’d left Duke’s Forest … it felt like a dream.

The spell was inside her, swirling in her stomach, its coldness flooding her veins. The butterfly slowly opened its wings and fluttered from her shoulder to her hand. This was real. This was the piece of the puzzle she was missing. If she could only understand it, she knew she would finally understand herself.

“I’m ready,” she said at last.

“Then let’s go.”

They mounted their horses, and Emris laid his hands over both of the godspeed charms tied into the bridles, speaking the incantation to seal the spell. Once he was done, he nodded. Lena took a deep breath and dug her heels into the horse’s flanks.

Their journey to the City of Kings sped past in reverse, far into the night—twinkling lights broken by long swathes of blackness, the screams of owls rising from solitary barns. Otherwise, the ride over the King’s Road was silent. The moon was a sliver of white like a god’s fingernail. Hours later, as they gained on the mountain range in the west, the sun started to rise and the horses descended, their hooves thudding as they met the road surface.

Lena reined her horse to a stop at the edge of the forest. Sure enough, she felt a kind of tug in her stomach, as if the spell were drawing her inside. And yet…

This is the place I killed the serpent.

Farther in, the dead explorers lie in the clearing.

Farther still, the hounds tried to catch me under the city walls.

And beyond that, Vigo’s bones lie bare outside the castle.

There was no glowing path to guide her this time—and even if there had been, she wasn’t so sure she would want to follow it.