Myrthe. Bastiaan wanted to ask where she was, but he needed to finish the conversation at hand.

“The only way to fight Banes is with Talents.” Bastiaan hoped that was true.

“If the Well even gives people Talents,” Hedy snapped. “It’s a selfish pool, that.”

Bastiaan swallowed. Maybe she didn’t understand. “You’ve tried getting rid of your Bane with water from the Well of Talents?”

“I tried the Well of Talents first! I did everything right. After almost a year of searching for it, Kees and I found the Well. We both drank. He received a Talent and I did not. I wasn’t about to go home empty-handed. We’d heard the Nightwell was nearby and found it within a day. So I got myself a Bane.”

Her lips twisted. “We encountered a pilgrim on our trip home. Wanting to help him, we shared our story, and the moment he learned I had a Bane, he ran me through with a blade. Asked no questions. Didn’t care about our story, or why I’d sought a Bane. I would have died had Sven not found Kees and me the next day. Unlike the pilgrim, Sven had compassion. The Well of Talents is fickle. Selfish.”

Bastiaan turned to Kees. “Do you agree?” Kees had a Talent, after all.

Kees merely shrugged. “Hedy’s been through a lot. I don’t have a Bane, so I don’t understand her pain or her struggle.”

“I don’t need a Talent.” Yet Hedy so clearly feared her Bane being used at the hands of the king. “The Well of Talents was stingy, yet the Nightwell welcomed us with open arms.”

The Well of Talents asked for her patience. Bastiaan suspected if she’d waited long enough and humbled her heart, a Talent would have awoken.

She had to be wrong. The Well of Talents would stop the Nightwell. Somehow.

Otherwise, they were doomed.

“We need to get to the Well.”

“We will in time,” Sven said.

“There is no time!” Bastiaan couldn’t waste breath on these imbeciles. Let them dig their own graves. He needed to get to the Well. At the very least he could tell Myrthe his findings and let her try to convince Sven to be less of an idiot. “Where’s Myrthe?”

Bastiaan scanned the people again, stopping on each light blonde head but not finding her. A chill entered his chest and he snapped his attention back to Sven. This time the demand came out unrelenting. “Where is Myrthe?”

Sven’s nose wrinkled against an imagined stench. “Gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?” The way Sven said gone implied more than her absence. He grabbed Sven by the coat and barely held back a growl. “What happened?”

Sven shoved him away. “She entered the Trial. Probably seeking glory for herself.”

“You let her go in alone?” The Trials claimed lives within seconds sometimes. “How long ago?”