It took everything within me to leave him lying there. At least he wasn’t in danger of being stabbed. He had Kees to thank for that.

A gust of purple wind swirled around me, tightening around my chest and squeezing. A woodsman stood mere feet away, focused on me with a hand outstretched.

The squeeze increased, bending my ribs inward. I curled over my midsection, grimacing against the sharp pain. My ribs would snap any moment. Puncture lungs. Crack my chest cavity like an eggshell.

King Mattias bowled the woodsman over. He screamed in the man’s face, neck veins popping, but no sound came out.

The woodsman got the picture and dropped his hand in horror.

King Mattias headed my way, but I wasn’t going to wait to become someone else’s captive. I couldn’t risk him touching me—I remembered what happened to Bastiaan’s Talent when the king touched him.

My Talent was silent, but I wasn’t ready to fully bury it with Mattias’s Bane touch.

I bolted for the corner door after Coralythe and Luuk, sparing one last glance over my shoulder. The moment I rounded the doorframe, Sven looked up from the militair he was strangling with his bowstring. He met my eyes.

I could see his thoughts as clearly as if they were written in the air above him.

You did this.

He blamed me for the death descending upon him. He was one who would always strap blame onto the backs of others. I turned my back on him and the guilt that came with him.

I burst out of the kleinschloss, the opposite side from where we first entered. The movement was disjointed and labored, my ragged feet functioning on nothing more than a memory of what feet were supposed to do. The numbness would last only so long.

But adrenaline banished any threat of pain.

I didn’t know where to go. How to get away. Voices screamed from behind. Shouting commands. Amid the fray I thought I heard King Mattias, and that frightened me the most. If he’d regained his voice from Hedy, a single command from him could undo my very will.

I crossed a frozen garden of snow-dusted plant skeletons and ducked behind a statue to catch my breath. I opened my eyes again and realized how light the sky had grown. The cusp of sunrise. That much time had passed?

I could see beyond the kleinschloss now. Down into the valley where the freshly dug canal wound its serpentine trail. Tools and torches and workers had all been moved. The mouth of the canal rose up the bank of a hill to meet the enormous lake that was the Nightwell. A colossal dam held the waters at bay.

Two figures stumbled up the hill on the left. Coralythe and Luuk, mere moments away from reaching it.

“No,” I breathed.