She’d whistled and summoned a sea fox. Not because she’d known that was what her whistle would do, but because she’d had a hunch guided by Kahina, the woman who kept flame hawks as pets. The Paladin of Fire.

And now, though the cat hadn’t exactly warded off mice, that six-fingered tabby had helped her escape the rats. Which left only one line in the poem that perhaps was not a poem at all.

“Always, always stay the night for Baile’s slaughtering,” Stix repeated. “Slaughter Ring. Slaughtering.” Her eyes lit on the moon shining above Baile’s head. Another difference between this relief and the one in Lovats. “Midnight?”

The tabby nuzzled against Stix’s calf with a purr.

“What happens at midnight?” Ryber asked, but Stix only shook her head. The answer was so close. Within reach. She just needed the proper angle. Just needed the proper words. Damn the voices for always going silent …

Baile would never forget the tide comes at midnight.

“Oh,” Stix breathed to the relief. “Oh.” Kahina had already given her the answer—and really, it had been there all along. The tidal river beneath the Ring. The condensation that lived on the stones. The humidity that breathed in the very air of Saldonica. Lady Baile had built her palace here for a reason; Stix had simply been unwilling to see.

Unwilling to accept she didn’t know everything already.

With that thought, the memories finally awoke. The stone room disappeared.

“Only in darkness can we understand life, and only in life can we change the world.” Stix frowns at the paper, a torn edge from Eridysi’s diary. The Sightwitch has gathered a whole stack of young Lisbet’s prophecies, and now she is laying them out, one by one, for Stix and Rhian, the Paladin of Fire, to see.

Rhian palms one of the papers, her muscled forearms rippling and her large, round eyes widening. “Six turned on six,” Rhian reads. “And made themselves kings. One turned on five and stole everything. It means we will die, doesn’t it?”

Eridysi cringes. “I hope not.” She rustles through the stack for several moments. She has never been the most organized person—her workshop always makes Stix’s fingers itch to move, to rearrange, to label. But eventually Dysi finds the page she needs and thrusts it toward Stix and Rhian. “Lisbet also said this, the next day. I don’t know if it’s a correction of what she said before or if it’s a new prophecy…”

Stix takes the page and reads aloud, “Six turned on six and made themselves kings. Five turned on one and stole everything.”

Rhian’s frown—a constant on her olive face these days—briefly smooths with surprise. “Perhaps there are two possible outcomes?”

“Perhaps.” Dysi shrugs. “When I ask Lisbet, all she will say is, ‘A good question, Dysi. A good one indeed.’”