PROLOGUE

They had not bothered to give her a torch.

The thornhall's lower passages ran on faelight — cold, blue-silver luminescence that pooled from channels carved into the stone and required no wick, no oil, no mortal consideration of any kind. It did not extend to the preparation chamber below the great hall. Either the Court found the irony pleasing, or they had simply never thought to accommodate the comfort of someone they fully expected to be ash within the hour.

Ivara decided it was the former. The Vethara Court had never done anything by accident.

She stood in the dark and took stock of herself the way she'd learned to take stock of things — methodically, without sentiment, beginning with what she could not change and ending with what she could. She could not change: the silver chains at her wrists, which were largely ceremonial and largely irrelevant, since she had nowhere to run that the Court could not reach in three steps. The room. The occasion. The crowd waiting above her head, three hundred fae in their court finery, who had come to watch the last of the Solhast line die neatly and finally and in a way that could never be called murder.

What she could change: the way she breathed. The set of her jaw. Whether she let them see her afraid.

She chose not to.

The dark was absolute, the kind that pressed against the eyes and made the mind conjure shapes from nothing. She had always been good at the dark. There had been a period — the first two years after her father's arrangement with the Court, when she was fourteen and alone in these halls with nothing but her name and her wits — when the dark had been the safest part of her day. Darkness meant no one was watching. Darkness meant she could disassemble the composure she wore like armor and breathe without managing what her face was doing.

She breathed now.

She thought about Brennach.

The morning three weeks ago, when he'd come to her room before dawn — she hadn't asked how he'd gotten past the Court's watchmen, and he hadn't explained, and that particular competence of his had made something ache behind her sternum that she didn't have language for. He'd pressed his forehead to hers in the old way, the way their mother had taught them before everything went wrong. When they were small and frightened, their mother would cup their faces and press her brow against theirs and breathe slowly until they breathed slowly too. Brennach had done this without speaking, and she'd let him, and they'd stood that way in the grey predawn for a long count of breaths.

He'd gone before she could say anything. She hadn't known what she would have said.

She thought about the letter she'd left on her windowsill, folded into thirds. Not instructions — she'd resisted the impulse to leave instructions, because instructions implied she believed he couldn't manage without them, and he could. Not arrangements, because there was nothing left to arrange. Not an apology, because she had examined herself carefully and found she had nothing to apologize for. Just his name, written in her handwriting, because she'd wanted him to have something that was only his. Something that meant:you existed, specifically, and I saw you, specifically, and that mattered.

She hoped he hadn't read it yet. She hoped he was still asleep.

Above her, through the stone ceiling, she could hear the assembled Court — not voices but a collective presence, a weight of bodies and held breath and fae magic that pressed downward through the rock. Three hundred witnesses. The entire High Vethara Court and their various dependents and allies, gathered to watch a mortal woman attempt to touch the Thornbound Crown and burn.

The door at the top of the stairs opened.

Silver light flooded down, and with it the particular cold that lived inside the thornhall's upper levels — ancient, mineral, carrying the faint scent of the thornwood on it, pine and dark earth and something older underneath that she'd never been able to name. She turned to face the light. Her eyes took a moment to adjust. The fae attendant at the top of the stairs was young, smooth