Fifty-Eight. Rune

Seraphine’s dark eyes narrowed on Rune. But instead of being surprised that Rune was a witch, she said: “Why did you inform on Kestrel?”

Tears fell as the inevitability of it all sank in. “Someone betrayed us. The Blood Guard would have killed us both: Nan, for being a witch; me, for not handing her in. She told me if I loved her, I had to betray her. So she wouldn’t have to watch me die.”

Seraphine’s forehead creased, almost delicately.

Lightning flashed, and the charge in the air raised the hair on Rune’s skin.

“Nan told me to find you. I came to your house the night they arrested you. I spent two years tracking you down and got there too late.”

What would have happened if she’d arrived an hour earlier?

Would either of them be here, awaiting the knife?

“I failed both of you.”

Seraphine’s gaze sharpened.

“No,” she said, her irises flaring strangely as something in the distance caught her attention. “I don’t think you have.”

Light flickered at the edge of Rune’s vision. When she looked up, four black fiery comets hit the platform like cannonballs, aimed directly at the guards on either side of her and Seraphine. Rune heard the thud of their bodies hitting the wood.

All around them, the platform burned. Despite the rain, heat sizzled in the air. More fireballs hit, striking the wooden beam overhead. Rune covered her head with her manacled hands, but knew it was of little use. She and Seraphine were completely exposed.

Something cracked and Rune looked up to see the beam directly overhead start to split.

Then fall.

As the heavy timber descended on them, Seraphine dived at Rune, knocking her out of the way. The beam crashed through the platform floor right where they’d both been standing.

Seraphine pushed herself up. “Are you all right?”

Rune nodded.

It smelled like burning flesh and … something else.

Blood and roses,she thought.

Magic.

Rune had smelled this same scent once before, on the night of the Luminaries Dinner. It rolled over her like a wave.

Someone in the crowd screamed.

As more screams joined the first, Seraphine flew to the wooden rail at the edge of the platform, leaning as far as the chains around her ankles would let her. Rune was about to push herself to her feet, when her stomach cramped. Like a warm, achy swell in her lower belly.

That ache. She spent the better part of every month waiting for it.

As something warm and wet pooled between her thighs, a rush of relief came over Rune.

Her monthly cycle had started.

Fresh blood to cast with …

Except she had no way to use it. Her hands were trapped in iron. Wondering why no soldiers were coming to simply kill them and get it over with, Rune pushed to her feet, joining Seraphine at the wooden rail, scanning the platform.

“Merciful Ancients,” murmured Seraphine.

Dozens of figures cloaked in gray were sweeping across the city square, heading for the platform. The scarlet uniforms of the Blood Guard were cutting toward them, while the crowd in between swelled. Chaos erupted. Citizens tried to scatter, screaming and pushing, desperate to get out of the way.

Beneath the dark sky, thunder rumbled dangerously as gunfire rang through the air.

Rune squinted, trying to see the faces beneath the gray hoods. “Who are they?”

“Witches,” said Seraphine.

Rune’s heart skipped at that word. She squinted harder, realizing she recognized some of the girls beneath the hoods. Witches she’d rescued from Gideon’s clutches. Most she didn’t know at all. But leading them was a girl she knew by heart.

Verity de Wilde.

Her spectacles flashed when the lightning flickered, and her brown ringlets were loose around her shoulders. In her hand was a knife Rune had never seen before. One shaped like a crescent.

“Cressida Roseblood is alive …” Seraphine’s eyes narrowed. “… and has somehow gained a witch army.”

“That’s not Cressida.” Rune corrected her. “That’s my friend Verity.”

Rune had met Cressida. Verity and the youngest witch queen looked nothing alike.

“I assure you,” said Seraphine, “that girl is a Roseblood. She’s simply altered her appearance.”

Rune frowned, forced to recall Verity’s missing dorm room. Her endless exhaustion. Her heavily perfumed scent.

Was it all one elaborate illusion?

The magnitude of it—endlessly pretending to be someone else for two years straight—would require a lot of power.

And a lot of fresh blood.

A terrible feeling was taking hold of Rune.

Verity had reacted almost defensively when questioned about the Roseblood sisters using Arcana spells. And Verity had been at the Luminaries Dinner the night Cressida Roseblood was also in attendance. What if Verity was responsible for the spellfire?

What if Verity de Wilde was Cressida Roseblood in disguise?

“I’m sorry,” said Seraphine. “But your friend Verity doesn’t exist. Or if she did, she doesn’t anymore.”

“Are you saying Cressida killed Verity and stole her identity?”

“It’s very likely, yes.”

“But that means …”

Cressida Roseblood, not Verity de Wilde, had been Rune’s closest confidant for two years—without her knowing.

This whole time, Rune had trusted and confided in a murderer. In the girl who’d tortured Gideon and killed his little sister.

She rested her restrained hands on the wood railing to steady herself.

It can’t be true.

Verity was her friend.

But Rune had only become friends with Verity in the months after the revolution. By then, Cressida was dethroned and on the run. That left plenty of time to kill the girl and subsume her identity before befriending Rune.

The thought of Verity—the real Verity, a girl Rune was forced to concede she didn’t know at all—being cornered by the witch queen made Rune feel like she was going to throw up.

How could I have missed the signs?

Rune watched the girl she’d formerly known as Verity cut through the crowd, a small army of witches in her wake. Despite Rune’s horror and loathing, that girl was the closest thing she and Seraphine had to an ally right now.

Everyone else in that crowd wanted them dead.

Rune remembered the countless times Verity—no, Cressida—had absently traced the spellmarks on the open pages of her spell books. If she’d been memorizing all of Rune’s spells, then she likely knew the one that would set Rune and Seraphine’s hands free.

Picklock.

Leaning as far as she could over the railing, Rune’s voice battled with the thunder as she shouted: “My Queen!”

The girl who’d stolen Verity’s identity glanced up, her gaze swooping like a hawk to Rune.

As smoke filled the air, Rune raised her ironclad hands.

“A little help?”

The witch queen smiled, and Rune shivered at the sight. Holding out her pale forearm, which was covered in bloody spellmarks, she smudged the symbols with her hand.

The illusion fell away.

She was Verity no longer.

That curly brown hair straightened, lightening to moon-white. Her dark eyes turned crystalline blue. And the curves of her body fell away, flattening and lengthening into the wispy queen Rune remembered.

Snatching a young woman from the crowd, Cressida pulled back the girl’s hair. As her victim screamed and fought, trying to get away, Cressida bared the girl’s pale throat to her knife’s crescent edge, and slit it.

Rune glanced away too late to unsee the red blood, running like rivulets down her neck. The girl dropped to the stones, choking on it. Cressida dipped her fingers in the blood and drew a new symbol.

The spell flared to life. The locks of Rune and Seraphine’s manacles clicked. The heavy iron blocks imprisoning their hands opened, along with the chains around their ankles. Both fell, hitting the burning platform with a clattering thud.

Rune and Seraphine were free.