No sooner does he say the words than the wound goes numb, like an icy wind has brushed over, freezing it. The pain is still there, but it is a dull thrum beneath my skin. It no longer feels like I’m being torn apart from within.

I open my eyes to five concerned faces staring down at me. Heron’s hands are covered in blood—my blood.

“What happened?” Blaise asks. “Were you attacked?”

He’s on his feet, searching our small tent for any sign of intruders, but I shake my head.

“Not here,” I manage to get out. I sit up carefully and cough. The smoke is still in my lungs. If anything, it’s getting stronger. “In my dream. Cress. She knows I’m alive; she knows I killed Rigga. She stabbed me, and I woke up…”

“You woke up stabbed,” Artemisia says quietly.

“It isn’t possible,” Blaise says, still pacing the tent, searching for some other explanation, but there is none.

“And yet…” Artemisia trails off, her eyes trained on my wound.

“It’s not possible,” Blaise says again, stopping his pacing to stare at us. “You can’t really believe this madness.”

“I’ve seen madder things than this,” Erik says, turning his face toward Blaise. “Yourself included, if you don’t mind me saying so. The real madness would be in ignoring the truth when it demands to be acknowledged.”

Blaise doesn’t have a response to that. He only scowls before turning to me.

“Are you all right?”

It’s such a ridiculous question that I can’t help but laugh, but the movement makes the dagger wound ache all over again.

“Here,” Heron says. “Lie down and I’ll heal it completely.”

I do as he says and bring the blanket up to cover my hips so that Heron can lift my nightgown and bare my stomach. There is so much blood, though the wound itself is still frozen.

“I have to unfreeze it first,” Heron says. “It’ll hurt for a few moments—badly—but then it’ll be fully healed.”

I take a deep, bracing breath before nodding. “Go ahead,” I tell him.

S?ren reaches for my hand, squeezing it tightly in his to distract me, but it doesn’t work. As soon as Heron begins working, pain floods through me again, blurring my eyesight and turning my mind into a whirl of bright colors and agony. I hear myself scream, though the sound feels far away, not quite a part of me.

“Breathe,” Heron says, his voice low. I feel his hands on me, warm and soothing but always gone too quickly. I can feel the skin closing, feel it knitting itself together again, excruciating and slow. “It won’t leave a scar,” he continues, which I suppose he means to be a relief, but the idea doesn’t faze me—what’s another scar, after all?

After what feels like an eternity, the pain begins to ebb and I find I can breathe normally again, though I can’t rid myself of the smell of smoke. It lingers in my lungs, like Cress’s fingers, refusing to let me go completely.

“There,” Heron says, lifting his hands from my stomach and pulling the blanket up to cover me. “Good as new, or thereabouts.”

“What happened, exactly?” S?ren asks me.

“I thought I could find out how she was progressing with Brigitta and Jian—Laius, rather.”

“Did you?” Artemisia asks.

“Not in so many words, but when I mentioned her mother, Cress frowned. She looked annoyed. I don’t think she’s broken her yet. I don’t know about Jian.”

“What did she say, then?” Heron asks.

I find my voice and tell them about the dream, the half-dozen other girls Cress has turned. I tell them about the moment when I knew that she knew I was alive, and the moment she slipped the dagger into my flesh, as easily as a knife through a pat of butter.

“She called it a surprise afterward,” I say, shaking my head. “?‘I hope you enjoy my little surprise.’ That’s what she said. And she smelled like smoke, like burning. I still smell it now,” I admit, wrinkling my nose.

S?ren frowns, looking around the room. He sniffs at the air, and the others do as well.

“I smell it too,” he says quietly. “Smoke.”

Blaise shakes his head. “It’s a hallucination,” he insists. “She said she smelled smoke, and now all of us can smell it.”

But when the screams sound from outside the tent, I realize that Blaise is wrong—it isn’t a hallucination. It isn’t a stubborn remnant of my dream, either. An instant later, Maile bursts into the tent, still dressed in her own nightclothes, red-faced and winded.

“The camp at the Air Mine,” she manages to get out between gulps of breath. “Our scouts just returned. It’s on fire. The whole thing.”

OUTSIDE THE TENT, THE SMOKE in the air is thick enough to choke me, and I hold the sleeve of my bloodied nightgown up to cover my nose and mouth to filter some of it out. All around our small camp, people are panicking, running in one direction or another, half-asleep still and trying to determine what’s happening.

Maile leads us to the northern edge of the olive grove, where the Air Mine is just visible rising over the pale pastel horizon. At first glance, I could mistake it for the sun itself rising. The whole thing is ablaze, the brightness of the flames so intense that I have to shield my eyes to look at it.

“How?” Artemisia asks behind me, unable to manage more than the single word.

I can’t bring myself to answer, though in my gut I know exactly how, and exactly why. I remember Cress leaning in, twisting the knife in my stomach.

“I hope you enjoy my little surprise,” she whispered. I thought she’d meant the stabbing, but that wasn’t it—Cress had another trick up her sleeve. She knew what had happened at the Ovelgan estate and so she knew exactly where we would go next.

Maile was right when she said it was the predictable course to take.

“They’re burning all of it,” S?ren says, pulling me out of my thoughts. “The mine and the stores and the slave camp—everything. Why would they do that?”

“Because she knew we were going to take it and she couldn’t get warriors there quickly enough to protect it,” I say. “And she would rather destroy it all than lose it to me.”

Without waiting for a response, I turn around and walk back toward our camp. Horror and fear duel in my mind, but I force myself to speak loudly enough to drown them out.

“I want everyone on the move now,” I say to the gathered men and women. “We need to get word to our other groups as well—especially the Fire and Water Guardians. We’ll extinguish and control the fire as best we can while the rest of our army fights off the guards—I’m sure many of them will still be lingering about, waiting to ambush us.”

“You can’t be serious,” Maile says, matching my pace. “It’s a trap; you must know that.”

“I do,” I say. “But there are people in there.”

“Good as dead already,” she replies. “What’s the point of losing more people in the process of trying to save them?”

I know she’s making sense, but I barely hear her. Blood pounds in my ears, pushing me forward, demanding action.

“You don’t have to take orders from me,” I tell her. “But that’s the order I’m giving my people, and given that most of them could have very easily found themselves in a burning mine, I can’t imagine anyone will decide to sit it out. You, however, are welcome to.”

For a beat, she doesn’t say anything, but then she quickens her pace and jogs ahead. “Like I’m going to let you take all of the glory,” she shouts over her shoulder. “I’ll get word to the eastern group.”

“Then I’ll take the west,” Blaise says before running off in that direction.

Heron catches up with me, Erik beside him. “There are Air Guardians in there,” Heron reminds me. “I should go in as well. If I can get to them, we might be able to coordinate enough wind to help extinguish the fire.”

“Or you’ll feed it,” I point out. “Stay outside. There will be injured slaves coming out, and they’ll need your help when they do.”

“And me?” Erik asks.

“Stay in the camp with S?ren,” I tell him.

“Theo—” S?ren says, coming up on my other side.

I shake my head, already anticipating his protests. “It’s dark and we don’t know what sort of trap we’re getting into. The last thing we need is you getting mistaken for a Kalovaxian guard. Stay here with Erik and keep watch. If you see anything new heading our way, get word to us.”

S?ren doesn’t like being a lookout—I can see it in the twist of his mouth—but he nods.

“Go,” he tells me, and in the dim light I can see the worry outlined clearly on his face as he looks at me. “I don’t need to tell you to be careful, so I’ll just say to come back safe, all right?”

* * *

—

I know that Artemisia is riding as fast as she can, but as I stare at the flames blazing in the distance, it doesn’t feel fast enough. Screams whip through the air, raising goose bumps on my skin and sending my heart thundering. I don’t realize I’m holding Artemisia too tightly until she delivers a gentle but solid elbow to my side.

“Get a hold of yourself,” she shouts at me over her shoulder. “You aren’t good for anything if you’re a panicked mess.”