The mist tastes like graves.

It settles over the Isle of Tears in veils of gray and silver, clinging to stone monuments that rise from dark water like the bones of forgotten gods. Rain begins as I step onto the dock, gentle at first, a whisper of moisture that kisses my upturned palm and gathers in the lifelines etched across my skin. Clear water. Clean. Nothing like the chaos that poured from my hands three days ago and turned an island of living druids into ash and silence.

"Keep your hand down."

I lower my arm. Let the rain soak into black silk instead, the funeral dress growing heavier with each breath of wet air. Everything is heavy now. My clothes. My body. The emerald necklace digging into my clenched fist, its facets cutting crescents into my palm where I've gripped it too tight for too long.

The boat rocks behind me, wood groaning its relief at the dock. My stomach lurches with the movement, bile rising hot and acidic. I grip the railing until my knuckles bleach white, but the nausea doesn't fade. Nothing helps. Not the cold air, not the honeysuckle drifting from somewhere beyond the mist, not the wall of my brothers' bodies pressing close on every side.

They tower over me. They've always towered over me, but now, with exhaustion turning my bones to water and blood starvation clawing at my insides, they seem impossibly tall. Moving in perfect synchronization while I stumble between them like something broken.

Gulls cry overhead. Sharp, mournful sounds cutting through the rhythmic slap of waves against the hull. Sailors shout across the harbor, ropes creak, wood groans. The island of the dead receiving its latest Queen.

Zaos touches my elbow. His hand is warm through the silk. "Steady."

I pull away. Can't bear it. Can't bear the weight of gentle fingers against my skin when the chaos magic stirs beneath my ribs, when it would rather reach for him than let me feel anything clean.

For a moment, through the rain-streaked air, I can't believe he and Erik aren't identical twins. The same face stares back at me from both brothers — high cheekbones sharp enough to cut, straight noses, strong jaws that could have been carved by the same sculptor's hand. The same full lips that manage to look both sensual and cruel depending on how they curve. Even their eyes hold that same intensity, though Zaos's are violet where Erik's burn ice blue. The only real difference is the hair. Zaos wears his long, black as a raven's wing, cascading down his back in waves. Erik's is cropped short, severe, showing the clean lines of his skull.

The Isle rises from the water ahead. Dark cliffs slick with rain and mist. Monuments to the dead. Tombs carved from the Crone's Tears themselves — this archipelago of islands born when pieces of the moon fell from the sky and became sacred ground. Where Queens have been laid to rest for centuries. Where my mother will burn tonight.

Where I might burn too, if anyone discovers what I've done. What I am.

The ship shudders as it meets the dock. Wood groans, ropes snap taut, and the hull scrapes stone with a sound that rattles my back teeth. I'm moving before the gangplank finishes dropping — three days on that boat, three days of swells and salt spray and the smell of bilge water soaking into everything, three days of holding myself together in a cabin the size of a coffin while the chaos whispered and Novak's blood thinned in my veins. I would have swum the last mile if I had to.

My boots hit the gangplank and immediately slip on wet wood. Still caked with mud from that shore, still carrying evidence of where I've been. Each step is a battle against muscles that won't obey, against a body that's forgotten how to move without Novak's blood singing through my veins.

Three days since I've fed. Since I've felt the warmth of the blood bond steadying the chaos, keeping me whole. He's not here. I scan the harbor, searching for blood-red sails among the vessels crowding the dock, but I don't see them. Don't see him.

"Careful." Nasir offers his hand as I reach the gangplank's end, voice flat and political. "The stones are slick."

I take it because refusing would draw eyes I can't afford. His palm is dry against mine, steady where mine trembles.

Salt spray mists my face. The taste of it on my lips, sharp and clean, reminds me of drowning. Of washing up on that shore three days ago with the Isle of Silence burning behind me and death coating my tongue.

The dock is worse. Solid ground should help but doesn't. The world tilts, rights itself, tilts again in a nauseating rhythm. Mist wraps around everything. The barnacle-crusted posts rising from dark water. The cliffs beyond like sentinels guarding the dead.

Other ships have docked. Crew and representatives from realms I've only ever read about press the narrow quay on every side — creatures with translucent wings that throw fractured light, beings whose skin moves like bark or water or something with no name in any book I've studied. Their magic bleeds into the wet air around them and my chaos reaches for all of it with desperate hunger.

I shove it down. Force it back. Hold it behind ribs that feel like they might crack.

Honeysuckle cuts through the wet air. Mulberry. Scents that used to mean home, safety, summer afternoons helping Mother tend her garden. Now they just smell like loss.

My throat closes. Burning raw from three days of screaming, of crying, of the lies I told my brothers when they found me half-drowned in that village. I was staying there. I'd been there when Mother died. Nowhere near the Isle of Silence. Nowhere near the destruction.

They believed me. Or they pretended to.

"She looks half-dead already."

The voice drifts through the mist to my left. I don't turn. The Shadows — always watching, always waiting for me to stumble so they can take what they think they deserve.

Erik's shoulders stiffen. Rune's hand drops to his belt where a blade would normally sit. Funeral rites keep his fingers still. Barely.

"Ignore them," Nasir murmurs.

Dakath materializes at my other side.

That's the only word for it. One moment the space beside me is empty, the next he fills it ,all of it, every available inch, and the sheer scale of him stops my breath for a half second even after three days. Massive. Lupine. Built wrong for anything except violence, with a muzzle full of teeth and pawed hands tipped with claws that catch what little light the mist allows. His fur is dense gray, darkening to near-black down his spine, and his amber eyes glow faintly even in daylight. He smells like wet animal and woodsmoke.

His bulk cuts the wind. The heat coming off him seeps through wet silk — steady, animal warmth that asks nothing.

He doesn't speak. Just stands there. It's enough. He was the one who brought bread and water during the voyage while the others kept their careful distance, sliding tin cups under my cabin door without knocking. That means more than anything he could say now.

"Can you walk?" The words vibrate low in his chest.

My legs shake beneath sodden silk. My muscles scream from exhaustion, from blood starvation, from holding the chaos in check every waking second.

I nod anyway. Lie with my body the way I've been lying with my words.

We walk. My brothers form a living shield around me, their synchronized steps a stark contrast to my stumbling gait. We leave the dock behind, moving onto the island proper. The path begins here, winding upward through the mist.

The air itself feels different as we climb. Thick with magic bleeding off hundreds of representatives from realms I've only read about. Temperature shifts as my brothers and I walk past different groups. A pocket of warmth near the fire-realm delegation, their skin flickering with embers beneath the surface. A chill so deep it makes my teeth chatter near beings who smell like winter and taste like frost on my tongue.

The path winds upward through cobblestones slick with rain, leading toward the burial grounds where Mother waits.

Where the pyre waits.

Where everything I've tried to protect is about to go up in flames.

The path narrows as we climb, forcing the crowd closer together. My brothers tighten their formation, becoming an impenetrable wall of flesh and fury around me. I'm grateful for it. I'm also drowning in it — too many bodies, too close, the heat of them pressing in from every side when I can barely breathe as it is.

But I hear them. Gods, I hear them.

Whispers like insects crawling over skin. Speculation about whether I'm strong enough. Bets on how long I'll last in the trials. Quiet discussions about what happens if I fail, who would take the crown, whether the Nexus would survive the chaos of a succession crisis.

And underneath it all, darker whispers. About how weak I look. How young. How unprepared.

About how I might not make it through the night.

It becomes harder to breathe. Each inhale burns. The wet silk restricts my ribs, makes it impossible to fill my lungs completely. Sweat mixes with rain on my skin despite the cold. My vision blurs at the edges, gray creeping in like the mist itself is trying to swallow me.

"Don't listen to them," Zaos murmurs. His violet eyes flick to mine, then away. "They said the same about Mother when she was crowned. They're always wrong."

Are they? Mother survived her trials. Became Queen. Ruled for centuries.

And still died. Still left me here, alone, with secrets that will get me killed if anyone discovers them.

The trees thin as we climb higher. More monuments appear, these ones newer, their stone still sharp-edged and detailed. Queens who ruled within the last few centuries. Their mates standing beside them in stone, their accomplishments carved into the bases in script too small to read from this distance.

One monument catches my eye. A Queen with her hand raised, palm out, like she's pushing something away. Or maybe pulling something toward her. Her mate stands behind her, his hands on her shoulders, his face tilted down to look at her with an expression that might be love or might be fear. Hard to tell with stone.

The plaque at the base reads: Selene the Stormcaller and her bonded, Theron of the Deep Waters. May they rest eternal in the Crone's embrace.

Bonded. Not married. Not wed. Bonded.

The word makes my stomach clench. Makes me think of Novak and the blood bond we share, the one that's forbidden until after my coronation, the one that's the only thing keeping me from losing control completely.

The one that makes me dependent on a vampire I can't even find.

Pain shoots up my calves. Sharp, bright agony that makes me stumble. Dakath's paw steadies me before I fall.

"Keep moving." Erik's voice. Cold. Impatient. "We're nearly there."

Nearly where my mother's body waits to burn.

Nearly where I'll have to stand in front of all these people and pretend I'm not breaking into pieces so small they'll never fit back together.

The path opens ahead. Through the gap in my brothers' formation, I see it. A clearing carved from the forest, ringed by more monuments, these ones ancient beyond measure. And in the center, rising like an accusation, the pyre.

My legs stop working.

Dakath's paw finds my elbow. Gentle despite the claws. "One step at a time," he rumbles. "That's all you have to do."

One step. Then another. Then another.

I can do that. I have to do that.

Even if every step takes me closer to the moment when everything I've been hiding catches fire and burns me alive.

The clearing holds its breath.

Silence falls as we enter, thick and suffocating as the mist that clings to everything. The crowd parts, creating a path straight to the pyre, and I have no choice but to walk it. My brothers stay close, but even they can't shield me from this. From the hundreds of eyes tracking my every step. From the weight of expectation pressing down until my spine wants to crack.

The pyre rises before me, and I finally see her.

Mother.

Wrapped in silk so white it hurts to look at. They've laid her at the top, positioned like she's sleeping, like she might wake at any moment and tell me this was all some elaborate test. Her hands are folded over her chest. Her hair, black as a raven's wing, has been braided with flowers. White roses. Moonflowers. The same ones woven through the wood below her.

She looks peaceful.

She looks like a lie.

My mother was never peaceful. She was fire and steel and a will that could bend kingdoms. She was the woman who hid me from execution, who taught me to survive, who looked at a daughter born with chaos magic and decided to gamble everything on the chance I could control it.

She was the only thing standing between me and the pyre.

And now she's on one.

The emerald necklace cuts deeper into my palm. I don't remember clenching my fist this hard, but blood runs warm between my fingers, dripping onto the ground in slow, fat drops that disappear into the earth.

"Kalypso." Zaos's voice, barely a whisper. "You're bleeding."

I don't care. Can't care. The pain is the only thing keeping me tethered, keeping the chaos magic from reaching up through my chest and tearing everything apart.

...she's GONE...finally gone...nothing to stop us now...

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

Erik stands at the base of the pyre, his crimson cloak a slash of blood against the white flowers. He turns as we approach, and those eyes find mine. Ice blue. Cold as the depths of winter ocean, cold as drowning in saltwater while something hungry waits beneath the surface.

My chaos magic surges toward him.

It's been doing this since he found me in the village. Reaching for him differently than it reaches for anything else — not to consume, not to devour, but to twine. To merge with whatever wrongness lives beneath his skin and become something worse than either of us alone.

It sickens me. This pull toward the brother who looks at me like I'm prey. Like I'm something to be possessed. I hate that I can't control what I'm drawn to any more than I can control the magic eating me from the inside.

A figure steps forward from the crowd. Ancient, bent with age, their gender impossible to determine beneath layers of ash-gray ceremonial robes embroidered with silver flames. The Keeper of Pyres. They carry a torch, its flame steady despite the mist and rain.

"We gather," they begin, voice cracking with age but carrying across the clearing like thunder, "to honor She Who Was. The Mother. The Queen. The light that guided us through darkness."

Lies. Pretty lies wrapped in tradition.

Mother wasn't light. She was pragmatic and calculating and willing to hide her chaos-touched daughter rather than see the kingdom fall into civil war. She loved me, maybe, but she loved the crown more.

Just like I will. Just like I already do.

"She leaves behind a daughter." The Keeper's eyes find mine. Rheumy with age but sharp. So sharp. "The Maiden who must become Mother. Who must prove herself worthy through trial and sacrifice."

The crowd murmurs. A wave of sound that rolls through the clearing, whispers that carry speculation and uncertainty and something sharper.

"The Septinox awaits," the Keeper continues. "Seven nights. Seven trials to prove the Queen Maiden's worth. Seven chances to bind the Vakas, the protectors chosen from each tethered realm who will serve, defend, and strengthen the Queen's rule for the rest of their lives."

Seven chances to fail. Seven chances for my chaos magic to break free and expose what I am.

Seven chances to die.

I search the crowd. Can't help it. My eyes hunt through faces and fabric, desperate for a glimpse of him. For blood-red silk that matches the color of what runs through my veins when he feeds. For skin pale as moonlight, hair dark as the space between stars, eyes that burn with an intensity that makes my chaos purr instead of scream. For Novak. The only soul who knows the monster I am, who's tasted the chaos in my blood and still comes back for more.

He's not here.

Of course he's not here. The vampire realm, Hellas, sent representatives, I can see them clustered near the eastern edge of the clearing. Beautiful, cruel creatures in flowing silk and leather, their skin ranging from deep brown to pale as moonlight. But Novak isn't among them.

I'm alone. Truly, completely alone.

The chaos magic claws at my ribs, sensing my panic, feeding on it. The whispers grow louder, more insistent, promising power and freedom and an end to the constant struggle to hold everything together.

...let us OUT...let us BURN...like she burned...like they all burned...

The druids. The Isle of Silence. The screaming.

My vision tunnels. The clearing shrinks to just the pyre, just Mother's body wrapped in white, just the flames that will consume her the same way my chaos consumed an entire island.

"The Maiden will light the pyre." The Keeper holds out the torch.

To me.

Expecting me to take it. Expecting me to set fire to the only person who ever protected me.

My hand won't move. It hangs at my side, fingers locked around the emerald necklace so tight I feel bones grinding together. My legs have turned to stone. My lungs forget how to pull air. The torch wavers in the Keeper's ancient grip, flame dancing, waiting.

Take it. Just take it. Just reach out and take it.

I can't.

The crowd shifts. Restless. Impatient. Hundreds of people watching me fail at the simplest task.

My arm lifts. Slow. So slow. Like moving through water. Like drowning. My fingers uncurl from the necklace, leaving blood smeared across my palm, across the emerald that catches torchlight and throws it back in shattered pieces.

Reach. Just reach.

My hand shakes so hard I can see it trembling in the firelight. Three inches from the torch. Two. One.

"Kalypso." Erik. His voice cuts through the roaring in my ears. He's beside me suddenly, close enough that I smell leather and something sharper. Metal. Blood, maybe. "Take the torch."

It's not a suggestion.

My fingers close around rough wood. The torch is heavier than it looks, the flames hot enough that I feel them against my face even at arm's length.

"Walk forward." Erik's hand finds the small of my back. Pushes. Gentle but inexorable. "Do what's required."

What's required. What's always required. Perform. Pretend. Play the role they need me to play.

I walk. One step. Two. Three. The pyre looms larger with each pace, until I'm standing at its base, staring up at white silk and flowers and a mother who will never wake.

Heat rolls off the wood in waves even before the flames touch it. The air shimmers, warping reality at the edges. Sweat breaks out across my forehead, my upper lip, the back of my neck.

Tears come without permission. Hot tracks down my face that mix with sweat and rain until I'm drowning in salt water that tastes like grief. My chest cracks open. Not physically. Worse. Something inside me splits apart, and everything I've been holding back pours out.

"I'm sorry." The words break on a sob. My whole body shakes with it, with the weight of guilt and loss crushing down until I can barely stand. "I'm so sorry, Mother. I'm so sorry."

Sorry for being born wrong. Sorry for having chaos magic that sentenced her to a life of hiding, of lying, of constant fear that her daughter would be discovered and executed. Sorry for destroying the Isle of Silence, for killing the druids who tried to help, for proving that maybe everyone was right and chaos-touched children should be put down before they can hurt anyone.

Sorry for still being alive when she's not.

The grief is a living thing. It claws up my throat, tears at my ribs, makes my knees buckle. I catch myself on the pyre, one hand braced against wood that will soon be ash. The torch wavers. Drops lower.

Hold it. Hold it. Hold it.

But I can't hold both. Can't grieve and control the chaos at the same time. Can't be the mourning daughter and the composed Queen Maiden and the monster hiding beneath skin.

Something has to break.

I choose grief.

The torch touches wood, and I let myself shatter.

Flame catches. Spreads. Crawls up the pyre like something alive, consuming flowers and timber with hungry crackles that pop and hiss. The heat intensifies immediately, a wall of it that makes the air in my lungs feel like I'm breathing fire. My eyes water, tears streaming not from grief now but from the assault of heat and light.

Smoke rises in thick black waves, greasy and suffocating as it rolls toward me. My throat closes against it, rejecting air that tastes like ash and something far worse coating my tongue. The smell hits a moment later.

Hair burning. That's the first thing I recognize. Acrid, chemical, nothing like wood smoke. The silk catches next, melting and charring, releasing a stench that makes my stomach heave. But underneath it, something else builds. Something sweet and sick that shouldn't smell sweet at all.

Fat rendering. Skin beginning to char. The scent crawls into my nose, my throat, coating everything. Sweet like meat left too long in the sun, like decay dressed up as something almost appetizing before your brain recognizes it as wrong. So wrong.

I stumble back but the smell follows. The smoke follows. Greasy residue settling on my skin, in my hair, on my lips. I can taste it. Mother burning. Taste the chemical tang of hair, the fatty sweetness of flesh, the chalky mineral note as bones begin to heat.

The fire roars louder. Wood cracking, splitting. Liquid hissing as it drips into flames. Popping sounds like kernels bursting. Fluids boiling. Fat spattering. The white silk blackens, peels away in strips.

Through the flames, I see her body moving. Not alive. Gods, not alive. The muscles contracting from heat, making her limbs curl inward. Her back arches. Fingers that were folded peacefully over her chest now claw at air. The silk splits where her skin blisters, bubbles, splits. Black char spreading across white.

My vision swims. Heat and smoke turning the world into a wavering nightmare. I can't breathe. Can't pull air into lungs that burn from the inside.

The flames climb higher, and through the smoke and tears, I see something that makes my blood turn to ice.

A figure in the fire.

Not Mother. Someone else. Someone taller, broader, with hands that reach toward me through the flames.

Father.

His face forms in the smoke, but it's wrong. So wrong. The flesh has rotted away from his skull in strips, leaving patches of bone gleaming white through the char. One eye socket holds that ice-blue iris I inherited, but it's filmed over, milky with death, bulging from the degraded tissue around it. The other socket is empty. Just a hole filled with writhing darkness.

His jaw hangs loose, connected by tendons gone black and brittle. When his mouth opens, I see teeth stained with rot, gums pulled back so far the roots show. His tongue is a swollen, purple thing that lolls between broken teeth.

Weak, he mouths through the flames. Bits of flesh fall from his face as his jaw works. Unworthy. Chaos-touched abomination.

The hands reaching for me are worse. The skin has sloughed off completely, leaving bone and muscle and sinew exposed. Fingers bend at wrong angles, joints dislocated, nails hanging by threads of dead tissue. Where the flames touch him, his flesh bubbles and splits.

But he keeps reaching. Keeps burning. Keeps coming for me.

The voices in my head laugh.

...he sees you...he KNOWS...

I stumble back. Father's corpse-face follows, burning brighter, growing larger. Those skeletal hands push through the fire, and I swear I feel them. The cold of dead flesh against my throat. The stench of decomposition filling my nose.

"Kalypso."

Zaos. Just my name. But I hear the question in it, the concern threaded through that single word.

I can't answer. Can't look away from Father's burning corpse reaching through the flames.

The chaos magic screams louder.

...BURN THEM...burn them like you burned the druids...like you'll burn EVERYONE...

"Kalypso."

Erik's voice cuts through the nightmare like a blade through rot.

The chaos magic lurches toward him. Desperate. Hungry. Reaching for that wrongness that lives beneath his skin, and the moment it does, Father's corpse vanishes. The specter dissolves like smoke caught in wind, and there's nothing in the flames but Mother's body burning, turning to ash and memory.

Everything snaps back. The pyre. The crowd. The rain still falling in a steady drizzle.

My body pivots without permission. A puppet with Erik holding the strings.

He stands three feet away, crimson cloak dark as arterial blood against the white flowers still burning. Rain streams down his face, plastering that short-cropped hair to his skull. His mouth tightens. Just a fraction. The kind of movement you'd miss if you blinked. But I don't blink. I see the way his jaw shifts, the muscle jumping there like he's biting back words.

His chest rises. Falls. A sigh barely contained.

The look in those ice-blue eyes is the same one I've seen for three days straight. Like I'm a problem he's tired of solving.

My knees unlock. Just fold inward like paper left too long in water. The ground rushes up, and I'm falling, the world tilting sideways as my legs forget how to hold weight.

Fur brushes my arm before I hit stone.

Dakath. His massive pawed hand closes around my elbow, hauls me upright. Takes my weight like it's nothing. His other paw finds my waist, steadying, and the heat of him seeps through wet silk.

"I've got you," he rumbles.

I'm shaking. Not delicate tremors but violent shudders that rattle my bones. The black silk clings to my skin, heavy with rain and sweat, cold despite the pyre's heat. My teeth chatter. Blood from my palm drips onto stone.

"Pathetic."

The word slices through the fire's roar. Male. Deep. Carrying the kind of authority that comes from years of commanding men.

My body goes rigid. Even trembling from cold and exhaustion, some part of me still knows when a predator speaks.

"Is this truly what the Mother left us? A mewling child who can't even stand without her beast-brother propping her up?"

I find him in the crowd. Not hard. He stands in the front ranks where the high-born gather, close enough that I see the details. Armor. Bronze and leather worked into intricate patterns. A high-ranking officer. Someone with power, with influence, with the arrogance to speak at a Queen's funeral.

His face is all sharp angles and cruel confidence. Clean-shaven. Scarred along the jaw where someone got close enough to cut him once. He doesn't look at me with pity or concern. He looks at me like I'm meat on a hook, already dead but too stupid to fall.

"The Mother could make kingdoms kneel with a word," he continues, voice rising so more of the crowd can hear. "She conquered realms. Built empires. And she leaves us this?" He gestures at me, at where I'm shaking in Dakath's grip, tears and snot still streaking my face. "This fragile thing that shatters at the first test?"

Laughter ripples through sections of the crowd. Nervous. Uncertain. But laughter nonetheless.

Dakath's growl starts low. A rumble that vibrates through his chest where I'm pressed against him, traveling up through my ribs like distant thunder. The sound builds, deepens, until it's less noise and more threat.

The warrior's smile widens. "Though perhaps fragile is what the Shadows prefer. Easier to enjoy when she fails. Easier to break when they pass her around like—"

The growl tears free. Loud enough that people in the front rows flinch. Dakath's claws flex against my waist, careful not to pierce but I feel the pressure, the restraint it takes not to drop me and lunge.

Rune, one of my other brothers, scoffs. "Bold words from a man who's never faced the trials himself."

Tor joins him — Rune's twin, same jaw, same eyes, same capacity for cold judgment. "How many commanders have we buried on this island, brother? I've lost count."

They don't defend me. Not really. But they defend the principle.

The commander's smile doesn't falter. "Simply making an observation, my lords. The Maiden looks... ripe for breaking. Just like her mother did, in the end."

Something cracks open in my chest. My fingers close tighter around the emerald necklace, the facets biting fresh into already-raw flesh.

Zaos moves swiftly, stepping between me and the commander. "You forget yourself," he says. "This is a funeral. The Mother deserves—"

"Your name."

Erik's voice cuts through everything. Quiet, almost gentle, and absolutely terrifying.

He doesn't move toward the warrior. Doesn't need to. His crimson cloak hangs dark with rain, and somehow the entire clearing tilts toward him. Like gravity shifted.

Zaos steps aside. Not retreat. Recognition.

The commander's smile finally cracks. "Commander Theo, my lord. Of the—"

"I'll remember it."

Three words. That's all.

But something in the way Erik says them makes the clearing go silent. Even Dakath's growling cuts off mid-rumble.

Erik has marked him.

The crowd feels it too. Bodies shift, creating space around the commander like he's already a corpse and they don't want the rot to spread.

"The Maiden mourns her mother," Erik continues. "As is proper. As is tradition. The funeral rites are sacred, Commander. Interrupting them speaks poorly of your judgment."

A warning. A promise. A death sentence wrapped in civility.

Commander Theo's jaw tightens. His hand drops to his belt where a sword would hang if weapons were permitted. He finds nothing there. Something moves across his face — fear, just a flash of it, before the cruel confidence slams back into place.

"My apologies, my lord. I meant no disrespect to the rites."

"Of course not," Erik says.

Erik's gaze slides away. Dismissal. The commander lives.

For now.

I don't remember walking back to the ship. My feet moved. My brothers moved around me. The crowd parted and the path unspooled beneath my boots and somewhere between the pyre and the dock the emerald necklace split my palm open again — I feel it now, the warm slow leak of blood against chain links, the stone slick in my grip.

I didn't let go. Not once.

The ship lurches as we pull away from the dock. I grip the bench hard enough that splinters dig into my palms. The emerald is slick with blood, Mother's blood mixing with mine, creating something that feels like a promise or a curse or both.

Dakath settles beside me. His bulk blocks the wind that whips across the deck, provides warmth my soaked dress can't. He doesn't speak for a long moment, just sits there, massive and solid and somehow comforting despite the claws and fangs.

The burial island shrinks behind us. Smoke from the pyre still rises, a dark column against gray sky, marking where my mother burns. Where the only person who ever protected me turned to ash and left me alone.

I don't look away. Can't. Not until the mist swallows it completely and there's nothing left but water and the sound of waves against the hull and the chaos voices screaming in my head.

"Why don't you wear it?"

Dakath's voice is low. Rough like stones grinding together. I follow his gaze to where the necklace dangles from my clenched fist, emerald catching light and bleeding it back in green fragments.

"The necklace," he clarifies. "Your mother's. Why not put it on?"

I look down at my hand. At the blood mixing with rain, at the emerald cutting into my palm, at the delicate chain wrapped around fingers gone white from gripping too hard.

"I needed something of hers to hold," I say. The words come out quieter than I intended. Raw. Honest in a way I haven't been honest with anyone since the druids died. "Something to ground myself. If I wore it..." I trail off, searching for the right explanation. "I'd just fidget with it. Pull at the chain. Break it, probably. This way I can feel it. Know it's there. Know she was real."

Even if she's ash now. Even if she's gone and I'm alone and the chaos is winning.

Dakath makes a sound. Not quite agreement, not quite understanding. Just acknowledgment that he's heard.

"Lean against me," he says after a moment. "Sleep until we reach Crone's Rest."

Crone's Rest. The main island. Where The Great Hall waits with its twelve statues and seven nights of trials that will either crown me or kill me.

I lean against Dakath's shoulder. Fur soft beneath my cheek, warm despite the wet. His breathing is steady, deep, the rhythm of it pulling at me like tide.

Maybe I can rest. Just for a moment. Just until we arrive at Crone's Rest and everything gets so much worse.

Just until the trials begin and I have to face them without Novak, without the blood bond, with nothing but chaos screaming in my head and the desperate hope that I can hold on long enough to survive.

My eyes close. The chaos voices quiet to whispers. For the first time since Mother died, I let the darkness take me.