The academy slept, but Soren did not.
He moved through the corridors like a ghost, a pack slung across his shoulders and a blade at his hip. The torches had burned low. He’d studied the guards’ rotations years ago and never thought he’d use that knowledge to sneak out like a thief.
The eastern gate was unguarded no one was foolish enough to enter the Forbidden Forest. Soren slipped through, and the temperature dropped ten degrees.
The trees grew twisted and black, their branches clawing at a distant moon. Fog coiled around the roots like living things. The silence was the worst part the held-breath silence of something waiting to strike.
You shouldn’t be here alone, Kael rumbled.
"I know."
The Proctor forbade this.
"I know."
Your father would—
"I know." Soren tightened his grip on his blade. "But she’s dying, Kael. And I will not stand by and watch."
His wolf went quiet, not in submission, in understanding.
In the darkness of her unconscious mind, Nyra floated.
There was no pain here. Just endless, quiet darkness, warm like being held in the palm of something vast.
A voice drifted through the void. Then the darkness shifted, and she was in the palace gardens the private ones where she and Thorne had played as children. The fountain was singing.
Thorne sat on its edge, dangling his feet in the water.
"You’re not supposed to be here," Nyra said, her voice small.
"Neither are you." He grinned his real grin, the crooked one he saved only for her. "You’re supposed to be fighting. Not floating around in the dark."
"I’m tired, Thorne."
"I know. But you can’t rest yet. You made me a promise."
"Take the throne. Avenge you. Get strong." The words came automatically. "I’m trying. I’m trying so hard."
"I know you are." He stood and walked toward her, dripping water onto the garden path. His eyes weren’t right too pale, too distant, like he was looking at her from the other side of something she couldn’t cross. "But there’s someone fighting for you right now. Someone who doesn’t even know why he’s doing it. You owe it to him to fight too."
"Who?"
Thorne smiled. "You know who."
The garden dissolved. The roses wilted. The fountain crumbled. Thorne’s voice echoed one last time: "Wake up, little sister. Wake up and fight."
Corvin stood in the corridor outside the healer’s wing, and he knew.
Soren’s suite had been dark. The Sword Sovereign always kept a torch burning in his window a habit from childhood, a light to keep the nightmares away. Tonight, the window was black.
"Where is he?" Corvin demanded.
Ragnar looked up with bleary eyes. "Where is who?"
"Thornridge. He’s not in his suite."
"He said he was tired. Went to bathe and sleep."
"He’s not there." Corvin’s jaw tightened. "He went after the leaf."
Ragnar was on his feet instantly. "He wouldn’t. The Proctor forbade it—"
"Soren doesn’t care about his word when something he wants is on the line." Corvin was already moving. "How long ago did you leave him?"
"An hour. Maybe more."
"Then he’s already in the forest." Corvin stopped. Turned. His eyes were blazing. "I’m going after him. He doesn’t get to be the hero. Not for Thorne."
He strode away before Ragnar could respond.
In an abandoned classroom on the east wing. Nikolai arrived first, then Xavier. Killian came last, slipping through the door like a shadow.
"The poison worked," Nikolai said. "But not completely. The prince is still alive."
Xavier’s smile flickered. "The healer must have slowed it. I heard they’re sending guards for some rare leaf."
"The Silverthorn Leaf." Killian’s voice was flat. "The antidote."
"Can they find it in time?"
"The forest is a death trap." Nikolai crossed his arms. "But we can’t leave it to chance. We need a contingency."
Killian wasn’t listening. He stared at the wall, hands clenched. Corvin had rushed to Thorne’s side. Corvin had stayed outside the healer’s wing for hours. Corvin had looked desperate, desperate in a way Killian had never seen him look at anyone.
"Killian." Nikolai’s voice sharpened. "Did you hear me?"
"I heard you."
"Can Draven be trusted to keep his mouth shut?"
"Draven will do whatever I tell him." Killian’s lips curved into something ugly. "But this isn’t over. If the prince survives—"
"He won’t."
"—then I’ll finish it myself."
Xavier raised an eyebrow. "That sounds personal."
"It is." Killian turned toward the door. "Corvin Eldritch is mine. He just doesn’t know it yet. And I will not let some weakling prince take him from me."
He vanished into the corridor.
Xavier looked at Nikolai. "He’s going to be a problem."
"Not yet. But soon. Keep watching him."
Valeria stood at her window, staring at the eastern gate.
She had seen him leave. She had been unable to sleep, her mind churning with Soren’s strange behavior his refusal to leave the prince’s side, the way he had looked at Corvin like he was ready to kill him over a first-year.
She had gone to his suite to demand answers. And she had seen him slipping through the eastern gate, heading into the Forbidden Forest.
For a prince he had only known for a few weeks.
"Soren," she whispered. "What has that boy done to you?"
Her reflection showed a woman she barely recognized bitter, jealous, grasping at a man who had never truly been hers. She had loved him for years. She had given him everything. And he had never once looked at her the way he looked at that pale, weak, infuriating prince.
Something was wrong about Thorne Astrlyn, and Valeria was going to find out what it was.
Even if it meant tearing the prince apart herself.
"He’s deteriorating faster than I anticipated," Master Aldric said grimly. "The poison has reached his heart. He has six hours. Maybe less."
Finn let out a sound like a wounded animal. Marek put a hand on his shoulder, his face ashen. Jasper’s book lay forgotten on the floor.
The Proctor stood rigid. "And the guards we dispatched?"
"Still in the forest. No word yet."
"Then we pray."
Corvin was already gone.
The marsh stretched before Soren like a wound in the earth.
Stagnant water, twisted reeds, fog so thick he could barely see his hands. Every step sank ankle-deep into sucking mud. Strange splashes echoed across the water too large for fish, almost human but not quite.
To your left.
Soren turned. Yellow, slit-pupiled eyes glowed in the fog, too high off the ground to be any normal creature. They watched him, unblinking. Then they vanished.
"This place is cursed."
Yes. Keep moving.
He pushed deeper, scanning the banks for the distinctive silver shimmer. It grew only in the darkest places, where moonlight touched the water but nothing else dared grow.
Then he saw it a single plant on a small island of solid ground, its leaves long and sharp, glowing faintly silver.
Soren waded toward it, the water rising to his waist, then his chest. Something brushed against his leg beneath the surface. He ignored it. His fingers closed around the stem.
Behind him, the water exploded.
A creature rose from the depths massive, scaled, its jaws lined with teeth that glistened in the silver light. It was something older than wolves, something that had never been tamed.
Soren shoved the leaf into his pack and dove sideways as the jaws snapped shut where his head had been. His blade was in his hand before he finished rolling. When the creature lunged again, he drove the steel deep into its throat.
The creature screamed, thrashing, bleeding, and crashed back into the water.
Soren knelt in the mud, chest heaving, blood dripping from a gash across his shoulder where the creature’s teeth had grazed him.
He had the leaf.
He just had to make it back alive.
Behind him, in the darkness of the treeline, something else was moving. Something that had been following him since he entered the forest.
Something that was closing in fast.