The walk took hours, though hours meant very little in a sky with no sun to measure them by.
They found nothing but death the entire way — dead flowers underfoot that crumbled to gray dust with every step, the occasional bleached bone half-swallowed by the meadow's endless gray, once the intact skeleton of something with wings too large to have belonged to any bird the chosen ones recognized, curled protectively around a smaller shape that had long since stopped being distinguishable as anything at all. Nobody spoke much. There was a particular exhaustion to walking through a landscape built entirely out of what had already been lost, and the house conserved its words the way it conserved everything else it might need later.
Katherine walked near the front, beside Thomas, her dark element humming low and watchful under her skin the way it hummed whenever she expected, correctly or not, that something was about to require it. KaSandra walked at the center of the group, the coat's gold-white seams catching what little ambient light the gray sky offered, the thread inside her quiet but present, the way a held breath is present even when nothing has yet required it to be released.
"How much further," Fenix asked, at what felt like the fourth or fifth hour, his fire flickering low and impatient at his fingertips.
"We'll know when the ground stops trying to kill the flowers," Niall said, not looking up from where his attention stayed fixed on the earth beneath them. "It's gotten worse since we started. Whatever's doing this — the queen, the anchor, both — it's stronger the closer we get. I'd guess we're close."
He was right. Within the hour the last of the dead flowers gave way entirely to bare gray ground, cracked and lifeless in a way that made even the meadow behind them look, by comparison, like something that had once held hope of recovering. The castle loomed close now, close enough that its full scale became apparent — towers that seemed to bend slightly at their peaks, as though the architecture itself had been built by someone who understood the ordinary rules of construction and had chosen, deliberately, to violate them, black stone that drank the gray light rather than reflecting any of it.
"Everyone stays close," Thomas said, as they crossed the last stretch of open ground toward the castle's enormous doors, already standing open, already waiting. "Whatever's on the other side of that entrance, it's expecting us. She's had three weeks to prepare exactly as much as we have."
They crossed the threshold together.
The floor lit beneath their feet the instant the last of them stepped through — a vast circle of symbols in a language none of them recognized, glowing the specific sickly violet of something built with intention to harm, and Katherine had just enough time to shout a warning before the light rose up around all of them at once, swallowing the enormous entrance hall whole.
When it cleared, the group was gone.
Not dead. Thomas understood that immediately, in the half-second of panic before his training reasserted itself over the fear — the light had not killed anyone, the specific texture of it had been separation rather than destruction, a spell built to scatter rather than to end. He stood alone in a corridor he did not recognize, black stone walls close on either side, torches burning with the same sickly violet the floor had glowed, and understood, with the particular cold clarity of a man whose entire training had been built around exactly this kind of contingency, that the demon queen had split them exactly the way she'd intended to from the moment they crossed her threshold.
"KaSandra," he called, and his own voice came back to him flat and swallowed by stone that seemed built specifically to keep sound from carrying further than the person who made it.
Nothing answered.
Somewhere in the castle's black maze, scattered into pairs and singles the queen's spell had chosen for reasons none of them yet understood, the rest of the house was finding out, one corridor at a time, exactly what waited for them.
Kristen found herself standing beside Ashton — one of Thomas's newer trainees, quiet and steady, a blink-light talent Kristen had sparred against more times than she could count over the last two years — in a round chamber lit by torches that burned the same violet as the corridor outside, and had perhaps three seconds to register the chamber's occupant before the occupant registered them.
He was tall. That was the first thing Kristen's mind fixed on, some old instinct cataloguing the threat before the rest of her caught up — tall and composed, dark hair, dressed in something that looked less like armor than like the memory of a throne room, standing at the chamber's center with a stillness that had nothing uncertain in it at all.
"First of seven," he said, by way of introduction, his voice carrying easily through a room built to swallow sound. "I am Davran Superbia, and I am afraid the two of you have drawn the least fortunate assignment in this entire building."
"We'll see about that," Kristen said, and reached for her blink-light before the sentence had even finished leaving her mouth.
The world stopped.
It was not darkness, not unconsciousness, not any interruption Kristen had a name for — it was simply stillness, total and absolute, her own body caught mid-motion with her power half-summoned and going nowhere, Ashton frozen beside her in the exact stance he'd been reaching for his own magic in, the torches' violet flames holding perfectly motionless mid-flicker like something painted rather than burning.
Davran walked a slow circle around them both, unhurried, examining them the way a man examines something he has already decided the fate of and is simply confirming the details before proceeding.
"This is what I offer everyone who fights me," he said, to no one who could yet hear him, the words existing more for his own accounting than for theirs. "A single moment of complete honesty about the shape of the fight before it begins. You cannot outrun what I can stop. You cannot outpace a man who has made time itself agree to hold still for him. I tell you this not out of cruelty, but because I have learned, over three hundred years, that a fair warning changes nothing about the outcome and costs me nothing to give."
Time resumed.
Kristen's power completed the summons a half-second late, the blink-light flaring around her hands, and she understood — in the sudden rush of motion returning all at once, faster and more disorienting than any fight she'd trained for — exactly what Davran had meant. He had stopped time for less than a second. It had been enough to let him close half the distance between them, close enough now that Ashton's first strike, thrown a half-second too slow, passed through empty air where Davran had been standing and found nothing at all.
The fight that followed was not a fight in any sense Kristen recognized from two years of training. It was a series of moments in which Davran simply removed the portion of time either of them needed to land anything meaningful, over and over, patient and total, wearing them down not through strength but through the specific cruelty of never once letting them keep pace with their own reflexes.
Ashton went down first, a blow that should have been blockable landing instead in the half-second Davran had stolen from his ability to see it coming, and did not get back up.
Kristen felt something in her go very cold and very clear.
She had trained her whole life around speed — blink-light was built for exactly the kind of fight Davran had just proven impossible to win on speed's own terms, and she understood, standing over Ashton's still form with the violet torchlight burning steady around them both, that there was only one thing left in her arsenal that Davran's stolen half-seconds could not touch, because it did not rely on speed at all.
The forbidden fairy spell had been taught to her once, years ago, by a teacher who had made her swear never to use it except as an absolute last measure — a binding built not on power exchanged for power, but on a life given whole, all at once, the caster's own continued existence spent in a single irreversible transaction that could not be stopped, could not be outpaced, because it did not happen in time at all. It happened outside it.
"Davran Superbia," Kristen said, and something in her voice made even the still, composed general go quiet for the first time since the fight began. "You said you offer everyone a single moment of complete honesty. Here's mine."
She began the spell.
Davran's eyes widened — the first crack Kristen had seen in three hundred years of unbroken composure — and he reached to stop time again, to steal the half-second that would let him close the distance and end her before the binding completed. It was not fast enough. The spell did not need time to work, and time was the only weapon Davran had ever needed.
The violet chamber filled with white light that had nothing sickly about it at all, and when it cleared, Davran Superbia — first-ranked, undefeated, the man who had never once in three hundred years lost anything he had not already chosen to give — was gone, unmade the way the thread had unmade the assassin weeks before, and Kristen lay very still on the black stone floor beside Ashton, her chest no longer rising, a small fierce smile fixed on a face that had known, choosing this, exactly what it would cost.