Read Chapter 33: The Siege of Dawn

The first shadow struck down the great hall doors before the screams had even finished echoing from the eastern corridor. One moment, the gilded oak stood firm, the next it splintered inward, driven by a tide of black smoke that moved with terrible purpose, curling around the threshold like a living thing.

Anya felt the rings burn against her chest. She’d hidden them in the inner pocket of her gown, twin weights of cold metal, but now they grew warm—hot—as if responding to some summons.

“He’s here,” she said.

Kael had his sword half-drawn before she finished the thought. He stood between her and the advancing dark, his boots planted wide on the marble floor. “Then we don’t stop running.”

They ran.

The western corridor stretched long and narrow, hung with tapestries that depicted the kingdom’s golden age. The tapestries blistered as they passed. Threads of black reached out from within the woven scenes—hands, claws, things with too many fingers—grabbing for Anya’s skirts. Kael’s blade caught one, severed it, and the thing shrieked with a voice that was almost human.

Guards appeared ahead, faces pale beneath their helmets. Captain Venn, a man Anya had known since childhood, raised his torch.

“Your Highness! The east wing is—” His words died as the shadow overtook him from behind. Not attacking. Passing through. And when it passed, Venn’s eyes went flat and gray, and his torch clattered to the floor.

He didn’t fall. But he no longer saw them.

“Not dead,” Kael said, pulling Anya by the wrist. “Taken. Possessed. Go.”

Every door on the corridor burst open at once. Servants, guards, courtiers—people Anya had grown up with, had laughed with in the gardens, had watched celebrate her namedays—stepped out in unison. Their movements were too smooth, too synchronized, like puppets on a single set of strings. Their eyes did not meet hers.

“They’re just bodies now,” Kael said, reading her hesitation. “If we stay, we join them.”

He was right. She hated that he was right.

They abandoned the corridor, cutting through the kitchens. A cook stood frozen beside the ovens, a ladle still in her hand, her face slack. The shadow constructs had spread faster than fire. Anya could feel them now—a cold pressure against the back of her skull, the same sensation she imagined a man might feel standing too close to a cliff’s edge.

The rings burned hotter.

Kael kicked open the service door that led to the great hall, and for a moment she thought they’d made it. The vast space stood empty, lit by the last of the dying sun through the enormous stained-glass window above the throne. Blue light fell across the floor in shattered patterns, fragments of cobalt and sapphire pooling like spilled ink.

Then the doors behind them slammed shut.

And Malachai stepped out of the shadow at the far end of the hall.

He had aged in a way that had nothing to do with years. His face was the same—angular, handsome, disturbingly young for the power he wielded—but his movements were wrong. He glided rather than walked, his feet not quite touching the floor.

“Princess.” His voice curled through the hall like smoke. “I felt the rings the moment you took them. Did you think I would not?”

Anya’s hand went to her collar, pressing the rings flat against her sternum. “My father will—”

“Your father is unconscious in his study, and will not wake until I permit it.” Malachai tilted his head. “The true question is whether you will surrender the rings willingly, or whether I must peel them from your cold, unremembering fingers.”

She didn’t flinch. But she tasted copper on her tongue.

Kael moved before Malachai finished speaking, a blur of steel and purpose. His blade should have taken the sorcerer through the chest. Instead it passed through shadow, and Malachai laughed—a sound like breaking glass.

“You are charming,” the sorcerer said, and a hand of darkness closed around Kael’s throat. “But the rings are mine by right. They were forged from the Queen’s dying wish, and I have waited seventeen years to collect.”

Anya’s blood went cold. “Her dying wish? She didn’t die. She fled.”

“Is that what you remember?” Malachai’s smile was almost gentle. “Your mother did not flee, Princess. She was taken—by the King’s servants, on the King’s orders, after he discovered my ring upon her finger. He thought her faithless. He was so certain that he let me bind his daughter to the curse to prove his devotion to her memory.”

The floor seemed to tilt.

The ledger’s warning surfaced in her mind, unbidden. Do not trust. Do not trust. Do not trust.

“You’re lying,” she said.

“I have no reason to lie. I will take the rings regardless.” Malachai spread his arms, and the shadows behind him rose like a tide, dozens of the hollow-eyed constructs shambling forward. “You may choose to give them freely. It will spare you the sight of your loyal guard being unmade.”

Kael struggled, his boots scraping the marble, his face going red. Anya watched him fight—not for himself, she realized, but because she was still frozen, and he had placed himself between her and the sorcerer even now.

The ledger had warned her not to trust.

But the ledger had been written before she understood what she was fighting for.

Anya pulled the rings from her collar. Twin bands of silver, engraved with interlocking vines. They were still warm. Still burning.

“Let him go,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt. “And I will give you what you want.”

Malachai’s eyes glittered with triumph. The shadows hesitated, and Kael dropped to the floor of the throne room, gasping, beneath the shattered stained-glass window, where the blue light pooled like water around them.

The sorcerer glided forward, hand extended. “A wise choice, Princess. I will remember this—even if you will not.”

The blue light caught the rings as she raised them. And in that moment, Anya understood what Elara had been trying to teach her. The curse was not a cage. It was a key, and she had been carrying the lock wrong her entire life.

She looked at Kael, who was on his knees, reaching for her, his mouth forming a warning she could not hear.

The sorcerer’s fingers closed around the rings.