Page 7 of Revels on an Angel’s Grave

Teeth gritted to avoid screaming, she forced her eyes to open. Through teary, blurred vision, she counted the details around her, grounding herself.

The tapestries on the walls; woven landscapes and hand drawn star maps; the sculptures between the windows; the doors at the far end, sealed.

Anyone could stumble around the corner, though. Anyone could find her vulnerable. She needed to get away from here to really process what the Fates were saying.

Gritting her teeth, Emmeline dragged herself through the corridors of the foreign manor. She stopped at every turn to breathe over the pain splitting her skull, the flickering lights and crippling, mad laughter, repeating,

A fortune spun by Fated hands,

A choice taken from forsaken bands.

Two hearts staked through with malice.

Star’s Reign and Star’s Ruin.

She didn’t know how long it was until she collapsed inside her suite, spine pressed to the door. Until the Fates’ voices settled into their dusty hum in the back of her mind and she had enough energy to cross to her dressing chamber.

The mystlights ignited, and Emmeline winced as her sensitive eyes adjusted. Dropping to her knees, she shoved aside piles of skirts, hangers squeaking against one another.

Emmeline didn’t look at the pieces of parchment she’d tacked to the wall right away or the lists and arrows upon them. She dove for her journal and scratched out those haunting words the Fates had spoken, adding the music and bones to the strict record she’d kept of everything they’d told her since the seeing chamber.

A fortune spun by Fated hands,

A choice taken from forsaken bands.

Two hearts staked through with malice.

Star’s Reign and Star’s Ruin.

Not long now.

When she was done, she fell back on her haunches. She had no Fatesforsaken clue what the reading meant—what fortune it was referring to, what choice. But Star’s Reign and Star’s Ruin were two of the things the Fates had proclaimed above the destroyed seeing chamber, so she was almost certain it all had to do with Roremar.

Blinking, she studied the wall before her. The notes. The theories.

The name in the center of it all: DRYVIUS.

The giant question mark she’d drawn beside those seven letters had icy shame dripping down her spine.

She’d assembled this wall her first night in the capital, pinning up her lingering theories and the pieces that were still unanswered after toiling through them for two weeks aboard the ship that brought her here.

The Fate of Chaos and Revelry was responsible for the murders on Lyra—he’d used Roremar to do it—and it had something to do with his relationship to the Fate of Cruelty and Adoration since all the women were tied to her.

But she couldn’t figure out why.

They thought Dryvius was trying to complete a ritual, an act of revenge, each woman a failed attempt, but the specifics were a mystery.

She scanned the list of evidence from every scene, remembering the twelve-pointed star tattoos and the sigil of the Warders of Selene—the cult they’d discovered that wasn’t a cult at all but a reference to the Fates themselves—the background on the victims, and myths they’d uncovered in trying to connect it all.

Nico’s movements those final days were charted on their own page, and her throat tightened as she skimmed the records. His joking laugh echoed through her memory, how he’d confided in her that all he wanted was to lighten his brother’s load.

Tears stung Emmeline’s eyes.

“Roremar,” she whispered, shoulders curving in. “Where are you?”

She tried to look at the evidence wall as she knew he would. With that unique, keen mind. The analytical observation that peeled apart the surface details to reveal the reasoning beneath.

But she couldn’t make the pieces align.