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“Claudia was right. She always said that loving me would get him killed.”

“No, little mage, this isn’t your fault.”

I lay Arlo down carefully, smoothing his hair away from his forehead with fingers that leave blood in the strands, and I press my lips to his brow.

Kylian drags me up, and somehow, my legs still hold me.

The remaining dragon ship is retreating across the water, its sails torn, its hull smoking, its men scrambling over the deck. The black dragon circles low above it before dropping back to the ship, its hulking body returning to that of a man and disappearing onboard.

They are leaving.

I see it through the smoke, through the tears that won’t stop. I see its sails catching wind, see its hull cutting through the dark water, see the men moving on its deck like ants, like nothing, like creatures who do not know that they have just ended the world.

They think they can leave?

They think they can kill him and sail away. They think his life was a small casualty of war, a number to be counted and discarded, a name and a face they never knew.

They are wrong. They are so wrong.

My hands hang at my sides, red to the wrists. Arlo’s blood drips from my fingers onto the deck, each drop a small, dark period at the end of a sentence I am not finished writing.

I grip the railing. The steel groans. It burns red under my palms, deep as Arlo’s blood, deep as the rage that is finally rising up to meet the grief.

“They’re not leaving,” I murmur.

And the sea churns.

CHAPTER 66

• Alessia •

THE SEA DOES not turn with my rage.

It becomes it.

One moment the ocean is an indifferent current. The next, it is the manifestation of my grief, my fury given form, a living extension of the thing that has torn open inside my chest. I feel it rise through the hull beneath my feet, feel it answer my call, feel it gather itself into something vast, vengeful, and mine.

“Alessia!” Kylian warns.

I hear him the way you hear thunder from very far away—a rumble at the edge of perception, irrelevant to the storm already breaking overhead. His hand grips my shoulder, but the touch barely registers. I am already somewhere else, unraveling, becoming something that cannot be held by hands or bound by chains or reasoned with by kings.

“They’re not leaving.”

My voice does not sound like mine. Kylian grips my shoulder for a second, but my magic surges violently, throwing him back.

“They’re not leaving!” I scream again.The wind picks up, howling my outrage as it surges.

It tears across the water so hard that the sails of the retreating ship snap and twist, one mast cracking down the center as lightning flickers inside the clouds above.

Kylian reaches me from behind, his arms coming around me as he tries to pull me back against him.

“Little mage,” he says against my ear, his voice harsh with fear. “Do not let this take you.”

“He killed him,” I say, and my voice does not sound like mine.

“I know.” His grip tightens, yet my hands refuse to let go of the railing, as if forged to it.

The bond tries to wrap around me, tries to pull me back, tries to warm what has gone cold inside me. But my magic opens, and it tears out of me and into the world.