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I tried to picture rolling up to the Gorgon King’s fortress in one of these earth-machines and blowing a hole straight through his pretty walls. Kick-arse indeed.

“The trouble won’t be getting in,” I said. “It’ll be getting out again with his entire army at our backs.”

“Right. So, I’ll ask again. How are we doing this? Because I don’t know about you, but I have never once stolen a practical god before, and I imagine they’re rather hard to put in a sack and toss over your back.”

I grinned and clapped him on the back.

“Lucky for you, my friend, I have a plan. And just the thing we’ll need for it.” I started walking. “Come on. Time to steal something else first, before we go and bag ourselves a furious king.”

The moment Aster and I reached the top of the hidden stairwell, I turned us toward my mother’s chambers.

Years ago, my father had given her ten Way Stones, crafted by a Way Weaver, so that she might travel between kingdoms and visit the family she had left behind. Way Weavers were rare things now. Most were long dead, and there had only ever been one with the skill to forge a stone that a person could carry in their pocket and crack open to reveal a door between worlds.

Fortunately, my mother had never used all ten.

Unfortunately, she had left only two.

The three of us, Atlas, Father, and I, had agreed long ago to keep them for some dire emergency. This, I thought grimly, more than qualified.

But her door had not been opened in years.

I felt it the moment I pushed it wide. That strange, held-breath stillness. The air was thick with dust and the ghost of a perfume I had not smelled for years. Nothing had been touched. Nothing had been moved. My father had forbidden it all those years ago, and not a single servant had dared to defy him since.

Her brush still lay upon the dressing table, a few strands of dark hair caught in its bristles. Her shawl still hung over the back of the chair where she had left it. A vase of flowers, long since crumbled to grey dust, still sat upon the sill. It was less a bedchamber than a tomb. A room where time had come to a stop the day she died, and never started again.

I had not set foot in it since.

“You alright?” Aster asked, quiet for once, lingering in the doorway as though he understood that stepping inside would be to step into something sacred.

“No,” I said, because there was no sense lying to him. “But it doesn’t matter. We’re not here for me or memories of those who have passed.”

I crossed to her writing desk and pressed the carved rose at its corner, the way I had watched my mother do a hundred times as a child. The hidden drawer slid open with a soft sigh. Two blue Way Stones lay within, pale and smooth, humming faintly against my fingers as I lifted them out.

My eyes drifted, despite me, to the great portrait above the bed. The two of them. My mother, dark-haired and laughing, and my father with his hand at her waist and a look on his face I had only ever seen him wear for her. Gods, they had loved one another. A love that was a thing of legend in these halls. The kind that bards still sang about. And when she had been taken from him, it had not made my father stronger.

It had hollowed him out.

It had broken something in him that never once mended and left a great grieving emptiness standing where a king used to be.

It was why I had never let myself fall. Watching what love had done to him. Or should I say, what the loss of it had done to him, I had decided long ago that the surest way to ruin a man was to give him a thing he could not bear to lose.

And now I watched my brother live that exact nightmare. Down in that chamber, with the woman he loved fading cold in his arms.

My gaze drifted back to my father’s painted face, and that familiar guilt rose up to meet it like bile.

Because it hadn’t been grief that finally finished what remained of him.

It had been me.

My hands, wielding the darkness. Demetrios had been the one steering, I knew that now, his will wrapped around mine like a fist around a puppet’s strings. But it had still been my body that did it. My eyes were the last thing my father ever looked upon, and gods, the betrayal he must have read on a face that was not truly mine to wear in that moment.

I had wanted to die with the knowing of it. Might have, too, had Atlas not come and sat at my bedside in the infirmary. Had not gripped me by the back of the neck the way he had when we were boys and refused to let me drown.

‘If you do not bury this deep, it will consume you,’ he had told me, his voice rough with his own grief.

‘It will hollow you out the way losing Mother hollowed him, and there will be nothing left of my brother except the hating.’ He had held my gaze until I could not look away.

‘Alexandra risked everything to drag you back into this world. Do not make a liar of that gift by squandering the life she bought you on a crime that was never yours to carry, my brother.’