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Az didn’t want to, but he looked. So did the rest of them.

A lone figure stood by the far window, gazing at the front lawn and the turquoise river beyond. Toward the very spot where a stranger had landed four weeks ago.

Azriel clenched his teeth, avoiding the urge to touch Truth-Teller’s hilt.

He’d been in this house, poring over Mor’s latest report from Vallahan, when his shadows hissed in his ear: She’s here in the grass and mist; she has come. She smells of another world; the bloodline is back—

He’d stalked onto the lawn, silent as death, and seen her: a red-haired female who smelled both Fae and human, in strange clothes and garishly pink shoes, coated in blood that didn’t smell like her own—a female’s blood that was not human or Fae or any manner of creature from this world.

The stranger’s name was Bryce Quinlan.

She had winnowed onto the lawn—and yet she hadn’t. She fell from the stars. Fell from the rock, fell from the sea—

His shadows had been babbling, trying to put into language what they were puzzling out with the female’s every gasping, shuddering breath.

Then Truth-Teller had begun thrumming. Singing. And right as he’d crept to the kneeling female and angled the blade against her golden throat . . . he’d spied the great black sword.

Truth-Teller had leaped in his hand, and only his determined grip on the knife had kept it from falling out of his grasp. And then his iron will had him following a protocol beaten into his very blood. Putting a potential enemy in a blindfold, keeping her unaware of where she was going or who was around her. Flying in several different directions to further disorient and unnerve her.

Not that Bryce had needed any more unnerving. She’d been shaking in his arms. Sobbing, though she hadn’t shed any tears. She was soaked in that other person’s blood, as if she’d bathed in it.

But there was no hatred, no sense of a vicious warrior’s triumph about her. Only fear and despair and pain and terror and a deep, shattering grief.

In those initial moments, he’d been so stupidly pitying that he’d brought her to the town house, not to the nearest holding cell or to the Hewn City. No, that had come later.

It ranked amongst the most reckless and idiotic decisions he’d ever made. No one had said so, but Azriel knew it—and would never forget it, either. He’d brought an outsider from another world into the heart of his home city, surrounded by families and children.

So much had happened after that. So much, and so quickly.

Judging by the silence in the room now, the others were remembering it, too. The Mother knew they were all still processing what had occurred, and what they’d learned.

Az had just done what had usually served him well: buried it down deep and moved on. Even if he still wouldn’t draw Truth-Teller. Hated even attaching it to his body. Maybe he’d get lucky and a sharp wind would one day rip off not only his wings, but the cursed blade, too. Spare him from actually working up the nerve to chuck it in the nearest trash bin, where it deserved to be.

Nesta continued staring out the window as she said to none of them in particular, “Am I even allowed near the Trove these days?”

Azriel might have regretted bringing Bryce Quinlan to the town house, but at least he’d retained a healthy wariness of her. Nesta, on the other hand . . . Nesta had ultimately, naïvely trusted the female. And had thus nearly destroyed them all.

Cassian’s face remained hard as steel.

“Vallahan and Montesere don’t know that you’re banned from wielding the Trove,” Amren reminded her.

For a heartbeat, Az wished his shadows had remained close enough to read the nuances of Amren’s harsh tone. But even if they had been, he might not have dared ask them to. Not with Amren.

“And if Vallahan and Montesere ever learned what happened with Bryce Quinlan, they’d march on us immediately,” Mor said, brown eyes almost golden as she surveyed the crackling fire. “You gave the Mask to Bryce to take to another world, Nesta. She might have convinced you she needed it to win her own war, but it may very well spark a new one here if others find out.”

“She gave it back,” Nesta argued, still not turning from the window.

“Yes,” Rhys said icily, “and now our enemies have every right to take the Trove by force to ‘protect’ this world from our good intentions.”

Though Nesta’s earth-shattering power had been diminished—yielded so the babe in this room might live—enough remained for her to command the Trove. To make her a threat. To allow her to Make things as she willed.

Was it a relief for Nesta to lose some of that monstrous power, as it would be for him? She hadn’t let on, even before Bryce Quinlan had landed on the front lawn.

Tension snapped taut through the room. Az felt, more than saw, his shadows ripple, aching to sweep between his friends like a phantom wind and report back on every twitch, to paint for him a portrait of what they were all feeling. Stand down, he ordered them.

His shadows slumped back to the floor by the doors. He gave them a withering glare.

“That’s not the point,” Cassian started, and Az didn’t miss the pain in his brother’s eyes. Even Cassian was angry at Nesta and what she had chosen to do—and even more pained by this new distance between them all. That Rhys was even in the same room as Nesta was a solid step forward after these three weeks, but it didn’t mean any of them forgave her.