Crown of Midnight (Part VI)

Synopsis

The dream comes back the night the forest changes its song, and Riley Thorn knows both at once for what they are — not a nightmare and not weather, but a summons. In it she is small again at the edge of a moonlit clearing, watching her father kneel over a circle of glowing symbols, and she knows exactly what he is doing and exactly how it ends. “To break the chain, a sacrifice must be made,” Marcus Thorn tells her, gently, the way he always does. It is the thing he believed to the end. It is the thing that killed him. And every time, too late, she tells him the same answer: there was another way, and he wrote it down himself, and he simply would not trust anyone to help him carry it. Above Edgewood the light in the trees has begun to fail in a way it never has before, and the shapes she saw in the dream as a child — long serpentine forms with hollow eyes, coiling up out of the earth — she can finally name. They were never the thing itself. They were the reaching of it: fingers of a vast dark testing a lock her family has spent generations feeding. Everything the pack has faced, every face it has fought and sealed and mourned people over, has been one prisoner straining at the same chain. This time the chain is coming apart on its own, and it is not the only thing arriving. The Hunters have stopped scavenging at the edges of the wood; they answer at dawn with a horn and a full company in ranks, patched armor stitched with glowing sigils, better armed than anyone in Edgewood has ever seen them. They have watched this village bleed for its magic for six generations and they have drawn the obvious conclusion about who should be holding it. Her father left her a sentence and a circle and no instructions. Her mother, it turns out, left something too — in the smallest of the journals, in a hand nobody thought to read. Riley is the first Thorn to hold both halves at once, and the last one who will get the chance. The final book of the Midnight Heiress series.