And how had she repaid him?
The guards were gaining on them.
Kestrel wiped the tears that were streaming down her face. “I don’t think we have a choice.”
Elora didn’t wait for another request. She simply slipped the ring onto her finger and let the Hollows come back to life.
“You can’t catch us and save your princes!” Kestrel shouted behind her as Micah’s screams tore through the woods again. All she could do was hope they would choose to save him instead of chasing after her.
Then, she and Elora ran.
And this time, Kestrel didn’t look back.
Chapter 40
The Road Ahead
KESTREL
As healed as Kestrel was, it still wasn’t enough. Dodging and jumping over sentient tree roots while also trying desperately to outrun the guards she was certain were gaining on them, Kestrel was having a hard time keeping up their hastened pace.
Elora eventually offered to let her lean on her shoulder, so that she could help carry some of her weight. But it only slowed them down more.
The rootless were ravenous around them.
The gravemoors clawed at their feet.
They wouldn’t make it out of the Hollows alive. Not like this.
“Take off the ring,” Kestrel huffed, narrowly leaping over one of the gravemoors that was reaching up for them from the dirt.
“What?” Elora balked. “I won’t be able to help you if I?—”
“You will,” she said, remembering another part of her underwater vision.
Fractal splices of that vision kept splicing through her mind.Kestrel didn’t know how long she’d been down there, but it had felt like an eternity—the visionhad coveredan eternity. Years and years, centuries of events, millennia of history, some of which Kestrel couldn’t help but wonder had previously been lost to time. She had seen so much of Grimtol’s past that it was difficult to sort out the important parts, the ones that still made sense.
Elora cast her a dubious glance. She didn’t know everything Kestrel now knew. Didn’t understand how much knowledge she now possessed about…everything.
But in that vision, Kestrel had witnessed her own birth. Heard the promise the dragon had made to her mother to“give back what had been taken.”Not even Aenwyn had understood the implications then, not until her belly had swollen with a new bundle of joy.
Kestrel. Her only daughter. Her only heir.
Kestrel was still making sense of the tangled tapestry of history that had been splayed before her, but she had understood this: Aenwyn had been infertile. The eggs in her womb, dead. And the dragon had brought one of them back to life. It had chosen Kestrel and raised her from the dead.
Elora and Kestrel were more alike than they had ever known. And Kestrel would prove it to her.
Before Elora could pull away, Kestrel reached for her hand and tore the ring from her finger.
“Don’t! You don’t know what will?—”
Elora flung herself from Kestrel—or at least she tried to. But the Daughter of Daybreak was holding tight. It was just a hunch, but if she was right, it could change everything.
And Kestrelwasright.
Clutching onto Elora’s hand, nothing happened to her. The death magic that everyone feared—it had no effect on Kestrel, a princess who had also been brought back to life.
Elora’s eyes slammed shut, a terrified shriek ripping from her lungs.
