Chapter 68: The Private Performance

THE MUSIC CHANGED at half-past the eleventh bell.

Not suddenly. Not in a way that most people would notice. The orchestra in the upper gallery shifted from a Modegan reel to something slower, something in a minor key that wound through the ballroom like smoke through an open window. Couples on the dance floor adjusted without thinking, their steps slowing, their bodies drawing closer together. Conversations dipped in volume. Wine glasses paused halfway to lips.

It was masterfully done. A mood change so gradual, so organic, that it seemed to arise from the evening itself rather than from any deliberate hand.

But I noticed.

I noticed because I was watching Cinder.

He had been patient all evening. Through the feast, through the first dances, through two hours of political maneuvering disguised as celebration. He had stood by the eastern windows, a glass of wine untouched in his hand, and he had waited with the terrible patience of something that has waited for three thousand years and can wait a few hours more.

Now he moved.

It was subtle. A word to a servant. A nod to a man I didn’t recognize, broad-shouldered, dressed in the deep blue of the King’s household guard. A gesture toward the north end of the ballroom, where a pair of doors opened onto the King’s Gallery, a smaller, more intimate performance space reserved for private entertainment.

The servant vanished into the crowd. The guard took up a position beside the gallery doors.

And Cinder crossed the room to speak to the King.

I couldn’t hear what he said. The ballroom was too loud, too full of music and laughter and the white noise of four hundred people performing the elaborate theater of Vintish society. But I saw Roderic’s face as he listened. Curiosity. Pleasure. The brightening of a man who has been promised something he wants.

Music, I thought. He’s offering the King music.

Of course he was. He’d spent a year learning what Roderic loved. A year building trust, building rapport, becoming the indispensable Lord Ferule. And he’d learned the one weakness that even the most guarded king couldn’t hide.

Roderic Calanthis loved music the way other men loved wine or women. It was the one thing that could make him lower his guard.

Cinder knew this.

Cinder had planned for this.

“Kvothe.”

Simmon appeared at my elbow, his face flushed from dancing with Fela, his borrowed cravat slightly askew. “Something’s happening. Devi sent me. She says there’s movement in the lower corridors. Servants carrying something heavy into the gallery.”

“An instrument?”

“She thinks so. A hammered dulcimer, maybe. Or a psaltery.”

Neither. I knew what it would be. A harp. The kind of harp that Denna had been training on for months, the one Master Ash had given her, the one whose strings were tuned to frequencies that resonated with the ancient bindings beneath the palace floor.

“Where’s Wil?”

“Watching the southern entrance. Fela’s covering the garden doors.” Sim’s eyes were tight. “Kvothe, should we move? If they’re setting up for something—”

“Not yet. If we act too early, we’ll be thrown out before the performance begins. And I need to see what he’s doing. I need to understand the mechanism before I can break it.”

“And if the mechanism breaks us first?”

I didn’t answer that.

The King’s Gallery was a long, narrow room that ran along the north face of the palace, its outer wall composed entirely of windows that looked out over the royal gardens. During the day, I was told, sunlight poured through the glass and fell across a floor of pale marble veined with gold. The acoustics were legendary. The space had been designed by Illien himself, some said, or by someone who had studied under him. Every surface was angled to catch sound, to cradle it, to let it bloom.

Tonight, the windows showed only darkness. The garden beyond was invisible, swallowed by the moonless night. The room was lit by candles in wall sconces, their flames steady and warm, and the light they cast was softer than the ballroom’s brilliance. More intimate. More dangerous.

A select group of nobles had been invited to the private performance. I saw Baron Jakis, his expression calculated. The Duchess of Meliere, wrapped in emeralds and curiosity. Three lords I didn’t recognize, and five ladies who watched each other more carefully than they watched anything else.

Princess Rosiel was there. Her face was composed, serene, showing nothing of the girl who wanted to study alchemy instead of marriage. She stood beside her father, her hand resting lightly on his arm.

And King Roderic stood at the center of it all, his grey eyes shining with anticipation.

He looked, in that moment, like a child about to receive a gift.

I wanted to grab him. Shake him. Scream at him to leave, to run, to take his daughter and his guards and flee this palace and never look back.

Instead, I slipped through the gallery doors behind a pair of minor nobles and pressed myself into the shadows near the eastern wall.

I was not invited to this performance.

But I was going to watch it anyway.

What I didn’t see—what she told me later, in the fragments she could remember—was what happened in the antechamber before she entered.

She was alone. A small room, barely more than a corridor, with mirrors on one wall and a door at each end. The harp was waiting on a stand. The servants had withdrawn. Cinder’s people had brought her here and left her, because the binding in her skin would do the rest. She didn’t need guards. She needed only to walk through that door and sit and play.

She stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself.

The Yllish knots on her arms were already glowing faintly—responding to the proximity of the seal beneath the palace, warming up like an instrument before a performance. She could feel the song gathering in her chest, building pressure, the way a dam feels the weight of water it was built to hold.

She could have fought. She still had her counter-knots—the amber words, the maybe-words, the anchors she had spent months writing in secret. She could have used them now, thrown everything she had against the compulsion, burned through her defenses in one desperate attempt to resist.

It might have bought her an hour. Perhaps two. But Cinder’s knots were carved in bone, and hers were drawn on skin, and she had always known which would last longer.

So she chose.

Not to fight. Not to surrender. Something harder than either.

She lifted her hand and, with one fingernail, scratched a single Yllish character into the skin of her inner wrist, just below the counter-knot she’d placed there two nights ago. The character was old. Older than the knots Cinder had carved. It meant mine. Not possession—declaration. The Yllish distinction between a thing owned and a thing claimed.

This choice is mine. This ending is mine. Whatever he takes, he does not take this.

She picked up the harp. Straightened her shoulders. Drew one long, deliberate breath.

And walked through the door.

She entered from the far end of the gallery.

Denna.

I had seen her earlier that evening, across the ballroom, dressed in white silk that caught the light like water. But here, in this smaller, quieter space, she was something else entirely.

The dress was simpler than what the other women wore. No gems. No elaborate embroidery. Just white silk that fell from her shoulders in clean, unbroken lines, the fabric so fine that it seemed to move a half-second after she did, following her like a loyal shadow.

Her hair was down. Dark waves that fell past her shoulders, framing a face that was, as always, devastating in its beauty. But it was a sharper beauty tonight. Honed. Stripped of its usual warmth and replaced with something that glittered like the edge of a knife.

She carried a harp.

Not the instrument I expected. Not a Vintish court harp or a Modegan pedal harp. This was older. Smaller. A lap harp with strings of silver that caught the candlelight and threw it back in threads of white fire. Its frame was dark wood, carved with patterns I recognized.

Yllish knots.

They covered the instrument the way they covered her skin. Loops and whorls and intricate geometries that seemed to shift when I looked at them directly. Writing that was also binding. Language that was also power.

Denna sat on the stool that had been placed at the room’s focal point, where the acoustics converged, where every sound she made would be amplified and clarified and rendered in its purest form.

She positioned the harp against her shoulder.

And she looked up.

For one heartbeat, her eyes found mine.

There are things that pass between two people in a single glance that would take a lifetime to speak aloud.

In that heartbeat, Denna told me everything.

I know what’s about to happen. I’m going to fight it. I may not win. Please. Please be ready.

Then she looked away, and her fingers found the strings, and the first note filled the gallery like the first light of dawn filling an empty room.

The song began softly.

A simple melody. Four notes ascending, two descending, a pause. Then again, the same pattern, but with a subtle variation in the third note that opened the phrase like a question. It was the kind of opening that a casual listener would call pleasant, even pretty.

But I was not a casual listener.

I heard the architecture beneath the melody. The mathematical precision of the intervals. The way each note was chosen not just for its beauty but for its resonance, its frequency, its relationship to the harmonic structure of the room itself.

She was tuning the space. The way a namer tunes their mind to hear a true name.

The gallery’s acoustics caught the sound and cradled it, and the notes hung in the air longer than they should have, each one layering over the last, building a lattice of sound that was delicate and complex and terrifying.

Because I recognized the melody.

It was Denna’s song. The one she’d been composing for years. Her version of the Lanre story. The version that cast Lanre as a hero instead of a villain, that told the story of a man who loved his wife so much that he tore the world apart trying to save her.

But it was different now.

Changed.

The melody was the same, but the harmonics beneath it were new. Darker. The musical equivalent of a door being unlocked, a seal being loosened, a thing that had been held shut being slowly, carefully, deliberately pried open.

The audience didn’t understand what they were hearing.

I could see it in their faces. They were enchanted, yes. The Duchess of Meliere had tears on her cheeks. Baron Jakis’s calculated expression had softened into something almost human. Even the guards at the door had relaxed their posture, their hands dropping away from their weapons, their eyes going soft and distant.

They heard beauty. They heard art. They heard a woman singing about love and loss and the lengths to which a man will go to save what he cherishes most.

They didn’t hear the binding.

But I did. And with every verse, with every repetition of that deceptively simple melody, the binding grew stronger. The harmonic lattice thickened. The resonance between Denna’s voice and the patterns carved into her harp and the ancient tiles beneath the palace floor grew more pronounced, more powerful, more wrong.

I could feel it in my teeth. A vibration just below the threshold of hearing, a tremor in the bones of the building that had nothing to do with sound and everything to do with the foundations of reality being gently, expertly stressed.

The Yllish knots on Denna’s harp were glowing.

Faintly. So faintly that in the candlelight, you might mistake it for a trick of the flames. But I wasn’t mistaken. The carved patterns on the dark wood were phosphorescing, a cool blue-white light that pulsed in time with the music, growing brighter with each phrase.

And then I saw it on her skin.

Through the white silk of her dress, through the fine fabric that clung to her arms and shoulders and back, the faintest tracery of light. The Yllish knots that Cinder had carved into her flesh, the bindings he’d etched into her very being, were answering the harp’s call.

She was glowing.

Like a lamp behind a curtain. Like something holy and not entirely of this world.

I started to move.

Not fast. Not obviously. I simply began to drift along the eastern wall, angling toward the front of the gallery where Denna sat, keeping my body in the shadows, keeping my movements casual enough to pass as a restless listener looking for a better vantage point.

I made it perhaps ten feet before a hand closed on my arm.

“I wouldn’t.”

The man was one of Cinder’s. I knew it instantly, not from his face, which was forgettable, or his clothes, which were the standard Vintish formal black, but from his grip. It was too strong. Too precise. The grip of someone who knew exactly how much pressure to apply to communicate a warning without causing a scene.

“Lovely performance, isn’t it?” His smile was pleasant. Empty. “Best to watch from here. The acoustics are better near the wall.”

“I prefer to be closer to the music.”

“I know you do.” His eyes held mine, and there was nothing human in them. Not the inhuman black of Cinder’s eyes, but something subtler. The flatness of a man who had surrendered his will to something else, who moved and spoke and smiled according to instructions he no longer questioned.

“Let go of my arm.”

“When the performance is over.” His grip tightened. Not enough to bruise. Enough to hold. “Lord Ferule was very specific about the seating arrangements. He wants everyone to enjoy the show from their assigned positions.”

I could have broken free. Called the wind to shatter his grip. Called the name of stone to crack the floor beneath his feet. But any use of naming here, in this room, with the bindings already straining, would be like striking a match in a room full of gaelho.

So I stood. And I watched. And I listened.

And I felt the world begin to change.

The second movement of Denna’s song was the story of Lyra.

Her voice shifted, rising from the rich lower registers into something clearer, purer, a soprano line that wound through the gallery like silver thread. She sang of love that transcended death. Of a woman so beloved that a man would break the world to bring her back. Of a promise made at the foot of a mountain, beneath stars that wept to hear it.

The words were beautiful. The melody was devastating.

And the magic was building.

The glow from Denna’s skin was unmistakable now. Even the enchanted audience had begun to notice, though they seemed to interpret it as artistry, as some clever trick of the candlelight, as part of the performance rather than a byproduct of forces they couldn’t comprehend.

The Duchess of Meliere leaned toward her companion and whispered, “How is she doing that?”

The companion shook her head, her eyes never leaving Denna. “I don’t know. I don’t care. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

She wasn’t wrong. It was beautiful. Denna’s face in the blue-white light of the Yllish knots was otherworldly, luminous, the face of something from a fairy story or a fever dream. Her voice filled the gallery the way water fills a glass, completely, leaving no space for anything else.

But beauty is not always benign. This was the kind that destroys.

The floor trembled.

Not much. Just a tremor, the kind you might attribute to a heavy cart passing on the street outside, or a door slamming somewhere deep in the palace. Most of the audience didn’t notice.

But King Roderic did.

I saw his expression change. The enchantment that had softened his features flickered, and beneath it, the shrewd intelligence of a man who has survived thirty years on a throne reasserted itself. His eyes narrowed. His head tilted slightly, the way a dog’s tilts when it hears a frequency beyond human perception.

He felt it. Through his feet, through the marble floor, through the ancient tiles that bore the crest of his house, the seal of his bloodline, the binding that had been part of his family’s legacy since before they knew what it meant.

He felt the seal straining.

“Something’s wrong,” I heard him murmur to his daughter. His hand found hers and squeezed. “We should leave.”

But Princess Rosiel was entranced. Her grey eyes were wide and wet, her lips slightly parted, her entire being focused on Denna and the song. She didn’t hear her father. Didn’t respond to his touch.

The song had her.

It had all of them.

The third movement began, and I understood.

It was a key. The entire composition was a key, and Denna was turning it, and the lock she was opening was beneath our feet, beneath the palace, beneath the city, in the dark foundations of a world that had been sealed three thousand years ago by men and women who understood that some doors should never be opened.

Each verse was a tumbler falling. Each chorus was a ward disengaging. Each bridge between sections was a barrier dissolving.

And the thing being unlocked was aware.

I could feel it now. Not just the vibration in the floor but a presence. A vast, cold intelligence pressing against the inside of the seal the way floodwater presses against a dam. Patient. Relentless. Awake.

It had been asleep for three millennia. Denna’s song was waking it up.

“You feel it, don’t you?”

Cinder’s voice was close. Too close. I turned and found him standing beside me, having materialized from the crowd with the soundless grace of a predator. The man who had been holding my arm was gone, replaced by something far worse.

Cinder’s eyes were his own now. Not the disguised grey-blue he’d worn all evening, but their true color. Black. Not the black of ink or coal or night. The black of absence. The black of a space where something had been removed and nothing had rushed in to fill the void.

“The song is almost finished,” he said conversationally, as if we were discussing the wine or the weather. “Three verses left. Perhaps four. And then the seal will be open enough for what I need.”

“I’ll stop her.”

“You won’t.” He was utterly calm. “You can’t reach her in time. You can’t use naming in this room without catalyzing the reaction. And you can’t kill me.” He smiled. “Not tonight.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I want you to watch.” His voice dropped, and for a moment, the mask of Lord Ferule slipped entirely, and what looked out at me from behind those black eyes was something ancient and broken and filled with a hunger so vast it had its own gravity. “I want you to see what’s coming. I want you to understand that everything you’ve done, every clever trick, every desperate gamble, every sacrifice, has led to this. To you. Standing helpless. Watching the world change.”

“You’re insane.”

“I’m free.” He turned back to watch Denna. “Or I will be, in a few minutes. Three thousand years of servitude. Three thousand years of Haliax’s leash. Tonight, I slip it. Tonight, I become what I was always meant to be.”

“And what’s that?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. The hunger in his eyes said everything.

The fourth verse began, and reality bent.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. The air in the gallery warped, the way air warps above a hot road in summer, and through the distortion I could see something that shouldn’t have been visible. A crack. A fissure in the fabric of the world, hairline-thin, running from the floor to the ceiling like a fracture in a sheet of ice.

It was there and not there. Real and unreal. If I looked directly at it, it vanished. If I let my eyes unfocus, the way Elodin had taught me, it blazed like a wound in the skin of existence.

The seal was breaking.

Not catastrophically. Not all at once. Cinder was too clever for that. He was applying pressure gradually, precisely, the way a locksmith applies tension to a pick. Too much force and the lock jams. Too little and nothing moves. But just right, just exactly the perfect amount of pressure applied to just exactly the perfect point…

Click.

Something gave. Deep beneath the palace, in the ancient foundations where the original seal had been laid, something shifted. A ward that had held since the Creation War released its grip. One of many. But one fewer than before.

The candles in the gallery flickered. Every flame in the room guttered simultaneously, dipping toward darkness, then recovered. The audience murmured, stirred, but the song drew them back under before the unease could crystalize into fear.

Denna’s face was wet with tears.

They streamed down her cheeks unchecked, falling onto the strings of her harp, and where they struck, the silver threads blazed brighter. She was crying, and the magic was using her tears the way it used everything she was and had and loved.

She was fuel. She was the instrument. She was the channel through which Cinder’s millennia of planning poured itself into the foundations of the world.

And she was fighting.

I saw it in the knots.

The Yllish bindings on her skin were not all glowing the same color. Cinder’s knots burned blue-white, cold and precise, the color of winter stars. But threaded through them, almost invisible, were other patterns. Warmer. Softer. They glowed with a faint amber light, like candle flames seen through fog.

Denna’s counter-knots. The ones she’d written in secret. The anchors. The reminders. The Yllish words that whispered maybe where Cinder’s screamed must.

They were working.

Not enough to stop the song. Not enough to break the binding. But enough to slow it. To blunt the edges. To create tiny spaces of resistance in the overwhelming flood of Cinder’s will.

I could see it in the music. The melody occasionally stuttered, a note arriving a fraction of a second late, a phrase resolving in an unexpected direction. To the audience, these variations sounded intentional, artistic, the mark of a musician who understood that perfection is less interesting than imperfection.

But they weren’t artistic. They were rebellion.

Every stuttered note was Denna fighting. Every unexpected resolution was her will asserting itself against the thing that had been written into her blood and bones.

She was losing. Slowly, inevitably, the blue-white knots were overwhelming the amber. Cinder’s writing was deeper, older, more powerful than anything Denna could manage with a pot of ink and a mirror. His bindings were carved into her skeleton. Hers were drawn on her skin.

But she was fighting.

Gods, she was fighting.

I tried again to reach her.

I pushed away from the wall, shouldering past a nobleman who was weeping openly, moving toward the center of the gallery where Denna sat luminous and weeping and trapped. But the crowd had thickened. Bodies pressed close, drawn toward the music like moths toward flame, and each one was another obstacle between me and the woman I loved.

“Move,” I said. Then louder: “Move!”

They didn’t hear me. The song was too loud in their minds. They swayed and wept and smiled and their eyes were glass and their bodies were barriers and I pushed and I shoved and I gained a foot, two feet, three.

A hand caught my collar. Another of Cinder’s people. A woman this time, beautiful and blank-eyed, with a grip like iron. I broke free, tearing the borrowed velvet, and she grabbed me again, both hands on my shoulders now, driving me back.

“Let me through!”

“The performance isn’t over,” she said, smiling.

I called the name of iron, shaped it into a command so precise it would only affect the metal in her grip. The silver buttons on my coat tore free, and her hands slipped, and I lunged forward.

Into another body. Another pair of hands. Another empty-eyed servant of a thing that had spent three thousand years learning how to block a doorway.

There were five of them. Six. Positioned throughout the crowd, invisible until the moment they weren’t, hands reaching out to redirect, to delay, to channel me away from Denna the way shepherds channel sheep away from a cliff.

They didn’t need to stop me. They just needed to slow me down.

Until the song was finished.

I stopped thinking like a man and started thinking like a namer.

I didn’t need to reach Denna physically. I needed to reach the song. I took a breath and listened the way Elodin had taught me — not with my ears, but with the part of me that could hear the true name of the wind hiding in the spaces between gusts.

I found a thread of the wind’s name. A single syllable that meant stillness. Cessation. The wind that stops.

I spoke it. Shaped it into a blade and drove it into the lattice of Denna’s song, intending to cut one thread, to create one moment of quiet in which the binding might falter.

The word struck the music.

And the music struck back.

It was not pain exactly. It was wrongness. My word — the name of the wind shaped into silence — hit the Yllish-woven harmonics and did not pass through. Did not shatter them. Did not disrupt them in any way I had intended.

The Yllish knots ate it.

I felt my naming swallowed. Not deflected — consumed. The way a river swallows a stone, closing over it, making it part of something larger. My word entered the lattice and was unmade, its meaning stripped, its power redirected, its intent inverted.

The silence I had spoken became sound. The stillness became motion. The cessation became acceleration.

Every candle in the gallery flared white-hot. The crack in reality pulsed wider by an inch. The harmonic lattice I had been trying to disrupt thickened and strengthened, fed by the very power I had thrown against it.

I had not disrupted the ritual. I had fed it.

And Denna screamed.

Not with her voice — that continued singing, compelled by the knots carved into her bones. But her body screamed. The amber counter-knots, her secret rebellion, flared violently, blazing through her skin like embers caught in a sudden wind. They had been carefully calibrated, those counter-knots. Painstakingly balanced against Cinder’s bindings. A whisper of maybe set against the roar of must.

The collision sent a shockwave through every knot on Denna’s body. Cinder’s blue-white bindings pulsed brighter, tightening their grip. Her amber counter-knots flickered wildly, some flaring, some dimming, some going dark entirely.

I watched three of her anchors die. Three tiny points of amber light on her left forearm guttered out like candle flames in a storm. The small spaces of freedom they had carved inside Cinder’s control collapsed.

Denna’s fingers stumbled on the strings. A dissonance cut through the gallery. For a fraction of a second, her eyes found mine through the tears and the light, and what I saw was not anger.

It was worse.

You made it worse, her eyes said. You made it so much worse.

The air between us was wrong. Where my naming had collided with the Yllish song-magic, the two systems had left a scar in the room’s reality. The air shimmered and bent, and sounds that passed through it came out distorted, as if heard through deep water.

My hands were shaking. There was a hollow place behind my sternum where the word of wind had been, an emptiness that ached like a missing tooth. Not permanently — I could feel the name reforming, slowly, the way a stream reforms after a stone has disturbed it. But for now, I was diminished.

I understood then. Naming speaks to what a thing is. Yllish knot-magic speaks to what things mean. When the two collide, they don’t cancel. They corrupt. Like two melodies in incompatible keys — not dissonance, which can be resolved, but a fundamental wrongness that produces harmonics no single system could generate alone. Harmonics that break things.

Conventional naming — wind, stone, fire, iron — was worse than useless here. It was ammunition for the enemy.

If I was going to stop this, I would need something else entirely. Something that operated on neither the level of is nor mean, but on the level beneath both.

I didn’t know what that was. Not yet. But I could feel it waiting, patient and hungry, curled in the deepest part of me like a sleeping thing that knows its time is almost come.

Silence.

The fifth verse was the turning point.

Denna’s voice cracked.

Not from strain. Not from exhaustion. From something far worse. The song was reaching its climax, the part where Lanre stands before the doors and speaks the words that will undo everything, and the power required to sing that passage was more than her body could contain.

The Yllish knots on her skin blazed. Not just visible through the silk now, but burning through it, the fabric singeing where the patterns pressed against it, tiny threads of smoke rising from her shoulders, her arms, her back. The smell of burning silk joined the scent of candle wax and wine, an acrid note that cut through the beauty like a scream through silence.

Denna was burning.

Not with fire. With power. With magic so concentrated and so wrongly used that her body was becoming incandescent, a filament in a circuit too powerful for it to sustain.

And still she sang.

The crack in reality widened. I could see it clearly now, even looking directly at it. A line of absolute darkness running from floor to ceiling, and through it, shapes. Movements. The suggestion of vast things stirring in a darkness that had held them for three thousand years.

The audience had stopped pretending this was normal. Several nobles had fled to the gallery doors, only to find them sealed. Others had collapsed into chairs, their minds overwhelmed by the proximity of power they had no framework to understand. A few stood transfixed, staring at the crack, their faces slack with terror or wonder or some terrible combination of both.

King Roderic had drawn his sword.

It was a ceremonial weapon, jewel-encrusted, never designed for actual combat. But he held it like a man who knew how to use a blade, his body positioned between the darkness and his daughter, his grey eyes clear and hard and afraid and absolutely resolute.

“What is this?” he demanded, his voice cutting through the music the way it had cut through conversation at dinner. “Lord Ferule! What have you done?”

But Cinder was gone. Vanished from the gallery in the chaos of the fifth verse, slipped away to whatever position he needed for the final act of his three-thousand-year plan.

The King stood alone.

His daughter behind him.

The darkness before him.

And Denna’s song building toward its final, devastating note.

I threw the last of Cinder’s people aside. Called the wind, just a breath of it, enough to clear a path through the press of enchanted bodies. Felt the bindings in the floor shudder at even that small use of naming, felt the crack in reality twitch wider by a hair’s breadth.

I didn’t care. I had to reach her.

“Denna!”

She looked at me. Through the tears and the light and the smoke rising from her own burning skin, she looked at me, and in her eyes I saw everything.

I saw the girl I’d met on the road to Imre, sharp and beautiful and hiding a dozen heartbreaks behind a smile. I saw the woman who’d sat beside me on the Eolian roof, singing songs we’d never finish. I saw the fighter who’d written her own will into her flesh in defiance of a monster who thought he owned her.

I saw the end.

It’s too late, her eyes said. The song is in me. I AM the song. If you stop the music, you stop my heart.

“There has to be another way,” I said.

But even as the words left my mouth, I could feel the truth of it. The binding was too complete. Too deep. Cinder hadn’t just used Denna as a channel. He’d made her into one. Rewired her at the fundamental level, so that the song and the singer were the same thing, inseparable, a single instrument playing a single note that would unmake the oldest lock in the world.

You couldn’t stop the song without stopping the singer.

You couldn’t silence the music without silencing the voice.

The crack in reality groaned. The darkness behind it pressed harder. Something vast and cold and unutterably alien brushed against the edge of the world, testing the weakness, probing the gap.

And Denna’s voice rose into the sixth verse.

The final verse.

The one that would open the Doors of Stone.

I stood ten feet from the woman I loved, and I understood with perfect, devastating clarity what I was going to have to do.

Not yet. Not in this moment. But soon. In minutes. In the space between one heartbeat and the next.

The performance wasn’t over.

But the audience was no longer watching.

They were praying.

The gallery shook. Dust sifted from the ceiling. A window cracked, a single line running diagonally across the glass like a scar. Through the crack, the night air rushed in, cold and sharp, carrying the scent of rain and something else, something that smelled like ozone and tasted like copper and felt like the moment before the world changes forever.

Denna sang.

The Yllish knots blazed.

The seal strained.

And somewhere beneath us, in foundations older than memory, the Doors of Stone began to open.

I had come to this ball to save the world. To stop Cinder. To rescue Denna.

I was about to fail at two of those three things.

But standing there in the King’s Gallery, with the music breaking around me like waves against stone, I didn’t know that yet. I still thought there was a way to save everyone. I still believed, with the arrogance and desperation of a young man who has never learned the one lesson that the world teaches over and over and over again.

You cannot save everyone.

You can only choose who you lose.