What happened next I had to learn from Hytham after the fact.

  The creature held my head beneath the water and looked back at Hytham with a wide, cold grin. “Follow her and join us,” it growled.

  Hytham cried out and leapt at the mournling, his glaive raised high overhead.

  Its grin didn’t falter as it raised the sheriff’s arm to defend itself from Hytham’s blow. He pierced through its arm and into its chest before splashing over to me. Holding one side of the arm spear fast against his hip, he slashed through the other, severing my connection to the mournling.

  He carried me out of the water and began his prayer of healing while removing the shadow-spear from my side.

  I awoke to the glow of his healing magic and strong arms about my shoulders. Hytham’s voice soothed my initial struggling, believing I was being held by the mournling, and he held me through a fit of choking on water which, unfortunately, I coughed all over him as I struggled to clear my lungs.

  “I’m sorry,” I rasped, trying to wipe my mouth clean. I removed my hand from my face, frowning. Mournling sludge coated my arm. Dark, slimy patches cling to Hytham’s chest as well from the mournling’s equivalence of blood.

  “You have nothing to apologize for,” Hytham murmured, tucking my head against his shoulder.

  I shut my eyes and leaned into the heat of his chest. We’d survived. Just barely on my account. I clawed my fingers into the black tabard he wore to blend in, as much as he was ever going to, selected in place of the white tabard or the Order. Hytham had saved me. He ran his palm along the back of my hair. Without him, I’d be dead.

  Death. I lurched back, though Hytham held me fast. “Am I a mournling?” My gaze darted across the parts of myself I could see—aside from cuts and bruises, my arms appeared normal. The wound in my side had stopped pumping my blood out into the cave, though it still looked even more ghastly than when I’d been stabbed in Shakerton.

  “No.” Hytham’s grasp tightened around my shoulder and he shook his head. His eyes tinged gray in the dim light of the cave, and the conviction of his voice warmed me as much as did his proximity. I do not know how he repelled the chill of the cave water that clung with such determination to me, but I wasn’t going to complain.

  “Are you certain?”

  He tucked me back against his chest, and I caught the faint hint of laugher rumbling at the back of his throat. “I am.” The muscles of his arms flexed, holding me closer, and he changed his address to Lifkin. “You’re alright,” he murmured. “You’re safe.”

  A series of peaceful moments passed as his fingers trailed through my hair, soothing me, when a deep, ghostly sigh interrupted the pair of us. I gasped and tightened my hold again.

  “What is it? Another mournling?” Hytham asked, reaching about for his glaive in the same moment that Calvert’s spirit swirled to a semblance of life beyond us.

  “It is colder than I had believed it would be,” the spirit said. Calvert spoke with the same gravity he had when he addressed my clan, though the note of concern in his voice had not been present before.

  “Sheriff Calvert?” I kept my voice low—the large mournlings were still unaccounted for, but I wanted Hytham to know what was happening even if he couldn’t see the spirit. Aveela had taught me not to startle them and to ease them into their understanding of the path before them that led to the afterlife.

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  Distressed spirits were more susceptible to possession or were easier for mournlings to sense—no one had survived enough encounters with them to be able to say one way or another.

  “I thought there would be more light. Have I . . . have I failed Ilona?”

  Hytham crouched low beside me, his glaive in hand. I wrapped my hand around the weapon’s shaft and shook my head. A frown flickered between his brows.

  I rose to address the spirit and wrung the water from my hair, sending it trickling onto the cave floor. I held onto the twist I had made to prevent my hands from shaking, only some of which was brought on by the cold. “You, umm, you haven’t passed on yet. But you can, when you’re ready.”

  The spirit fixed his gaze on me. The pale green glow had faded from his eyes, replaced my still shadows instead. “You freed me.” The gravity of his sentiment settled over my chest. He was grateful for my help, didn’t resent me for being the one to usher him toward realizing it was his time to pass on.

  I nodded. “We both did.”

  “I apologize for trying to harm you. That was not my intention.”

  “Mournlings rob spirits of their will. But when you’re ready, I can help you on your way.” His fear of his spirit being rejected by his goddess still hovered in the back of my mind. Aveela had avoided telling me what it meant that I could see Hume spirits after I told her about the Hume boy. Was there something wrong with them? Did seeing them mean they had been rejected by their goddess? She would have told me if that were the case, which left the other glaring possibility that the problem was me.

  “Hmm.” The sheriff cast his gaze about the cave. “We do not have much time before the great beasts return to their lair. But . . . if there were something I could do for you, a way to repay your kindness perhaps, I would consider it a great honor. I cannot fade away with a soul-debt.”

  I released my hair to fall back over my shoulder and chewed my lower lip. Though I didn’t want to ask, the conversation I’d had a year before with the Lifkin spirit drifted back to me on slow, silent wings. “Several moons ago, a spirit told me my sister was still living.” I glanced nervously at Hytham. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might know of her whereabouts. I was sure he couldn’t have told me even if he had known. Whatever the Hume had done with her, wherever they had taken her, I knew it to be a secret.

  “She was taken as a child. She was seven,” I continued. I dropped my gaze from both of them, barely able to speak. Here I was in a cave with those I’d long regarded as my enemies, those connected to the ones who had taken Iredella from me. “Soldiers of the baron stole her from the woods and delivered her to adjudicators of the Order. When my uncle asked after her, the Order and soldiers denied it. I-I’ve never seen her since.” For years I had believed she was dead.

  The Hume nearly killed my uncle when he begged them to tell him what had happened to Iredella. My family had to shrink so we could survive.

  Hytham sucked in a sharp breath at the mention of the adjudicators, but I didn’t look at him.

  “Your sister was one of seven girls taken,” the sheriff said to me.

  I raised my gaze to the Hume spirit’s, an invisible, cold hand about my throat just as threatening as the mournling’s had been. The threshold between hope and despair where my sister was concerned was not one I could afford to blindly approach.

  Seven. Stolen from their homes, their families. Had they all been the daughters of Lifkin revolutionaries? Those seeking to restore the Lifkin prince to the throne?

  “She is in Grimcross, held there by the Order.” The sheriff sighed and the edges of his spirit began to fade. “She is one of the ones who remains. Strong.” He inclined his head. “You are on your way to finding her. I wish you both well.” Sheriff Calvert raised his fist to his chest, nodding swiftly over it in a soldier’s salute.

  “You and the adjudicator must go. Seek out Devrim, for your sister. He will return to Grimcross after he has found the artifact. The creature comes. My debt is paid.” And with that, he faded.

  “Draeza—” Hytham began.

  I shook my head. “He said the mournling is coming, the one that took him.” Far off in the distance, through the winding tunnels of the cave, the decisive drumming of many sharp legs trickling over and against one another began clicking its way toward us. “We have to go.”

  Hytham rose, casting a final glance back at the sheriff’s mangled body. The shadow tentacles still hung off of him, floating atop the settling cave pools.

  I tugged on the mail covering his sleeve. “He bid us to go. They won’t be able to possess his body again, now that we’ve dispersed the mournling energy. His soul passed on.”

  The drumming of the legs rumbled closer.

  Hytham nodded his chin back the way we’d come. “Lead the way.”