Seraphine had to get away.

  Away from the cot frames. Away from the smell of crushed herbs and blood. Away from the eyes that would ask what went wrong.

  She found an alcove where two support ribs met and formed a shallow pocket in the wall.

  It wasn't private. Not truly. Nothing in this pce was. But it was far enough from the others, the sounds of the courtyard reduced to a distant vibration.

  Seraphine leaned her shoulder against the stone.

  Her knees buckled.

  She slid down until she was sitting on the cold floor, spine pressed to the wall, Pulseweaver in her p. Her hands trembled as if they belonged to someone else. She stared at them, willing them to stop.

  They didn't.

  Her throat closed around her next breath. Seraphine pressed the heel of her palm to her mouth, trying to force the sound back down.

  Grief arrived as fatigue first, then as nausea, then as a sudden hollow pressure behind her sternum. Her breath hitched, and the tears came anyway.

  She had been holding her posture for too long.

  In front of everyone, she had to be the Sage. The one who could do anything and everything.

  Here, for a moment, she let herself be the girl from the Tower.

  Her forehead touched her knees.

  When her thoughts finally aligned into something coherent, they settled on a single immutable fact: it was not Rocher who had failed.

  He and Evelyn and the others had bought time exactly as Cire had wanted—time purchased in blood and fear.

  There had been only one anchor point left.

  One.

  It would have been a brutal and efficient thing, a wide-area cmp meant to force the Demon Lord's motion into a narrow channel, to reduce its impossible speed to something a sword could meet. The magic was set. The circuit was nearly complete. The st anchor point had been mapped, marked, and, on paper, solved.

  Cire's pn would have worked.

  If only Seraphine had caught them.

  If only she had been faster.

  She pressed her fist against the stone and squeezed until her knuckles bnched.

  The first minutes had been panic in its purest form, unfiltered by thought.

  The chasm looked bottomless. It was a long shaft, breathing cold air up its throat in a constant draft. The dim glow from Pulseweaver revealed ledges, stains, twisted supports. A few points where the stone narrowed into shelves.

  Hope.

  She'd shouted Cire's name until her voice went hoarse.

  The darkness swallowed any sound.

  For those precious few minutes, Sir Veyne shouted alongside her.

  He had come to the edge, white-knuckled and pale, his eyes darting between the void and the courtyard above where the Demon Lord still moved.

  "Sage," he had said, voice tight. "We cannot stay."

  "We can," she had snapped without meaning to. "I can."

  "This isn't your fight," he had tried. "The ancient Demon Lord is still up there. The Hero. The line—"

  "They can hold," she said. "Cire is still down here."

  Veyne's mouth had tightened. He had looked at her the way he looked at the colpsing bridge: assessing, trying to decide how much weight it could take before it became a fall.

  Then he left.

  Seraphine had watched him vanish, leaving her alone in the dark.

  Desperation taught her faster than study ever had.

  Levitate was not a spell designed for sustained thrust. It wanted to create buoyant resistance, not lift. It wanted to slow, not carry.

  She forced it to anyway. She forced the air to become steps.

  The first attempt had nearly dropped her.

  Her footing—if it could be called footing—dissolved beneath her as the magic destabilized. She had corrected mid-fall, heart smming, and rebuilt it beneath her feet.

  One step.

  Then another.

  She had begun to walk downward.

  The chasm was wider than it had appeared from above. Its walls curved and narrowed unpredictably. Old support beams jutted from stone like broken ribs. Moisture slicked surfaces at irregur intervals. It was a terrible pce to navigate without light.

  She could only imagine how terrifying it must have been for them. That is, if they were still—

  No.

  She had moved through it like a bde cutting cloth, Pulseweaver orbiting at her shoulder, blue runes carving visibility into darkness.

  "Cire!"

  Nothing.

  No answering light. No falling debris. No echo of impact.

  She descended faster.

  All the while, Cire's voice sat at the back of her mind, as clear as if Cire were standing behind her with her hands on Seraphine's shoulders, steering her back toward sanity.

  Stop, Seraphine.

  Don't be stupid.

  Prioritize the fight above.

  Her mind tried to obey. Her heart didn't.

  She had kept going because climbing back up meant admitting failure.

  When she finally gave up—because it was giving up, no matter how she tried to dress it—her legs had fallen out beneath her.

  She had wasted the hour.

  Without Phymera, she could not rewrite the st anchor point, to lock in the suppression field, to bring the pn to completion. She had not been there to help fight the Demon Lord either, leaving Evelyn and Rocher to fend for themselves.

  Most of all, she had not found Cire.

  Her memory flew to Rocher's wild eyes, to the way his hands had clenched around the cot frame and crushed it.

  He had tried to move the moment he understood.

  He swung his legs off the cot, blood soaking through the back of his armor. He fell forward, driven by nothing but will. Evelyn had pnted herself in front of him like a wall and shoved him back with her shoulder. Lumiere had snapped at him to hold still.

  He would not listen.

  It had taken Evelyn and the st of Cire's fast-acting sedative, forced between his teeth with no gentleness at all, to stop him. His eyes had gssed over mid-protest. His words had slurred into nonsense. He had sagged, furious even as his body betrayed him.

  Evelyn had looked at Seraphine afterward without accusation, which was somehow worse.

  Cire would have wanted them to focus, her expression had said. Cire would have told them to swallow their grief until they'd solved the live threat still trapped here with them.

  Evelyn had understood that.

  Seraphine hadn't—not until it was too te.

  Her fingers curled against the stone.

  With an anguished cry, she punched the ground.

  The impact jolted pain up her arm, sharp enough to cut through the fog. She hit the floor again and again, until her knuckles split and warmth slicked across her skin.

  She sucked in a breath and forced herself upright.

  The darkness tilted. For a moment the recess seemed to sway, as if the corridor itself were exhausted.

  Then a pale gold light spilled across the stone beside her, soft-edged and steady.

  Holy Light.

  Seraphine froze, half rising, half ready to sh out.

  Lumiere stood at the mouth of the recess, her robe catching the light like pale water. She looked too clean to be real. Too composed. But her eyes were rimmed red, the set of her mouth taut.

  She let the light hover low, respectful.

  "I was wondering where you went," Lumiere said.

  Seraphine swallowed. Her throat hurt as if she had been screaming again.

  "What do you want?" she managed.

  Lumiere's gaze dropped, briefly, to Seraphine's bleeding knuckles. Then lifted again without comment.

  "What are you pnning to do?" Lumiere asked instead.

  Seraphine ughed once, a dry sound that scraped.

  "I don't know," she said. The honesty came out like a confession. "I want justice. I want someone's throat in my hands. I want to drag Halbrecht out of whatever hole he crawled into and make him look at what he's done."

  Her voice broke on the st words.

  "And," she added, quieter, "I want to keep searching."

  Lumiere's expression softened by a fraction.

  "You are about to colpse," Lumiere said. "You've been running on fumes these st few days. And now you have spent the st of those too."

  Seraphine's eyes stung. She blinked hard and hated that it did not help.

  "How can you be so calm?" she demanded, turning toward Lumiere with tears she had not given permission to shed. "How are you standing there like this is a problem we can defer?"

  For a moment Lumiere did not answer.

  Then her shoulders dropped, barely. The Holy Light trembled just once.

  "I am not calm," Lumiere whispered.

  She took a step closer, and the recess brightened. Seraphine could see the fine dust on Lumiere's sleeves, the faint smear of ash at her cuff, the way her fingers flexed as if she were restraining some rger impulse.

  "I am merely focusing on what I can do," Lumiere continued. "Because if I let myself think about what I cannot, I will..."

  She stopped. Her jaw tightened. She started again with more control. "If I still had the full power of the Saintess, instead of this piddling thing, I would be down in that chasm myself."

  The bitterness in her voice startled Seraphine. She so rarely let it show.

  Lumiere looked down at the light at her side as if it had offended her. It was smaller than it should have been. Dimmer. It clung to her like a stubborn ember.

  "Instead," Lumiere said, "I am taking advantage of Bishop Halbrecht's sudden absence."

  Seraphine's breath caught.

  Lumiere's gaze sharpened. "He cannot call us away if he is not here to do it. And he cannot stop us if we are already moving."

  "What do you mean?" Seraphine asked, voice thin.

  "I have arranged a search party," Lumiere said. "Priests who can hold the light. A few padins whose bodies still work."

  Seraphine stared at her.

  "They'll do that?" she whispered. "For her?"

  Lumiere huffed a dry ugh. "Is it so surprising that Cire has built goodwill among them?"

  Her voice wavered. She swallowed it down.

  "They are mobilizing as we speak," Lumiere finished.

  Something in Seraphine loosened with a violence that made her dizzy. Her knees threatened to fold again. She took a step forward without thinking, the stone shifting under her, her bance gone.

  Lumiere moved at once, hand lifting as if to catch her.

  Seraphine did not fall.

  She stepped into Lumiere's space and wrapped her arms around her.

  Lumiere went stiff in surprise.

  Then her arms came around Seraphine's back, careful and firm.

  Seraphine pressed her face into the shoulder of Lumiere's robe, and the scent of ash and clean herbs hit her, grounding.

  "Thank you," Seraphine choked. "Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I wasn't there in time. I'm sorry I can't fix it."

  Lumiere's hand slid up to the back of Seraphine's head, fingers threading gently into her hair.

  "You may join the search," Lumiere said, voice low. "After you recover."

  Seraphine made a sound that might have been agreement. Might have been grief.

  "I will," she said into the cloth. "I'll go. I'll find her. I promise."

  Lumiere held her tighter for a breath.

  Then, very carefully, she let out a ugh that was not ughter at all.

  "The kingdom would fall apart if they saw their Sage and Saintess like this," Lumiere murmured.

  Seraphine pulled back just enough to see her face.

  Lumiere's eyes were wet. Her composure was a thin gss held in two hands.

  "And yet," Seraphine said, voice raw, "here we are."

  Lumiere blinked, and a tear finally spilled. It tracked down her cheek in the soft gold light and vanished into the fabric at her colr.

  "Here we are," she echoed softly.