“Mom,” Ash said, and Kami felt his resolve snap in her mind, knew that he could say no more.

She was the one who had to speak.

“Lillian,” she said, “tell me where Jared is.”

When Lillian answered, her voice sounded distant, as if she was making a proclamation. As if she was a specter or a banshee calling out tidings of death.

“He went to Aurimere alone,” Lillian said. “He got me out. He got the boy out. He saved our lives, and he paid for our lives. I woke outside the house with the child calling me to part the flame and let him through. We waited out in the dark for as long as we could, but Jared never followed us. The boy says Rob caught him, which means that he is in Rob’s grasp now. He is past all help. He is lost.”

Of course he’d done that. How could she, who knew him so well, not have known what he would do? What else would he have done but the most heroic and crazy thing possible? And he had succeeded. He had saved someone he loved and someone she loved, brought them out from under the shadow of death. He was gone beneath that shadow now, vanished into the sorcerers’ manor. Lillian was saying that she would never see him again.

Darkness rose up before Kami’s eyes, as if she was going to faint, but she refused to faint. She felt Ash’s feelings course through her as his gasp rang through the room. He stumbled toward his mother and almost collapsed headlong into her arms. Lillian stood still for a moment, then her hand rose in a stiff jerky motion and she began to awkwardly stroke his hair.

The winter wind blew through the open door, cutting through the shadows, swirling around the people clinging to each other. Everyone was linked, Kami saw, everybody holding on to somebody, and it occurred to her that even if nobody had been willing to fight Rob, nobody had offered up a victim to him either. Nobody had offered the tokens of allegiance Rob had asked for. The people of Sorry-in-the-Vale had not surrendered yet.

Kami let go her death grip on the bar and walked over to the window. She looked out at the frost-touched town and at Aurimere in the distance, swallowed by flames.

“He’s not lost,” Kami said. Her voice was steadier than she’d thought it would be. “I won’t let him be lost.”