Nova's POV
The letter was a trap.
Ryder saw it first something off about the seal, the way the wax sat wrong, too perfect, too deliberate and he dropped it in the snow before anyone touched it, and the darkness inside it detonated harmlessly three feet from anyone's hand, a small contained pulse of fading magic that left a scorched circle in the frost and nothing else.
Ravenna's final message. Sent before she came to the field.
I was here, it said, in the only language a two-century witch spoke fluently. And now I'm not. And you will never be certain I'm gone.
Nova looked at the scorched circle for a long moment.
Then she turned away from it, because there was nothing there to fight, and she walked back through the gate into the palace, and she let the morning take whatever it needed to take.
The ballroom had stopped being a ballroom.
