chapter one

I
N The mONTh BeFOre The GaTheriNG, The Wall Weeps
blood.
We stand in its shadow, Lux and I, as the day turns to wind-
swept dusk. The wall is built of bones and magic, held together
by a spell that wanes throughout the year. Moon by moon, it
turns more fragile. And these nights, the bloodied nights where
the magic of the wall is like an unraveling thread, are when the
vespertine come.
It’s early storm season, and the days are still long enough that
there’s light to see by as I check Lux’s armor, running my chipped-
polish fingers from buckle to buckle. She’s dressed the same as all
the wardens. The same as me. A white linen dress with collar and
sleeves buttoned close, a leather belt with a strand of bone shards
clipped to one side, a sickle-curved knife sheathed on the other.
Out beyond the wall, the moorland is hazed by dimming sun-
set. The holy wards, stuck in the earth at regular intervals, look —-1
—0

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 like the sharp-pointed wrought iron fence that encircles our
chapel yard.
Lux raises her arms obediently as I tighten the straps that hold
her armor in place. We’ve worked as a team since she joined the
wardens when we were both children. She’s my best friend—my
only friend — and the movements between us have been repeated
so often that now our preparations feel like a ritual. Lux standing
straight-backed, her hazel-gray eyes focused on the slice of
moorland visible through the barred gateway. Me, with my head
bowed like a penitent as I carefully check each knot and stitch.
This armor is a new creation, one I’ve just finished. Wolfspine
bracers, each vertebra sharpened to a brutal point, and a rib cage
strengthened at the joints with silver chain. Tonight, if we encoun-
ter a vespertine, it will be the first time the armor has been tested.
And that makes me nervous.
I fasten and refasten the buckles three times over. Then Lux
hufs a sigh between her black-painted lips and shifts her weight
from one foot to the other. “We’re good, Everline. Stop worrying.”
I scrunch my hands into my pale skirts to still my restlessness.
My own armor and weaponry are a modified version of what the
other wardens wear—twin knives, no shards, none of the care-
fully sewn pockets to hold chips of bone or vials of honey required
for casting magic. It takes no time at all to check the clasp on my
belt and straighten the strands of bone-and-chain lariat that drape
from my collar to my waist, clinking against the rib-cage bodice
fastened over my linen dress.
-1— Lux gathers up her hair and begins to braid it back, tying the ends
0— with two white ribbons. Both of us share similar coloring—olive

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skin and treacle-dark hair—but there’s a glow to her I’ve always
coveted. Her hair is shot with strands of umber that catch the sun-
light, and her cheeks have a petaled flush that intensifies when she’s
pleased, or angry.
Finished with her braids, Lux takes another ribbon from her
pocket and motions for me to turn. I turn. She combs her fingers
through the length of my hair, then starts to weave it into a braid.
Facing away from the moorland, I look toward the enclave. I
can see the chapel with its iron fence and real glass windows. The
entrance to the catacombs is beside it, framed by the citrus trees
that pass for our orchard. A few orange fruits still persist on the
highest branches.
“There,” Lux says. “All done.”
She winds the braid up into her hand. Holding it away from
my neck, she traces a zigzag pattern over the freckles that mark my
nape in a constellated pattern. The last step in our familiar routine.
A sound echoes across the yard, footsteps crushed over the
graveled path. Lux lets go of my hair. My stomach sinks at the sight
of Briar Linden—my half sister—walking toward us with an
unhurried stride.
She’s a year my elder, and we look nothing alike. She’s clear-
eyed and fair, the same as our father, their features so similar that
no one would ever doubt she belongs to him. She even wears her
armor the same way he does, with her white linen sleeves pulled
down beneath wristlets of bone and a single, polished clavicle
hooked on her shoulder as a pauldron. Neither was made by me.
Even from here, beneath the low susurrus of wind, I can hear —-1
the clink-clink-clink of bone on bone as endless shards clatter —0

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 together in her overfilled pockets and on the strand at her waist.
She carries a single knife on her belt with a ribbon tied to the hilt,
as though it’s some kind of stickpin you might use to hold a chi-
gnon in place. I’ve only ever seen her draw it once.
Briar comes to a lazy stop when she reaches us. Her wheat-gold
hair is shaved on one side, the rest pulled over her opposite shoul-
der in a loose braid. Her lip is pierced at the center with a silver
barbell, and she chews at it when she looks at me, her pale brows
knotting into a frown.
“Oh, good,” she says, sounding not at all pleased. “You’re
still here.”
“Have you come to deliver our farewell? I hope you’ve brought
a lace handkerchief to wave.”
She brushes an invisible speck of dust from her sleeve. “I’m
going with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I wasn’t asking your permission, Everline. While Father is
away, I’m in charge.” Raising one finger, she deliberately taps at
the insignia pinned to her chest—the branch-and-bone symbol
usually worn by our father, Fenn Linden, commander of the Vale
wardens.
“Fenn,” I say, “doesn’t attach his insignia with a tailor’s pin.”
Ignoring me, Briar goes on. “I’m in charge. And I’m assigning
myself to your patrol.”
“I could always stitch the insignia on for you. I have a needle
and thread in my pocket.”
-1— There’s a flicker between us, one of those dizzying moments
0— where I can almost feel the balance tilt in my direction. Then she

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quirks her mouth into a smile. Her lips are painted black, the same
as Lux’s; her smile a sharp line etched across her delicate face. “I
suppose you do have more room in your pockets, since you don’t
need to carry anything to cast spells.”
My hand goes to my knife hilt, the motion more instinctive
than anything with real heat. Briar tilts her head, eyes on my blade.
The air between us carries a haze of barely perceptible tension, as
her fingers twitch toward the strand of bone beads at her hip.
Lux steps between us. She lifts her chin in the direction of the
gate. “Shall we go before the wards are entirely out of power?”
Briar moves lightly past us and presses her hand against
the lock. There’s a click as the magic that holds it closed shifts.
The gate swings open. She walks out onto the moor, her index
finger pressed to her mouth as she licks away the blood claimed by
the unlocking spell.
I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek, trying to ignore
the sting of her earlier words. Briar Linden is the best caster at
the enclave. Better than anyone—including Fenn, who has com-
manded the wardens since he was only a little older than I am now.
But all wardens have an aptitude for magic. Even those without
Briar’s skill can manipulate the blood-and-bone spellwork used to
maintain the wall and fight back the vespertine when they try to
break through.
All wardens have an aptitude for magic—except me.
Lux turns to the wall, scrapes her thumb through one of the
freshly oozing drips of blood. She smears it across the bridge of her
nose in a crimson streak. I echo her gesture. Briar does the same, —-1
avoiding my gaze as she catches some of the blood on her finger —0

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 and paints it elegantly onto her face. The magic-infused blood
from the wall has an icy tang to it, like something just unfrozen. It
crackles on my skin as we walk out onto the moorland.
The ground here is flat, deceptively so. From where we stand,
beside the wall with our blushed shadows flung up against the
closing gate, the world appears to end abruptly; gorse and heather
cut of in a line. Beyond is only darkening sky, colored by slants
of early sunset.
It’s a wild place of thorn and weed and jagged stones. All threat
and fable, a graveyard and a battlefield. Where the first wardens
fought the first vespertine, then dragged their bones to the edge of
the moor to build our wall.
We have the battle scene immortalized in our chapel. A single
arching stained glass window set high above the altar, filling the
entire apse. It shows Saint Lenore with her bone armor and glim-
mering sword, all lit up as brilliant as a sunrise. Nyx Severin—
creator of the vespertine, a monster who was once thought of as a
god—is laid out at her feet, his body displayed in shards of violet
and obsidian glass that not even the midday light can pass through.
Lux and I fall into step as we cross the open fields between
wall and ward line. We’ve worked together like this since we
were recruits. Patrolling the moorland and setting wards to rein-
force the wall as its magic fades throughout the year. I know her
movements like they’re my own. Her quiet progress forward, the
way she tilts her head to listen to the night.
By contrast, the sound of Briar’s footsteps behind me is jarring
-1— and discordant. Her presence is as prickly as a stuck burr, no mat-
0— ter how hard I try to ignore it.

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 We reach the apiary, framed by sprawling tangles of wolf roses
and lavender blooms. I put my hand against the nearest hive, its
whitewashed wood still sun-warm. Bees hum beneath my palm
as they work in the nectar-laced depths. No flowers will grow in
the enclave, so we tend the bees here.
It was Saint Lenore who first discovered that honey from the
bees she kept could sweeten the blood spells cast by Nyx Severin.
The spells he used on his worshippers, trying to draw power from
their bodies as he sought a way to transcend the Thousandfold,
where he was bound.
Lenore changed these spells, used the honey to turn the magic
against Nyx and his vespertine when she and the first wardens
fought him, putting an end to his monstrous reign.
Now, just as Saint Lenore did, all wardens carry a stoppered
fiola alongside their bone shards and silver chains. Made of
annealed glass, these vials are our weapons against the vespertine.
And a drop of honey is added to each newly made fiola before
it’s sealed.
Lux pauses beside me, her eyes narrowed to the distance. A
wayward tendril of hair has escaped from one of her braids. It
marks a curlicue against her cheek as she examines the moorland
ahead. “There,” she says, voice softened. “Can you see them?”
Our holy wards are made from spike-sharp pieces of bone, split
to shards and polished smooth. A length of silver chain, held in
place by iron stakes, is strung between them, forming a barrier
across the moorland. Beneath each ward, where they are pierced
into the ground, the earth should glow—but there’s a blotch of —-1
darkness where one of the wards has failed. —0

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 We slip past the hives. Briar falls in beside me, winding her
stranded bone beads around her knuckles. As we make our way
to the burned-out ward, the scent of faded, dying flowers in our
wake, the end of the world cleaves the horizon. The landscape is a
bruise, all spiny gorse leaves and pallid heather, the darker charcoal
of lichen stones.
I follow Lux along the barrier to where bones circle the base of
each stake. Small shards and chipped vertebrae stained with dried
blood. The ground inside each circle flickers with an otherworldly
light—the holy fire of consecration, one of the first spells all
wardens learn, where they spill their blood on honey-slicked
bones and set them into the earth with a whispered incantation.
As we walk, I cast a sidelong glance at Briar. She’s never
patrolled with other wardens before, and I can’t help but wonder
what compelled her to join us tonight. It sets a queasy foreboding
in the pit of my stomach. I’m tensed, anxious, as I turn to look at
the darkening moorland beyond the wards. The painted shadows
seem empty, but that stillness is deceptive.
Vespertine live for the night. They’re wolflike, eldritch crea-
tures; silent and swift, quick to strike, quicker to vanish. And even
though Saint Lenore gave her life to destroy Nyx—their leader,
their creator—the vespertine continue to deliver determined
assaults against the wall. Like a tide, crashing against the shore
until it crumbles away.
But the wardens hold them back. We gather each year to rein-
force the power of the wall. Between times, as the magic weakens,
-1— we set our wards. And when the shadows lengthen and night
0—

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falls, we come here to the barrier and fight whatever gets spat out
of the darkness beyond.
Only once have the vespertine breached the wall. It happened
just before I was born, but Fenn has told me countless times how
the creatures spilled through the shattered bones. They fought past
the enclave and slaughtered their way into the Hallowed Lands,
where both the citizens and the wardens who fell were dragged
back to the vespertine stronghold beyond the moorland.
He’s told the story so often that it’s turned vivid, as though I
were there. I am out in the night amid the chaos and the terror. I
am watching the monsters swarm and watching them devour. The
air is sharp with screams, with howls. The earth turns dark with
blood.
It’s marked on me, this not-quite-memory spun from Fenn’s
words, a warning as indelible as a scar.
Because in the heart of that battle, my mother deserted the
wardens.
As we reach the burned-out ward, I draw my blade. Keep
my eyes fixed on the shadowy distance while Lux kneels down
to tend the barrier. Briar paces back and forth behind me. Her
bead-wrapped hand is at the hilt of her blade, which she draws
just far enough to bare a slash of polished steel.
Lux pulls the bones from the ground, dismantling the expired
ward. She slips the old shards into one pocket—ready to be cleaned
and used again—and takes new ones from the other, setting them
carefully into the earth. She uncaps a vial of honey and lets it drip
over the bones, then, using another shard, she pierces her finger —-1
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 and daubs a thumbprint of blood in the center of the ward. Her
magic ignites. The consecration gleams up, shimmering silver.
I hold out a hand, help Lux back to her feet. Her palm is gritty
with dirt, blood and honey smear her cut fingertip. We stand
together at the mended barricade. It stretches away from us in
both directions, an unbroken line of wards flickering like stars
against the dusk.
Then one of the lights goes out. Fast. Much faster than a
burned-down bone ward.
Lux tightens her grasp on my hand, pulls me close to her
side. A tremor passes through the air, like something alive that’s
twitching its skin, irritated by an unwelcome touch. As the tem-
perature begins to change, a rapid drop to frostbitten cold, a
shiver tracks down my spine. I want to flinch, but I force myself
to be still.
“It’s all right,” I tell Lux, sliding my hand free from hers. “You
can let me go.”
She nods, lip pinned between her teeth. She lost a sibling to the
vespertine when they attacked the Hallowed Lands. A sister, one
year her elder, the same as the distance in age between us. Lux is
ever-cautious, always protective of me. But as we draw our weap-
ons, I’m not afraid.
I am bone and blade and armor. I am vital, alive. Soft flesh
guarded by spear-sharp spines. When I blink, I see red-petaled
flowers behind my closed lids.
In the enclave, I am Everline Blackthorn—a warden without
-1— magic, there only by the grace of my father, the commander.
0— But out here, with Lux, it doesn’t matter that I’ll never cast a

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spell, that Fenn treats me more like a recruit than a daughter,
that the fiola I wear around my neck is empty glass.
Even the treachery of my mother—and my questions about
her that Fenn will never answer—feels softer, a faded hurt
rather than a persistent ache.
The vespertine emerges from the pooled shadows beyond the
line of wards, an indeterminate shape cloaked in darkness. I drop
to a crouch, my blade already at my palm. The point cuts my skin.
My blood lacks the power of warden magic, but it’s a bad omen to
fight monsters with an unmarked weapon.
Briar flexes her snared fist, her knuckles crackling beneath the
strands of silver and bone. Lux twists a shard between her fingers.
The sharpened end is already bloodied, consecration glimmer-
ing around her hands. She murmurs a spell and the light grows
brighter, washing over the ground.
When it hits the vespertine, we fall into sudden silence.
The monsters we fight are familiar horrors with pelted fur the
color of midnights and mist; onyx eyes and spike-sharp teeth.
They hunch over the ground, four-legged; their shoulders man-
tled with bone.
I know vespertine, more than any warden. I’m the one who
strips them apart once they’re dead, taking the fur and teeth and
bones that I’ll forge into armor. It’s the only magic I have, one I
taught myself when I realized I could never work the holy power
of other wardens.
And this creature has the same feel as the others we’ve fought.
The same ice-laced change to the air as it approaches. The same —-1
sharp, coppery stench of tarnished magic and old blood. —0

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 But this vespertine is like a girl, moving upright as she picks
a delicate path toward us through the tangled gorse. She raises
one pale, clawed hand and flicks back a sheaf of long, inky hair
from her face, revealing narrow, fine-boned features that are dec-
orated by paint. Swaths of grayish-white paste mark her cheeks,
and grim skeleton-toothed stripes of black cover her mouth. Her
dress is pale, ragged lace, smeared with mud like she’s crawled out
of a ruin. When she sights us, her lips draw back, baring a row of
crowded fangs. Her narrowed eyes shimmer like oil over water.
She is terrible and beautiful in equal measures.
Lux and I exchange a glance, though everyone knows you
should never look away from a vespertine. “What . . . ?” Lux
begins, but before she can finish, Briar unsheathes her weapon.
Her naked blade sings with a sharp, steely sound as it comes
free. The ribbon on the hilt snaps and flutters as she charges
forward.
“Briar, wait!” I grab for her arm, but my fingers close on empty
air. She casts me a single, disgusted look over her shoulder as she
lunges at the creature. Then the world turns blurred, all claw and
blade and motion. “Oh, hells.”
Lux and I rush into the fight. At any other time, the two of us
together—her magic, my armor, our strength—feels like a dance.
Practiced and familiar as a ritual or a courtship. But now, as we
fight alongside Briar, all sense of rhythm and control is lost to this
disastrous mess.
Briar attacks with heedless fury; all her attention directed at the
-1— creature. Used to fighting alone, she doesn’t wait for us or accom-
0— modate our movements. We fall into a chaos of sharp elbows and

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undone hair, wards stuttering at our feet as consecration sparks
and the undone barrier chains wrap the vespertine’s ankles.
I dart forward, my weapon raised, but Briar turns at the same
time, and the hilt of her blade catches my ribs. I stumble back,
my breath loosed into a sharp huff, a stinging ache when I try
to inhale. The vespertine collides with me, snarling, and we fall
down together in the dirt. Up close, she looks even more gro-
tesquely human, with a fragile softness to the curve of her cheek,
the bow of her lips. Beneath the iron scent of bitter blood, her
skin smells like honey. My stomach tightens at the wrongness of
it. The horror of a monster wearing a girl’s face.
Her bared teeth snap inches from my neck. I twist away, but
her claws rake my throat. She clutches at me, her gaze narrowed,
and her claws press deeper; piercing, relentless. A terrible heat
rises up from my skin, as though her very touch has burned me.
I choke out a cry, sharp hurt winding me into a coiled, animal
panic. I suck in a breath, trying to gather myself. I’m better than
this, even without magic. I’m not some cringing village girl afraid
of creatures in the dark.
I’ve never allowed myself to be.
I twist against the ground, moor grass crunched beneath me
as I get my knees up, my boots between myself and the vespertine.
I kick her—hard—and she falters back. Lux drags her away from
me, catching hold of the creature by the scruf of her neck, still
moving like the vespertine is a wolf-shaped thing.
Distantly, I can hear Briar yelling at me, “Everline, move!”
She casts aside her blade as she rushes forward, her fists are —-1
all chains and bone-beads and dripping blood. I roll aside, barely —0

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 avoiding the brutal crush of her boots. The air burns with conse-
cration. Briar slams her hand against the creature’s sternum, and
the vespertine chokes out a guttural cry.
Lux slips quickly behind the vespertine, twists the length of
her silken hair into a rope, and drags back her head. With one
swipe, she cuts the vespertine’s throat. Silence floods in, thicken-
ing the air with a quiet that’s broken only by the sound of our ragged
breathing. Lux steps back, hands raised as though in surrender.
The creature, dead, crumples at our feet.
We stand in a half-circle around the body. Everything feels
distant, like I’ve woken from a nightmare. The ones I’d have as a
child. As though this is nothing but a fable told to me by someone
else, instead of a truth played out right before me.
A heated sting blooms at my throat. Confused, I press my
fingers to the ache, and they come away stained with blood. I
remember the claws, my skin, the girl with her teeth at my neck.
Wordlessly, Lux drops her weapon, not even pausing to clean
the blade. She reaches for her field kit and passes me a folded square
of gauze. I press it to the wound.
“What,” I say, slow and tentative, “was that?”
Briar paces a rough circle around the body, a bone shard twisted
against her palm. “Oh, I don’t know, Everline. Maybe it’s the res-
urrection of Saint Lenore.”
Her teeth are set in a sardonic grimace, but there’s a waver
in her voice that echoes my own unsteady fear. She kicks at the
ground; tugs the ribbon from her hair, unraveling the length of
-1— her braid.
0—

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 Usually, this moment would feel like a triumph. One less mon-
ster to fight back from the wall. One less chance for the vespertine
to break through our defenses where the magic has waned.
Normally, this is when I’d strip the beast back to fur and bone;
then we’d burn the corpse.
But I can’t bring myself to move. Even to put my hands on this
creature feels wrong.
I stare at the dead vespertine, and the stillness of the night
presses down on me. “We need to show this to Fenn.”
Briar cuts me an irritated look. “He has a title, Everline.”
Scowling at her, I amend: “We need to show this to the
commander.”
Her insistence on Fenn’s title is not about duty. It’s her way to
claim him, in a way I never will. Other wardens are raised in the
Hallowed Lands, coming to the wall when they’re called to join
the enclave at the gathering. But I’ve lived here my entire life, ever
since Fenn returned from the brutally failed mission that left my
mother dead and me, his newborn daughter, in his arms.
I was raised in the shadow of the wall. But even that wasn’t
enough to eclipse the truth of my birth. That my mother broke
her vows and betrayed the wardens, deserted her watch and fled
to the moors as the vespertine tore through the Hallowed Lands.
Even before Briar came to the enclave, Fenn kept me at a care-
ful distance. He’s never wanted me to call him father, a fact that
Briar seized upon. Irritated at my use of his given name, wanting
me to be only another recruit rather than what I really am—her
illegitimate sister. —-1
—0

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 I turn my back on Briar, focusing instead on the fallen
vespertine. Lux and I are strong enough to carry a body between
us; we’ve done so before, with vespertine struck down on other
nights. But when I reach toward the creature, a shudder crosses
my skin. My mouth tastes bile-bitter. I start to search through my
pocket, where I keep my sewing kit in place of bone shards, and
take out a pair of tailor’s shears.
My skirts are made from layers of linen, folded around and
attached at the waistband. I cut the stitches from the topmost layer
and pull loose a swath of pale cloth. The piece of fabric is large
enough for a makeshift shroud.
“Here,” I say, passing one end to Lux, “help me with this.”
Awkwardly, with cloth folded over our hands, we fold the
linen around the vespertine. Briar watches us for a moment; then,
with a sigh, she takes out a stick of incense, lights it, and lets the
clove-scented smoke drift above our heads. The spiced scent laces
through the air around me as I kneel down to tie the shroud closed.
“Wait,” Briar says. She retrieves her own blade, then, carefully,
picks up Lux’s bloodied weapon from the ground. The stains on
the steel shimmer blackly in the moonlight. She cleans it against
the trampled moor grass, hands it hilt-first to Lux, who nods and
sheathes the blade.
I gather up the shrouded creature, swallowing back nausea at
the wrongness of this, the feel of her, so unlike the shape of any
other vespertine, folded inside the thin layer of cloth. Her body
is still warm. It’s like I’m carrying another warden, battle-fallen.
-1— I press my lips together, let out a sharp breath through my nose.
0— “I can do it on my own,” Lux says, reaching.

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 I want to argue, but she’s already taken the weight from me.
My panic subsides, becoming a throb at my temples and an ache in
my chest, a faint dizziness that I can almost ignore.
On our return to the enclave, Briar walks a few paces behind,
her fists wrapped with stands of bone beads, her gaze pinned to the
dark. We cross the moorland in silence until the wall takes shape
in the distance.
The pearlescent bones are woven together, echoing a trefoil
arch. From this distance, the wall glimmers with an ethereal light
that fills the horizon—a full moon, a necromantic cathedral. High
above, a single lantern shines from the watchtower like a tiny,
far-of star.
On any other night when we return, and I see the bones and
the wall and that celestial brightness, I feel elation, relief. But
right now, there’s only a cold, tired resignation.
An unshakable feeling that after tonight, nothing is ever going
to be the same.

—-1
—0

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