Ravenna Nightshade pressed her palm to the tower door and watched her own skin refuse to warm the stone. Three generations of Nightshade women had died pale as this door. She would not be the fourth. Somewhere behind her gold-flecked eyes slept a power old enough to burn the curse out of her blood, and she had come to the Archmage's library to learn how to wake it without killing herself. The door opened on its own. Yellow mage lights drifted between the shelves like slow fireflies. Books climbed four stories above her. She had one night to find what she needed. At dawn the tower closed to outsiders again, and her father's cough was already bringing up black. A small skeletal creature scuttled down a ladder, the bulb on its head swinging over open pages. It hissed at her, teeth bared, then pointed one long claw at a reading table near the back. She followed. Kael Talon stood at the table in dark battle leathers, not robes. His staff leaned against a chair, the blue crystal on top dim. He was younger than she expected, chestnut hair falling into eyes the same blue as the stone. He did not look up. "You want the awakening rite," he said. "Everyone in your line has wanted it. They all died on the floor of this tower." "I know." Her voice held. "I need the place the curse was cast. Without the anchor, the rite tears the caster apart. I've read that much." He finally looked at her. His gaze caught on the gold specks in her eyes and held there a moment too long. Then he pulled a thin ledger from under a stack and turned it toward her. "Your great-grandmother came here for the same answer. I gave her nothing. I was wrong." He tapped a line of cramped script. "The curse was cast in a garden that no longer exists. But the soil remembers. My scouts found the place last spring." Ravenna read the name of the valley. Her hands did not shake, though she felt them want to. "Why help me now?" "Because the thing sleeping behind your eyes isn't only yours." He lifted his staff. The crystal woke, matching the color of the small hedgehog-shaped tuft of leaves asleep on the shelf beside him, and the wings of a green sprite who lifted her head from a book. "It belongs to this world. And this world is running out of time." He rolled a map across the ledger and weighted the corners. "Three days' ride. I'll take you as far as the ridge. What happens in the garden, you do alone." Ravenna touched the marked valley. The anchor had a place now. The curse had an address. She had traded one impossible problem for a smaller, sharper one: survive whatever waited in that soil. "We leave at dawn," she said.