“You offered me a collar,” I tell her, struggling to keep my voice even. “I wasn’t your friend, Cress. I was your pet.”

She rolls her eyes. “So dramatic,” she chides, walking around the room with languid steps, trailing her fingers over the desk, leaving a path of burnt wood where she touches. I can feel my heartbeat speed up, and the urge to flee the room is difficult to ignore. When she sees my reaction, she smiles, pleased with herself.

It’s the way she used to smile at me from across a crowded room, as though we shared a secret just between the two of us. The memory feels like a kick in the gut, but I push it aside and focus on the present.

“I suppose I should thank you,” she says to me quietly. “It’s really something, isn’t it?” She examines her fingers thoughtfully. “I could burn you both with just a touch, you know. By the time your little guard came in, you would be nothing but ash.” She laughs, her eyes sparking with a malicious kind of joy. “An appropriate enough end for you, Ash Princess, don’t you think?”

I touch the dagger hidden beneath my skirt, though I know it wouldn’t do any good if it came to it. By the time I drew it, it would be too late. My own fingers are still itching and I wonder what would happen if I didn’t hold back my fury, if I let it burn through me until there was nothing left of me but flame and smoke and ash. It would anger the gods, I remind myself; it would risk bringing their wrath down on Astrea. It would mean never seeing my mother again.

But when I watch Cress control the fire at her fingertips with a frigid distance, I know she wouldn’t hesitate to use it against me. I know that if she tried, I would do whatever it took to stop her. I know that it wouldn’t be enough in the end—after all, she knows her power, she understands how to control it. I’ve been too afraid of mine to do the same.

The Kaiser beams at Cress like she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, like he wants to possess her. Cress smiles back at him, but there is something sickening in that smile, something dark and sticky. She paces the room and comes to stand behind him, placing her hands on his shoulders.

“You’re awfully quiet now, aren’t you?” she asks me. “No smart retorts to that? Because you know I could do it, don’t you?”

I find my voice and hold her gaze even though I want nothing more than to flinch from her. “You could. But I know you, Cress,” I say, hoping against hope that it’s the truth. “You aren’t a killer.”

Her eyes narrow and a shudder racks through her. Without breaking our gaze, she moves her hands along the Kaiser’s shoulders until they’re around his neck, her elegant, bone-white fingers closing tight over the Kaiser’s ruddy throat. She gently tilts his head back, forcing him to look at her before bringing her lips down to his in what can barely be called a kiss.

The Kaiser realizes what’s happening an instant too late—by the time he struggles, her touch is already fire, burning his mouth and throat before he can even utter a scream. The smell of burning flesh permeates the room, pungent enough to make me dizzy. I watch in horror as his body turns to ash beneath her embrace, his expression frozen in silent agony.

A scream dies in my throat. I can’t bring myself to look away from him as the life leaves his eyes. I have waited years for this. I have dreamt of watching the Kaiser die before my eyes. I never thought it would happen like this. I never thought that when it did, I would be more afraid than ever.

The smell of burning flesh gets stronger, making bile rise in my throat. S?ren covers his nose with the sleeve of his shirt, his face pale enough to match it, but Cress doesn’t seem bothered. Not by the smell or by what she just did. It can’t be the first life she’s taken, I realize distantly, and I wonder just how monstrous she has grown since I saw her last.

“There,” she says to me when she finally drops her hands away from the Kaiser’s corpse. “Now, why don’t we revisit those terms.”

She crosses behind the commandant’s desk, digging through its drawers until she produces a half-full bottle of wine. She sets it on the desk, reaching into the pockets of her dress and drawing out from one a small goblet covered in Fire Stones and from the other a vial of opalescent liquid.

My stomach lurches at the sight of it. Encatrio, the same poison I used on her and her father.

“Where did you get that?” I ask, my voice barely louder than a whisper.

She shrugs. “After what it did to me, it wasn’t difficult to figure out that it must have come from the Fire Mine. From there, it was a matter of asking the right questions and making people more inclined to talk.”

“You tortured them,” I say, my voice cracking. Monstrous indeed, but I started her down that path, didn’t I? I shaped her into this.

Cress rolls her eyes. “I wouldn’t have had to if they’d just told me what I needed to know.” Uncorking the poison, she pours a few drops into the goblet. “That should do,” she says, though I think she’s mostly speaking to herself. She pours the wine next, filling the goblet up halfway and swirling the drink around. Picking the goblet up, she comes toward me and I have to force myself to hold my ground.

S?ren steps in front of me. “What are you doing with that?” he asks, alarmed.

Cress only smiles at him. “I promise I won’t pour it down her throat. I’m only offering it to her—she’ll drink it herself, every drop.”

“And why would I do that?” I ask, my voice shaking.

“Because if you do, I’ll order my armies to retreat. You can keep the mine, you can keep the slaves you liberated—well, you can’t, because you’ll be dead, but your people will live.”

“We’re already living,” S?ren says. “The battle isn’t over.”

“Not yet,” Cress says, eyes darting to him only briefly. “But it will be soon enough. It doesn’t matter that you have more men. They’re untrained, they’re weak. They don’t have Spiritgems. Even if you do somehow manage to win this one battle, your army would be decimated and you would only hold the mine long enough for me to fetch more troops. We would return in a week and crush what was left of your army like a bug beneath a shoe.” She pauses, smiling at me. Unlike in my nightmares, her teeth aren’t pointed, but her expression is every bit as feral anyway. “It’s a simple exchange, Thora. Your death, or your people’s.”

I stare at her, paralyzed. It feels like a sick joke, but there is nothing funny about it. She’s serious. She’s offering me death and calling it a mercy, and she isn’t even wrong in that. If the Kaiser hadn’t shown up with reinforcements, we would have kept enough of our army to travel to another mine and wage another battle there, but Cress is right—even if we win this battle, the number of casualties would be too high. It would be our first and last stand.

But if I drink the poison, there would be hope. I’m not foolish enough to believe that Cress would let my army keep the Fire Mine for long, but it would be long enough to make another plan, to find another way to fight. I trust that in my absence, Artemisia, Heron, Erik, and Blaise would keep fighting. They don’t need me—Artemisia said so herself back at the Astrean palace. If I fall, the rebellion will keep going.

I have to believe that.

I hold Cress’s gaze and step around S?ren, taking the goblet from her. For an instant, our fingers touch. I expect hers to be hot, but they feel like mine.

“Theo, no,” S?ren says, pleading. “There are other ways.”

“No,” I say, not taking my eyes off Cress. “There aren’t.”

It may not kill me, I think, a feverishly desperate thought. It didn’t kill Cress, after all. Houzzah’s blood burns through my veins, I’ve seen the proof of that. But it seems even more likely that what fire I do already have will be amplified by the Encatrio, that, as Mina put it, my pot will overflow.

I should trust my gods, I should believe that they wouldn’t let that happen, that they would protect me. But they didn’t protect Blaise. They didn’t protect my mother or Ampelio or Elpis or Astrea as a whole. I can’t bring myself to believe they will protect me now.

I lift the goblet to my lips, but I pause before drinking. “Cress,” I say. Just one word. Just her name.

Something flickers in her expression, and for a brief, fleeting moment I think I’ve reached through to some part of her I thought was lost. She smiles at me the same way she did once, when we were just two silly girls sharing gossip. But that smile turns hungry.

“Drink,” she says.

I take S?ren’s hand in mine because I don’t want to die alone, and then I tilt the goblet back and drink.