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Oliver gritted his teeth and shook his head "I don’t even knohat that lanced at him "No? Truly? None of your , Oliver looked away, staring instead at Julianna and then at Collette, trying to assure theht Somehow

"You and your sister, boy, you’re half of this world and half of that An uncommon breed, and an unwelcome one"

Collette screa about?"

Ty’Lis ran his fingers over the braids of his beard "Idiot girl You haven’t an inkling, have you?" And nohispered so that only Oliver could hear, so that none of the soldiers, Atlantean or Yucatazcan, could make out a word

"We endary Fros between Borderkind and humans have produced creatures that are both You are the opposite of the Veil in every way, anatheic used to create it The stories the Lost Ones tell say that one day a Legend-Born will tear the Veil down, reuniting the torlds, so that at last they can all go hoain"

Ty’Lis pressed his forehead to Oliver’s, heat pulsing on the sorcerer’s clammy skin, and stared into his eyes

"That is why you must die To take away any such false hope But first, I have need of you…"

Again the sorcerer stepped back and gestured broadly to the king’s guards

"Put them all in chains," Ty’Lis commanded "And I shall attend to the Borderkind They are under arrest on charges of conspiracy and regicide You are all witnesses to the crime You see the Sword of Hunyadi, which ielded by the hand of this Intruder from beyond the Veil No other evidence is necessary He and his co of Euphrasia has shattered the truce between the Two Kingdoms, and in the name of Mahacuhta, my robes stained with his blood, I swear that Yucatazca shall have her vengeance, that there will be justice

"That there will be war"

EPILOGUE

The day after Christe with Sheriff Norris The twenty-sixth of Dece with the surreal Many shops reh Kitteridge gave the iht some silent apocalypse People slept in, recovered froifts in quiet solitude as they finished digesting the Christhts were still lit, decorations still hung No one dared drag their tree to the curb on the day after Christmas Not yet

After a day of such passionate celebration, the twenty-sixth of Deces at half-azed out theof the sheriff’s car at the stillness of the day Santa’s dead and gone

By the tie Lane, tears made thin tracks down her cheeks She wiped the driveway of the Bascolie house, a lovely little cottage larger than the house she’d grown up in, and then the car rolled to a halt in the shadohat could only be called a ht rose and it would have been a thing of beauty if not for the sheer emptiness of it Like the twenty-sixth of December, the Bascombe house was athis," Jackson Norris said

Again, Sara wiped her eyes "I really appreciate it"

"It’s just--" he began, but faltered when he turned to her and saw that she’d been crying

The sheriff hesitated, then he killed the engine and plucked his keys fro not to corateful

"I don’t knohat you expect to find here," he said