Vale of Dreams

A stolen bracelet is worthless, and Mordred is the only option

Nia lies flat on a rooftop in occupied Bristol, listening to dragons scream across the winter sky.

A stolen bracelet is worthless, and Mordred is the only option

Nia lies flat on a rooftop in occupied Bristol, listening to dragons scream across the winter sky. Below, her friend Serana waits in an alley while their soothsayer Tana reads the future in tea leaves at a nearby pub. Their target: a Fey captain carrying a bracelet that doubles as a portal key into Brocéliande, where Nia's captured lover Raphael is being tortured. Nia mind-controls the captain into stumbling toward the alley, where Serana knocks him unconscious and pries off the bracelet. But the runes etched inside reveal the portal closed three days ago. The key is worthless. As desperation tightens around her chest, Nia knows only one option remains—her father Mordred, the Kingslayer who once filled Avalon Tower with corpses, and who has spent fifteen centuries imprisoned alone on a hidden island.

A portal for Pendragon blood, sealed by a fatal oath

Back at Avalon Tower, Seneschal Wrythe Pendragon is dismantling demi-Fey teams while his Iron Legion cult openly surveils Nia's friends. She confesses her secret to Serana, Tana, and Darius: she found the lost Isle of Avalon months ago, and her father Mordred lives there—the same Kingslayer whose massacre paintings hang throughout the castle. Tana's cards confirm he is the only path to Brocéliande. Nia crosses the lake to Mordred's ruined castle, where a banquet table has been set for fifteen centuries, awaiting a celebration that never came. He offers a ley portal into Auberon's fortress and a silver moth to spy on the castle, in exchange for her help annihilating every Pendragon. Then he corners her further: a Hemlock Oath, a blood-sealed contract. She must plant a second moth inside Avalon Tower and tell no one about him—or die.

Raphael leaves his dungeon cell—and Nia—behind The portal deposits Nia inside Castle Perillos's walls, beneath twin moons of silver and red. She scales vine-covered towers, follows Mordred's moth through labyrinthine corridors, and reaches the dungeons. There she mind-controls a lonely guard, exploiting his desires and fears to unlock the cell. Raphael sits inside—scarred, shorn, his collarbone broken. Nia burns through the guard's psyche to make him an obedient puppet. In a firelit library, Raphael tells Nia their love made him reckless at Dover—half his mind was on her instead of the mission, and he kept making stupid decisions. They cannot be together. He will stay in Brocéliande to find his sister Ysolde. Nia should go back and work through proper channels. She leaves him with her heart in fragments,…