EMBER’S POV

“It’s not — they’re not—”

“They are commoners,” she says, and the word drips. “That is precisely what they are. I am not a balm, Ember. I am not a kindness you dispense. I am the Silver Wolf. My power is an art, the highest there is, elegant and old and earned across a thousand generations, and it is not — it has never been — meant to be SPENT on prolonging the lives of the weak. The weak die. That is the function of weakness. You keep trying to make me an instrument of mercy, and I keep telling you I am not built for it, and...