Sybil awakens in a locked room, having been drugged with ox-eye by Tory at Benji’s command. Maude breaks down the door, and she and Sybil set out to find Rory. They find him badly beaten in another locked room, and he confirms that Benji knows his identity. When Benji confronts them, Edora and a crowd of knights and woodsmen arrive in the corridor simultaneously, and Benji fabricates a cover story to protect his reputation, allowing them to leave. Later, Sybil confesses to Bartholomew her original plan to die by suicide after destroying the magical stone objects. Saddened, Bartholomew implores her not to lose hope.

The group confronts Benji in the library, where Bartholomew reveals a shocking theory: The tor isn’t just a magical landmark but the physical body of a great, ancient sprite. The spring water is its blood, and the limestone from which the magical objects were carved is its body. He also deduces that the ox-eye draft allows those hewn of limestone—like Bartholomew—to receive visions. Benji seizes on this, concluding that the recent earthquake was caused by sprites and vowing to unite the kingdom against them as a common enemy. When he taunts Rory—claiming to have won control over Sybil by killing Rory after the fall of Aisling Cathedral—Rory attacks the king and breaks his teeth. Enraged, Benji announces that the tournament’s final event will be a hunt for a sprite at dawn.

Before the hunt begins, Tory confesses to Sybil that she was the one who threw the spear that wounded her at the wedding, claiming that her aim slipped as she tried to protect Sybil. She states that she began to lose faith in Benji when she saw that he seemed pleased, rather than horrified, at Sybil’s near-fatal wounding. She now believes that Benji can’t be trusted, and she wants to help Sybil. Sybil doesn’t fully trust or forgive Tory, but she accepts her offer of help. 

The hunt starts in a sacred grove; the first person to return with the limb of a slaughtered birke will be declared the winner. Sybil and Tory hunt together, though Sybil has no intention of harming a birke. When a particularly tall one appears before them, Sybil instructs Tory to close her eyes—hiding them from the birke since birkes eat eyes. She then politely asks the birke for permission to climb it. The birke doesn’t respond but allows Sybil to climb. From high in its branches, she spots Samuel, who is carrying the Faithful Forester’s chime—the next magical stone object that Sybil needs to destroy. As she and Tory reach Samuel, Benji ambushes them. He shoots and kills Tory with an arrow and then springs a trap; he has Samuel ring the chime, whose knell scatters Sybil’s thoughts and induces traumatic visions, and traps her in a net. Benji reveals his plan to leave her for a birke to kill, using her death to stoke hatred against all sprites.

Horrified by Benji’s killing of Tory and by his intention to kill Sybil, Samuel defies the king, declaring him unfit to rule. Their ensuing fight accidentally starts a fire that engulfs the grove. During the fire, Sybil frees herself from the net by sawing it on the blade of Tory’s spear. As a birke emerges from the trees, Benji uses his coin to teleport to safety, abandoning everyone. Samuel is killed by the fire; as he falls, he tosses the chime to Sybil, who smashes it with her hammer. Trapped by the inferno, Sybil is rescued by Bartholomew, who flies into the flames. The strain is too much for his already-damaged body; his remaining wing and torso shatter, and they both fall from the sky.

With the sacred grove and Eichel House burning, the hunt is declared forfeit. Bartholomew is back at Maude’s home, his body catastrophically fractured. Overwhelmed by despair, Sybil lashes out, telling her friends that the hamlets deserve to burn for putting their faith in false gods and a greedy, treacherous king. Seeking to validate her hopelessness, she drinks a vial of ox-eye, which induces a powerful vision. She experiences the memories of the ancient sprite whose body became the tor, witnessing the ritualistic drowning of countless Diviners in its spring-water blood, including her own younger self.

The vision reveals that Bartholomew was always present, comforting the girls after their traumatic Divinations. He once told a young, despairing Sybil that he would shoulder any weight she gave him—a kindness that shaped how she endured her Divinations and cared for the other girls. The vision also shows her that, as a girl, she gave the other Diviners hope by telling them stories of a better future. Finally, she sees from the sprite’s perspective: When she destroyed Aisling Cathedral, she freed the ancient creature from its prison. The resulting earthquake was its joyous call, summoning other sprites to clear the rubble from its body. Sybil awakens from the vision, her despair replaced by a renewed sense of hope.

Her perspective transformed by the vision, Sybil finds Bartholomew and apologizes. She offers him her last name, and he becomes Bartholomew Delling. He speculates that he will only die when the cracks spreading across his body finally reach his stone heart. Sybil then finds Rory in the washroom, and they bathe together. Rory confesses that he’s in love with her, and Sybil tells him she loves him, too.

They move to a rug by the hearth, where Rory performs oral sex on Sybil, who drinks the restorative spring water from his blood. Rory says that there is spring water should they choose to go back to the tor, affording them time together to help the kingdom heal. They have sex, and Sybil, having fully abandoned her plan for martyrdom, promises Rory that she will remain with him always. They fall asleep together, their commitment to each other and a hopeful future solidified.