Warin drags Matilda down to the riverbed, saying he just wants to talk, but her instincts say that he’s dangerous. He asks her why she married a frail mortal and what she’s hiding. He assumes that she wants power over the river and the bridge, but she doesn’t. Warin recently became god of rivers, and he wants to exact a toll, which he finally tells Matilda about. He wants one third of either people’s produce/harvests/wine, their money, or their third-born child. Warin thinks it’s reasonable, while Matilda says it’s not.

Warin tells Matilda she has two days to convince Vincent to agree to the toll. Warin will ally with whoever gives it to him. The river yanks off Matilda’s cloak as Warin leaves.

Matilda returns to Wyndrift. She decides to climb the Maiden Tower to enter because of the magic she felt within it. A sentry guard recognizes her and lets her in. Matilda follows the sound of people eating to find Nathaniel and other warriors having breakfast in the hall. They are shocked to see her and even more shocked when she asks to eat with them.

She sits with Nathaniel and asks about his plans as they eat porridge. He intends to train and stay behind, as Vincent doesn’t want him helping with the evacuations. Vincent enters the hall, soaking wet, and demands that everyone leave him alone with Matilda.

Vincent accuses Matilda of sneaking out in the night, and she reminds him that she’s a herald who can travel as she pleases. He apologizes and says he’s emotional after thinking she drowned. Matilda assumes that Vincent refused to open the gate for her, but he reveals he was sleeping when Matilda was calling for help.

When she tells him about Warin’s tolls, Vincent refuses to pay, and Matilda agrees. Vincent promises that the gates will always open for her, and Matilda, in turn, shows him the bloody prayer he wrote and sent to her during the Dark Winter. She says she didn’t receive it until years later. She eats the parchment and promises to remain with Vincent and help him to victory. Vincent goes to find Hugh, and Matilda goes below to Bade.

Matilda finds the Underling door in an abandoned bedroom in the Maiden tower. She enters and finds the passage mostly abandoned, except for a sleeping hound pup. She sneaks around the hound without waking it, which is odd.

In the under realm, she enters Bade’s burrow and finds the fire out and Hem missing. Bade is prone on the floor, asleep. She finds Adria asleep at her desk, where she had written Matilda’s name on parchment with a 12-star constellation and the phrase “soul-bearer.” Matilda doesn’t have time to question what it means, as she explores the rest of the realm and finds the other Underlings asleep in the middle of the wedding feast.

Matilda contemplates killing Phelyra and all the others to take their magic, but the idea makes her feel hollow. She instead cuts a lock of her own hair and ties it around Phelyra’s wrist so that when she wakes, she’ll know Matilda spared her. Before Matilda leaves, she notices Enva is missing.

Matilda goes to Thile’s villa. She tries to avoid Thile, but he finds her and mocks her for marrying a mortal. She tries to find Shale, realizing there is no one else in Skyward she can trust, especially not Luz, goddess of rain, who is now Warin’s lover.

When Shale returns, he admonishes her for marrying a mortal. He tells her the cautionary tale of a now-forgotten god named Julian, who fell in love with and married a mortal princess. She needed to kill a god to prove herself powerful, so she murdered Julian in his sleep. Matilda asks Shale if she can call upon him for aid, and Shale says he will consider it but makes no promise.

Vincent leads the evacuated people to Hugh’s land and Drake Hall. Vincent hasn’t seen Hugh in years and worries he will turn them away, but Hugh needs access to Vincent’s bridge to transport the building materials that he sells. They stop and make camp for the night, and Matilda appears. Vincent is relieved to see her and kisses her, supposedly to keep up appearances, but he relishes her touch. He asks her about Bade, and she says she couldn’t contact him but has called upon Shale for help instead. Matilda searches Vincent’s pack for water to drink and finds her invisibility cloak. Vincent confesses he went after her into the river but only found her cloak. He asks her to sit beside him while he sleeps before his shift taking watch.

They lie together and discuss the stars; Matilda’s appeared shortly after Vincent’s birth, but the newest constellation is Adria’s. The mortals discovered that Adria became a goddess a year after the war ended, and she visited the mortal realm frequently. Matilda asks Vincent if he’s ever thought of killing a god, but he’s never wanted to.

Vincent shares his dream of living simply in a farm cottage like the one nearby, with the person he loves. Matilda shivers, and Vincent holds her close. He asks her about her appearance in his dreams, and she confesses she was only actually there once, in the dream where Grimald grabbed her, which she claims taught her not to trust mortals. Vincent asks why she allows him to hold her, and she says she trusts him to let her go.

Matilda stays with Vincent until he sleeps and then joins the knights. When they travel again, Matilda decides to walk instead of ride, getting to know the Wyndrift people, especially the children, who are drawn to her. The sky becomes dark, and an eithral appears. Matilda and Vincent tell everyone to play dead, but the horses are spooked. Matilda worries what the eithral’s presence means for the peace between the Underlings and Skywards.

The eithral leaves, and the group finds Hugh on the road. He was hunting the eithral with obsidian arrows, which is why he didn’t receive Vincent’s letter. Matilda introduces herself as Vincent’s wife.

Hugh asks Vincent how he captured Matilda, and Vincent realizes that Hugh isn’t the honorable man he remembered. Hugh begrudgingly agrees to honor his oaths to Vincent’s father and shelter the vulnerable at Drake Hall. Vincent asks Matilda to return to Wyndrift to be with Nathaniel, in case Grimald’s siege begins before Vincent returns. Matilda agrees, as long as Vincent takes her cloak for protection.

When Matilda returns to Wyndrift, Warin appears on the bridge. Nathaniel offers to raise the bridge and shoot arrows at Warin. Warin asks Matilda about the toll, and Matilda refuses the deal on Vincent’s behalf. Warin tells her that she’ll regret it when he goes to Grimald’s camp. Nathaniel raises the bridge and lets Matilda in.

The vulnerable make it to Drake Hall, but a storm hits the retinue traveling from Drake Hall back to Wyndrift. Hugh wants to stop. He claims that Luz is angry at Vincent, but he isn’t sure why. Hugh and his troops slow down, but Vincent dons Matilda’s cloak and rides on. The rain slows him, and he realizes he won’t reach Wyndrift by dawn. He sees the eithral in the sky again.

Matilda remains close to Nathaniel as they prepare for the siege and the possibility of Warin flooding the river. Night falls, and Vincent hasn’t arrived. Nathaniel asks Matilda to be gentle with Vincent, as she was his first love, and her absence greatly hurt him. Matilda promises Nathaniel that she will help them and won’t hurt Vincent intentionally.

Grimald’s forces gather on the bridge, and Grimald asks them to surrender. Nathaniel refuses, and the fighting begins. Warin appears and uses his powers over iron to destroy the metal portcullis, leaving Fury Tower open and vulnerable to siege.

Matilda and Nathaniel are trapped on the tower’s roof. Matilda orders Nathaniel behind her. She fights off the soldiers who attack them as they try to reach Maiden Tower. They pause as Matilda senses someone, and Bade appears. Bade and Matilda fight side-by-side, though Matilda can sense that Bade no longer takes joy in killing mortal men.

The warning bell sounds, announcing the lone eithral’s return. Matilda commands Bade to remain with Nathaniel. She goes to the tower and asks the eithral to let her see through her eyes.

Matilda can see the battlefield through the eithral’s perspective. She doesn’t know which of them is in control when the eithral picks up Grimald’s knights and casts them into the river. The eithral menaces Grimald and Warin before someone calls Matilda’s name, confusing her and making the eithral crash into the side of the tower.

Vincent follows the eithral to Wyndrift, kept unseen by Matilda’s cloak. He watches the eithral attack only Grimald’s men. He crosses the defenseless west bridge before revealing himself to Edric. Edric tells him where Matilda and Nathaniel are, and Vincent hurries to find them.

He finds Matilda in a trance, with Bade beside her, calling her name. Vincent realizes she’s controlling the eithral. She’s stuck in the trance, but when Vincent kneels beside her, holding her and calling her name, she comes back to him. Vincent wonders what this war will cost Matilda.

Matilda returns to her body to find Vincent and Bade with her. Bade asks Matilda what she’s done, as the Skyward ability to control flying creatures has been kept secret until now. Matilda feels shame for revealing it, but she’s happy to have stopped the battle. The eithral’s crash into the tower has created a barricade, keeping Grimald’s troops out and trapping the ones already in the tower. Bade questions what Matilda did with the eithral, but Vincent doesn’t question her. Matilda asks to speak with Bade alone, and when Vincent leaves, she asks him about the enchanted slumber. Bade has no recollection of sleeping or dreaming, but when he woke, he felt Matilda’s fear.

Bade again asks Matilda about the eithral, and she refuses to answer him. He cautions her about loving a mortal, and Matilda accuses him of only coming to help her out of obligation, not out of love. He doesn’t deny it, which hurts Matilda. Matilda tries to leave, but Bade asks her to wait. She sees the Gatekeeper’s eye open on her moonstone belt.

Matilda has learned that the eye only opens when someone close to her is dying. She hears a keening cry and finds Vincent cradling a bleeding Nathaniel. Matilda sees Orphia lurking nearby, but Orphia says nothing. She just looks at the eye. Matilda realizes Orphia knows that she is a soul-bearer and can chase Nathaniel’s soul to the wastes.

Nathaniel dies, and Vincent closes his eyes. Matilda slips her cloak on and prepares to go to the wastes when she sees a beautiful healer approach and put a hand on Vincent’s shoulders. This makes Matilda jealous, but she doesn’t have time to linger. Matilda goes to the top of the tower and manifests a door before stepping into the sky.

Matilda enters the wasteland and runs straight for the gate. She finds Nathaniel standing before the Gatekeeper, having ignored Enva’s music, which pushes souls toward Skyward or the Underlings. He tells the Gatekeeper about his life, but he doesn’t have enough stories to tip the scales.

Matilda offers her stories, which the Gatekeeper has never seen before. The Gatekeeper agrees to trade Matilda’s stories for Nathaniel’s life. However, the next time Matilda comes to the wastes, she must spend 10 years serving as herald for the Gatekeeper, only able to pass between the wastes and the mists. Matilda negotiates it down to seven years and agrees.

Matilda tells the Gatekeeper the story of her life up until she dons the slippers from Warin and enters the river. At that point, the Gatekeeper’s scale tips in Nathaniel’s favor. Nathaniel asks Matilda to give a message to Vincent, but Matilda realizes that, as soul-bearer, she could possibly take Nathaniel back to the mortal world. The Gatekeeper says it’s possible, but Nathaniel must hold onto Matilda and not look back when he reaches the wasted threshold.

When they reach the wasted threshold, Matilda realizes she must guide Nathaniel through his nightmare. They struggle to swim as nightmarish creatures rip at Matilda and hurt her. They barely make it through, with Matilda holding Nathaniel’s hand tightly. When they reach shore, Nathaniel remembers that in one of his nightmares, Matilda helped him.

Vincent sits in the sepulcher with Nathaniel’s corpse. He cannot bring himself to leave, feeling grief intensely. He feels far from Matilda and encourages himself to let her go. He watches as Nathaniel’s fingers twitch before he wakes and says Matilda’s name.

Vincent searches the fortress for Matilda. Nathaniel can barely speak of what happened, but Vincent figures it out. He finds Matilda climbing down Fury Tower, but she slips and falls. He runs to her and tells her Nathaniel is awake and in his body. She asks him to take her somewhere safe. Vincent takes her to his bedchamber.