Chapter 45
Forty-Five
It always comes back to the seeds-forsaken bagrava.
Furious tears trickle down my cheeks, and I wipe them roughly on the back of my wrist, wishing I could go back to before I was a master gardener, before the Marauders became addicted to bagrava, before Earth Mother blessed my people with the miracle in the first place, and stop her from creating the plant altogether.
It would have been better for my ancestors to perish on the Tomb Flats than for Earth Mother’s gift to be twisted and misused like this.
“How?” I snap. “How, pray tell, do you use a soil conditioner to alter people’s memories?”
Rowenna lifts one shoulder in an innocent shrug.
“The idea came to me during the interminable hours I spent in Queen Tessa’s salon, watching them sip their purple tea and float away from reality.
I started to wonder if their hallucinations could be molded.
If, perhaps, the bagrava made their minds malleable enough to plant ideas or make suggestions.
So I started experimenting and eventually discovered it is possible to alter memories if a high concentration of bagrava is injected directly into the bloodstream. ”
“You’ve been injecting the bagrava?” I ask, aghast. “Into whom? Do you know how dangerous that is?”
Rowenna waves a dismissive hand. “It doesn’t cause lasting damage. Just a little sickness that subsides as soon as the injections cease.”
“How could you possibly know that? How many people have you experimented on? And why? I still don’t understand why you felt the need to fake your death!”
“It’s the only way I could carry out my plans,” Rowenna snaps back.
“I didn’t come to Vanzador just to wear glittering dresses and prance around fancy salons.
I came to dismantle it from the inside out.
I tried to ingratiate myself with my new husband and the royal family, but they wouldn’t let me in.
So I attempted to weasel my way into their government, certain I’d find weaknesses to use against them.
And I did. But I couldn’t take advantage of Soren’s weaknesses without compromising the security of Tashir.
Eventually, I realized stealing his power and harnessing it myself was the only way forward. ”
I nod because I knew my sister’s silly simpering and prancing about with the courtiers had to be an act. “Keep going.”
Rowenna’s eyes narrow with annoyance—unused to taking orders from anyone.
Especially me. “I easily uncovered most of Vanzador’s secrets—like the memory sacrifices that fuel Soren and Alaric’s power and the resulting hospitals full of dying people.
I was elated to learn Vanzador was slowly destroying itself, but I still needed a way to maintain the protective mountain range around Tashir without Soren or his son.
So I started scouring the library for more information about their power and eventually came upon Callahan’s journal and the mysterious mention of blood, flesh, and bone.
And thanks to our husband’s fondness for reliving the past, I discovered they were gemstones.
But I couldn’t figure out where they were kept.
There aren’t royal coffers or a vault of any kind on the mountain, and despite being a model wife and acting like a perfectly brainless courtier, Soren and Alaric remained as aloof and impenetrable as the Fortress walls. ”
“Because we knew what you were all along,” Alaric says “A wolf is still a wolf, even cloaked in wool.”
“Will you please hurry up and die so I don’t have to endure your insufferable company?” Rowenna snarls at him.
“I’ve suddenly recovered my will to live,” Alaric bites back, but his words slur, and the effort makes him wince.
“Good luck with that.” Rowenna looks him up and down pointedly.
Alaric does look terrible: sunken, blood-spattered, and paling by the second. If I don’t staunch the bleeding and get him to a healer soon, there will be no prayer of saving him.
Rowenna proudly continues her recollection.
“When it became clear I was never going to find the gemstone triad on my own, I decided to stage my death—implicating Soren and Alaric, of course—so I could bring in someone more unassuming and earnest. Someone easily overlooked, who could worm into the royal family and Soren’s political operations without suspicion. ”
“Someone like me,” I say flatly.
“Don’t say it like a bad thing!” Rowenna chides. “You’re precisely what we needed—someone na?ve and idealistic who had something to offer in return. Something Soren wanted so badly, he might let down his guard and lower his defenses to attain it.”
I force myself to laugh to keep from crying.
Even Rowenna was using me to get to the bagrava. Its roots are so entangled with mine, I don’t know where the plant ends and I begin. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually cared for me or if I’ve only ever been a means to an end—a host for this parasite that’s slowly killing me.
I shake my head as another realization dawns. “You told Soren I was a master gardener! Not Mother or Father.”
“It wasn’t that big of a deal.” Ro waves me off.
“I let your secret slip to Elodie—that girl’s never been able to keep her mouth shut.
I had to ensure Soren would bring you here.
I couldn’t trust anyone else to follow the breadcrumbs I laid.
Only someone who knew me, inside and out, would be perceptive enough to carry out my plans. ”
Ro grins as if this is all a grand compliment, but I hear the opposite. She needed someone mindless and codependent. Someone she could easily use and manipulate, who would follow her orders without question.
A pawn. A soldier.
Pain spreads through my chest like a blight, devastating and all-consuming. Just when I think it can’t get any worse, Alaric casts me the most empathetic look. Like he knows exactly what I’m thinking. How deeply these revelations hurt me.
His kindness is even more unbearable than Rowenna’s confession.
“Once you were here,” Ro continues, oblivious to my devastation, “I planted clues—like the carvings in our maid’s chamber and the zinnia in Callahan’s journal.
Little things that would prompt you to look for the gemstones and people who might be able to help you locate them, like Elodie Tomasko and Garitt Von Nevus. ”
The sound of the councilor’s name scrapes my ears like iron dragging across rock, waking something primal and ferocious within me.
“Garitt Von Nevus was the opposite of helpful! He tried to assault me because of an arrangement he supposedly had with you. Please tell me you didn’t sell yourself like that—and knowingly endanger me. ”
Rowenna blows out an exhausted breath. “He isn’t that bad. Sometimes leaders must pay a small price in exchange for—”
“My body isn’t a small price!” I shout even louder. “Just as staging your death isn’t a small lie!”
Alaric tries to chime in, but a wet, hacking cough curls him into a ball.
“Shhh. Save your strength,” I murmur.
“Sometimes our own comfort must come second to the future of Tashir,” Rowenna says.
I gape at her, completely gobsmacked by how much her time in Vanzador changed her. Hardened her.
Has it, though? a tiny voice in the back of my mind asks—a voice I used to attribute to Rowenna. But now that I’m truly listening, I recognize it instantly—so calm and encouraging and so clearly my own, I don’t know how I ever thought it belonged to my sister.
Rowenna has always been calculated and controlling, it tells me, but you failed to see it because she made you believe she was protecting you, looking out for you, like an older sister should.
“I knew you were too weak to handle the requirements of this job,” she says with a derisive snort. “It’s exactly why I kept you in the dark—why I sheltered you from the real work. How dare you judge me for doing what needs to be done for Tashir?”
Not long ago, these accusations would have sent me into a spiral of shame and doubt. I would have fallen on my face to apologize and begged Rowenna to tell me what to do and how to feel, but now I boldly meet her stare.
“That’s the thing. This isn’t what needs to be done. We don’t have to steal the gemstone triad. In fact, it’s a terrible idea, as it will require our people to sacrifice memories to fuel the stone’s power.”
“Only for a short while,” Rowenna says, “Just until—”
“I wasn’t finished,” I say over her. “There’s a good chance the stones won’t even work in someone else’s skin.
We need to work together, with Vanzador, not against each other.
Alaric and I have discovered so many ways we can strengthen both countries.
I’ve been growing goblin’s gold to light their mine shafts, and in return, I’ve been given a percentage of the output.
I’m going to use that money to purchase new farming equipment and food stores from the isles across the sea to send to Tashir.
Just think what a difference that will make. ”
“You’re daft if you think the Vanzadorians will actually let you have a penny. Why would they suddenly pay for things they’ve always taken?”
“Because Alaric is different.” I fist the lapels of his jacket and silently beg him to open his eyes and voice his agreement. But he’s so quiet, so deathly still. “The future will be different with Alaric as king—and with me as his queen,” I add softly.
“You’re the one who’s hallucinating if you honestly believe that,” Rowenna says with a tired sigh.
“Or maybe I’m finally seeing clearly for the first time in my life because I’m not looking through your jaded eyes.”
Rowenna scoffs. “How can you say that when you haven’t seen anything? I’ve been prowling around the Fortress, setting all of this in motion, and you saw none of it.”
“You’re lying. You couldn’t have been creeping through the Fortress. Someone would have recognized you.”
“I had help, of course.”
“Who?” I demand. “Von Nevus?” I shudder at the thought of him slinking through my chamber, touching my things.
“He volunteered, but I knew you’d never let him close enough.”
“Who else would have unfettered access to my rooms? What sort of Vanzadorian would agree to help you destroy their own country?”
“The desperate kind,” Rowenna says with a vicious smile. “A person with something—or someone—they’d do anything to protect if they were, say, gripped by a sudden strange illness. Do you happen to know anyone like that?”
She bats her eyes and my stomach lurches.
“No,” I argue. But all the pieces fit: Cloudia’s sudden illness, brought on by Rowenna’s injections. Delphine befriending me, supporting me, when she had no reason to do so. How she’s been there, at my side, every step of the way.
“It was so easy to manipulate her,” Ro continues. “I followed her home one night and saw how happy she and her sister were—the best of friends, merrily playing house together. A lot like you and me.” Rowenna winks playfully.
“It isn’t possible,” I say weakly. “Delphine is my friend. She despises you.”
“You’re right about the second part.” Rowenna laughs. “Delphine definitely despises me. But she is working with me—and has been from the start.”
“I don’t believe you,” I say, but my voice is small and shaking.
“Ask her yourself.” Rowenna’s gaze darts over my shoulder, and I hear the sound of shifting pebbles, the unsteady intake of breath. But I refuse to turn. Can’t bring myself to look. I don’t know how I’ll survive if Delphine is, in fact, standing there.
“Did you bring everything I asked for?” Rowenna asks.
After a long prickling pause, I hear her familiar voice. One whispered word that rips through me like an arrow.
“Yes.”