Chapter 1 #2
Freyda’s talons squeezed my shoulder again, bringing me back to myself. She always knew when the shadows were coming for me.
I scratched her belly once more, then opened the Warden’s note, expecting it to be a summons to her office upstairs. But reading it made me stop short.
Come to the Stillhouse at once, it said in her precise, cramped penmanship. Nothing more.
Freyda ruffled her feathers and gave a soft chirp, disquieted by my sudden unease. The Stillhouse was cruelly named; there was nothing still about the place. It was where we kept our most dangerous prisoners. No matter how diligently we scrubbed its walls, we could never wash away the stains.
Thinking of those mean, dark rooms turned me cold. I stood at the edge of the stable yard and focused on the rhythm of my breathing until I’d squashed my rising dread and paved over it with stone.
The Warden’s message could mean only one thing. It was time, once again, to interrogate the harpy Nerys.
***
A horrible shriek burst through the air just as I stepped into Nerys’s cell.
I was glad I’d left Freyda up above, though I’d almost been cowardly enough to bring her with me.
The scream of a harpy is a terrible thing—multitonal, discordant, loud enough to make one’s ears bleed if the harpy is at full strength.
Luckily for me, Nerys was hardly more than a deflated bag of skin and bones on the floor. She had few feathers left, her wings small, fleshy, and pocked with sores in their absence.
Even at the grisly sight of her, I didn’t break my stride once. What a model Rose I was. I closed the door behind me and headed down the stone stairs to join the Warden. She crouched over Nerys, staring into her cloudy yellow eye. In her hand she held a glass syringe of bright green liquid.
“The tip I received indicates that the creature Kilraith could be hiding in the Cold Barrens,” the Warden said quietly, “building an army out of the scraps of Mhorghast. Planning his final offensive. That’s where you were born, isn’t it, Nerys?
A hatchling harpy taking her first awkward flight among the frost-trees. ”
If I closed my eyes, I’d be able to imagine her speaking to a small child. I could convince myself that perhaps she was telling a bedtime story.
I did not allow myself to close my eyes.
“Nerys,” the Warden said, wheedling, “I know you don’t want me to give you more of this serum. I know it hurts. I don’t like causing pain, if you can believe that. So don’t make me do it. Let’s have a conversation instead. Tell me where in the Barrens someone like Kilraith might hide.”
The Warden waited, statue-still. The only things that moved were her black eyes, darting across the harpy’s mangled skin. Cataloging every wound we’d inflicted on her, every infected scar.
What was she thinking? I wondered. What was she feeling? If she felt anything, that is. After twelve years with the Warden, I still couldn’t be entirely sure what made her tick.
The only thing I knew for certain was that as frightened as I was of her, I loved her even more. And I wanted her to love me.
It was my greatest triumph—and the source of my deepest shame—to be the Warden’s favorite Rose.
“Nerys, talk to me about the Barrens,” she continued. “I’ve been there myself hundreds of times, but I know harpies love their secrets, and I know somewhere in that harpy mind of yours are hiding spots that even I’ve never seen. Describe to me exactly where they are.”
For a long time, Nerys was still. The silence was awful, heavy. The vials of poison sitting on the little wooden table to my right glowed like gems in the torchlight.
I fixed my gaze on the harpy’s unblinking eye.
The flesh around it was ghastly, swollen and abused; she could barely open it.
She was quiet for so long that I began to think she was dead, or close to it.
Die, I thought, directing all my energy toward her.
Maybe some scrap of my mother’s godly power would rise up within me and sap the life from this poor creature.
Please die. Give up. There’s nothing left for you here.
Finally, Nerys shifted to look away from the Warden and right at me instead. Gemma would have been horrified to see the left half of the harpy’s face, where flesh and muscle had been scraped away to expose her bones. Farrin would have excoriated me for allowing such treatment.
But at the sight of Nerys’s wounds, I felt only a small ripple of disgust that I tamped down immediately. May all your thorns drip poison, came the thought.
And here we were—the Warden and me—dripping our poison just as we were supposed to.
Nerys cracked open her dry, lipless mouth. All her sharp teeth were gone. Her gums were black and green with infection.
“Kill me,” she rasped, looking right at me with the one eye she had left.
“Never,” the Warden snapped. “I will keep you alive for the rest of my life, and I have many decades left in this world.” Then she plunged the syringe’s needle into the sagging flesh of the harpy’s neck.
The Warden’s poisons worked quickly. Nerys’s body seized before I could draw another breath.
Once she had been massive and powerful, requiring dozens of steel chains bolted to the floor to contain her.
Now all the chains were gone. We’d broken her so thoroughly that they weren’t necessary.
She twitched and screamed between us on the cold floor, each stone stained black with her blood. Weeks of it, layers upon layers.
The Warden leaned closer, put her mouth right above Nerys’s ragged, tufted ear.
“Tell me about the Barrens, Nerys,” she shouted, implacable.
Harpy screams were nothing to her. “Tell me, and I’ll make it stop.
Are there underground caves? Strongholds in the mountains?
Vaults cloaked in Olden magic? The Great Mother Harpy has always been fascinated with fae.
Did she strike a bargain with one of the clans?
Are they hiding Kilraith? Are they hiding He Who Is All? ”
“Please,” Nerys moaned. Her limbs bent unnaturally, jerked out of alignment by the poison. A wrist snapped; a wing inverted. “Kill me!”
I did not look away. I’d seen worse, and my dread was safe beneath all the stone inside me. I imagined a smooth winding road of it stretching from my tongue down to my throat and then to the panic bubbling in my gut. Quieting me. Coating me with cool stillness.
The Warden tossed away the syringe with a sharp curse. “Mara, get over here. And bring the Box.”
I was ready to obey until she mentioned the Box—the nickname for a poison so vile that I’d seen it used only once in all my years of service. That stopped me in my tracks, startling me out of the cool, still place I’d been standing in.
At my hesitation, the Warden rounded on me. “The Box, Mara.”
I don’t know what made me do it. Maybe I harbored a scrap of my mother’s power after all, indignant at the treatment of one of her sister Neave’s creatures.
Maybe it was my exhaustion, or the shadows on the Warden’s haggard face that betrayed her own.
She was not herself. None of us were. The breach bells rang every hour.
The Mist was falling. The queen was dead.
And we trained new Roses every morning while burning the corpses of dead ones every night.
“Madam, we can’t,” I said quietly. “The Box is meant for—”
“I know what the Box is for,” she said, rising to her feet. Her voice was chillingly quiet. “I designed it. And I’m telling you to bring it to me right now.”
She could have easily retrieved it herself. It sat there on the table with the Warden’s other tools of torture: a single drop of dull purple liquid in a slender glass vial.
But now it had become an order. A challenge, a test. The Warden held out her hand, watching me, waiting.
Maybe there was a drop of pity or kindness left in me, no matter how hard I’d worked to rid myself of such things, especially over the last few blood-soaked weeks.
“There are other ways to find information about the Barrens,” I suggested, trying for reason. “We can dispatch a scouting squadron, send Posey with them. They can act as her prisoners if they need to.”
“We don’t have soldiers to spare for yet another dangerous scouting mission,” the Warden said. “And I’m tired of playing games with this creature. Bring me the Box.”
“It will take you many weeks to brew another batch.” I was getting desperate. “What if a dire situation arises tomorrow and we need what we have left?”
“Then we’ll brew more.”
“Madam, we don’t have the resources—”
“We’ll find the resources!”
“It will kill her,” I said sharply. My skin was hot with anger, with fear. I should not have come here without Freyda.
“It won’t, and you know it. Did you hear that, Nerys?
” The Warden crouched, hands on her knees.
“This vile substance I’m about to feed you will make you think you’re dying, but it lies.
You’ll think you’re finally passing into the Great Dominion, where the gods were born, where you can finally find peace—but then you’ll find yourself right back here before me, with noxious fire burning you from the inside out and the memories of everyone you’ve ever killed screaming in your head.
And you’ve killed a lot of people, haven’t you?
Do you wonder what they felt in their last moments, as your talons tore into them?
As your venom choked their lungs? Soon you will no longer have to wonder. ”
With every sentence, the Warden pressed closer to Nerys.
Her voice climbed in both volume and pitch and began to fracture.
To my horror, I thought I heard a wave of tears amid all her fury.
The sound shocked me into moving toward her—to comfort her, to lead her away from this death-drenched room.
She needed a drink of water; she needed rest.
But as soon as I got close enough, she grabbed my forearm, yanked me toward her, and twisted me around to face Nerys. I tried to squirm away, but the Warden’s grip was strong and cold as ice.
“Look at her,” she commanded. “Look her in the eye and tell her to answer my questions.”
My shock left me speechless. Long weeks ago, I’d been here in this very room with Farrin and Gemma, manipulating them into using our collective influence to pry more information out of Nerys.
Because we had Kerezen’s blood in our veins—the blood of the goddess who had created sirens, incubi, succubi; the goddess of seduction and beauty—our mere presence had made Nerys talk.
I didn’t see how it was possible for the Warden to know about this. Had someone—my family, Gareth, my sisters’ lovers—betrayed our secret? My thoughts immediately flew to Wardwell, where Mother had hidden herself away.
“Tell her, Mara,” the Warden said, watching me carefully.
“I don’t see how me asking her questions will make any difference,” I managed to say.
“You’re lying. You’ve been keeping something from me.”
It took all my strength to meet her dark gaze with a look of what I hoped was genuine confusion. “I don’t lie to you, Madam.”
“You do when it serves your interests and that of your sisters,” she replied, then pushed on before I could speak.
“Do you think I’m oblivious to the rumors of what happened in Mhorghast?
Most of the stories I’ve heard are useless gossip, but some give me pause.
And I can read between the lines of the report you gave me.
You shouldn’t have gotten out of such a place alive, much less unscathed.
You’ve fought Kilraith twice now, and though he still lives, he hasn’t managed to kill you. Why?”
“We’ve been lucky,” I said quietly.
“Yes, the wicked sort of luck that blesses fools and liars.” Suddenly the Warden’s expression softened.
She didn’t release me, but with her free hand she cupped my cheek.
I leaned into her cool touch before I could stop myself, my heart fluttering madly.
Not even I, favored Mara, was immune to the allure of the Warden’s affection. Her touch was rare, a precious gift.
“It saddens me that you don’t trust me with the secrets you carry,” the Warden murmured. “You know that I think of you as my own daughter, don’t you? All of you are my daughters, but you especially.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. The weight of her attention was unbearable, the kind of pain that bordered on bliss.
“I trust you,” I whispered. “I am yours, Madam. I serve you with all my heart.”
She watched me for a moment longer, holding my face gently in her hand. Then something dark crossed her face, a gutting flicker of sadness. She shoved me away and stood, glaring down at Nerys.
“Someday you’ll stop lying to me, Mara,” she said quietly. “Until then, know that every day you persist in deceiving me is like a knife to my heart.”
Then she retrieved a sword from the shadows and with one swift stroke severed Nerys’s head from her body.
“There,” she said, her voice flat and dull. “A gift for you, Mara. Her long suffering has ended. Am I not merciful?”
Her disappointment in me was physical, a blow that stunned tears from my eyes. In a moment, I would tell her everything, if only to banish that look from her face. The words danced on my tongue.
“Leave me,” the Warden said, saving me from myself. “I need to clean this up. And there is much to do.” She brought a shaking hand to her temple, pressed her fingers to her hairline as if to stave off a headache. “Always so much to do,” she repeated quietly.
I turned and fled up the stairs. Only when I burst out of the Stillhouse and my boots touched the grass did I feel like I could breathe again.
Freyda swooped down from the trees, and when I opened my arms she came to me, fussing at me as if I were an errant child.
I held her to my chest and pressed my brow to her silken head until my eyes were dry once more.