Chapter 2
After three afternoon training sessions with new recruits and an evening patrol to assess the state of the Mist in my assigned territory, I was in no mood for company.
I’d sustained a nasty knock on the head from a terrified young mountain nymph who’d fallen through a hole in the Mist and had been only too happy to be driven back into the Old Country where she belonged.
My joints ached, and I’d been unable to stomach lunch or dinner after the incident with the Warden, so I was ravenous.
The idea of a quiet few minutes in the privacy of my room with some stew—and more importantly, some bread—was the only thing keeping my legs moving forward.
But my room was occupied.
Cira and Brigid turned as I opened the door. Cira was sitting cross-legged on my bed, and Brigid was reading in the corner chair. Both of them were in their nightclothes, and both of them looked far too eager for such a late hour.
“I know, it’s late, but don’t kill us just yet,” Cira said, holding up two sealed letters with a grin.
My breath caught. “Are they from…?”
Brigid closed her book and smiled. “They are. Both of them.”
I set my dinner on the bedside table and took the letters from Cira with suddenly shaky fingers.
“You’re trembling,” Cira observed. “What happened? Is Nerys—”
Brigid hushed her with a sharp hiss.
The first letter I opened revealed Gemma’s handwriting, the second Farrin’s.
I held each of them for a long moment before I could bring myself to start reading.
The sight of their penmanship alone was enough to make me feel weepy again, and I’d already felt weepy more than enough for one day. I wasn’t used to the feeling.
“Can you tell us what they say?” Cira asked.
Brigid made an irritated noise. “Cira.”
“I was just asking.”
Quickly, I read each note three times. I could hear their voices in my head—Gemma’s clear as a bell, Farrin’s steady and sharp. Then I fed the letters to the fire and watched the flames until my sisters’ words were ashes.
“No news,” I said flatly. Farrin and Ryder were still in the capital, working with the royal councils to oversee military operations and secure housing for the refugees fleeing south.
Come and find me, Ankaret had said before her death—and Farrin had tried, as hard as she was able to with all the world on her shoulders.
But there had been no sign of our late queen in either of her forms. And Gemma and Talan were still searching the country for signs of the awakening gods, but they still had no leads, not even a whisper of one.
Soon it would be winter; traveling would be more difficult and dangerous, even for them.
The cold made people desperate. So did war.
And their letters hadn’t even touched on the ytheliad, the curse that had allowed Kilraith to gain such strong footholds in both Edyn and the Old Country.
Our theory was that five objects anchored the curse.
The first was the Three-Eyed Crown, which had bound Talan to Kilraith and was now hidden at the university, being studied.
Then there was the egg that had been hidden inside the human host of Jaetris, god of the mind, which my sisters and I had taken from Mhorghast. It too was safe in Fairhaven, the capital city.
Gareth and his team at the university had been studying each of these anchors for weeks—their markings, the strange movements of their clockwork parts, the shadowy images that darkened their jewels—and if their interpretation was correct, three anchors remained: a key, a goblet, and a black lake under a full moon, the only anchor that was not an object.
But scouring the shores of every lake in Gallinor had revealed nothing.
I’d even led teams of Roses to Olden lakes—including the vast black lake at which the Order conducted our recruiting trials—and we had found nothing there either.
I was beginning to worry that Gareth and his team had made a mistake, that the image of the lake was meaningless and there was an unknown fifth anchor somewhere for which we hadn’t even begun to search.
My worries these days were plentiful, and my concern for my sisters’ safety ate at me more than any other.
“Every day I worry the letters will stop coming,” I muttered to the fire. “Every day I wonder if I should tell my sisters to stop sending them. Contacting me puts them in danger. And if the Warden—”
I stopped, cursing my mistake. I hadn’t yet told either of them about my true lineage and hoped I would never have to. A fool’s hope, but I clung to it anyway.
“If the Warden what?” Cira demanded.
“Nothing.” I rubbed my forehead hard. “It’s nothing.”
“We heard you went to the Stillhouse today,” Brigid said. “What happened? Something did. I saw it on your face the moment you walked in.”
That question seemed safe enough. I turned to face them. The firelight kissed Cira’s brown skin, black braids, and bandaged shoulder with gold. Brigid, nearing thirty-five and the oldest Rose in service, was solid as a tower, tall, and pale with white-blond hair cropped short.
I could hardly stand to look at either of them, especially Brigid. A thirty-five-year-old Rose was unheard of. Her marvelous luck would run out one of these days, and I didn’t think I would be able to survive the blow.
“Nerys is dead,” I told them simply.
“Good,” Brigid said at once. “That should have happened long ago. She hasn’t given us relevant information in weeks. There was no reason to keep tormenting her.”
“The Warden enjoyed it though,” Cira said, watching my face. “What changed her mind?”
A vision of the Warden flashed through my mind—her hand tight around my arm, her fingers brushing my cheek. Her eyes hard and black, furious. Know that every day you persist in deceiving me is like a knife to my heart.
“I did, I suppose,” I said, trying to push the memory out of my head. “She wanted to use the Box on Nerys. I told her she shouldn’t, and things became strained.”
After a moment, Brigid asked quietly, “Did she hurt you?”
I scoffed, retrieved my dinner, and sat on the floor to eat. “Why does that matter? She has hurt all of us many times.”
“It matters because I’ve seldom seen you this upset.”
“I’m not upset. I’m tired.”
“Mara, come sit on the bed,” said Cira. “It’s softer.”
“I don’t want softness,” I snapped, and then, as I chewed ferociously on my bread, something inside me broke open, and the tears I’d been fighting all day spilled out of me.
I wasn’t a loud crier; one moment I was eating, and the next my eyes were burning.
A tight pain in my chest made it hard to breathe.
Brigid gently took my tray and helped me to my bed, then pulled her chair close while Cira curled up beside me and wrapped her arms around one of mine.
The gesture reminded me so unexpectedly of Petra—my first friend at Rosewarren, and my first kill—that I nearly shoved her away.
But her warmth was too comforting to spurn, and after a few minutes, my eyes had dried.
Then Cira said, “The Warden is quite unwell, isn’t she?” When no one answered, she added irritably, “She really ought to hurry up and have that child she’s supposed to bear.”
Brigid blew out a sharp breath. “Cira, now is not the time.”
“Tell me I’m wrong, then.”
“I said it’s not the time, not that you’re wrong.”
Cira released me and sat up. “The sooner she has a baby, the sooner the baby can grow up and train, and the sooner the Warden can pass on her magic to her daughter and make her Warden, and then she can die and leave us all in peace.”
“Hold your tongue,” Brigid said. “We’re not going to talk about the Warden dying right now, or even talk about her at all.”
“You’ll agree, though, that she’s not herself.
Yelling at everyone, stalking around the grounds talking to herself, going to the outposts for days at a time without warning, leaving Mara to run everything on her own.
And just look at her, she’s exhausted!” Cira gestured indignantly at me.
“None of this is the behavior of a stable Warden. Did you know that of all the Wardens in the history of the Order, her tenure has been the longest? By decades?”
“She’s just tired,” I said wearily. “And I’m not on my own. I have all of you to help me.”
“But Mara, when you’re tired, you don’t terrorize your students.”
“That’s enough,” Brigid said. There was a sharpness to her voice that hadn’t been there before. “We all need rest, and dawn patrol is only four hours away.”
I buried my face in my pillow. “That is not nearly enough hours.”
“Fine,” Cira said with a huff. “No more Warden talk.” Gingerly she settled back down beside me, and after a long moment of quiet, she said, “Tell me the story of Ankaret and Kilraith again.”
“I’m going to scream,” Brigid said blandly.
“Listen, just yesterday I was shot by a very stupid man, and now my shoulder hurts. I like the story, and I deserve a treat. And anyway, the more we hear it, the likelier it is that we’ll uncover some helpful piece of information hidden inside it.” Cira looked at me. “Don’t you agree?”
At the sound of those two names, uttered so casually by Cira’s youthful voice, a little chill raced down my body.
Ankaret and Kilraith: two accidental children born of their gods’ destruction.
One a beloved queen who remembered nothing of what she had once been, one buried for centuries in the dark sea, stewing in hatred.
I could still remember the hoarseness of Farrin’s voice as she’d told us all the story that day in Ivyhill, after the destruction of Mhorghast. How gaunt she had looked, as if receiving the memories of the god Jaetris before he died had drained half her life away.
If Ryder hadn’t been beside her, helping her stay upright, I’m not sure she would have been able to find the strength to speak.
“Are you saying you want a bedtime story?” I asked Cira. “Aren’t you a little old for that?”
“No one’s ever too old for bedtime stories,” Cira said promptly, a sentiment I couldn’t bring myself to argue with.
But before I could say another word, the room exploded with the peal of the breach bells.
The full breach bells, which meant that not just the squadron on duty would be deployed; all of us would be.
The walls shook suddenly, as if a huge fist had slammed into the priory; my tray toppled off the bedside table, and the stew splashed across the floor.
“Shock wave,” I muttered, bolting out of the bed. Since the collapse of Mhorghast and the death of Ankaret, the Middlemist had grown more unstable every day. By now we knew quite well what it felt like when part of the Mist fell. The impact resonated for hundreds of miles.
“Godsdamn the godsdamned Mist and everything it touches,” Brigid grumbled mutinously.
From outside in the corridor came the sounds of running feet and barked orders as Roses ran to their stations.
Ripples of magic spilled through the air; they were transforming, and so were we.
Already I could feel my body elongating and the sharp pinpricks of pain that marked the bloom of feathers along my spine.
Brigid strode toward the door, downy gray feathers cascading across her skin. “What’s happened?” she shouted.
“Mistfall,” came the answer—Danesh, one of my fellow squadron captains. Her changing voice split in two. “Sector Three is down!”
“All of it?” Brigid asked, incredulous.
I bolted to the door, Cira just behind me. Sector Three housed two small settlements and an Order outpost.
Sleep would have to wait.
It was time for battle.