Chapter 8
The next morning, at the mouth of the university greenway that would bear us all north, I found Gareth amid the chaos of his team—twenty librarians and professors, all their personal effects, and dozens upon dozens of books, trunks, and pieces of equipment.
They weren’t being especially chaotic, actually, or annoying, and yet I found myself annoyed.
If I couldn’t hide away with my sisters as my heart of hearts desired, then I wanted to zip right back to Rosewarren and return to work as usual.
Instead I was shepherding a passel of librarians and would have to get them settled in their rooms before I did anything else.
The very thought of that—and the cold reality of leaving my sisters yet again—made me want to run until I collapsed, or strike one of the punching bags in our training yards until my knuckles stung and my mind was clear.
Gareth must have sensed my agitation. He watched me approach with something like apprehension on his face and shooed away one of his colleagues without even looking at him.
“I’d like to make something clear before we leave, Professor,” I told him sharply. “Just because I defended you against General Haldrin doesn’t mean I like you.”
A devastating opening statement, I thought, but Gareth just smiled and crossed his arms over his chest. “Your dancing, Lady Mara, suggested otherwise.”
I pushed on, refusing to give him the pleasure of a reaction.
Refusing, too, to think about either dancing or the warm press of his hand on my waist. If I wanted a warm press of anything, I knew where to find it. And if my rebellious body was any indication, I needed to do so as soon as possible.
“The Roses are unaccustomed to strangers,” I said. “Your arrival will cause quite a stir. But know this: If you set your sights on any of my Roses, I’ll banish you from the premises, and your team too.”
“Ah. Farrin has told you the tales of my many conquests.”
“Some of them, anyway. Enough for me to be on my guard around you.”
Gareth looked away, rubbing the back of his head. His smile faded, and when he looked back at me, his gaze was earnest.
“This assignment is important to me,” he said quietly, “as is my work and what it could mean for all of us. I won’t ruin it. You have my word.”
He wouldn’t soften me with those pretty green eyes of his. “Good. Life at Rosewarren is hard enough without piling heartbreak on top of all our other battles.”
“I meant what I said at the ball, Lady Mara. I know you don’t think very much of me, but I’d like to do whatever I can to change that.”
“So you can study me? Or to ensure that your team gets the best cuts of meat at dinner?”
Gareth shrugged and gave me a small smile. “So we can be friends. It’s nice to talk to someone who understands what it feels like to be…not entirely understood.”
That shook me, though I wasn’t certain why. Maybe because it was the most sincere I’d ever seen him. Maybe because I was tired and missing my sisters so much it hurt.
I turned away before he could read my face. He deserved a better response than that, but at the moment I couldn’t give him one.
“When we get to Rosewarren,” I said over my shoulder, “please stop calling me Lady. There are no ladies at the priory. There are only Roses.”
***
I was flying beside the Warden.
I was flying beside the Warden.
Not ten minutes after I’d arrived at Rosewarren with Gareth and his team, the breach bells had rung.
I’d reached the training yards at the same time as the other summoned Roses, all of our bodies halfway through their transformations—limbs lengthening, nails becoming talons, feathers sprouting along our unfolding wings.
Cira’s golden eyes had been eager as always.
Brigid, though, had shot me a bewildered look.
I’d soon understood why.
The Warden had been waiting for us in the yard, already in her avian form—an owl, black and gleaming. At the sight of her, I’d stopped short. Freyda, just behind me, had landed on my shoulder and plucked restlessly at my hair.
But there had been no time for questions.
The Warden had barked orders at us and launched herself into the air.
We’d followed at once, the instincts of our training stronger than our confusion, and now I was flying beside her, en route to the human village of Sablemire in the northern Mistlands.
Hostiles had been sighted. The village had called for aid.
It was an unremarkable mission. Such things happened every day in these times of war. And yet this time the Warden was with us, leading our squadron.
The Warden never flew with us on missions, nor did we expect her to. She was the Warden, not a general. It was up to the squadron captains, like me, to lead the Roses into battle.
I couldn’t make sense of it, but I didn’t try to for long.
The Warden was remarkable, beautiful, her flight smooth and sharp.
My nape prickled at her nearness. The entire squadron seemed reverent in her presence—no idle chatter, our formation flawless.
Even our familiars were quiet, and Freyda flew closer to me than usual, as if sensing the moment’s import.
Suddenly the Warden pointed with one taloned hand at the village on the horizon, from which smoke rose like storm clouds.
She was so close to me that her black feathers brushed against my brown and gray ones, silk against silk.
I shivered. I was giddy. I thought nothing of my sisters or of Gareth or of the little burning girls from Graystone.
I was a Rose about to dive into battle alongside the Warden, and that was all I knew.
“There,” she said quietly. In the cocoon of her magic—the magic that bound us to her and her to us—I could hear her easily.
I saw it too—the village of Sablemire, one of the smallest and most remote ones in the northern Mistlands. It was a town for people who didn’t much like other people. Sleepy, forgettable, isolated. Not even Oldens had touched it yet.
Until today.
“Separate and dispatch,” the Warden said, reminding us of our orders. Not that any of us needed reminding. My skin itched with battle hunger, and I knew my squadron would feel the same.
“Two furiants,” Cira said quietly, her voice carrying to all of us. She had the sharpest eyes of everyone except for me. “A figment, I think. It looks like a human man with a shimmer around him. Two shifters, a family of griffins. Wood nymphs? Possibly a siren. Gods, she’s gorgeous.”
“Maybe we’ll spare her, at least,” said Caralind.
A couple of the others laughed. I did not. The word family stuck in me like a splinter.
“A motley crew,” Brigid observed. “That’s odd.”
“Enough chatter,” the Warden said. “We’ll dive on my command. Ruby Formation.”
I couldn’t let it go: a family of griffins.
Freyda, flying off to my left, suddenly let out a chirp and dove down into the Mist. A few seconds later, she returned with an urgent cry and pushed her head against my sternum, as if warning me away.
My blood turned cold. Something was wrong.
“Wait,” Cira said, squinting. “I count twelve hostiles, no more than that. Far fewer than we thought. And they’re not doing anything. They’re just gathered in what must be the village square. I see humans, I see—”
“Children,” said Brigid, her voice clipped. “Madam, your orders?”
The Warden didn’t answer. We were close enough now that we could plainly see what awaited us: not a village in ruins, but one still standing.
The columns of smoke were coming from chimneys.
This far north, winter was in full force.
Snow already blanketed the ground, and icy wind bit my cheeks as we emerged from the cover of the Mist, but I hardly noticed the cold.
My full attention was on the village below.
The square was crowded with humans and hostiles alike, but as Cira had said, the hostiles were hardly that.
No one was running or screaming. There was no violence here.
And in the crowd I saw many small figures among the taller ones.
There was a griffin bull with two pups clinging to his back.
The siren Cira had seen held an infant in her arms. A quartet of wood nymphs stood nearby with pine needles in their hair and moss coating their feet.
One was on the older side, her skin wrinkled and her posture hunched.
The other three were much smaller. They couldn’t have been more than five years old.
I scanned the rest of the scene frantically.
The furiants, with their luminescent palms and glowing white eyes, weren’t using their powers of the mind to hurl objects at the villagers.
They were sitting at a table instead, sharing a meal with them.
And the figment? When I found him, my heart sank.
As Cira had described, a shimmer of illusion outlined the human male form he’d assumed, but he wasn’t trying to deceive the villagers.
He was sitting beside a small, pale child, beautiful and copper-eyed—a vampyr, though I could see no others of her kind.
He held her hand while one of the villagers bandaged her leg.
Another man—a human man—had spotted us and was standing on a crate, waving his arms. He was hollering something, and though I couldn’t make out the words, his meaning was plain enough.
Stop. Wait. Others noticed him and began to do the same.
The griffin plucked the pups from his back and stepped in front of them, his body a shield.
The siren held her infant to her chest and ran.
And even though my wings propelled me ever forward, I felt frozen with dread.
Somehow I managed to speak. “Madam, we must abort, they’re not—”
“Now!” the Warden cried.
In an instant she was gone, diving fast toward the panicking crowd, and we all did the same, falling into Ruby Formation with the automatic movements honed by countless hours of drills.
But I broke ranks, going after the Warden instead.
I would ram her if I had to. This was a mistake; her intelligence was wrong.
These Oldens were not hostiles. They were refugees, and clearly the villagers of Sablemire had formed some kind of alliance with them.
But the Warden was deadly fast, speeding out of my grasp like a shining black arrow before I could get close enough to stop her.
She went for the vampyr first. One moment the child was sitting between the healer and the figment, watching our descent with alarm.
The next, the Warden grabbed her by the arm with her shining black talons and flung her into the nearest building.
Her body hit the wall with a sickening crack before dropping to the ground. She did not get up.
I whirled around and spread my wings wide. “Abort!” I cried. “Abort, now!”
And for a moment the squadron obeyed. Cira drew up short; Brigid turned to block the others, echoing my command.
But then I heard a furious howl behind me.
I whipped my head around to see the Warden darting through the crowd in a blur of black.
The griffin reared up to meet her, but she was faster than he was, and he was a distracted father.
She swooped around him, plucked one of his pups from the ground by the scruff of his neck, and seemed ready to toss him as she had done the vampyr child.
But then she looked up and saw me, and she paused for a heartbeat.
Her eyes locked with mine—hers round and gold, crowned with furrowed feathers—and I thought I saw the hint of a smile flit across her face.
Her hesitation gave the griffin bull enough time to whirl around and knock her from the air with one massive lion’s paw.
The pup dropped into the cradle of his waiting wings, and the Warden went flying. She skidded across the ground and crashed through the door of a nearby cottage.
That was all it took: the sight of the Warden reduced to a limp pile of black feathers.
Behind me, my squadron let out a chorus of furious war cries. The blood fever that drove us through battle after battle, year after year, had seized them. Our Warden was hurt. And an Olden invader had been the one to do it.
The griffin lunged at us, claws outstretched.
The furiants leapt to their feet, eyes and hands blazing, and flung their table at us with the force of a slingshot.
Their chairs followed, then the doors they ripped from every building on the square using only the power of their minds.
I threw myself to the ground just in time.
A spinning windowpane zipped past my head before crashing into the building behind me.
My fellow Roses tore past me, their familiars scurrying and flying alongside them.
I could hear only the sounds of battle—the roars of my sisters, the roar of the griffin, and the roar of my own blood.
I had a choice to make and only a split second in which to make it.
I could stop this now, somehow, even though I feared the moment for that had died along with the vampyr child, or I could fight.
Behind me, Caralind screamed in pain. Brigid roared my name. She needed my help. The Warden still wasn’t moving. And my bones were singing for blood, just as my training had taught them to.
If I tried to call off my sisters, I might lose them. I might lose the Warden.
I had lost enough. The furious thought ripped through me like lightning. I had lost enough.
It was like the world inside me switched from brightest day to darkest night in one breathless instant.
And it was a relief to let the fever take hold of me.
Fighting was familiar; fighting was instinct.
I was good at it. And when I was fighting, I couldn’t think of anything else. I couldn’t hurt. I couldn’t yearn.
The Warden managed to lift her head and push herself up on shaking arms. Our eyes locked once more. Hers were full of pain; her jaw glistened with blood. On her face was a silent plea: Help me, Mara. Please.
I whirled around with fire in my heart. I would help her. I would, and I would bring her safely home. I would bring all of the Roses safely home. If I couldn’t manage that, what good was I to anyone?
If I couldn’t manage that, what had all of this been for?
As I leapt into the fray, I saw no adults, no children. I saw only enemies. And I tore through them all like a knife through thin paper.