Chapter 44 #2
“I am very old, and the position of the Warden is even older. The magic that binds all of you to me is ancient. Few beings would have been strong enough to serve as an anchor for him. But I was, and am. And I had all of you to protect me, and the ear of the crown as well. There was no safer place I could be. But then you and your sisters stole the others from him, one after another. And she found one herself and left it right there in the open for you to find. Do you know what these losses did to me? How they tore at me, how angry he became? Can you even imagine?”
I could. Even in my shock, I was beginning to understand. “The black lake under the full moon,” I whispered. The moon above us cast half her face in shadow. “We could never find an anchor here, not in all our searching. Of course we couldn’t. The anchor is you.”
Her smile was soft and sad, and a little cruel.
“Professor Fontaine really should have put the pieces together. I was worried when he came here, even though it was at my request. I wanted to keep an eye on him. But he never suspected a thing. I suppose he was distracted.” She clucked her tongue.
“It seems to me that you both would have been better off if you’d never known each other. ”
I wanted to slap her, grab the knife and start cutting, bring her to the brink of death in the most painful way possible. But I needed her to keep talking.
“What else did you do for him?” I demanded. “You served as an anchor of the ytheliad, fed him power. What else?”
“The funny thing is,” she murmured, no longer quite looking at me, “I don’t think she would have let me do it just now.
You stopped me, but if you hadn’t, she would have.
I’ve tried many times to kill myself, just like you.
But every time, she manages to stop me. She is quite fond of you Roses, as she should be.
Goddess of the Unknowable. And who is more unknowable than we are? ”
She laughed quietly. Her eyes drifted closed once more. “She’s getting stronger every day. I have to do it, Mara. I need you to see that.”
She again. Both the Warden and Kilraith had mentioned a mysterious she. The answer was taking shape in my mind, but I didn’t want to believe it.
“Stop these riddles,” I said. My voice sounded hollow to my ears. “Tell me what you mean. Tell me exactly.”
“Do you think your professor was the only person capable of engineering a transference?” the Warden said bitterly. “And I didn’t even have help. I didn’t need it. I examined his notes. Very messy, very fussy. Too many variables.”
Her words sank in slowly, confirming what I had feared.
“Zelphenia,” I whispered. “She’s inside you.”
“She was hardly a wisp of a thing at first, and glad for the offer. It took me years to track her down. And I thought it was terribly clever of me. Something to fall back on. If Kilraith betrayed me, I’d have a god to help me.”
Suddenly I needed answers to a hundred new questions. “How did he never find out?”
A faint smile toyed at her lips. “He underestimated the depth and power of my binding magic—what I can hide, what I can trap and contain. He underestimated me. Many men do. The Warden is up at the Mist, guarding her chicks. No grander than a schoolteacher. For centuries, they took our sacrifice for granted. They won’t be able to anymore. ”
“You didn’t send us to Falkeron to look for Zelphenia,” I said, understanding at last. “You sent us to curb our progress with the anchors, to distract us from the war.”
“The Blessed Abbot was to occupy you with useless texts and false trails until I sent for you. I didn’t know what had happened there. I would never have sent you into such danger if I had.”
“And yet you would kill me now, and all the other Roses, without explanation, without warning. And the others in Aidurra and Vauzanne—will you kill them too?”
“Dismantling only one branch of the Order would leave two others still in chains,” she replied evenly.
“I am bound to my sister Wardens as surely as you are bound to me, and the Mist, the Wood, the Crescent are bound to each of us in turn.” Her eyes gleamed with triumph. “What I do, I do for us all.”
My stomach churned to think of it: hundreds of Roses dying in an instant. And with the Wardens gone, the Mist would vanish. Aidurra’s Crescent of Storms would disappear. The Knotwood of Vauzanne would shrivel up and die.
Edyn would have no protections left against the Old Country.
“The other Wardens,” I whispered. “Do they know?”
She laughed. “Of course not. They haven’t the spine for this.”
“But you’re connected, the three of you. Surely they’ve sensed your intentions!”
“Another advantage of working with the goddess of the unknowable. My hapless sisters sense only what I wish them to perceive.”
I was almost too furious to speak. “You’re evil. What you’re doing is evil.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
Kilraith was supposed to win, and we would have been free.
But now?” She laughed again, tears spilling down her cheeks.
“Kilraith is dead. The war is over, or it will be soon enough, and our last chance at freedom is gone. Everything will go on exactly as it always has. And I can’t let that happen.
I cannot condemn any more girls to this life of servitude. I will not.”
“Instead you’ll condemn them to death?”
“These Roses, yes, but no others. Isn’t that a beautiful thought, Mara? Don’t you see? We make this sacrifice so others won’t have to.”
“Neave is still alive,” I said tightly, “and Caiathos, and my mother. If this Order dies, they’ll create another one. They will build a new Middlemist and bind others to it in our stead. This sacrifice will be a waste of life.”
“And these are the gods you were so intent upon saving?” The Warden couldn’t stop laughing. “No, they won’t bind any others. They are mere shadows of what they once were, even your precious mother. And even if they could, they won’t have the chance.”
“It wasn’t Kilraith destroying the Mist,” I whispered, realizing it with dreadful certainty. This was the worst revelation of all. “It was you. Everyone driven mad by the failing Mist, all the work we did to stem the bleeding—”
“Kilraith,” the Warden said, her voice curling. “Kilraith was a broken creature blinded by a desire for revenge. He could never have done what I did.”
Suddenly every strange behavior I’d observed over the last several months, every outburst, every sign of fatigue made a terrible kind of sense.
The Warden had served as both an anchor to a curse and a host to a god.
And with that power she had been unraveling the Mist from the inside, undoing gods-made magic as old as the world.
This was unthinkable, impossible. It was no wonder that she had been slowly falling apart.
She was watching me closely. “You don’t approve of what I’ve done. I’m not surprised. You have their blood in your veins. Of course you want to defend their decisions, continue their legacy of cruelty.”
I shook my head, my mind scrambling for a solution. “There has to be another way to reform the Order, something other than total destruction!”
“There isn’t.”
“I don’t believe it. You’re so lost in your own anger that you can only see paths forged by violence. You’re no better than Kilraith.”
“And if you refuse to see the truth—that what I’ve done, and what I will do, is the only acceptable response to generations of bondage—then you’re no better than the feckless gods who brought us here.”
She glared at me, her black eyes sunken in her white face. I held her gaze and refused to blink.
Finally the Warden sighed. A light somewhere inside her seemed to go out.
“I’m tired, Mara,” she said, all the vitriol gone from her voice.
“Aren’t you? Help me do this. Release us both.
The one thing Zelphenia has been good at since I found her is keeping me alive.
Even with her meager strength, she manages that one thing because of what my body has given her.
This body that has never been my own from the moment I was born.
But now that you’re here, you can end this for me.
She can stay my hand, but not yours. She can’t touch our binding magic.
It’s too mighty for her, Mara. We’re too mighty for her. ”
Suddenly a scorching power spiked through my body, forcing me to move. I started pushing against the Warden’s wrist, driving the blade inexorably back toward her throat.
Panicked, I tried to yank my hand away from her, but the binding magic wouldn’t allow it. It was the same insistent feeling that changed my body from woman to bird and back again, the same sour charge that guided me back to the Warden when missions took me far from the priory.
I couldn’t fight it. The rose tattoo on my thigh burned like a brand. I smelled smoke, I smelled lightning. And I watched through furious tears as my hand pressed the blade into her neck. My strength was nothing compared to that of the magic that bound me to her.
“I hate you,” I whispered. “You’ve taken everything from me. And now you won’t even let me die by my own hand.”
She smiled up at me past the blade of her knife. “Even now, you are mine. Remember that, Mara. Think of it as we take our last breaths. You are not his, and you never were.”
“You’re wrong,” said a voice beside me, hard and steady and impossibly, terrifically real. “She belongs only to herself.”
I nearly lost my grip on the Warden’s wrist as I watched the owner of this miraculous voice kneel down beside me. He smiled grimly at me, mud-spattered and bandaged but alive.
“I look worse than I feel,” Gareth said. “And fear not, my darling. I’ve brought friends.”