A Song of Ash and Moonlight (The Middlemist Trilogy #2)

Prologue

Farrin opened her eyes to a strange world full of smoke.

She didn’t recognize the walls around her, or the ceiling above her, and she didn’t understand why the air was so choked and bitter. For a moment, she lay frozen in her cocoon of quilts—yes, these were quilts around her, the ones from her bed: one white with tiny green leaves, one a soft gray like morning in winter, both decorated with her mother’s embroidery—and she thought to herself, as she always did when waking from a nightmare, My name is Farrin Ashbourne. I am eleven years old. I am safe at home, at Ivyhill. My sisters are Mara and Gemma. My parents are Gideon and Philippa. My name is Farrin Ashbourne.

She pressed a finger to her thigh with each name: Farrin. Mara. Gemma. Gideon. Philippa. Five names, five fingers. The familiar recitation cleared her mind. Rooted once again in the waking world, she was finally able to understand that she was not in her bedroom but in her music room on the second floor, lying underneath the piano in a nest of pillows.

The room had been hers since she could remember, and she loved it with every ounce of her being. It boasted soaring ceilings, and little stone birds that perched on the ivied rafters, and huge windows of rippled glass. She liked to push those open on pleasant days and imagine her music drifting across the grounds to greet the earth, the flowers, the tenant farmers in their tidy fields. Long curtains flanked each window—creamy, delicate, fluttery in breezes—and all along the far side of the room, organized neatly on gleaming mahogany shelves, were her collections of sheet music and composer biographies and treatises on bowing technique, and near the windows, on a fancy little pedestal, was a tasseled velvet bed for her kitten, Osmund.

In the middle of the night, Farrin often left her bedroom to creep up to the second floor and make a nest under the piano, which felt secretive and wonderful, as if under the piano was a whole other cozy world to which only she had the key. In her safe, pretty house, in her own safe, private room, in the safe, hidden world under the piano: this was Farrin’s favorite place in the whole world.

And it was on fire.

That was the reason for the smoke, and the orange glow at the windows, and the feeling, everywhere, of terrible, encroaching heat.

Ivyhill was on fire.

Panic tore away the lingering fog of sleep, panic like nothing Farrin had ever known. Her heart hammering, horrible coughs seizing her all at once, she scooped up Osmund, who was cowering beside her in the pillows, his black hair standing on end, hissing at something—perhaps at the smoke, or the fire itself. With Osmund cradled to her chest, Farrin ran for the door in bare feet, her braid swinging, and threw it open.

The hallway beyond was black and seething, and the smell of the smoke was terrible—nothing like the sweet, piney scent of wood crackling in the hearth, nothing like the warm breadiness of Mrs. Rathmont’s ovens downstairs. It stung , lashing at Farrin’s throat and nostrils with every breath she sucked into her lungs. She threw an arm over her mouth, eyes watering, Osmund clawing frantically at her nightgown. She could hardly breathe; the smoke was vile, unstoppable, and it was laced with something else , something biting and brittle, like the charge of a coming storm.

A chill swept through Farrin, even as she stood there sweating in the sweltering heat. She knew that smell. It was the smell of magic, searing and furious. A spell, she suspected—a spell crafted with wicked intent.

Ivyhill hadn’t simply caught fire. No, someone had set fire to it. And Farrin knew only one family equal to such a task, a family with power and resources to rival her own, a family that hated the Ashbournes as much as the Ashbournes hated them.

The House of Bask.

Something crashed downstairs, something huge and groaning that made the floor shake under Farrin’s feet. She staggered back into her music room, quaking with fear, coughing so hard it hurt. Tears streamed down her face as she peered down the hallway to the right, then the left. The left, she thought, looked a bit dimmer than the right, which she hoped meant fewer flames. She prayed to Caiathos, god of the earth and all its elements, though something in her heart told her the prayer was useless.

If the Basks had indeed set this fire—if they had found spellcrafters clever enough to break through Ivyhill’s protective wards—then the long-dead gods couldn’t help her. They were all going to burn. All of them. Mama and Papa. Mara. Gemma. Gilroy. Mrs. Rathmont. Madame Baines. Every maid, every cook.

The Basks wanted only one thing. Farrin had learned this at her father’s knee.

The Basks wanted to destroy her family.

She tucked Osmund into her nightgown and pressed his tiny head against her breastbone, hoping the thin fabric would somehow protect him from the smoke. Then she ran left down the hallway, hardly noticing when Osmund lodged his claws in her skin. At the hallway’s end stood two staircases. One led upstairs; the other would take her down to the first floor.

Farrin paused, wiped the tears from her eyes. Her hand came away wet and black with smoke. Was the fire upstairs or downstairs? Which way should she go?

She sucked in a breath and tried to yell for her parents, for her sisters, but she couldn’t get out a word, only a sort of rasping sound, desperate and frightening. Had the smoke taken away her voice? Would she ever get it back? What if she chose the wrong stairs? Having no voice would then, perhaps, be the least of her problems.

Farrin let out a sob. Her chest drew tight with a primal despair. Was she going to die? She was. Her house was going to kill her.

Osmund had gone still under her nightgown, though Farrin could still feel the frantic beat of his heart under her palm. She gave him a tender squeeze— it will be all right, precious —and decided that no, she was not going to die. She needed to get Osmund out. He was small and helpless, an innocent, grumpy little fluff goblin, and she was his only chance of salvation.

She squinted upstairs. The air was strange and shimmery with heat. Yes. That way, upstairs. It had to be. The stairs going down to the first floor looked brighter to her blurry eyes, and the air felt hotter. So the fire had begun downstairs.

As she raced up to the third floor, she felt a little twist of hope. If the fire was downstairs, then that meant upstairs could still be safe. Maybe the flames hadn’t yet reached that part of the house. She could scuttle through one of the windows in the long hallway that led to the art gallery, then crawl out onto the roof and use the glossy, crisscrossed carpet of her mother’s ivy vines to climb down to safety.

But when Farrin reached the top of the stairs, she stopped short and froze.

The long corridor stretching out before her ended in flames. That was the art gallery, there past that roaring mouth of fire. All her parents’ sculptures and paintings, all the dimly lit nooks where Mara would sit with her sketch papers and study the play of light on stone faces, the texture of brushstrokes on canvas.

All that beauty, turned to ashes.

Dazed, reeling, Farrin turned to run back downstairs, but just then the whole staircase buckled with a horrible groan, like the house itself had given up. She lurched back with a scream, nearly teetering over the edge into that pit of singed carpet and splintered wood. Below, down the same set of stairs she’d run up only moments before, fresh flames licked up the walls, showing her their tongues.

There was nowhere else to go. Farrin turned left, away from the art gallery and the stairs-that-weren’t, and hurried down another hallway so thick with smoke she could barely see her feet. Down this corridor was a series of little parlors and studies meant for guests, and each one had windows, and windows meant fresh air. That was all Farrin could think of as she ran: air, windows, out . Those rooms looked out over an inner courtyard, which wasn’t ideal, but if she could only stick her head out some window, any window, and breathe for a few moments, she would be able to think more clearly and come up with a better plan.

Farrin loved plans. Music was full of them, and once you understood what the composer’s plan was—how all the notes fit together and why—the whole of the music became clear to you, laid out in tidy lines and phrases, like bricks set one by one until a house was made. And then it was up to you, the musician, to expand upon that plan laid out before you and make it your own. Fill it with furniture, adorn it with color.

The notes of Merrida Jan-Tokka’s Sonata for an Autumn Morning raced through Farrin’s head: the third movement, joyous and urgent. Leaves spiraling on a brisk breeze, whirlwinds of orange, torrents of gold.

Farrin held on to the notes with her mind and her heart. She had learned that piece when she was five, and she’d performed it for the household staff—her first performance, euphoric, terrifically nerve-racking. A celebration, a perfect night. The house done up in shades of amber and tangerine and gilded scarlet, the windows thrown open to a black chilly sky, stars like snow flurries. Mara, three years old and overcome by the music, hiding her bashful face in Mama’s sleeve. Baby Gemma cooing with delight—gold curls and bright blue eyes, already a beauty—and waving her socked feet from her perch in Papa’s arms. Papa beaming with pride, so handsome with his broad smile and strong jaw, his golden-brown hair that looked just like Farrin’s.

And Mama—Gemma’s blue eyes, Mara’s brown hair, skin pale as the moon. She had pulled Farrin into her arms afterward, with the house all a-clamor, Gilroy wiping his eyes on his sleeve, Mrs. Rathmont—tearful, ruddy-cheeked—passing around tiny iced cakes, perfect domes of sugar. Everyone elated, everyone’s head full of Farrin’s music.

Mama had pressed her cool cheek to Farrin’s hot one and said quietly in her clear, clean voice, “Your music, little bird, will give the gods new life.”

Stumbling down the smoky hallway, pawing at the walls for a doorknob, Jan-Tokka’s sonata ringing in her memory, Farrin finally found one of the guest parlors and shoved hard at the door. It barely gave way, swollen and sweating, damp with heat and a crackling, sour magic, and when she tumbled inside, she fell forward onto her hands and knees, and she did not get up.

She could not get up. She could only crawl across the rug, and she did so, one-handed, holding poor Osmund to her chest. He was frighteningly still, his heartbeat faint. Could she even still feel it at all? Yes, he’s alive , she told herself, staring ahead at the far wall, stubbornly clawing her way forward. He’s alive, we’re alive, I’m alive.

Her head hit something solid. The wall. She’d made it. The wall held three windows, and the closest one was maybe two feet above her head.

Gasping, blinking hard, she reached for it. She would push it open. She would pound it to pieces if she had to.

Her hand shook; her arm buckled. She collapsed on the floor and stared at the red-and-blue floral wallpaper. It was peeling away from the wall in jagged strips. Each strip screamed as it unfurled, like the voice of a tiny log creaking in a fire. Woozy, coughing so hard she felt like her chest might burst open, Farrin laid her spinning head on the carpet and cried. Her sobs were weak, her lungs black, each breath harder than the last.

A single charred ivy leaf drifted down from the rafters and fell before her nose, and Farrin grabbed it and held it to her lips. It was a piece of her mother, and it was the last thing she would ever see. She tried to breathe, desperate to find some lingering scent of her mother’s perfume or the woodsy tang of her mother’s botanical magic, but breathing only made the blackness come faster. Farrin closed her eyes.

Then—a light, flickering and white. It shone even through her closed eyelids, and it was so strange, so clean and bright, that Farrin, trembling on the knife’s edge of her young life, found the strength to open her eyes.

A figure knelt beside her. Right there, impossibly, next to the screaming wallpaper. Gangly, graceless, all awkward elbows and long legs. Half boy, half almost-man.

And he was shining , a glow radiating from him as if some Anointed artisan had devised a way to paint a living being with starlight. Luminous, a beacon. A shining boy.

Stranger even than the light of him was the mask he wore—made of cloth, Farrin thought, with his nose and mouth covered and the eyes blacked out. Frightening, crude. The mask covered his face entirely, even hiding most of his hair, though Farrin could see a few damp, dark strands escaping the mask.

He reached for her. Pale hand, sweaty and soot-blackened.

“Don’t be afraid,” he told her. His voice was neither deep nor high, crackling somewhere in between. It was rough but kind, and his dirty hand was steady.

“I know the way out,” he said.

Farrin hesitated. The shining boy was bright and lovely, but the world around him was hot, shimmering, terrible. The house was furious; everything shook. The sound of shattering glass exploded far too close, and then came a great sucking noise like all the air in the room being gulped away. At the same moment, the boy lurched forward, knocked Farrin back to the ground, threw his body over hers, and held her there, tucked safely against the wall. Both of them shaking, both of them breathing hard.

When Farrin opened her eyes, she saw a floor glittering with glass. A terrible hopelessness flooded through her. The house was falling apart around them; they would never find a way out. The boy was lying; the boy wasn’t even real. She was dying; she was dead.

Just then, Osmund poked his head out of her nightgown and glared up at the shining boy—angry yellow slits for eyes—and he mewed, the plaintive cry he used to announce to the world that he was hungry. The squished, indignant sound gave Farrin strength.

She grabbed on to the shining boy’s hand and nodded against his chest.

He squeezed her hand tight, then pressed something to her mouth—a thick cloth, cool and damp, the most incredible thing Farrin had ever known.

“This will help you breathe,” the boy shouted, but Farrin was already gulping down whatever air she could find, leaning hard against the boy as he put his arm around her and hurried her out of the parlor, down the hallway. Which hallway? Which stairs? Farrin didn’t know, couldn’t follow the path they were taking. The house was a shifting labyrinth, the throat of a beast, and the blessed cloth against her mouth was drying up. Her lungs were choking her again—two black fists, twisting smaller and smaller in her chest. One hand cradling Osmund, the other held tight in the shining boy’s hand.

Something crashed overhead. The boy spit out a nasty curse, his hand so tight around hers that it hurt. He darted away, pulling her with him, just as a huge shadow fell out of the sky. A piece of charred ceiling, black and glowing, crowned with seared ivy.

“This way!” the boy shouted, as if Farrin had some choice in the matter. The boy’s grip was iron, his strength unending. Flames roared around them, spitting smoke and sparks. Collapsing walls chased them down hallways that seemed never to end.

And through it all, not once did the shining boy flinch. He was like some great eagle, Farrin thought dreamily, colors spinning in her eyes. Orange, gold, throbbing red, blots of black. A great eagle with her held safely under his wing, flying her all the way out to the ocean. No wind could stop him, no storm, no shadow. His eyes were bright and clear, and he knew the way home.

“Farrin!” he screamed from very far away. “Farrin, come on! Keep walking!”

But she couldn’t keep walking. Her feet were made of stone, and besides, feet needed lungs to work, and lungs needed air, and there was no longer air to be had.

The world spun around her, lifting her, jostling her. She was running; no, the world was ending, splitting open.

No. The shining boy was running, and she was in his arms.

Her eyes fluttered open, and she saw a cloudy sky slashed in half. White light, cool and soft: the waxing moon. Then orange, shuddering, a whip of rage, heat bleeding into blackness.

Suddenly Farrin was lying flat on her back, smoke behind her eyes, smoke down her throat. The shining boy, leaning over her, smoothed the wet hair back from her face. Then he went very still, held his hand above her mouth for a moment, and let out a shaky sigh of relief.

“You’re breathing,” he said. “You’re going to be all right.” He sat back, made a strange sound. Maybe he was laughing? “You’re going to be all right,” he said again, his crackling, not-quite-a-man voice torn up from the smoke.

Farrin reached for him in confusion, seeing only the faint glow of him, the twin shadows of his strange, blacked-out eyes.

He found her hand and held it. Against the fire, his silhouette was a bewilderment: half shadow, half shine. “Star of my life,” he said, pressing a quick kiss to her knuckles. The kiss sent a shock through her tired body. Star of my life , she thought. What a pretty thing to say, and odd, since he was the one who shone.

Then the boy’s body went rigid beside hers. He released her and stood.

“I have to go,” he said. He sounded horribly angry.

Farrin reached for him, tried to protest. He was leaving her? But he couldn’t! Where was she? Where was her family? Where was her house? And her piano, and all her music, all the things she loved? If he left her, the fire would come. If he disappeared, so would she.

“I’m so sorry,” the boy said, quiet now, gentle, and he touched her face, his hot hand on her hot cheek. “They’re coming now. You’ll be all right.”

And then he was gone. Farrin turned to find his hand, the warm strength of him, and found only wet grass, cold earth. She managed to crack open her eyes, and through the crust of soot and tears, she saw the distant shape of Ivyhill. Her home, afire. Black and misshapen, outlined by a wicked molten pen.

She tucked Osmund under her chin and wept, and then her father was there, frantic, sobbing, pulling her up into his arms so fiercely that she dropped Osmund to the ground. And Gemma was bawling at their father’s knee, limp golden curls hanging in ruined ribbons, and there was Mara, ashen but dry-eyed, crouching to catch a disoriented, truly vexed Osmund before he scampered off into the night.

And Mama?

Farrin twisted in her father’s arms, heart in her throat, and found her at last—Philippa Ashbourne, her beloved mother, on her knees in the grass not far from them. She cried silent tears as she watched Ivyhill burn, her arms rigid at her sides.

Gemma clung to their father’s leg while Mara tried in vain to comfort her. Osmund yowled restlessly in Mara’s arms. A few of the servants found them and huddled in frantic conference with their father and the head groundskeeper, Mr. Carbreigh, who was an Anointed elemental. All of them gestured wildly at the distant fire, and, thus distracted, no one else noticed the change that came over Philippa Ashbourne.

But Farrin noticed. Farrin saw the moment when her mother became someone else— something else. Farrin saw when Philippa stood and wiped her cheeks, her expression hard and mean and unfamiliar. The fire lit up her whole face, turning her eyes to twin flickering suns. She was incandescent with fury. Farrin could feel it, even half alive as she was. She knew the dips and curves of her mother’s body even more intimately than she knew her own, and as the flames roared on, Philippa Ashbourne’s body changed right before her eyes.

Every line of wrist and shin and rib became a weapon, every softness hardened to stone. The very air around her seemed to snap to attention as if suddenly shot through with deadly magic, and even though what had happened was a catastrophe, something so big and terrible Farrin’s mind couldn’t wrap completely around it, Philippa Ashbourne gazed upon the fire and smiled, wide and slow, as if she’d learned a most delicious secret.

And in that moment—so baffled and smoke-poisoned that later she would forget the whole thing entirely—Farrin, for the first time in her life, felt truly, unspeakably afraid of her mother.