Chapter 6
When we left the capital two days later, Father and I sat alone in our coach, our staff in another, and Gemma rode her gray mare, Zephyr. She refused to sit with our father in a contained space; I envied her ability to so utterly disdain him.
I glanced out the window as we crossed the Godsmouth, the longest river on the continent. Gemma made a splendid picture trotting along the bridge in her sky-blue riding clothes: hose and gleaming boots underneath a ruffled skirt, a smart jacket with ruffled collar, all her curls pinned up beneath a feathered hat. She chatted jovially with Lilianne, her lady’s maid, who insisted on riding her own horse just as her lady did, instead of enjoying the comfort of the servants’ coach.
Any citizen who caught sight of our caravan would know us at once as the Ashbournes. And if they saw Gemma—riding happily out in the open air, gorgeous and carefree, talking with anyone and everyone—they would be assured that whatever rumors were flying about were just that. The queen ill? The Citadel under attack? Whatever had happened, it couldn’t have been that serious. Otherwise the Ashbournes would have hurried home using swifter magical means, and Lady Gemma would certainly not have been out in the open air for all the world to see.
I sat back in my seat and looked across the cabin at Father, who was pretending to read a book. He hadn’t turned the page in a half hour.
“So,” I began, trying to sound angry and brave, pressing my sweaty palms against the seat cushion, “will you apologize to me now? Will you explain yourself? Or will we pretend that none of this ever happened?”
He surprised me then. He slammed the book closed. “Damn it, Farrin,” he muttered, and looked up at me, imploring. “Of course I’m sorry. What do you think it felt like to see you dying on the floor?”
He was bursting; he wanted absolution. And yet I’d been the one to begin this conversation. I’d been the victim of his scheming. “I don’t know,” I replied. “What did it feel like?”
“It felt like the night of the fire all over again. It felt like searching the grounds while Ivyhill burned, and not finding you, and not finding you.”
I kept my voice cool. “And yet this time, the threat was of your own rash, stupid design. Or did you set the fire yourself too?”
“Of course I didn’t. Destroy my own home? How could you even suggest—”
“How can you be surprised that I would suggest it?” I sat board straight, fists clenched on my thighs. “You deceived everyone—the queen, the Basks, Gemma, me—and turned what was meant to be an occasion of hope into one of disaster.”
“That sinkhole the queen has hidden from us all would have widened just the same that day, even if I’d been the very picture of diplomacy,” he said sullenly.
A memory rose of Yvaine, frantically sobbing, throwing herself at her own magic while the beguilers worked desperately to hold it fast.
Yvaine had not divulged that to my father or to the Basks during their long meetings. She had told them about the sinkhole, the efforts to contain it; she had apologized for concealing the truth for so long. She had wanted to mend the breach on her own, she’d told them. In light of the situation at the Middlemist, she had not wanted to burden anyone else with this mystery.
But the madness that had seized her, the things she had shouted— If they come here, they’ll die! Make them go to sleep! —that, my father still did not know. And never would, I hoped.
“You’re deliberately misunderstanding me,” I said, struggling for patience. “You’re being a child. Worse than a child, because you have the capacity to fully grasp the dynamics of this situation and what an extraordinary ass you’re proving yourself to be.”
Father leaned forward, bringing his tired face and bloodshot eyes into the sunlight. “What I have done and what I will continue to do,” he said quietly, “I do for the protection of my family.”
“Father, the war is over .”
He gave me a tired, grim smile. “This war will never be over.”
“You’re evil,” I said, fighting not to cry. I couldn’t contain it any longer; the fear and anger and, worst of all, the wrenching disappointment that had been burning in me since the night of the ball was a hot river inside me, flooding its banks.
“You’re evil, and you’re a fool. This war was never real to begin with. It was the machination of a monster using a string of enslaved demons to toy with us for his own amusement. He fed on the violence our families threw at each other; our hatred sustained him, made him stronger. Made it easier, perhaps, to do whatever he’s now trying to do: tearing the world apart, endangering Mara and all the other women and girls who fight at her side. That’s the legacy you’re so desperate to maintain? Kilraith made fools of us all for years and years, and he’ll continue to, if you let him. He—and whatever other wicked creatures might be out there, hungering for chaos—will have you blindly throwing punches at the Basks while the world crumbles around you, and they’ll be glad of it, because you’ll be looking the other way while they destroy everything we hold dear.”
I sat back, buzzing with anger and horribly tired. I stared right at my father, who was looking at me as if he’d never seen me before, as if until now he’d dismissed my every worry, every frustration, as mere fits. As if he considered me a daughter who couldn’t possibly grasp the truth and would, in the end, see the error of her thinking and obey him, love him, as she’d always done.
“I wish the poison had killed me,” I said quietly, not realizing until I uttered the words that this was a dreadful wish of mine. The very thought brought me a strange sort of peace. No more notebook of tasks, no more sleepless, miserable nights in my bed, no more exhaustion. “I wish Yvaine had been unable to heal me. Maybe seeing my corpse at your feet would have been enough to make you see reason. Or maybe not.” I sighed, closed my eyes, clenched my jaw hard so my mouth wouldn’t tremble. “I think you’re too far gone for that. I think you’re a shadow of the father I once loved.”
I heard him shift and wondered if he might try to come sit beside me—to comfort me, maybe, or more likely to try and wheedle me out of the snit I was in, make me see reason. But there was only silence, stillness, and then, I thought, my heart hammering, a muted sound that could have been crying.
I curled my fingers into my skirts and kept my eyes closed. It was better in this place behind my eyelids. Warm and dark, easy to imagine myself far away from everything that hurt.
***
There were three ways to travel from the southern part of the continent past the Middlemist to the north: greenway, a combination of horse or carriage and ship, and luck.
A person could theoretically cross from the southern half of Gallinor to the north, or the reverse, by simply entering the Mist and somehow surviving the shimmering silver maze of it to emerge on the other side. Certainly people had managed to do so. But it was terribly easy to get lost and very likely that you would starve to death before you found your way out. Olden creatures could slip through the barrier between realms and attack you or eat you, or trick you out of your mind. Or a normal human person, lost in the Mist themself and mad from the loneliness of it, the strangeness of it, its whispers and suggestions, could stumble upon you and mistake you for a chimaera, or a shifter, a fae, and murder you before you could murder them.
These were only some of the stories my sister Mara had told us during her years serving the Order of the Rose, a sisterhood of women and girls bound to patrol the Middlemist and protect Edyn, the human world, from the Old Country, where the gods were born and their magic ran wild.
So, not once, then, had we tried traveling Mistwise. Not even my father was fool enough for that.
Fortunately, being an Anointed family rife with power and business savvy, friends of the queen and the envy of most, had afforded us the kind of wealth that allowed us to hire Anointed wayfarers. These were elemental humans, rare and expensive to work with, whose magic had a narrow but highly useful purpose: instantaneous transportation from one location to another using plant life as a conduit. There were thirty-six greenways that I knew about scattered across Ivyhill, though I’d long suspected that Father kept others secret from me. One of those known to me was located in a hidden lagoon, buried underwater amid ferns and water weeds. An inconvenient location, but that was the point. This greenway led to Ravenswood, the Bask family’s estate, and had allowed our family to spy on them for years.
But spying was not our purpose this time; we were visiting Ravenswood as guests and allies of the family, and our goal was to discuss the safety of the realm. This was not an occasion for sneaking through greenways.
Carriage and ship it was, then, and gods , it was tiresome. Two weeks of travel, mostly through mountains—first the Little Grays in the south, and then, after two days traveling by boat through the Gloaming Sea, the taller, meaner Great Grays and their harsh northern winds. By the time we arrived at Ravenswood and I stumbled out of the coach, my legs stiff from our final day of travel, I felt ready to kiss the ground, even horrible and rocky as it was, laced with cold, black northern dirt.
Before I could, Ryder and Alastrina were striding forward to greet us, their parents and the entirety of their household staff arrayed behind them in splendid lines. Everyone, even the kitchen maids, was dressed in black, blue, silver, and rich shades of gray in tribute to the surrounding mountains.
“Lord Gideon,” said Ryder, approaching with his hand outstretched. “Welcome to Ravenswood. I hope your journey was swift and uneventful?”
Father glared at Ryder and then at me for making him do this. I glared right back, too tired to feel intimidated by that fearsome scowl of his, and we held there for a moment, neither of us blinking, until finally Father relented with a slight sag of his shoulders and shook Ryder’s hand. He looked murderous, his jaw clenched and his eyes burning with a thousand insults.
“Ciaran,” Father said in greeting with a hard little smile. He knew just as well as I did that this was not the name Ryder preferred. “Alastrina.” He kissed her outstretched hand; I held my breath, certain he would bite off one of her fingers. “Our journey was long but unremarkable,” he went on. Curt, stone-faced. “I’m sure everyone in my party would be grateful to be shown to their rooms with all due haste.”
Ryder nodded briskly and gestured over his shoulder at a tall, mild-faced man in a sharp black suit who I took to be the family’s butler. He clapped his gloved hands together, and the yard burst into activity. Our servants unloaded our coaches; our grooms unhitched our horses; the Basks’ aproned kitchen staff scurried back inside to continue preparations for supper while their household staff came to assist ours. As everyone bustled around me, I stood quietly and took it all in. Alastrina stiffly led my tight-lipped father toward Lord Alaster and Lady Enid at the front of the house. Gemma flitted about in her cheerful floral gown, introducing herself to everyone she could find, trying valiantly for cheer.
Gareth came up beside me to gaze up the rocky drive at the house. It was a huge, sprawling structure, all sharp dark towers and broad windows, gray stone walls and black slate roofs, windows bright with candlelight. I imagined it as a monster perched on the mountainside, looking down at us with all the warmth of a carrion bird. Near the house, two other families stood, as finely dressed as our hosts but looking uneasy, like children worried that their parents might start arguing at any moment. I knew them, of course. The Nash family hailed from the southeastern coast, and the Barthel family lived on the Northern Isles. A southern family and a northern one, both Anointed, the Nashes friends of my family and the Barthels friends of the Basks, just as Ryder and I had agreed in our letters—letters my father had refused to read.
“I trust you’ll tell me whatever I need to know,” he’d told me every time I’d tried to discuss the plans for our trip, falsely warm, not looking at me. We’d hardly spoken since our argument coming home from the ball.
I watched Lord Alaster lead him inside the house, dread churning inside me. Gemma hurried after them, skirts rustling, exclaiming in admiration over the house’s architecture. The Barthel and Nash families followed them with some reluctance.
Gareth whistled low and held out his arm to me. “Well. I, for one, expect this to be a very entertaining weekend.”
I grabbed on to his arm, fiercely grateful he’d come with us. His fathomless brain would be useful in our discussions; his Gareth-ness just might keep me from fleeing this place and running all the way back home.
Ryder strode up to us, looking grim and thoughtful. “Farrin. Professor.” Then his eyes met mine. “We should compare notes before supper. Alastrina and Gemma too. And you too, Professor, if you wouldn’t mind. An additional clear head would be appreciated, considering the circumstances.” He turned and gestured up the drive. “Our staff will show you to your rooms. We’ll meet in the west parlor in an hour. Supper is at eight.”
Questions crowded my mind. Not once in our correspondence since the ball had we spoken of his offer to teach me to fight, but suddenly, in the midst of this tense, solemn flurry of activity, I wanted nothing more than to try swinging my fist at him again. I imagined what it would feel like to make contact: bone to bone, flesh to flesh.
He glanced at me once more; his blue eyes seemed even brighter here, with the cold northern wind whipping at our faces. He saw my clenched fist, which I hadn’t realized I’d closed, and seemed ready to say something. Then he turned and strode toward the house, his dark dress coat swirling in the wind. A raven flew down from the trees to alight upon his shoulder and stared back at us, watching us with unblinking black eyes until they both disappeared inside the house.
***
That night, we all sat down to supper in the Basks’ cavernous dining hall, a grand but cold space with walls of black stone, a gleaming floor of blue tiles, sideboards heaped with food and candles. Gorgeous tapestries of northern mountain scenes hung from iron rods on every wall: a bright blue lake framed by snow and fir trees; white wolves and shaggy reindeer; the goddess Neave soaring through the wintry sky with snow falling from her robes. On one tapestry, a band of fierce northern men rushed at a cloud of silver and gray with their swords raised. Out of the cloud reared monstrous heads, pieces of claws and wings.
The Middlemist.
I looked at that particular image only once before quickly averting my eyes. The sight of it left an uneasy feeling in my throat, like I’d swallowed too large a bite of food. I knew that Ravenswood sat much closer to the Mist than Ivyhill; from the top of their highest tower, Alastrina had said, you could see the Mist running silver across the horizon. But even so, why would any northern men have to fight monsters from the Mist? That was Mara’s duty, and the duty of all the other women and girls conscripted into the Order of the Rose.
I reassured myself that it was a symbolic depiction and tried not to think about it further. There was more than enough to face in this room without having to worry about an odd tapestry too.
We—Gemma and I, and Ryder and Alastrina—had just finished telling the other families present about the sinkhole in the queen’s palace. In the wake of our words, the room fell into a heavy, fraught silence. I looked around the table, trying to read everyone’s expressions, my heart pounding. Talking about the sinkhole had taken me back to that horrible room in the palace; the memory of Yvaine’s sobs rang in my ears.
“Hold on a moment,” Lady Kaetha Nash said incredulously, pulling me back to myself. She was a formidable woman, tall and elegant, with a rich voice, smooth brown skin, and tremendous skill as a beholder, able to see through lies and disguises based in magic. My family had known hers for years, and Gemma and I had decided to invite her because of her wisdom, her level head, and her wicked sense of humor. But in that moment, she seemed cold, unfamiliar. Quietly furious.
“I must stop you there, Ryder,” she went on, “and ensure that I’m not in fact dreaming and have heard you rightly. You’re saying that some unknown force has opened a magical sinkhole inside the Citadel, that it’s been there for weeks and weeks, that the queen has been keeping this fact a secret and has only just now told you about it, and that she has tried to close it and failed ?”
Lady Kaetha’s voice rang through the dining hall. I tried not to flinch at the anger it held, which I had to admit was warranted, reminding myself that it was not a personal insult to Yvaine.
At least, I hoped it wasn’t. I hoped this week wouldn’t devolve into a long string of bitter tirades condemning the queen for her deception.
“That’s right, Lady Kaetha,” Ryder replied at once. “The Citadel has been compromised, and we don’t know why or how.”
Lady Kaetha looked around at all of us; at her wife, Leva, her scowling son, Ewan, and her stricken daughter, Elianor; at the plates of half-eaten food scattered across the huge table of blue-veined marble. Lady Leva shrugged helplessly and put her face in her hands.
I clutched the napkin in my lap and braced myself for whatever came next.
Lady Respa Barthel, pale hands steepled at her lips, drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “And you’ve brought us all here to tell us this why?”
“Because, like ours, your families are Anointed,” said Gemma, seated at the other end of the table between Lord Alaster and Ewan Nash. My wonderful sister spoke with a gentle but firm serenity I certainly didn’t possess at the moment. “The gods chose our ancestors to help the queen protect the realm. And right now, the realm needs protecting.”
“Protecting from what?” said Lady Respa, sounding more than a little irritated. “How can we know how to fight a thing we’ve not seen? The queen ought to invite us to the Citadel, allow every Anointed family to set eyes on this aberration for themselves.”
Across the table, Lady Leva raised her head and said thoughtfully, “Is it possible this sinkhole could be a simple magical abnormality? A phenomenon that will resolve itself naturally given time?”
“Of course,” answered Gareth, “but if that’s the case, the question becomes how long that resolution will take and what it will look like.”
“And how many people it might kill in the meantime,” Lord Alaster said over the rim of his wineglass, his cold blue eyes considering us all without blinking. “Those chimaera that escaped through it this past summer killed twenty-two people. Royal beguilers and royal guards. Loyal subjects of the queen. Twenty-two. And yet Her Majesty has not seen fit to explain to her people the real reason for their deaths. She has hidden that reason behind a cloak of secrecy and deception and ordered us to do the same. To lie for her.”
I couldn’t help but bristle at the tone of his voice. My determination to remain an impartial voice in these discussions vanished in an instant. “Yvaine wanted to avoid a panic,” I blurted out, “which for all we know could have drawn countless would-be heroes to the capital, brandishing their magic without thinking. Whatever power feeds the sinkhole is already volatile. At least, Lord Alaster, there have not been more deaths since those tragic twenty-two.”
“Not yet,” Lady Enid said quietly, sitting at her husband’s left hand. At this massive table, without the splendor of the Citadel to make her shine, she looked small and frail, even sad, a delicate shadow of her haler children.
Lord Alaster smiled at me. The unkindness of it sent a chill slithering down my back. “ Yvaine , is it? Of course the queen’s pet would defend her without question.”
Father, sitting across from me and two chairs to my left, set his hands flat on the table and glared at his plate, clearly fighting against his rising temper. “You will not speak of my daughter that way,” he said, very low, deadly soft. It was the first thing he had uttered since we’d all sat down for supper.
Gemma looked at me frantically. I could have slapped myself for letting the queen’s given name slip. I wrestled for control of my anger, threw a hard look at my father. Don’t you dare , I thought, willing him to somehow hear it, to see my face and calm himself, no matter how awful it felt.
I said hastily, “You’re right, Lord Alaster, that I am inclined to defend the queen, but we are not here to argue about my friendship with her or about her wisdom in choosing to keep the sinkhole a secret. That decision lies in the past. What we are concerned with now is what’s to come. What does this sinkhole, this breach, mean in the context of the larger world?”
Ruddy-faced Gentar, the genial son of Lady Respa and her husband, Sesar, chewed thoughtfully on his roasted potatoes. “You think that whatever force created the sinkhole could be the same one creating trouble in the Middlemist?”
“We can’t be sure without further research,” Gareth replied, “but it’s a possibility we can’t discount. The timing suggests something more than coincidence. I’m going to propose to the queen that a team of scholars from the Committee of New and Emerging Magics join the royal beguilers at the sinkhole. They can study it with fresh eyes, and exchange information with similar scholarly research teams currently stationed in the Middlemist.”
Lady Respa raised her eyebrows. “From what you’ve said, it doesn’t sound like the queen will be amenable to such…interference.”
Gareth flashed her a charming smile and leaned forward on his elbows, his messy blond hair flopping over his brow. “I am determined to convince her.”
“You’re that confident in that smile of yours, Professor Fontaine?”
His grin widened. “It has never once let me down.”
The Nashes’ bashful daughter, Elianor, cleared her throat. Her cheeks flushed pink as she spoke. “Has there been word from Vauzanne about similar occurrences in the Crescent of Storms? Or from Aidurra about the Knotwood? Things like the Mistfires, the increased sightings of Olden trespassers?”
At once I thought of Talan, who was gods knew where at the moment, living in disguise and in hiding, investigating those very questions and never staying in one place long enough for Kilraith to find him—we hoped, we prayed. I glanced quickly at Gemma, aching for her, begging her silently to be brave, but of course she was, beautifully so. There was no trace of heartbreak on her face, nothing that gave away how at every moment she was half out of her mind with worry for Talan’s safety. She took a regal sip of her wine, her curls gleaming softly in the dim light. I wished I could have marched around the table and hugged her.
“So far the queen has not informed of us any such communications,” Ryder said.
“Though she hasn’t exactly been completely forthcoming about other things, has she?” mused Lady Enid, absently rubbing the rim of her largely untouched plate. “Perhaps we can’t trust that she isn’t keeping that information secret as well.”
It wasn’t a malicious accusation, simply a matter-of-fact statement, but I felt my hackles rising nevertheless and felt perilously close to making a fool of myself again. I grabbed the hot buttered roll from my plate, tore off a huge hunk of it, and shoved it in my mouth.
Ryder conceded the point with a reluctant nod. “A possibility we have to acknowledge. And part of why we’re all here today. We have to—”
“Is the queen ill?”
Another awful silence fell as everyone turned to look at Lord Sesar Barthel, who, like my father, had said very little since our meal had begun. He was a handsome man, brown-skinned and white-haired, with the stern visage of an exacting teacher.
I glanced quickly at Ryder. We had all agreed not to mention Yvaine’s outburst, but now that we were sitting here, it seemed irresponsible to keep that a secret too. Ryder frowned, saying nothing. Alastrina widened her eyes, shook her head ever so slightly at him.
“That silence tells me all I need to know,” Lord Sesar said, grim and tired. “What is it? A natural disease? Some sort of magical infection? Is someone trying to kill her?”
Young Elianor looked horrified. “ Can someone kill her? Is that even possible?”
“We can’t say for sure,” Gareth replied carefully, “but I imagine it would be extremely difficult.”
“But not necessarily impossible,” countered Lord Sesar.
Gareth glanced at me, then said reluctantly, “No. Not necessarily.”
Gentar leaned forward, earnest and fierce. “But possibly impossible. The gods might very well have imbued her with invincible strength when they chose her to be queen. And until proven otherwise, that’s what I’m going to believe. She’s never done anything but good for us, and if she is ill, it’s no fault of her own. And she can’t be held entirely responsible for poor decisions she might make while not herself, can she? That’s why we’re all here, isn’t it? To help the queen, to be her strength when her own wanes. Right now it seems she does need our help. That’s all I need to know.”
Gentar’s mother, Lady Respa, raised her glass. “Hear, hear.” More murmurings of agreement rippled down the table.
But then Lord Alaster cleared his throat and said smoothly, “A lovely sentiment, young Gentar, but there’s even more to this story than a sinkhole and a mad queen. Isn’t there, Ciaran?”
“Lord Alaster,” Gemma said reasonably, “the queen is not mad , and it’s uncharitable to say so.”
Alaster waved her silent. “The Barthels and the Nashes, I think, do not yet have all the information they should.”
Lady Enid touched her husband’s sleeve. “Alaster…”
He ignored her and went on. “My children and their new friends journeyed to the Old Country only a few weeks ago, and there they fought a monster, for lack of a more precise term. A monster who had enslaved a demon and used that demon to foment discord between my family and the Ashbourne family.”
Alastrina glared at her father. “I don’t know what this has to do with anything. We’re here to talk about the sinkhole and the Middlemist, not—”
“But don’t you think it’s all something of a piece, my dove?” Alaster said, his voice sweet but his eyes hard. “And anyway, our friends ought to know whom, exactly, they’re agreeing to work with.”
Gentar, his potatoes at last forgotten, looked at Gemma and me with shining eyes. “So it is true, the legend about the demon. Did you kill it? And the monster too? What kind of monster was it?”
“No, they didn’t kill either of them,” Lord Alaster replied. “In fact, they freed the demon, if you can believe that. They freed a creature known for deception and bloodlust. And now,” he added, his gaze sliding slowly to Gemma, “one of them is fucking it.”
Shock washed over everyone like a cold wave. Father slammed his fists against the table and surged to his feet, a slight wave of his sentinel power crackling through the room. Everything—table, chairs, all of us—flew up from the floor an inch or two before slamming back down.
Lord Alaster watched him from the head of the table, expressionless. He raised his glass and took a drink.
“You absolute shit,” Father spat at him. Ryder rose, as did Gentar and Lady Kaetha. I tensed, bracing myself for the inevitable, for this whole night to come crashing down around us. We would have to go home at once; we would have to tell the queen we couldn’t do it, that we couldn’t bring ourselves to cooperate for five minutes, much less long enough to help her.
But then Gemma went to our father and took his hand in hers. He froze and looked down at her gloved fingers, completely stunned, and all the fight seemed to go out of him in an instant. It was the first time Gemma had acknowledged his existence since the revelation of what he and my mother had done to her as a child, how they had hired an artificer to alter her body and stifle her unpredictable power. A horrible softness melted my father’s furious expression; I could hardly bear to look at him.
“The demon you speak of is no monster,” Gemma said, her head held high, her voice unwavering. She had grown so much, my sister, during these last months. How strange it was to hardly recognize the woman standing before me and yet, at the same time, to see her smiling, innocent child self shining in her face. How marvelous, to know her and yet constantly be meeting her for the first time. “His name is Talan,” she said, “and his master was the monster. Talan is just as much a person as you and I and everyone sitting at this table. You will not speak of him otherwise.”
Lord Sesar considered her gravely. “And his master? He still lives?”
“We can’t be sure,” I answered on Gemma’s behalf, giving her a moment. “We still know very little about him. But we fought him, and we believe we wounded him, perhaps severely.”
Lady Kaetha looked skeptical. “You believe you wounded him?”
Gentar sat back down, his eyes still shining eagerly. “How’d you do it, then? What did he look like?”
“We used our gods-given powers,” Ryder said, “as we all must in the months to come, in the name of Edyn and in the name of the queen. My wilding magic and my sister’s. Farrin’s power of song and Mara Ashbourne’s sentinel strength.”
He paused then, and in the brief beat of silence, Lady Respa looked keenly at Gemma.
“And Lady Imogen?” she said. “What did she do? Being near such a display of magic must have been painful for her.”
Lord Alaster let out a soft laugh. “She embraced her demon lover and crooned a lullaby to make him feel better.”
Now Alastrina was the one to snap. “Father, for the love of all the gods,” she spat, looking fiercely at him, “would you do all of us a kindness and shut your mouth unless you have something useful to say?”
This was perhaps the worst silence of all. Lord Alaster slowly lowered his glass and stared at his daughter, eyes glittering, and I saw the mighty, beautiful Alastrina Bask shrink right before our eyes. She sat back in her seat, pale and speechless, shoulders slightly hunched as if to protect herself from an oncoming blow.
Gemma spoke into the sudden spooked quiet. “I was able to break the curse, Lady Respa. The monster known as Kilraith had woven a wicked glamour around Talan, and I broke through it and dislodged the object that bound them together.”
“She also tore entire trees from the ground,” said Lord Alaster mildly, still staring down his daughter. “She flung them around like weapons. So my children told me.”
I shot an angry look at Ryder, though I had no right to. We’d told our father the same story.
Lady Kaetha was astonished. “But Lady Gemma has no magic.”
“It seems she does now. Strange, isn’t it? That a woman for whom magic is anathema was able to traipse into the Old Country illegally—with the assistance of a shieldmaiden of the Order, no less—and suddenly bloom into a freak possessing divided magic? The magic of Kerezen and the magic of Caiathos? What other secrets might the Ashbournes be keeping from us, I wonder?”
My father tore his hand from Gemma’s grip and took a ferocious step toward Alaster. “You dare to accuse my daughter of misdeeds when she has done nothing but fight evil and free a bound creature from forced servitude? And when your own children were right beside her, helping her, defending her?”
Gemma gaped at him. Now it was her face, shocked and grateful, that I couldn’t bear to look at. She reached for Father’s hand again with tears in her eyes, and he took it without looking back at her, seething at Lord Alaster like a wild animal defending his young.
Lord Alaster remained unperturbed. “For all I know, she might have influenced my children’s minds, forced them to trespass into the Oldenside with her. Maybe her beloved demon has been teaching her his ways.”
“Alaster, please stop this,” Lady Enid said quietly, gripping the edge of the table hard. “It’s difficult enough for us all to sit here and talk about such uncertain things, our friendships so new. What are you trying to prove by riling tempers?”
Lord Alaster whirled on her, his arm raised as if to strike. “Friendships?”
I jerked forward in my seat. I heard Lady Leva’s alarmed cry, Gentar’s indignant shout.
But before any of us could move, Ryder surged forward and grabbed his father’s arm. Alaster rose, fighting him, trying to free himself, but Ryder held fast. They struggled in silence for a moment until Ryder seemed satisfied by something I couldn’t see. He flung his father free with a grunt of disgust. Lord Alaster resumed his seat and retrieved his fallen napkin as if nothing had happened.
In the shocked silence, Lord Sesar spoke. “It’s interesting to me that these events are transpiring all at once,” he began, without accusation. He sounded thoughtful, somber. “The sinkhole opening in the Citadel, the chimaera attacking. This…demon…being freed. The monster Kilraith losing his slave, perhaps suffering injury. The Middlemist becoming more dangerous, volatile, violent. A sort of sickness spreading through the Mistlands. Lady Gemma experiencing an onset of powerful and unfamiliar magic. All of this remains unexplained, and yet at the heart of so many of these incidents is an Ashbourne and a Bask.”
The unspoken questions hung in the air: Why you ? Why these families? What does it mean? Why has the queen chosen you to rally her people?
These were questions I couldn’t answer. But I tried my best, desperate for any sort of reassurance in the midst of this terrible dinner.
“This is why we’ve asked you all here,” I said, my voice surprisingly steady. “Because we trust you, because you are influential and respected, your blood blessed by the gods, and because no family—not even two families—can unravel this mystery alone.”
I looked around at all of them, even Lord Alaster, hoping they would see in my eyes or hear in my voice something true, something inarguable that would strike a chord of understanding in their hearts.
“Whatever is affecting the Middlemist,” I said, “whatever created the sinkhole, could also be affecting the queen. She must be protected at all costs. If she falls ill, truly ill, and can no longer reinforce the sinkhole, then the Citadel could fall, and after that the capital. And that disaster, and the Mistfires, and every other new strangeness emerging in our world will only be the beginning. We must find the answers she cannot, allow her the space to heal and protect herself and, therefore, protect her people as best she can.”
Those were all the words I could find. Without thinking, I looked to Ryder, a silent plea on my lips.
He did not disappoint me. “And we can’t allow old feuds and bruised egos to interfere with this task,” he continued. “Doing so would mean betraying the trust the gods put in our ancestors—and even worse, betraying the trust the people of our country have put in us to keep them safe from what lies beyond the Mist.”
I sat back in my chair, my mind whirling. I felt suddenly exhausted. A grave silence filled the room. Alastrina caught my eye and gave me a quick, firm nod. Father quietly took his seat; Gemma stood behind him, her hand on his shoulder, his fingers still holding hers. I clung to the sight of them both and dared to hope that this, at least, was the beginning of something good.
After a moment, Ryder said quietly, “I think it’s fair to say that we all have much to consider. I suggest we retire for the night, think on what we’ve discussed, and resume these conversations at luncheon tomorrow.”
I waited at the table until nearly everyone else had left. A strange feeling kept me sitting there, waiting for Lady Enid and Alastrina to leave the room. It was as if seeing them go meant they would be all right, somehow, that the shadows would fold them away into the house and keep them safe.
Lord Alaster noticed me watching them; his cold gaze settled upon me like the feeling of being followed.
I waited a beat, took a drink of water. If he was trying to frighten me as he’d frightened everyone else, it wouldn’t work.
I left the room sedately, pausing to examine one of the tapestries, and only began to hurry when I reached the stairs to the guest wing. Once safely in my room, I shut the door and leaned back against it, breathing hard. What a horrible house, so dark and cold and quiet, with its looming black walls and its cruel-eyed master. At least my room was warm. A fire blazed in the hearth, and my bed was piled high with furs to ward off the northern chill. Beside it, on a marble-topped table, sat a small piece of paper, folded in half.
When I opened it, the sight of Ryder’s familiar handwriting made my heart jump strangely.
Come to the northern stable yard in the morning , read the note. I’ll be there at eight. It’s time to fight.