Chapter 7
When I arrived at the stable yard the next morning, blowing on my fingers to warm them, I found Ryder already there, shirtless and sweating, fighting an invisible enemy with a long wooden staff.
The sight of him stopped me in my tracks. Even when he was fully clothed, his strength was obvious, but without a scrap of fabric on his torso, every line of muscle was startlingly… present . Broad shoulders, broad chest, sweat trickling down his abdomen and highlighting every chiseled line. Damp tendrils of his shoulder-length dark hair had fallen loose from their knot and now clung to his neck. He spun and swerved through a series of elaborate movements I couldn’t follow. Beyond him, the blanketed horses stuck their heads out of their stalls to watch, their breaths puffing in the cold morning air.
I marched over to the stone wall surrounding the yard before he could catch me staring at him, but whatever advantage I thought that would give me was lost when I blurted out, “Why aren’t you wearing clothes?”
He stopped exercising to look at me, then glanced down at his dripping torso. “I got hot,” he said simply, “and I wanted to catch you off guard.”
Then he rushed at me without warning, leaped over the wall, and swung the staff at my head before I could even think to move. The thing whipped through the air and then stopped right at my nose. Only then, standing there cross-eyed, frozen with fear, did I manage a muted yelp.
Ryder gave me a hard smile. “It seems my ploy worked perhaps a little too well. Do you not know to duck when a weapon comes flying at you?”
Mortified, I opened my mouth, closed it, then finally remembered how to speak. “You surprised me.”
“That was the point. Most attackers don’t announce their presence before having a go at you.” He looked me up and down, frowning. “Why are you wearing that?”
My cheeks grew hot as I imagined how I must look to him: a shivering southern girl wearing a plain work dress, muddy boots, and a fur-trimmed coat so rarely used that the stiff leather creaked when I moved. Wishing fervently that I were anywhere else in the world, I made myself raise my chin and meet his gaze.
“This is what I wear most of the time,” I told him. “Well, without the coat. It seemed practical to train in it.”
“Fair enough. But we’re not fighting today.”
I stared at him. “We’re not? But your note—”
“You’re not ready to jump right into combat training. First I’m going to teach you how to strengthen your body.”
“I’m not a weakling. I walk miles almost every day at home.”
“I didn’t say you were a weakling, did I? And walking isn’t fighting.”
He jumped back over the wall and strode into the stable while I stood there fuming, staring resolutely at the ground, unable to find even one sufficiently scathing reply and determined not to gawk at his muscled back. In general, I’d cared very little about muscled backs until this morning and didn’t appreciate what the sight of his in particular was doing to me.
When Ryder returned, his arms were full of clothes. “These are my sister’s work clothes. They’ll be a little big on you, but they’ll serve for now.”
I unlatched the gate set into the wall and joined him, keenly aware of the horses’ curious eyes on me. “Do you ever walk through gates like a normal person?”
“Of course. But it’s more fun to jump over them.”
“Are you a man or an animal?”
He grinned and tossed the clothes at me. I just barely caught them. “I suppose you’ll have to wait and find out for yourself, Ashbourne,” he said, and then paused, catching himself, and sobered a little. “Farrin,” he said, with a little bow. A strange cloud darkened his face; he turned around to tug on a shirt of his own. “Hurry and change. We’ll start with a run.”
***
Ryder did his best to kill me. We began with a two-mile run, followed by carrying heavy flat stones the size of serving platters from one end of the stable yard to the other again and again and again , followed by punching a painted leather target Ryder held to his chest until I started to see spots.
“You’re slowing down,” he told me, maddeningly unmoved by the pathetic pummeling of my fists. Even when I missed the target and hit him—which happened more often than it didn’t, a circumstance of my inexperience that I couldn’t bring myself to be angry about—he was like a tower of stone, not even swaying back on his heels.
Anger blazed up in me, threatening to erupt. My hands hurt, I was sweating right through my borrowed clothes, and I dearly hoped that the horses were the only ones watching us. I shoved Ryder as hard as I could, which was nearly as impactful as a kitten barreling into the side of a bear, and then spun away, breathing so hard my chest burned.
“You’re trying to make a fool of me,” I gasped out.
“No. I’m trying to show you what you should be doing every day—or at least most days—to strengthen your body.”
I wiped the sweat from my drenched brow and started furiously pacing the yard, refusing to look at him. “You could perhaps be a little kinder to start off with.”
“You’ll only be here a week. We’ve much ground to cover in that time. I want you to return home with aching muscles and a basic regimen to continue practicing. And you can teach your sister too, once you’ve started improving.”
The thought of Gemma doing this alongside me, witnessing the extent of my disgrace, was too horrifying to contemplate. I pushed against the feeling as hard as I could, but I was too tired to think straight and muttered petulantly, “Why don’t we bring her out here now? You can teach us both at once and save me the trouble.”
“You’ll be a terrible student with her around. Being a captive of the Vilia made her stronger. She’d run circles around you, and you wouldn’t be able to focus.”
I couldn’t stand the matter-of-fact tone of his voice, as if he’d thought through all of this a hundred times and anticipated every single thing I could say.
I marched over to where he stood, putting our equipment away in a large wooden crate. I started to lunge at him, to shove him again, but then stopped, feeling foolish and childish, and lost my footing. He must have heard the imbalance in my footsteps; he turned around to catch me, one hand around each of my wrists, and when I tried to wrench myself free, he held fast. I twisted and fought, but still he had me trapped.
“If you found yourself in this situation during a fight,” he said quietly, “how would you get free? How would you fight back?”
I hated him. I hated his godsdamned unruffled teacher’s voice, and even more than that I hated how he looked at me, so calm and patient, his eyes like a vivid summer sky.
Inspiration came to me in a flash, and in a fit of rage, I pivoted slightly, put all my weight on my left leg, and slammed my right knee up into his groin.
He did release me then, with a slight pained grunt, and collapsed a little against the crate. But when I turned on my heel to leave him, buzzing with triumph and fury, I heard him laugh out a quiet curse, and he didn’t sound angry. He sounded glad.
A strange feeling came over me then, a feeling like lightning on the horizon. A quiet burn in my belly. I fought a smile; I didn’t want to smile. What was there to smile about? One small victory didn’t make up for two hours of humiliation. Feeling hot and edgy with irritation, I hurried up to the house with no plan in mind except to put as much space between me and Ryder Bask as possible.
***
The next few days passed in a blur of activity.
Every day, from the afternoon until late in the evening, our four families met to discuss strategy, scattered around the house in small groups or all gathered around the grand dining table. We debated what other families we could trust with the information we had, which was of course a point of major contention and led to many long arguments. We discussed whether to involve the Upper Army, comprised of magic-wielding soldiers, or perhaps just the Lower Army, whose soldiers used only conventional weapons and no magic. What would be the political consequences of telling one and not the other? There were also the questions of what official petitions needed to be made at the capital and at the university for funding and personnel; how we could make them as discreetly as possible so the Royal Senate wouldn’t find us out and bring everything out in the open; and how to coordinate defensive and research efforts with the Order of the Rose.
Every night I went to bed with a raging headache, feeling stuffed to bursting with names and places and ifs and buts. My body was stiff and sore, and my nerves were utterly shot from hours of playing peacemaker between my father and Lord Alaster, the latter of whom seemed determined to provoke Father at every possible moment.
Worst of all, every morning I suffered through training with Ryder until it was time for luncheon. On the fifth morning of working with him, my patience finally snapped.
“Try again,” he told me, standing a few paces from me. “And try actually listening this time.”
“I am listening,” I snarled from behind my raised fists. “I’m just not good at this, and no amount of repetition will change that.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said mildly. “Let’s try anyway. Two.”
I blew a strand of hair out of my eyes and punched the leather target marked with a faded number two. I imagined the two was in fact Ryder’s face, and my fist landed right where it was supposed to. I felt a small surge of satisfaction—that had been a good one, I thought—but Ryder didn’t seem impressed.
“Four,” he said.
Angrily, I hit another of the leather targets hanging from the stable rafters, this one bearing the number four .
“Three. One. Three. One. Two. Four. Four.”
I obeyed, or at least tried to, but punching the heavy leather bags was hard enough without also having to think about numbers and pivoting my body, for each target hung at a different height and a different distance from me. I had to shift, dart, duck, and stretch, and command my muscles to move as they’d never done before, and I couldn’t do any of this quickly enough. I kept forgetting where three was and punching one instead, and four instead of two, and Ryder kept saying the numbers faster and faster, so fast it didn’t seem possible that anyone could move that quickly except for Father and Mara, and their sentinel power seemed to me in that moment like the worst kind of cheating.
I felt absurd, stumbling around in the midst of his soft-eyed horses, with Ryder’s critical blue gaze on every awkward lunge of my body. I wore one of my own dresses that day—it was true, he’d said, that I needed to feel comfortable fighting in my everyday garments—but the skirts kept getting in the way.
“Aren’t you a musician?” Ryder observed. “Farrin Ashbourne, the most talented savant on the continent? Fingers nimble as a squirrel, voice clear as starlight? Isn’t that what everyone says?” He raised one sardonic eyebrow. “I wouldn’t know, looking at you now. You have no rhythm whatsoever.”
I flushed hot with rage and whirled on him, raised my poor throbbing fist to hit him—but then his words truly registered, and I paused, inspiration coming to me in a soft bloom of clarity.
I turned away from him, back to the targets. “Start again,” I told him.
He watched me curiously for a moment, then obeyed. “One. Two. Four. Two. Three. One.”
This time, I tried something different. This time, I thought of music. When I played my piano, I didn’t think of each individual note, nor of the minute movements my fingers and arms and torso had to make in order to strike the correct keys. I thought of the phrasing, how a series of notes flowed and ebbed, how they changed tempo—slow, fast, slowing, now faster—how their dynamics carried them from soft to loud and back again. The theme was the important thing, the overall idea of the piece, the feeling the composer and the performer wanted the audience to experience as they listened. When I played my piano, rhythm fed tempo, tempo danced with dynamics, and each note, though precious on its own, was merely a part of the larger whole. When I sang, I was always thinking of the next phrase and where it would take me: the shape of the piece, the flavor of it, its rises and falls. Breathing through and past each peak and valley, working with the natural contour of each string of notes, and allowing them to help me rather than treating them as obstacles to dissect and conquer.
So, this time when I punched, the breath in my lungs became an aria, my feet on the ground worked piano pedals, the pistons of my arms were my fiddle and bow. Instead of agonizing over my body’s individual movements, I breathed through every blow and jab, imagining each of them as just another tone in an arpeggio of muscle and breath.
When Ryder finally stopped calling out numbers, my head, arms, and fists were humming with energy—not the same kind of rightness I felt after playing my piano, but a small, stuttering sliver of that. I stepped back, wiped the sweaty hair from my face, and grinned.
Ryder, standing there with his arms crossed over his chest, gave me a small smile right back. “What did you do differently?”
“I’m a musician,” I answered archly. “I found my rhythm.”
He raised an eyebrow, and his smile grew. “Part of it, anyway. You still missed about half the targets.”
“But how was I moving? It was better, wasn’t it? Just tell me it was, even if it’s a lie. I feel too good right now to receive criticism.”
“What an insolent student you are,” he said, but he was still smiling as he turned to start unhooking the targets, and the sight warmed me from head to toe, emboldening me.
“When do I get to start fighting you ?” I asked.
He paused, then turned. I couldn’t decipher the look on his face; when his gaze locked with mine, I felt a little shiver of anticipation.
“We could try sparring a little right now,” he said slowly, “just for a few minutes, before luncheon.”
“Wonderful.” I put up my fists and got into position. “Let’s do it, then.”
He smirked. “So eager to punch me in the face.”
“Am I that obvious?”
“To me you are,” he said quietly, but before I could think about what he meant by that, he swiveled around and let his fist fly at me. I ducked, felt the air of his punch whoosh past me, and stumbled back on my heels a little, but I caught myself and spun around before he could strike again. I bounced on the balls of my feet, looking at him from behind the wall of my fists. He was wickedly fast and much stronger than me, but I couldn’t deliberate forever. I breathed in and out, and then I struck out at his face with my fingers bared. I could claw an eye out, I could rake my nails across his cheeks; these were things he had taught me. But he dodged my blow and punched low; his fist landed squarely on my stomach, and even though I knew he was holding back for my sake, the impact still knocked the wind out of me. He took the opportunity to grab me around my middle and yank me back against him.
At first, stunned, I could only struggle ineffectually in his arms. His chest was a wall at my back, his grip like iron, and my vision was still a little fuzzy from the blow to my stomach.
“Think, Farrin,” he said quietly, his breath hot against my ear, his lips grazing my skin. Goose bumps raced down my arms, and before he could do that again, my senses returned. I stomped hard on his instep, and he swore and released me. I slipped away and grabbed the wooden staff leaning against the nearby wall; I held the thing with both hands, not entirely sure what do with it, and whirled around to fling it at him.
But he was ready; of course he was ready. He’d grabbed the other fighting staff, and it met mine with a huge crack that hurt my teeth. I pushed hard against his weapon with my own, but I was closer to the wall than I’d realized, and with a single hard push, he had me trapped against it.
Our gazes locked above the cross of our staffs. I was gratified to see that he was breathing hard; he’d won, but I’d made him work for it.
I grinned at him, giddy and exhausted, my head still ringing from our staffs crashing together. And then he did the most remarkable thing. His face softened as he looked down at me, and he reached out with one hand—his other still held his staff against mine, pinning me against the wall—and gently brushed a sweaty strand of hair from my cheek.
“Well done, Farrin,” he said quietly.
I stared at him, my heart thundering. I’d never seen Ryder like this, never seen such a tender look on that rough bearded face of his. I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t understand my own response to it. I was trapped, vulnerable and outmatched, his tall, broad frame looming over me, but I didn’t feel unsafe. Far from it. In fact, I found myself leaning toward him, wishing desperately, unthinkably, that he would touch my cheek again. Something about that touch felt familiar; if he did it again, I would lean into it, grab his hand, and hold it against my skin.
“I…” I couldn’t think of what to say. I swallowed hard, my mouth suddenly dry. I wet my lips and felt a panicked sort of thrill when I saw his gaze drop to my mouth. “Did I hurt you? You know, when…when I stomped on you?”
“I’ll live.” He smiled a little, and then something dark and sad fell over his face, and he lowered his staff and turned away from me. He walked back to the hanging targets and resumed putting them away.
The abrupt dismissal galled me for reasons I couldn’t explain. I marched over to him. “What was that about?”
“What was what about?” he said flatly, not looking at me.
“The…” I gestured at the wall. “You…”
He turned to look at me straight on, waiting for me to speak. But I didn’t know how to put into words how it had felt when he’d touched me, how I hadn’t been frightened to be shoved up against the wall by a man who was until recently a sworn enemy, how I had in fact been…
Bristling, mortified by my own realization, I stepped back from him, holding my staff in front of me like a shield, but before either of us could say another word, there was a thunderous roar from outside and a cacophony of flapping wings.
We hurried into the stable yard just as a plume of dark feathers burst up from the expanse of forest between the stables and the mansion. Hundreds of ravens, maybe even thousands, swarmed through the bright autumn sky in obvious confusion. And then, cascading down the mountain from the house, came an urgent clangor of bells.
Ryder turned to find me, his expression fearsome. “Come with me. Stay close.”
I hurried up the mountain behind him, my legs like jelly after the hard morning. “What do those bells mean?” I thought of the Citadel going into lockdown, the tapestry of monsters hanging in the Ravenswood dining hall, and a stone of dread dropped into my stomach. “Is it the Mist?”
“Could be,” he replied tersely, but he said nothing else, not until we reached the broad stone drive that led up from the forest road to the mansion. A footman came barreling down to greet us.
Ryder stepped a little in front of me, his arm out as if to shield me. “What is it?” he snapped.
“It’s Lady Alastrina, my lord,” said the footman, eyes wide, face ashen. “She’s gone.”
At first the word didn’t make sense to me, like gibberish uttered by an infant.
“Gone?” Ryder said sharply. “What do you mean? Explain.”
The footman shook his head. “We were all gathering for luncheon, my lord, and were about to send for you, but then there was this great darkness that swept fast through the room, and it left everyone cold and confused, and when it was gone, so was Lady Alastrina. She’d vanished.”
Ryder stormed past him. “Nonsense. She simply left the room.”
“No, my lord,” said the footman, jogging alongside him. “She couldn’t have. It all happened so quickly—”
“She’s elsewhere in the house,” Ryder insisted. “She’s giving us all a laugh.”
But I didn’t believe that, and I suspected he didn’t either. The cloud of ravens still roiled in disarray above the treetops, calling out to one another—or to Alastrina, I thought, dizzy and cold. They knew she was gone and were trying to find her.
Inside the house, everything was chaos. Lady Enid was running from room to room, calling Alastrina’s name and searching every corner for her, shouting at the servants to do the same. Gemma hurried after her, trying in vain to calm her. She threw a helpless look over her shoulder at me, then gestured frantically toward Father, who was huddled in an antechamber off the dining hall along with everyone else.
It was infuriating that one of us had to be watching him at all times, but I gritted my teeth and went to him anyway. He was standing a little behind Lord Alaster, who faced a dark mirror framed with silver filigree. Another man’s tearful face stared back at him; the mirror, then, had been spellcrafted by a beguiler, turned into a conduit of communication with another mirror located miles away. I felt begrudgingly impressed; such mirrors were incredibly rare, as the magic required to create them was tremendous and, by all accounts, agonizing to conduct. The man’s image was watery and faint, and the pulses of magic coming off the mirror turned the whole room sour, making me think the man was very far away. But the sound of his voice was clear enough, and suddenly I recognized him: Uven Lerrick, a wealthy Anointed wayfarer who lived near Blighdon, on the southeastern coast.
“The same thing happened to us,” he was saying. From behind him came the sounds of crying and muffled shouts. “One moment we were all here, and the next, a great rush of shadows washed across the room, and I felt horribly cold, disoriented, my sight gone, my hearing gone. Then the shadows vanished, and my Dornen was no longer here. He just…he disappeared , Alaster.”
Father’s expression was grave. “Two Anointed humans on opposite ends of the continent, both gone in an instant?”
“And in the exact same manner,” murmured Gareth. “One I’ve never heard of before, at that.”
“We’ll search the grounds for her,” said Ryder fiercely. “She’ll be here somewhere. Whatever happened is just some minor magical abnormality. The Mist, having a bad day.”
“And suddenly abducting people?” said Lady Kaetha, frowning. “One from hundreds of miles away?”
“The Citadel’s even farther away than that,” Lord Sesar pointed out, “and it’s got a sinkhole inside it. What’s happening at the Mist is unprecedented in recorded history. None of us can predict what the effects might be.”
I touched Ryder’s arm before he could stride away. “Wild a raven and send it to Rosewarren,” I suggested quickly. “And send one to the queen as well. If anyone else has disappeared, Yvaine or the Warden will know.”
Mara , I thought, biting down on the small, dear word. I was too embarrassed to request that Ryder ask after her specifically, but I think he saw it in my face. He found my hand and squeezed it, my small hand held tightly in his own larger, calloused one for a brief second that left me flushed and unsteady. Then he left us, roaring at the servants to search the house, the grounds, the forest. Lord Alaster stayed where he was, staring in shock at the mirror, which had gone dark.
I raced after Ryder but stopped when I saw Gemma sitting on the floor in the receiving hall, holding a sobbing Lady Enid. Gemma’s face was gray, drawn. Whatever magic had swept through this house had pulled something from her, but she shook her head at me and said quietly, “I’m all right.”
I knelt and quickly hugged her. “Mara,” I whispered. “Do you think…”
“Mara’s safe,” Gemma said firmly. When I pulled back from her, her eyes shone at me like twin blue stars. “She’s safe . Go. I’ll look after Father.”
I kissed her forehead and hurried outside. The ravens still circled overhead, casting hundreds of flittering shadows across the ground. Their cries were terrible, hoarse and despairing. I ran into the woods, as everyone else was doing, including each family’s servants. I ducked behind a tree before my lady’s maid, Hetty, could spot me. I didn’t want anyone coming with me and stoking the flames of my rising panic with their own. Shadows sweeping through the house, and in their wake, Alastrina gone? And Dornen too, from so far away, and I hoped no one else, though the sinking feeling in my stomach told me that was a futile thing to wish for.
The pine forest surrounding the Ravenswood estate was vast, the trees tall and ancient. Soon I couldn’t hear anyone else shouting for Alastrina; I was alone. I stumbled over ridges and through tangled thickets, looking everywhere for a gleam of shining black hair, a flash of pale skin. I called for Alastrina several times, but as the forest deepened and the trees thickened, every sound grew muffled and strange. Finally I fell quiet; the smothered, flat tone of my own voice was frightening me.
I came to a stop beside a fir tree with a trunk as wide as two broad doors. I leaned against it, reassured by its massiveness, and caught my breath, shivering a little. I looked up at the thick canopy, all those branches laden with needles, swaying and whispering in the mountain air. Very little sunlight managed to break through them, and the air was cool and damp. I looked through the trees for the mansion, but I couldn’t see a bit of it, nor of the outbuildings and stables. I could see only trees, and every one of them looked the same. I listened for the ravens; I heard nothing.
Cold feet of fear started climbing up my spine. Running off into a strange forest on my own suddenly seemed like the most foolish thing I could have done. And then, almost as soon as I’d thought that, I felt with absolute certainty that someone was watching me. Everything was so still, the air heavy against my skin. I was not alone.
Frantically I looked around for a weapon, any weapon, and spotted an enormous fallen branch. I heaved it up from the forest floor and spun around clumsily to press my back against the tree. The branch was too heavy to be of any real use to me, but I tried to hold it up anyway, like I thought someone might hold up a spear. My arms shook under the weight of it; I held my breath and listened. Sweat rolled down my back. Then I realized I did hear something—a low hum like the buzz of magic, or a distant teeming hive of bees, or maybe a fire roaring in the next room. My mind couldn’t quite make sense of it; every time I thought I had pinpointed it, the sound shifted and slipped out of my grasp.
But I knew it was close. Something was making that noise, and it was behind me, beyond the shield of my tree, and it wasn’t moving, and I knew—I knew , with the instinct of prey—that it was waiting for me.
I couldn’t bear to just stand there anymore. I needed to fight; I needed to run. If I stayed where I was, I’d be disappeared, just as Alastrina had been. My heart pounding, white-hot panic tearing through me, I gripped the branch and imagined driving it into flesh and bone. I would do it if I had to. I could kill.
I lunged out from behind the tree and spun around, fumbling with the branch, almost dropping it, a muted cry of terror bursting out of me, and froze.
A creature stared back at me, though I wasn’t sure that was the right word. It was made of fire, I thought at first, but then the flames shifted and became feathers in a glorious array of colors: scarlet and gold, sunrise orange and sunset violet, all outlined with shimmering white. It was fire, then feathers, then flames again, and at the heart of this restless conflagration was a white-blue kernel, an agitated shape. First it was a bird, beaked and mighty, a raptor with piercing eyes, its wings rising up as if it was ready to alight upon a mountaintop. Then I blinked, and it was a person, maybe a woman, tall and lissome— too tall, unnaturally tall, with the same lightning-hot eyes and feathers falling around her like hair, like an extravagant gown. I blinked once more, and the creature was simply a column of fire, sparks spitting off of it and bouncing harmlessly onto the wet black ground.
For a long moment, our eyes locked—if those were indeed eyes fixed on me, fierce and unblinking, and not an illusion. Then a spark from the creature’s wing burst toward me, falling very near my foot. I flinched back from it, my nightmare of that long-ago fire returning to me in a paralyzing rush of fear. When I stepped back, I snapped a twig in two.
The creature flinched and shrank back into itself. Suddenly it was smaller, less terrifying, and it let out an ugly, discordant roar. Was it angry? Was it afraid? I didn’t understand the sound, had never heard anything like it: beastly and musical, ancient. I thought I heard a crack of thunder, and the strike of a mallet against a bell, and a great tearing, like an underground seam of the world splitting open.
Then the creature turned and fled, darting off through the trees faster than anything should be able to move. I dropped the branch and took off after it, not knowing what I was doing, not knowing anything except that I couldn’t let the creature out of my sight, not until I understood what it was. A word came to me as I tore desperately through the deep forest, following the creature’s blazing brilliance. It was the only word I could think of to describe what I was seeing.
Firebird.