Chapter 9
We arrived at Rosewarren with a passel of Roses from Thorngrove in tow—three girls and two women, all of whom had been horrified to see us arrive at their fortress laden with the Devenmere dead.
The elder of the women, Merta, marched out of the Rosewarren greenway before the magic had even released her properly. A rope of it lashed out at her ankle with a crackling snap, but she paid it no mind. She took us at a brisk pace through the training yards and into the priory, where the dark hallways whispered with Roses watching curiously from the shadows. When we reached what Merta claimed was the Warden’s private office, she slammed open the door without knocking, strode to the Warden’s desk, and placed the dead child from Devenmere atop it.
The Warden, sitting calmly before a pile of papers, froze and stared. She wore her customary black gown with the squared shoulders and her dark hair pulled back in a tight knot, not a strand out of place. Her pale face seemed to lose what little color it possessed as she stared at the wrapped, bloody bundle. She lowered the paper she held; she placed her hands flat on her lap. I heard Father, Gentar, Ryder, and Gareth gently lowering the wrapped corpses they carried to the polished tile floor.
“What is this?” Merta snarled at the Warden. She was wiry and fierce, her hair cropped short and her bare brown arms ropy with veins. Furiously she gestured at all of us waiting at the door. “These people have just come from Devenmere, where they say four chimaera attacked. They killed the beasts, but seven villagers are dead, including these, and we’re lucky it isn’t more.”
Merta grabbed the Warden’s desk, fuming, as if at any moment she would shred her way through it. “Why did we not know of this? You promised you would stop the old ways. You promised us you would release that binding, at least for us , your soldiers. You promised .”
Shock poured through me like ice. So, there was indeed some great deception here, and at least some of the Roses knew about it. Not Mara , I prayed, even though I knew very well that the gods wouldn’t listen to me, that they never listened to me. Not Mara. She didn’t know. Please, she didn’t know.
As if she’d heard my prayer, quick footsteps sounded behind me, and I turned to see Mara rushing into the room, her dark hair pulled back into a loose braid, her skin gleaming with sweat, dirt on her cheeks from the training yard. She wore a plain brown tunic and trousers and soft cracked boots, and on her shoulder was a brown, yellow-eyed falcon, small but fierce, with a speckled white belly and a keen, unblinking gaze.
Behind Mara hurried Gemma’s friend Nesset, one of the Vilia whom she had helped free from a curse spun by necromancers. I allowed myself a moment of gladness upon seeing her; she was a brusque woman, but ultimately kind, and an excellent trainer to the younger Roses, Mara had said. Tall and muscled, Nesset wore flowers in her thick black hair, and a skintight garment of cloth, hide, and thick vines encased her body like a glove. Though her mottled gray-brown skin had become more brown than gray since breaking free of the Brethaeus’s bindings, there was still something of a corpse about her: the green-black tinge to her fingernails, the flower-speckled moss binding the gnarled scars on her neck and arms. She was a revenant, an Olden creature raised from the dead by necromancers, and Gareth had warned us of the very real possibility that, without necromancy to hold it together, her resurrected body would someday fail her. But that day had not yet arrived, and I hoped it never would.
Gemma hurried over to her with an embrace that Nesset fiercely returned, though her stony black eyes were fixed on the dead child. Behind her were two young girls in brown-and-gray training clothes.
My heart seized to look at them; they were as small as Mara had been at ten years old, the year the Warden brought her to Rosewarren. Mara’s quick brown eyes took in the entire scene. Her gaze flicked to mine, then to Gemma’s. Her mouth thinned, and my stomach sank.
She did know.
Mara reached up to the falcon and stroked its breast, whispering something in an unfamiliar language. The only word I recognized was Freyda , which I knew to be the falcon’s name. Every Rose worked with a familiar like Freyda, an animal born and raised in the Mist and therefore imbued with extraordinary qualities: a long life, preternatural intelligence, an uncanny understanding of language and human behavior. The falcon glared at us all, then flew off of Mara’s shoulder and herded the two small girls away, chirping at them in harsh tones they seemed to understand and reluctantly obeyed. Nesset joined them with a scowl, her hands protectively on the girls’ shoulders.
“Mara,” said the Warden wryly when they had gone, “how wonderful that your family has chosen to visit unannounced yet again. And that they’ve brought friends as well.”
Mara went to each of us, even Ryder, and embraced us one by one. When she came to me, I fought the urge to hold her to me and never let her go. She smelled of dirt and sweat; she was sticky all over from whatever work she’d been doing. She was wonderful.
She stared down the Warden, who looked unimpressed. “What’s happened here?” she said, very low. “I heard some of what Merta said. Chimaera in Devenmere? And yet none of us knew of this, and the bells didn’t ring to summon us there.”
The Warden gave a tired sigh. She touched her temples and said, “Let’s adjourn to the parlor and talk. I’ll send for tea.” Her gaze slid to the child’s body on her desk. Something dark flitted across her face, highlighting the fine lines around her mouth and on her brow—the only signs of her age, though even Mara wasn’t certain how old she was. “And I’ll send for someone to take these bodies back to Devenmere so they can be dealt with properly by their own people. The priory is not a tomb.”
“No,” I said at once, surprising even myself. Ryder had implied the dead bodies would give us the strength to resist whatever veil of secrecy the Warden had engineered. We would keep them with us. “Where we go, they go.”
The Warden stared at me until I very nearly lost my nerve. Then she rose from her desk. “As you wish. Follow me.”
***
Once the tea and cookies had been served by a teenaged Rose in an apron, who stared at all of us with wide eyes, no doubt eager to take gossip back to the kitchens, the Warden began to speak.
“I suppose there’s no use in evading your questions,” she said evenly. She took a measured sip of tea and looked up at my father. “You saw the chimaera for yourself, Lord Ashbourne. You heard, I’m sure, what the people of Devenmere had to say about what they’ve endured.”
Father ignored his tea, his fists clenched on his knees, and said nothing, didn’t even give her a nod. I was glad; the longer we could keep the Warden talking of her own volition, the better.
“The fact is that the state of things here in the Mistlands is far worse than anyone knows, and I’ve worked hard to keep that truth hidden,” the Warden went on. She sat rigidly in her chair, her gaze distant and flat. “One of my duties as Warden of the Mist is to protect the people of Gallinor, yes, but another duty is to prevent needless panic.”
“I’d hardly call the people of Devenmere’s panic needless ,” Gemma said, her eyes sparking with anger over the rim of her cup. I was pleased to see that some of her color had returned.
Standing to my left near a wall of bookshelves, Mara shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.
“The Order of the Rose has protected the Middlemist since the Unmaking,” the Warden responded with awful calmness, “and it will continue to do so without burdening the crown, the Senate, or the people of this continent.”
“But we are burdening the people,” said Mara quietly. “Aren’t we, madam? It’s as Merta said. You promised us those days were over.”
The Warden’s eyelids flickered, not quite a blink. “I lied. I had to.”
She stared at Mara for a long moment, but my sister didn’t look away. She set her jaw and stared right back. My heart swelled with love for her. Gareth, sitting beside her, seemed quite transfixed by her, as if he’d never seen such a marvelous thing in his life, which didn’t surprise me. She was magnificent, lean and strong, self-possessed and unafraid. With a jolt, I remembered that they had never met before, my sister and my best friend. I made a note to give them a proper introduction before we left and stepped softly on Gareth’s foot. Get a hold of yourself , I said with a look. He hastily averted his eyes from Mara and took a loud sip of tea.
“You had to lie?” Merta scoffed, but before she could say more, the Warden silenced her with a single hard look.
“You are out of line, Merta,” she said quietly, and only when Merta looked at the floor, angry and abashed, did the Warden continue.
“When the gods created the Mist,” she said, “they made certain choices. They chose a woman to serve the people and made her high queen of Edyn. They chose another woman to serve the Mist and named her Warden. She was my ancestor, Llyris, and when the gods chose her, they blessed her with binding magic—unique to the human realm and tremendously powerful. I don’t know why they chose her, just as we don’t know why they chose the queen. I suppose they must have known Llyris was strong enough to withstand what they would do to her.
“They chose two other women to guard the Knotwood in Aidurra and the Crescent of Storms in Vauzanne. These were Tamina and Mariel, and the gods bound each to the magical rift of her continent, the place where the veil between human and Olden realms was thin. And in doing so, they bound their children, and their children’s children, and so on, and with the inexorable compulsions inherent to the binding magic ensured these women had no choice but to have children, to serve the Mist. This magic even prevents them from ending their own lives, thereby ending their service.”
A strange look passed over her face then; the corner of her mouth held a sad smile. “Interesting, isn’t it? How our gods chose only women to serve them? How they bound them and gave them the power of binding in return, but nothing else? No mercy, no end in sight? And the gods did all of this to compensate for their own failings. They could have made the seal between the Old Country and Edyn complete, and yet they didn’t. Was this a mistake? Or was it deliberate? I’ve never been certain which I think is worse, and now generation after generation has suffered as a consequence.”
“A sad story,” Ryder said tightly, breaking the awful silence that fell. He loomed at the edge of the room, arms crossed over his chest, brow fierce and furious. “And yet you’re using this explanation to justify the secret you’ve bound us all to keep—this act of binding we too had no choice but to receive.”
Suddenly he surged to his feet and rushed at the Warden. He knocked her from her chair and pinned her to the window behind her with his hands at her throat. She looked up at him without fear, as if she’d expected such an assault.
“When my family emerged from the forest that held us trapped,” he said quietly, “we found that much had changed in our absence. The Mist had grown—not south, but north. Into lands you perhaps deemed less worthy of protection?”
Father looked away, his expression miserable. I wondered: Would he and Mother have trapped the Basks in that forest, an act of horrible vengeance, even if they’d known the truth? That without the Basks to help protect the north, the people there would be far more vulnerable?
I feared they would have.
The Warden blinked, her face reddening from Ryder’s grip. “The Order cannot be everywhere at all times. I must choose how best to use our limited resources.”
“And when we discovered what you had done,” Ryder went on, “and that the people had been fighting for their lives without you to protect them, without us to protect them, we couldn’t speak of it, nor write of it. Not to the queen, not to other families in the south. Hardly even to each other. You bound us all to secrecy while we slept. Us and hundreds of others.”
The Warden gave him a strained smile. Her eyes were watering. “I did what I had to do. You would have done the same.”
“No.” He released her, shoving her hard against the window. He turned around, wiped his mouth. He was shaking all over; his voice was thick with sadness. “No, I wouldn’t have.”
“I don’t understand,” Gareth said quickly. I could see the gears of his mind turning. “How is such an act possible, binding hundreds of people to secrecy? I’ve never heard of such spellcraft. I know you’re a beguiler, Warden, but—”
“Haven’t you been listening, Professor?” The Warden stood with her head held high, red marks on her neck from Ryder’s fingers. She didn’t touch them. The word Professor came out sourly. “My blood is Anointed, just as yours is. Though whereas you were lucky enough to be born a sage, bearing the mind magic of Jaetris and enjoying keen intellect and an unflappable memory, I was born as this . I’m not only a beguiler; I’m a binder, one of only three in the world. And someday soon I’ll have to find a man to bed me—it won’t be difficult; many would do it in a moment out of sheer curiosity—and then I’ll bear a daughter, and she’ll become the Warden after me. And you ask me why I keep the fact of the Mist’s true, ever-changing illness quiet and bear the burden of that secret for our queen?”
Suddenly, watching the Warden’s black eyes glitter with that defiant sheen, seeing more emotion on her face than I ever had before in all my years of visiting Mara, I understood perfectly.
“You don’t want the Mist to die on your watch,” I said quietly. “And you don’t want to ask for help from anyone, or tell the queen, because that would mean admitting weakness.” I rose to my feet, suddenly so furious that my exhaustion faded in the face of it. “You’ll weave secrets and lies to everyone you can, even your own Roses, if it means you’ll have more time to repair whatever’s gone wrong without anyone knowing the true extent of your failure.”
Mara quickly stepped forward. “Farrin…”
“It’s all right, Mara.” The Warden stood behind her chair, considering me thoughtfully. “Your sister is correct. I don’t want the Mist to die on my watch, and it won’t. I’ll mend it. I always have, and all my ancestors have, and my daughter’s daughters will too. And if I can raise girls every year and send them off to die for this world, and feel my heart break again and again upon finding their slain bodies in the Mist—or worse, never finding them—then the people of the north will have to do the same, or else leave. A freedom I’m not afforded.”
Gemma made an incredulous sort of noise. “And what of those who can’t leave, for any number of reasons? We could have been helping them relocate all this time, if only you’d let anyone tell the truth about what they were enduring. You’re willing to sacrifice the lives of innocent people to protect your own pride?”
The Warden looked sharply at her. “Relocate every northerner to the south, and then any monsters that come sniffing through the Mist for human prey would have to go south instead, dooming everyone on the continent. And what if I did tell the queen? What could she do, with her own palace compromised and her mind breaking? Oh.” She said it softly, looking at us with mock surprise. “You mean you thought I didn’t know? Of course I know. I’ve known longer than any of you. Yes, even you.” She glanced at me with the tiniest of smiles, one that made my whole body blaze with anger. “The Mist was made by the gods, and so was the queen. They are linked as much as any two things in our world can be. The Mist is dying, and so is she. So no, I don’t bother her with the details of how I protect her country. I simply protect it. And I choose to protect the most people I can, which means bolstering the Mist’s southern borders and unfortunately having to abandon some of the northern ones. The south is more populous; the north’s people are scattered, and there are far fewer of them. So there you have it.”
She sat in her chair once more, hands clasped in her lap, and glared at the floor, her shoulders hunched, her face tired. My mind reeled with everything she’d said; I couldn’t think of how to even begin to move through the world after such a revelation. Yvaine wasn’t merely sick, she was dying ? I found a chair and sank into it. I felt like the world had suddenly cracked open under my feet.
After a long moment of fraught silence, the Warden looked up, her ordinary implacable expression restored, and said lightly, “Have I answered all your questions to your satisfaction?”
“In fact, no,” said Gareth bluntly. I realized he’d been taking notes this entire time and was now flipping through his notebook eagerly. “I have no fewer than fifteen questions for you—”
But he was cut off by a clamor of noise as Rosewarren’s warning bells suddenly began to ring, filling the air both inside the priory and out on the grounds with urgent song. A sharp current of magic darted outward from the Warden in too many directions to follow—seeking out all the Roses on duty, I assumed. The Warden rose from her desk and looked outside, her gaze distant.
“If I have to endure one more eruption of godsdamned bells …” Ryder muttered.
“There’s been a breach,” the Warden said quietly. My skin tingled as I imagined what it must feel like to be connected to the Mist by the ancient binding magic the gods had given her bloodline. What kind of information was this power sending her, and how did it sit in her body? When she looked out at the silver ocean shimmering just beyond the priory’s grounds, what did she see?
“Two werewolves coming down from a full-moon turning,” the Warden said, “and a furiant, tearing a path through the forest. They’re all fleeing…something. They’re heading straight for Fenwood.”
Fenwood. A chill swept through the room. Fenwood was a village on the southern Mistline, only a few miles from the priory.
“Fleeing something?” Gareth frowned, snapping shut his notebook. “If they’re fleeing something, maybe they intend no harm. Maybe they don’t even realize where they are. We should investigate—”
“Are you Warden of the Mist,” the Warden said coldly, “or are you a professor who lives in a safe tower far from here and knows nothing other than what he’s read in books?”
Gareth gaped at her, angry color darkening his cheeks. The Warden muttered something under her breath—spellwords, with another biting current of magic in their wake. Merta sat down heavily on a bench by the window, seething but silent; I suspected that whatever magic working the Warden had just uttered had bound her to her seat.
But Mara…in that moment, with the Warden’s spellwork sizzling through the air, Mara became a soldier. She threw Gemma and me one quick look before dashing out of the room. Freyda gave a sharp cry and swooped down to her shoulder from the corridor’s rafters. Gareth ran out after her, followed by Ryder and Gentar, and Lord Alaster, and even Lady Leva.
“No, please, don’t follow her!” Gemma called out to our companions, but their curiosity was too tremendous, and soon I was racing down the hall to follow them, my heart thundering with new panic. Father, Gemma, and I had witnessed Mara’s transformation only once, early this past summer. It had been an accident, one I knew Gemma would forever feel guilty about. This time, maybe I could stop them all—or at least stop Gareth—before they saw Mara in her most vulnerable, most inhuman state.
But Mara was a sentinel, like my father. She was strong and quick, and whatever magic the Warden had woven into her as a child, binding her to the Mist as a shieldmaiden of the Order, made her stronger and quicker. Before she even set foot outside, she began to change: her strides longer, her clothes shredding as her body transformed. Feathers sprouted from her arms; her fingernails elongated into gleaming claws.
Once we were out in the trees, she grabbed weapons from a younger, fierce-eyed Rose standing ready: a quiver of arrows, a spear, a knife belt. She slung it all onto her new body and sprang into the air—part woman, part bird, part indefinable beast. Her limbs were long and muscled and gleaming, silky, as if she were some water creature bursting out of the sea. Scraps of her clothing drifted to the ground like snowflakes as she tore into the air.
I finally caught up with the others, silently cursing both my aching body and Ryder for wearing me out so completely with our training.
“Look away,” I snapped at them, panting. “This isn’t for our eyes to see.”
Ryder, Lady Leva, Gentar, and Lord Alaster all obeyed almost at once, and even Lord Alaster had the grace to look abashed. But Gareth stood there gazing up at the transforming Roses like a child marveling at his first rainbow, his face open and soft with awe.
As she flew, Mara called out to the dozen other Roses hurrying to join her, all of them in various stages of transformation. They grabbed weapons from the young ones and leaped into the air after Mara. She shouted back at them in a trilling sort of language, and they darted into formation behind her—their familiars flying with them or else darting along below on paws and hooves—and then they were gone. The Mist swallowed them whole; a thunderous silence fell over us in their wake.
I grabbed Gareth’s arm and spun him around to face me, so furious with him I could barely speak. “I told you not to look at her!”
“I know, but…” He shook his head helplessly, and I was shocked to see that his eyes were bright with unshed tears. He had a small, wondering smile on his face, and he turned back to the Mist, as if the Roses would come bursting back toward us at any moment. “Gods remade, Farrin,” he whispered. He wiped his face with his sleeve. “She’s magnificent. I’ve heard the stories, of course, of Roses in battle—fierce and splendid, like something out of Olden tales—but to actually witness it for myself…” He turned back to me, dazed. “Mara. Mara. I’ve never seen a more beautiful woman in my entire life. Will you introduce me when they return?”
I almost slapped him. “Get hold of yourself. What’s wrong with you?”
Behind me, Gemma’s voice came sharply. “Will you not go with them? Do you never fight alongside the women you’ve imprisoned?”
I whirled and saw Gemma standing near the Warden with clenched fists, her eyes glittering with everything I felt: pride for Mara, and terror for her, and awful, desolate despair. It was torment to see Mara surrounded by these sisters who were neither Gemma nor me, and to be reminded yet again of how far she was from us, of how unfair it was for these girls to be taken from their families to be raised in this awful, dank place shrouded in the shadows of the Mist.
The Warden towered over Gemma, tall and fearsome in that square-shouldered black gown—but there was a quiet sadness there, too, in the lines of her face. She looked drained, defeated, and I wondered if sending the Roses away to battle took something from her, another freshly cut piece every time.
“My Roses have been well trained,” was all she said in reply.
Father, standing in the shadows by the door, turned away and dragged a hand through his hair.
I couldn’t bear the awful quiet. If I didn’t say something, the cannon of anger in my chest would ignite and shoot someone, most likely Gareth. That moony look on his face made me want to scream.
Instead, I wrangled my thoughts into some kind of order and approached the Warden. Everyone else could stand around feeling whatever they were feeling; I wouldn’t allow her to speak first, work some sort of binding magic on us, steer us away from why we were there.
“We’ve come here for two other reasons, Warden,” I said firmly. “One is to report a strange creature I saw in the forest near Ravenswood. A firebird: a creature of flame, with aspects of both woman and bird. Given your experience with all things Olden and the form the Roses take upon going into battle, we thought you might be able to help us identify it and determine whether it was involved in yesterday’s abductions of Anointed magicians.”
The Warden turned to look at me. “A firebird,” she said flatly, as if I’d spoken the strangest word ever conceived.
I resisted the automatic urge to apologize for my description of the creature, refusing to let the Warden cow me. I imagined her face as one of Ryder’s faded leather targets, recalled the fluid rhythm of my body as it moved to follow his commands, and felt a welcome surge of calm.
“And we want to take the Three-Eyed Crown to the university for study,” I added. “Locked up here at Rosewarren, it’s doing no one any good.”
“Nor is it doing anyone any harm ,” she pointed out coolly.
I couldn’t argue with that, but I pushed my doubt aside and held her cold black gaze nevertheless.
“Very well,” she said at last. “You, you, and you.” She looked at Gemma, Ryder, and me. “And you, Professor,” she added, the corner of her mouth quirking slightly. “You weren’t there in the Old Country that night, but I’ve a feeling you will be someday. I’ll take the four of you to see the crown, and we’ll discuss terms. The rest of you can wait in the parlor with Merta and finish your tea.”
Suddenly Merta was at the door, head slightly bowed. Mutely she guided Father, Lord Alaster, Gentar, and Lady Leva inside. She barely resembled the indignant woman we’d brought with us from Thorngrove. I tried not to think about what that meant, how often Mara might have gotten angry with the Warden only to be bound back into silence the next moment.
The Warden swept past us. “Come with me.”
***
We followed the Warden into depths of Rosewarren I never knew existed—deep, twisting hallways of cold stone that turned back on themselves so many times I gave up hope of remembering the way back. Every now and then the Warden murmured something to herself, the flames of our beguiled torches flickered, and I felt something in the air give way around us—most likely protective wards, though in my unease I imagined the earth itself shifting under our feet, creating corridors where previously there had been only dense rock.
At last we reached a small, round chamber. It appeared before us so suddenly, so unnaturally, that a chill cascaded down my body. And in the middle of it, sitting on a plinth of stone, was the Three-Eyed Crown.
Gemma went to it at once, crouched beside it, hesitated, then touched the thick silver band and its three embedded yellow jewels. She held it for a moment, then placed it tenderly back on the plinth and walked away from it, her back to us.
“Did you think holding it would summon your lover to you?” the Warden asked mildly. “The thing’s inert. Whatever power it once held vanished the moment it was torn from its host.”
I couldn’t see my sister’s face, but I could imagine everything she was feeling—every pang of heartbreak, every stifled nightmare of Kilraith taunting her with the voice and face of the man she loved—and I felt the strangest urge to point at the Warden and yell at Ryder to attack her, as if he were some vicious dog just waiting for my next command.
“Cruel comments like that are unnecessary,” I said tightly instead.
The Warden nodded once, her expression unreadable. “I do apologize.”
I didn’t believe for one moment that she meant it, but I bit my tongue, silently fuming.
“Are you certain it is inert?” asked Gareth. Now he was the one to crouch beside the crown and peer at it, squinting through his glasses.
The Warden raised an eyebrow. “You doubt my assessment, Professor.”
“I do. You said it yourself before: You possess binding magic, but no matter how powerful it is, that’s only one kind of magic, and it’s possible other powers might reveal something yours hasn’t.” He pulled out his notebook and pen and began scribbling. “I’d like to take some notes, observe the object while it’s in an environment it’s accustomed to.”
“You’re speaking of it like it’s an animal,” Ryder said. It was the first time he’d spoken in so long that the sound of his voice startled me. He glanced over at me, and my cheeks burned.
“I don’t think,” Gareth said slowly, “that we can discount any possibility when it comes to an object—and a curse—as powerful as this one.”
The Warden turned to me. “Tell me more about this firebird.”
I did, describing it in as much detail as I could, and when I’d finished, the Warden looked utterly perplexed. “I’ve never heard of such a creature,” she said. “And you were the only one to see it?”
“Yes, but others saw its remains—burned trees, embers in the dirt.” Desperate for her to believe me, I added, “I realize it could have been an illusion crafted by a figment, but—”
“Normally a figment’s illusions don’t leave behind traces for others to find,” the Warden said. “I’ve never heard of an entire group of people hallucinating something like that. Though…” She sighed, a soft breath of sound that seemed to shrink her. “These days, with the Mist as it is and with thirteen Anointed magicians missing—”
“Thirteen?” Gemma turned to stare, looking as astounded as I felt.
“Well.” The Warden paused, gave Ryder a quick glance. “Fifteen, including your sister, Lord Ryder, and the boy from Blighdon. By the time your raven reached me, the remaining thirteen had already been reported to me by other means.”
“And given all your many years of experience battling Olden forces,” Ryder said quietly, every polite word seething, every line of his body radiating tension, “what do you think has happened to them?”
“Impossible to say. Some Olden creatures hunt for sport, others for ransom. And then there’s the Mist itself, which is neither benevolent nor malicious. It simply is. Likewise, these abductions could be an act of magic that simply is , albeit one we’ve never encountered before. Which leads me to my next point,” the Warden said smoothly, turning to look right at me. “You want to take the crown to the university, try to find information about the curse it once contained. Fine. But in exchange, you must do something for me.”
Ryder took a step toward us. “I’d think knowing that we were working to untangle a piece of this great mystery would be enough for you.”
“That will be a tremendous comfort, Lord Ryder, to be sure. But I need more than comfort. I need bodies.” The Warden took my hand; I flinched, but she held on tight. “The queen loves you. She listens to you, perhaps more than she listens to anyone else. So I need you to use that love for something other than your own enjoyment and privilege and make a request of her—no, a demand.” She paused. “The Order’s numbers are dwindling. To protect us all, it needs fresh blood, and the ordinary recruiting traditions are insufficient. One daughter only, magical families only…this is not sustainable. We need a mandate. Compulsory and far-reaching.”
“What?” I breathed, horrified. “You want Yvaine to ask all families to—”
“No. I want the queen to require service of every family who has a daughter capable of withstanding the binding,” the Warden said, her expression as hard and unflinching as her voice. “Every family, regardless of magic, must send their daughters to me—all of them, not just one—and every daughter who passes the trials must be inducted into the Order and bound to service.”
Gareth stood, his notebook forgotten.
“You’re mad,” Gemma said, her eyes flashing. “Not once in the history of Edyn has there been a royal conscription into any army, Lower or Upper or Order.”
The Warden glanced at Ryder. “Lord Ryder doesn’t think I’m mad. Lord Ryder wishes I’d petitioned the queen for a mandate years ago. If I’d done so, maybe the north wouldn’t have had to bear the brunt of the Mist’s violence. Maybe his family and all their friends wouldn’t have to constantly rush about bringing aid to people I don’t have the resources to help myself. Isn’t that right?”
Ryder glanced at me, then away. His expression was stony. “It may be the only solution, Farrin. The missing people, the sinkhole…” He trailed off. I heard the word he didn’t say: Alastrina . And as much as I didn’t want to, as much as the realization sat uneasily in my stomach, I understood. If one of my sisters had been taken instead of his, I might not have been so quick to condemn the Warden’s request. In fact, I might have scoured the country and brought her new recruits myself.
“And we must begin the process as soon as possible,” the Warden added. “The trials take time, and after they’ve shown us which girls can endure the binding, there’s training, which also takes time. And time, I think you’ll all agree, is something we don’t have much of.”
Gemma shook her head, looked at me helplessly. “But what about relocating Upper Army troops to reinforce the Mist, redistributing soldiers who have already volunteered to protect their country?”
“That’s been tried before, many times,” Gareth answered, frowning at the floor. “Whole army squadrons have become mysteriously ill or been physically kept from entering the Mist by some power embedded in the land itself. No fighting force on record has ever been as effective at repelling Olden forces in the Mistlands as the Order of the Rose. Most scholars—myself included—think it’s something about the binding magic embedded in the Warden’s bloodline, with which the Roses are then imbued during their binding ceremonies. It’s like…the Mist wants the Order to patrol it. No other army will do.”
“The gods wanted the Order to patrol the Mist,” the Warden countered. Her back straightened proudly. “And the magic they left in the world doesn’t take kindly to being defied.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You want to send more children— everyone ’s children—into battle against something we don’t even know the shape of yet?”
“Not only children. Women too. Any girl or woman between the ages of eight and twenty-five. I can’t afford to be too selective. And neither can you. And neither,” she added, “can the queen.”
She looked hard at me. “Remind her of that, would you? And if within a month I’ve heard nothing from you or the queen, have heard no rumblings of a mandate being drafted in the Royal Senate—or if you try something foolishly heroic like evacuating northerners to the south, when I’ve already explained to you why doing so endangers far more people than it might save—all of this will tell me you’ve broken my trust, which means I’ll no longer trust you with the crown. I’ll retrieve it, and you’ll never see it again.”
“You have no right to this object,” Gemma protested. “It isn’t yours. And how are we to trust that you’ll protect it?”
“I’ll remind you that after you trespassed into the Old Country—breaking our queen’s laws and using one of my own Roses to do it— you brought the crown here, and you were right to do so. This is the safest place in Gallinor, one of the safest in the world, and it is thus because I’ve made it safe. That gives me the right, Lady Imogen.”
She looked around at us, appearing both young and old at once, her skin taut but her black eyes ancient, fathomless. I was reminded uncomfortably of Yvaine, how she could shift from mighty to childlike in the span of a moment.
“Some people might think me reckless for allowing this artifact out of Rosewarren and into the hands of people as irresponsible and rash as all of you,” the Warden said. “But I do what I must for my country and for my queen, and I need more Roses to do it. So as much as it wounds me to send you crawling to the queen on my behalf, I have no choice. Take the crown, and let’s go.” She held out her arm, indicating the corridor down which we’d come. “I have a whole list of things to do to keep this country from devolving into chaos and panic now that fifteen of its most powerful citizens have been abducted, and so do you. The sooner we all get to it, the better.”
Gareth had come prepared with supplies. He tucked the crown carefully into a soft cloth sack, then into a box that clicked shut with a series of elaborate clasps. He gave the box to Gemma, who held it tight to her chest as if it were the most precious thing in the world—and perhaps it was.
We hurried back up to the world above, and through every inch of those winding dark hallways, my mind whirled with questions, with helpless anger, as the weight of the Warden’s gaze pressed like cold fingers against the back of my head.
***
When we returned to Ivyhill after nearly five weeks away, the first sighting of the familiar vine-wrapped walls sent a feeling of peace pouring into me, like the first spill of light at dawn—but that ended abruptly when Gemma, riding Zephyr a little ahead of our coach, gave a sudden sharp cry.
Terror surged through me, and I sat up straight and looked out the window, fearing the worst—Kilraith had come back, or the firebird, and one or both of them had engulfed my sister in flames—but then I saw Gemma waving at me hastily, dismissing me. Her eyes were shining, and she was fighting a smile that nevertheless beamed out of every part of her, making her light up from the inside as if she were made of fireflies. My heart jumped into my throat. I knew what that look meant, though it happened far too rarely.
She exercised remarkable restraint until we reached the main drive in front of the house. Our staff was waiting to greet us; grooms came trotting up to the carriages to unharness the horses. I watched Gemma give Zephyr to a groom and then walk around the house toward the hedge maze as quickly as she could without making a scene.
I couldn’t resist; I had to see the moment of happiness for myself. I turned away from Father’s scowl—he knew as well as I did what Gemma’s little cry of jubilation had meant—and hurried after Gemma toward the hedge maze, keeping an eye out to make sure no curious servants were following us. Then I hid behind one of our hothouses, around the corner with a hand over my mouth, and saw the moment that Gemma ran into the arms of Talan, who waited for her just inside the hedge maze’s entrance. I heard her cry out, heard his low reply. He lifted her into his arms and held her to his chest, and Gemma wrapped her arms around his neck and started kissing him all over—his dark hair, his cheeks, his ears. She was ridiculous and wild, like a puppy who couldn’t stop wagging her tail, and Talan threw back his head and laughed. Even from a distance, I could tell he was tired; his shabby clothes wore hundreds of miles on them, and he looked thin, a little gaunt in the face. But with Gemma in his arms, he came alive, just as she had when she’d first spotted him.
I turned away then, letting them have their privacy, but I did go to the Green Ballroom before I went up to my rooms. I threw open the windows and sat at my piano, and I played all my favorite romantic songs, every one of them about love and longing and reunion, every one of them certain to make the listener’s heart ache in all the best ways. I played until night fell, hoping that wherever Gemma and Talan were—on the grounds, in the house, shut up safely in her rooms—they could hear my music and were comforted by its power, that the notes helped fold them up into a little cocoon of happiness and blocked out everything else.
Night fell, and I at last went up to my rooms, exhausted but happy. Playing my piano for those long hours had driven the worry out of me, and I didn’t know how long that would last, but I was determined to take advantage of it. I snuggled with Osmund, who purred so loudly I felt it in my chest, and then collapsed into bed without even taking off my boots.
When I woke later in the night, cool moonlight spilled across the room, and a slight autumn breeze drifted through the cracked windows, but I was sweating and breathless. The images of the dream I’d just had lingered, following me out of sleep. It had been no nightmare, but a dream of crystalline focus: Ryder pinning me against the wall of his stable, our wooden staffs crossed between our bodies. Only, in my dream, he’d not stepped away after he’d touched my face. Dream Ryder had said, Well done, Farrin , just as the true Ryder had that day, but in my dream, he’d then leaned down and kissed me, soft and slow, and his whole body had pressed sweetly into mine—the bulk of him against me, hot and hard and solid, enveloping me, overwhelming me, shielding me. He’d taken our staffs and thrown them aside, and then he’d lifted me into his arms, and I’d felt small in his embrace, tucked away, utterly protected. He’d lowered me gently to the floor, still kissing me, each kiss drawing me up and up toward something bright and hot, something inevitable, and then he’d pressed his leg gently between my thighs, his big hands roaming all over me, teasing me through my clothes, and then—
Suddenly I couldn’t bear to just lie there anymore, aching and remembering. I fumbled with the ties of my dress and stockings, cursing myself for not getting properly undressed before sleeping. And when my trembling fingers touched my breasts, my belly, my naked thighs, I cried out at the sheer jolting pleasure of it. I was awkward, to be sure, my fingers clumsy and nervous; my previous attempts had all ended in disaster, after all. But my dream had left me hot and wet between my thighs such as I’d never felt before, and with those images of Ryder held firmly in my mind, I touched myself all over. My hands feathering scattered lines across my belly were his hands, my finger circling between my thighs was his finger. I imagined what it would feel like to kiss him, how the roughness of his beard might rub against my skin, how the strength of him would press me down into the bed, and how intently he might watch me as I writhed beneath him—those bright blue eyes of his, that blazing, quiet intensity.
I thought of the way he’d said my name so gently— Farrin —letting the syllables fall from his mouth like rain. How would it feel, I wondered wildly, if he murmured my name against my thighs?
The thought unraveled me. My entire body tensed; a swell of heat came rushing up from my toes, drawing me up into myself, toward an ache deep inside my belly. Then the wave broke, and I let out a soft cry and came apart, pulsing quietly, the world behind my eyelids warm and black and gold. I clamped my thighs tight around my hand and moved against my fingers, chasing the gorgeous pleasure of it until the sensitive ache there told me to stop. When it subsided, my entire body tingling, I lay in the pillows and cried and laughed, my wet fingers trembling against the mattress.
So, that was it. That was what it felt like, or at least something like that. Certainly it was possible to achieve the feeling more skillfully, but I’d done it nevertheless. I’d done it on my own—with assistance from Ryder Bask, of all people.
The thought was absurd and somehow wonderful. I fell asleep half naked atop my bed, feeling wrung out and giddy, wiped clean, and more than a little ridiculous—but for the first time in what felt like years, my sleep was peaceful, long, and free of nightmares.