Chapter 11
Ryder appeared at Ivyhill’s front doors at seven o’ clock the next morning, just as I stepped out of them for my daily walk across the grounds. I opened the door, and there he was, frozen, his hand raised to knock. We looked at each other for a long moment, during which I could do very little except stare at him: his crisp black jacket and trousers, the cloth bag slung across his back, his freshly trimmed beard, his dark hair falling to his shoulders in neat waves. And his blue eyes, bright stars improbably shining in the morning light. Heat rose in me like the morning sun. Was it desire? Embarrassment? Nerves? Truly, I couldn’t tell the difference and wasn’t sure I wanted to.
I had been staring at him for far too long.
“You can come with me,” I said briskly, stepping past him, my face flushed, “or you can sit alone in the house until Gemma and Talan wake up, though gods know when that will be.”
Ryder dropped his bag inside the doors. “Clothes,” he said simply when I raised an eyebrow. “I can leave them there, can’t I?”
“Yes, though they might end up in a guest room or get thrown out.”
He shrugged, gave a little grunt. “Then I’ll buy more.”
The carelessness of this remark nettled me, though I easily could have done the same—lost a bag of clothes, bought new ones to replace them. I tried not to think of the ravaged village of Devenmere, of how many clothes the Bask family might have given to other victims of the Mist, while I lived my life at Ivyhill, blissfully unaware and obsessed with my own small problems.
I shook myself, trying to focus my scattered thoughts and forget the sound of Ryder’s grunt. What a bear he was. I couldn’t believe I had kissed him only the day before.
“Fine,” I said. And then again, sharply, “ Fine ,” as if trying to convince myself that this was ordinary and good, that I was entirely unbothered by the presence of Ryder Bask. I started storming away.
He followed me easily. “Where are we going?”
“I walk the grounds every morning to ensure everything’s in order,” I replied.
He grunted again in agreeable assent. “I do the same.”
“Well done, you. Would you like some sort of prize?”
“Not particularly. Though a cup of strong, hot coffee wouldn’t go unappreciated.”
“You’ll get your coffee when I do, when the morning’s work is done.”
“Seems fair.”
The complete ease with which he accepted my irritation was in itself supremely irritating. I walked faster, fists clenched, as if it were possible to propel myself through the air by punching it.
“You’re angry,” he observed after a moment. “I’m sorry I interrupted your morning routine.” He stopped walking. “I’ll go back to the house and wait.”
“Oh gods, please don’t ,” I said over my shoulder. “Then I’ll just be walking around thinking about how you’re sitting on the steps waiting for me like a great black dog. Keep walking.”
He caught up with me in a few long strides. “You are angry though.”
“I’m not angry, I’m just…” I blew out a sharp breath, searching for words that wouldn’t come. “I suppose I am angry. But I don’t want to think about why I am, and I don’t want you to apologize for anything, because you didn’t do anything worth apologizing for. Just…thank you for coming, as we agreed. And let’s keep walking. All right?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him nod. “All right. But if there’s anything—”
“There’s not.”
“All right.” Silence fell for a time. Then he said, “May I make a simple observation?”
“If you must.”
“You look very beautiful this morning. The morning light suits you.”
I laughed darkly. “I highly doubt that.”
“You doubt it? Surely you’ve seen it for yourself.”
“I haven’t,” I replied. “I don’t like looking in mirrors.”
He was quiet, then said gently, “I’m sorry. You said that yesterday. I’d forgotten.”
The fact that he’d forgotten anything about our time together yesterday when every moment of it, every word of it, had been scorched into my mind like a brand to flesh made me flare up all over in mortification. Of course he didn’t remember; moments like that meant nothing to him. He’d had many of them, I was certain. Even during all those years his family was trapped in a forest, Ravenswood was a community of hundreds—the servants, the grooms, the tenant farmers in the little village at the end of the main drive. He would have had years to practice and no lack of willing partners. And here I was, having spent the night twisting and turning in my bed yet again, thinking only of him—his hands on me, his lips on mine, the heat of him, the strength of him, how strangely familiar it felt to be held by him—and all the while aching for something I couldn’t find, not even after I’d touched myself and brought myself to shaking completion.
“I wouldn’t expect you to remember,” I said crisply. “I said many things yesterday and regret most of them.”
“Most of them?”
“Telling you to come here, that we need to visit the queen—I don’t regret that.”
“Ah.”
The tone of his voice on that small word was strange, full of something I couldn’t read. He said nothing after that, striding in companionable silence beside me and looking out over the Ivyhill grounds while I stewed in absolute misery until we reached the stables, where my stormy feelings grew even fiercer.
Byrn was there, our white-whiskered head groom, already awake and working a horse in the large training paddock with his apprentices. I recognized the horse at once, a black colt with a wicked temper and very little patience for humans. One of the grooms approached him with a lead rope and a simple loop halter that would rest around his neck. They wouldn’t even try to put it on him, I knew; they would simply let him smell it and nose it around, get him used to the feel of it against his body. But the colt was having none of it. He watched the groom approach with his head lowered and his ears back, and when the poor boy got close enough, the colt lashed out and snapped at him with his teeth. The boy dropped the bridle and jumped back, and the colt pawed the dirt with one angry hoof.
Byrn, meanwhile, stood to the side, not looking after his apprentice but instead glowering at Ryder and me as we neared the paddock. Some of the other grooms gathered in a watchful knot not far from him. Ryder’s face was well known—all the Basks’ were—and not once had any of them set foot on our estate so openly. I didn’t blame them for being tense; for all they knew, this was some sort of attack and I was actually Lord Alaster wearing a glamoured disguise. Never mind that they all knew we’d recently been to Ravenswood, ostensibly for pleasure. Their whole lives, the Basks had been enemies to us, to them, to their livelihoods.
“What’s his name?” Ryder asked me quietly as we reached the paddock fence, his blue eyes fixed on the colt and the furious flick of his tail.
“Jet,” I replied, just as softly. “A farmer in Fenwood found him wandering in the woods near the Mist and couldn’t find his owner. He managed to get him home, feed him, but every attempt at training him failed. He’s aggressive, impossible to work with. Byrn convinced Father to bring him to Ivyhill, take him on as a project. It took five men to wrangle him all the way here. Even our grooms with wilding magic haven’t been able to make progress.”
Ryder nodded. “I’m not surprised. The Mist got into this one, or else he’s seen horrors he can’t forget.”
I glanced over at him, chilled by the images his words conjured. “Whatever happened to his owner, you mean.”
“Possibly.”
Ryder put both his hands on the top rail and clucked his tongue. Then he murmured something under his breath, not in Ekkari, but something smoother, gentler—another Olden bestial language, I assumed. The gathered grooms hushed. Even the morning birds went quiet.
Jet turned to stare at him. He tossed his head and snorted, showing us the whites of his eyes. The look on his face was obvious, even to me. Just try it, stranger.
But Ryder only smiled, then entered the paddock through the gate nearest us. One of the younger grooms jerked forward, a warning on his lips, but Byrn hushed him with a sharp wave of his hand. He watched closely as Ryder slowly approached Jet, still murmuring quietly, his head lowered and his gaze deferential. He said Jet’s name. He held out his hand, a question suspended in the air.
Jet snorted and stamped his hoof, then reared up with an angry cry. I flinched, gripped the fence hard, but Ryder showed no fear. He paused, the cadence of his voice low and calm, songlike. I thought I heard questions now and then in his strange words, to which Jet snorted and whickered in response. Thanks to Ryder’s Anointed wilding power, Jet could understand what he was saying, or at least enough of it.
A delicate chill washed over me as Ryder finally reached Jet, still crooning to him with that gentle, low voice. He drew long, slow strokes down the colt’s back and under his wild mane that seemed to soothe his anger. He bumped Ryder’s arm with his muzzle, then lowered his head, blinking heavily as if overcome with sudden exhaustion or relief, and turned his whole face into Ryder’s chest. He let it rest there as Ryder stroked his neck and forehead, and at last the hush that had fallen over the paddock lifted. Birdsong returned, and I felt it was safe to breathe again.
Some of the grooms turned away, wiping their faces. Even Byrn’s eyes were bright.
“Impressive, Lord Ryder,” he said solemnly. “Can I ask what you said? We’ve tried Ekkari, and Aavmesh, as you did, and even Griskell and Kezhrati, but he responded to none of the arcane bestial languages, not even when I was the one uttering them.”
Ryder glanced at him. “You are an Anointed wilder too?”
Byrn nodded. “And all my apprentices have some wilding magic, though none are Anointed.”
“When the Mist touches a living creature, be it beast or human, whether the magic you try is Anointed or low doesn’t matter as much as shared experience. Jet has been changed by the Mist. So have I, having lived near it for so long. We understand each other. He doesn’t mean you harm. He’s just frightened and knows you have not tasted fear as he has.”
Then Ryder crooned to Jet again, something that sounded so tender that I had to look away. It was too dear, seeing him like this, with this wild, unkempt horse pressing his face against him, and then there was the incongruity of such gentleness belonging to such a towering, fearsome body. My own body roiled, as did my mind, my questions too muddled and my need too searing to contend with at the moment. I was glad when we left the paddock behind and continued on our walk, though for the remainder of it, I didn’t look at Ryder. I couldn’t, nor could I speak to him. I was too enmeshed in my own confusion, my own bewildered fantasies. After all, I knew very well what it felt like to be sheltered against the muscled mass of Ryder’s body—a feeling of safety and peace, of simple belonging, that I couldn’t seem to put out of my mind, no matter how hard I tried.
***
It was a relief to return to the house, even if that meant shutting ourselves up in Gemma’s study to hear what Talan had to say.
Before he even began to speak, I could tell his report would be grave. He was thinner and paler than he had been during his last visit, with shadows under his eyes and a brittle quality to his countenance, as if whatever he’d learned had changed the very essence of him. I tried not to feel irritated that even so, he was still as beautiful as he’d ever been, with the same sculpted cheekbones, the same great dark eyes, the same full lips. Gemma had brought him fresh clothes, and even as exhausted as he clearly was, the simple dark trousers and plain white shirt looked elegant on his tall, slender body, fine enough to be worn to a formal gathering.
“The first thing I’ll say,” he began, his voice soft and solemn, “is that whatever’s happening to the Mist is not unique to Gallinor. The other rifts are changing too. In Vauzanne, the Crescent of Storms is growing. Whatever ancient magic has until now kept its storms separate from the rest of the continent is unraveling, and now those storms are bleeding into the surrounding landscape. And in Aidurra, something similar is happening. The Knotwood is growing beyond its traditional borders, uprooting settlements and consuming ordinary woodlands like weeds overtaking a garden.”
He paused, took a breath. The echo of the crown shimmered like faint fingers of lightning across his brow and temples, punctuated by three thumbprint scars in the shape of the crown’s three golden jewels. Gemma’s left hand echoed these scars, a web of gleaming lines that she hid under neither glamour nor glove while alone with the three of us. Sitting beside him, she reached over to take his pale hand in her scarred one. The sight stirred something in me; irritated, aching, I looked away, focusing instead on the swirling green-and-ivory pattern of the carpet until I managed to find my voice.
“We’ve learned recently that the Warden has worked binding magic on those living in the Mistlands,” I said, “magic that prevents them from sharing the true state of the Mist with others.”
Talan nodded. “It seems that the Wardens of the Knotwood and the Crescent have done something similar. The information I learned came in pieces, either through disjointed speculation or from people who clearly wanted to say more but couldn’t.”
“And have there been Anointed magicians abducted from the other continents as well?” Ryder asked. He stood quietly by the fire, a plate at his elbow on the mantel; his lunch was untouched.
“Yes, at least five in Aidurra, at least seven in Vauzanne. But the numbers could be higher. Since I cannot speak to their Wardens or to the queen, I can’t be certain.”
“We must go to her at once,” Gemma said. I felt her eyes on me and kept my own trained on the floor. “Propose the draft. No, demand it.”
I did look up at her then, a swift, cutting glare.
“I don’t like it any more than you do,” she replied before I could protest, “but not only would that add to the Order’s numbers, thereby strengthening our defenses at the Mist and offering further protection to the north, it would reassure the people. Their queen is acting. Their queen is unafraid.”
“Or it would make them riot in the streets,” Ryder said grimly. “I doubt the people of Gallinor want their daughters, mothers, and sisters taken from their beds.”
The memory of little Mara, sitting bravely beside the Warden as the black carriage bearing the Order’s sigil took her away from us, came with a swift stab to my heart.
Desperate to change the subject, I said sharply, “What about Kilraith?”
A coldness seemed to slither through the room at the mere mention of his name.
“I haven’t encountered him,” answered Talan after a moment, his voice carefully soft, as if he feared that speaking any louder might summon Kilraith into the room. “Nor have I met any other demons, or any creatures at all, that are bound to his service as I was.”
Ryder looked hard at him. “It’s not as though his servants wear brands or carry brightly colored banners.”
“I would feel it, if someone or something were bound to him. I’d feel it like a chill in winter. His are chains you can never fully be free of. I wear their echoes on my skin.”
A beat, and then Talan let out a soft laugh into the uneasy quiet. He scrubbed his hands over his face. “Sorry. That was ominous. But it’s true nonetheless. I would recognize a fellow bound servant of Kilraith. I would taste the same magic that once imprisoned me, feel the same weight pulling at the air around me. And in none of my travels thus far have I found anyone like me or picked up any scent of him. He’s gone underground since we fought him. Since you fought him.”
Gemma scooted closer to him, squeezed his hand. “You were there too, darling. You fought him just as hard as we did, if not harder. Remember, those awful words you uttered were not yours. They were his . And without you fighting him from within, we might not have been able to defeat him from without.”
Talan turned toward her and pressed his brow to hers. He closed his sad, dark eyes while she kept a close watch over him with her bright blue ones, and I got the sense that he was breathing in the scent of her, letting it cleanse him.
“And there’s another thing,” Talan said after a moment. He opened his eyes and faced us. “I’ve found…something. I don’t know what it is. A forest in the far north, a place of perhaps twenty square miles, bound by magic I can’t penetrate. It’s dense and wild, very difficult to find. It’s like…” He frowned, thinking. “I think if I were less powerful, or if I had no magic at all, I’d be able to walk right through it and not feel or see anything out of the ordinary. But there is something there. A secret forest within an everyday one.”
“And your demon blood gives you the power to detect it?” Ryder asked.
My own blood ran cold as a horrible thought occurred to me. “You’re thinking Kilraith could be there,” I said quietly. “What you felt there is what you described. An echo of his chains on your skin.”
Talan nodded, looking grimly resolute. “I could be misinterpreting the feeling, of course, but I can’t ignore whatever it is I did feel. He could be there, or something else could be. Something that belongs to him.”
“The abducted Anointed,” Ryder muttered, his eyes glinting in the firelight.
“Or it could be a hidden weapon.”
“Or an army,” Gemma whispered.
Another silence fell, one rife with dread and unspoken questions, until Talan cleared his throat.
“There’s one more thing,” he said, rubbing Gemma’s fingers absently with his thumb. “When you travel as much as I’ve been traveling, when you stop in inns and taverns and sleep on the streets and beg beds from farmers for the night, when you wear a different forgettable face in each town, you hear all sorts of things. Rumors and stories and gossip, most of it nonsense. Tall tales, legends conjured over one too many drinks. But I’ve made note of things that seem interesting—strange words, or unfamiliar ones. Patterns in different versions of the same story. And there’s a particular story that’s been growing legs in Gallinor in the weeks since I’ve been gone. I’ve caught snippets of it everywhere, from the high streets in Summer’s Amble to the humblest seaside villages on the eastern coast.”
He drew a breath, lowered his voice. “The word I keep hearing is Moonhollow . The story around it is one of a palace surrounded by beautiful gardens, where wine runs through the streets like nectar and the food gives you such vitality that you don’t need to sleep. There, you can dance and never grow tired. There, the sun never shines, and the flowers drink only moonlight.”
Ryder grunted, waved his hand once in dismissal. “Nonsense tales spun from random pieces of Olden lore, translated by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Tales to distract imaginative children and breed lurid fantasies in the minds of bored men. And with everything that’s happened, it’s no wonder that people are turning to such stories.”
“Ordinarily I’d agree with you,” Talan said, “but in all my years wandering this world bound to Kilraith’s service, I’d never heard this particular tale of this particular place—Moonhollow. And now that we’ve fought Kilraith and sent him limping off to gods know where…” Talan trailed off.
Gemma finished for him. “Now you’re hearing of it everywhere.”
“Not everywhere. Not yet. But I’m hearing of it enough to feel uneasy.”
I picked at my thumbnail, my mind whirling. “And in Vauzanne and Aidurra? You’ve heard stories of Moonhollow there too?”
Talan shook his head. “That’s the interesting thing. No, I haven’t. It’s only here, in Gallinor.”
“And here in Gallinor stands a forest surrounded by magic that you, a demon, can’t penetrate.”
“That is no coincidence,” Ryder declared.
“No,” Gemma agreed, “nor is it a coincidence that Gallinor is where we live—Farrin, Mara, and I.”
The same thought had occurred to me, but it was too frightening to contemplate. I refused it. I rejected it. I scoffed and rolled my eyes. “Oh, and now we’ll start talking about fae blood , will we?”
Gemma was defiant. “I’m keeping my mind open to all possibilities. You might try it sometime.”
“We must go to the queen,” Ryder said, before I could respond. “Tomorrow. You’ll tell her everything you’ve observed, demon, and we’ll see how she responds. What she knows, what she doesn’t.” He paused, noticing Gemma’s pointed glare. “ Talan ,” he corrected grudgingly.
Gemma nodded. “And we’ll assess her health, see for ourselves how she has changed—or how she hasn’t—since we were last at the palace.”
“You mean I’ll assess her health,” I grumbled. That I was responding to fear and uncertainty with childish petulance didn’t paint me in a favorable light, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “You mean I’ll spy on my friend and report my observations to you.”
“More than your friend, she’s the queen,” Ryder said bluntly. “And more than her friend, you’re an Anointed magician tasked by the gods with protecting your country.”
“If the gods really wanted to protect us all so badly, they should’ve done it themselves,” I snapped. “Or done a better job of sealing us off from the Old Country. We’re not gods. It isn’t fair for us to be tasked with such a thing.”
Ryder regarded me with wry amusement. “I didn’t hear you complaining about your Anointed duties during peacetime, Ashbourne, nor do I hear you bemoaning the wealth and status afforded to your family.”
I rose swiftly, hot with shame. “That was uncalled for.”
“As is your fear,” he shot back. “You’re allowed to be frightened, but you’re not allowed to be a coward. You’re better than that.”
Unnerved by his sudden meanness, so starkly different from the gentleness with which he’d crooned to Jet only hours before, I took two angry steps toward him. “How dare you call me a coward when you’re the one who played that awful, craven trick on my father, when you beat him and humiliated him in front of hundreds of people?”
Ryder let out a disappointed hiss. “I’ve apologized for that, Farrin, and I won’t do it again. We were at war. Now we’re not. And how dare you balk at doing what must be done when your sisters are alive and well, and mine’s quite possibly dead somewhere, choking on Mist or gutted by a monster we hardly understand? A monster we only barely managed to defeat once and may not be able to beat again?”
I was stunned. There was no other word for it. I felt as if he’d punched me, and worst of all, I couldn’t blame him for it. He was right, and looking up at him—his blue eyes hard with anger and grief—I felt sick with self-loathing. They kept talking around me—Ryder and Gemma and Talan—discussing how best to travel to the palace and how we would pay a visit to Gareth at the university beforehand, but I hardly heard them, too furious with myself to pay much attention.
Ryder striding out of the room was the thing that pulled me out of my shock. I’d heard enough to understand that our meeting was over; we would leave for Fairhaven at dawn.
I hurried out of the room and caught up with him at the end of the corridor, where a pretty vine-draped atrium looked out over the entrance hall below. Afternoon sunlight poured through the tall windows, bathing everything in white and gold.
“Ryder, wait,” I said desperately, and he did, stopping at the top of the stairs. I didn’t think; I rushed over to him and touched his arm, which at the moment felt like a privilege I didn’t deserve. I held on to my courage with both hands. I had to make him understand.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. I stared at his jacket, the silver buttons at his collar. “You’re right. I am afraid. But that’s no excuse, and you’re so worried for Alastrina, and…I wasn’t thinking. I’m so sorry. Please believe me.”
He took a step toward me, lifted my chin so I had to meet his eyes. “I do believe you,” he said quietly. “And thank you. And I’m sorry for getting angry.”
“At least your anger was righteous. Mine was childish.”
“No. You’re right to keep reminding me of that day. Trina and I were fools, and it’s good to remember it. The more we remember, the less likely we are to do it again.” He paused, then gave me a small, rueful smile. “No matter how badly our parents may want us to.”
I laughed, so relieved that I felt shaky at the knees. Then Ryder came closer and held me, carefully, giving me time, perhaps, to pull away. But I could think of nothing more awful than pulling away from him, nothing more wonderful than his touch. I closed my eyes, letting myself sink into the strength of him, relishing the solid warmth of his embrace, the impossible sweetness of his head bending over mine. And again came that stitch of familiar feeling in my breast. It felt right, to be enveloped within the shield of his arms. It felt like returning to a place I’d known and missed, terribly.
In this moment of stillness, I was finally able to put a name to the sensation, and my eyes snapped open with sudden shock.
The shining boy . My heart pounding, I summoned his memory: pale skin, messy dark hair, taller than me, and, it had seemed, a few years older too. And Ryder had pale skin and dark hair, and Ryder was twenty-eight years old to my twenty-four. The shining boy had held me as we dashed out of my burning house. He’d carried me through the flames to safety. And here was Ryder, now, holding me, and only the night before, when he’d lifted me into his arms, I’d felt the same pull of belonging, the same ache.
Then Ryder was kissing my hair and releasing me, and I watched him hurry down the stairs and stride outside—to visit Jet, I assumed, and get his fill of the horses before the morning. I watched him through the stained-glass windows as he marched swiftly across the lawn, which our elemental groundskeepers were magicking a glittering gold in honor of the coming autumn. His coat snapped in the cool breeze; his hair whipped around his face, dark and wild as the animals he so loved.
Absently, I touched my hot cheeks, feathering my fingers across my skin. In Ryder’s absence, reason returned to me. I shook myself, leaning hard on the banister. Ryder, the shining boy? Alone on the landing, I nearly burst out laughing. The idea was preposterous. Worse than that, it made me doubt my own sanity. I could hear Gareth’s gently teasing voice even now. Darling, just because you’ve been held by only two men in your life besides me and your father doesn’t mean that those two men are in fact the same man. Especially when one of them might not ever have existed! Don’t look at me like that. I believe you, I always have, but we’ve got to at least acknowledge the possibility that that boy was a hallucination. You were three breaths from death, after all. Come on, now, let’s get you to bed. Clearly you need some sleep. I know, I’m being an ass. I don’t deserve you, really.
I rubbed my forehead hard, as if I could physically force my buzzing mind to fall silent, and gazed after Ryder until I felt eyes on me from below. I searched the room, the landings, and froze.
Father was there, halfway up the other set of stairs across the hall. He wore his training clothes and had a towel slung around his neck, and even from where I stood, I could feel the anger radiating off of him as he glared at me. His face was red from exertion and his hair was damp with sweat; he was fully alert, his sentinel power stoked by his exercises, and his eyes flashed. I knew what he would say. Training with Ryder was one thing, though it was hard to tolerate, but being held by him? And so tenderly?
I looked right back at him, coolly, though my heart was suddenly racing, and walked away before he could beckon me over. Once I was in my rooms, I shut the door, locked it, and sank slowly to the floor. Osmund trotted over with a chirp, and I welcomed him gladly. I tried not to think about how frightened I was of my own father, or about the sinking fear that he would never accept Ryder, never accept any of them. He would fight peace until the end of his days and die an angry old man. The thought made me terribly sad, terribly angry, and expanded ferociously until I had an awful headache and could think of nothing else. I held Osmund against my chest, pressed my face between his sweet silken ears, and let him purr my weary heart to something like calm.
***
My calm didn’t last. When Gemma, Ryder, Talan, and I arrived in Fairhaven the next morning, I knew at once that something was wrong. We stepped out of the greenway that began in the game park at Ivyhill and ended in one of the city parks abutting the university, and even there among the stately trees and the rolling lawns of gold-tipped autumn grass, the air thrummed with panic.
I saw the smoke first: a long black furl twisting up into the sky from somewhere in the city’s central district.
“Is it coming from the Citadel?” Gemma murmured.
No one knew the answer. We glanced at each other. The sight of Talan in disguise beneath a glamour that made him look like a mild-mannered, pale man of fifty, well-dressed and bespectacled, left me uneasy, even though I knew it was for our safety as well as his.
Talan shook his head at my unasked question. “I don’t sense Kilraith anywhere nearby.”
But I was not reassured, especially when we reached the university. Its buildings of pale brick were as stately as ever, capped with bell towers and clock towers and godly sculptures reaching toward the skies, but its broad, sunny streets were quiet, the air tense. Students and professors and groundskeepers were everywhere in their spotless robes and dirt-smudged coats, huddled in urgently whispering groups or walking quickly, eyes down, expressions grim. They held books in their arms, rakes in their hands; everything was ordinary at first glance. But the undercurrent of unrest was obvious, the air tight and hushed. I kept glancing fearfully at the curl of smoke, as if it were some sky beast that might launch itself at us without warning.
We hurried into the main library and up the stairs to Gareth’s office, and we’d barely reached the landing outside his door when it flew open to reveal his assistant, Heldine. She looked as prim and sour as ever, which comforted me; I’d always appreciated how no-nonsense and unpleasant she was, especially since it meant Gareth would never be tempted to flirt with her. I’d held his hand through the aftermath of many a horrible romantic mistake, but breaking the heart of a woman in his employ would be a difficult scandal for me to abide.
“Well, hurry inside, won’t you?” Heldine snapped, waving us past her and into Gareth’s private study. Bookshelves covered every wall, sagging with the weight of far too many volumes crammed onto them in haphazard piles. As soon as we entered, Gareth jumped up from his desk and ushered us inside.
“All the doors are locked?” he asked Heldine breathlessly.
Instead of looking annoyed at the implication that she hadn’t done her job properly—which I fully expected her to do—Heldine only nodded briskly. “Yes, Professor. And I’ll put the outer wards back in place at once.”
“Good, good. And the—”
“Yes, and the inner wards too.”
“Excellent. Thank you, Heldine.”
Then Gareth shut the door in her face and spun around to face us. His face lit up with excitement. “Follow me. I’ve got something marvelous to show you. But I don’t keep it in here, of course. You get all sorts of passages commissioned for you once you’re a seated professor. It’s really quite fun, in addition to being practical and necessary.”
I grabbed his sleeve before he could dash away. “Hold on a minute,” I said, exasperated. “What’s going on here? Why is everyone acting so odd? And the smoke—”
Gareth nodded gravely. “Yes, the smoke. Well, that’s part of what I want to show you. You see, since the abductions”—he threw a sympathetic look at Ryder and clapped a hand on his back, at which Ryder grunted in wordless appreciation—“there’s been a good bit of unrest in the capital, as you might imagine. Nothing too turbulent, not yet, but everyone wants to know what’s going on, of course, and what the Upper and Lower Armies are going to do about it, and what the queen’s going to do about it, and, well…”
Then he looked at me carefully, and I thought I knew what he was going to say. My heart sank.
“She hasn’t shown herself, has she?” I said quietly. “She’s been locked up in the Citadel?”
Gareth nodded. “Unfortunately, yes, which makes me suspect that whatever sickness ails her has grown worse. Some have gathered at the Citadel gates to protest the silence of the queen and the Senate, the perceived lack of action, and I don’t blame them. They’ve been lighting fires, camping out at the gates, marching along the promenade surrounding the Citadel. Nothing. The gates remain closed, no one knows if the Senate’s in session, and the queen hasn’t been seen for weeks. But something’s happening in the Citadel, whether it relates to the sinkhole or the queen or something else entirely, because look at this.”
As he spoke, he’d been leading us through a series of quiet brick passages, accessed through a bookshelf behind his desk that swung away from the wall. He ducked at last through a stone archway and flung out his arm dramatically.
There, on a plain wooden table in a cramped stone room, its only companion a single flickering lamp, sat the Three-Eyed Crown.
And it was moving .
Talan flinched at the sight. The glamour he’d woven vanished in an instant, revealing his true, ashen face. Gemma grabbed his hand and stepped a little in front of him. Ryder strode right toward the thing and leaned down to inspect it, and I followed him cautiously, transfixed despite my fear—and despite the hook of curiosity that had lodged in me the previous day. I refused to look at Ryder—his broad back, his muscled shoulders, his dark hair. Ryder, the shining boy? I had very nearly convinced myself that it was impossible. The son of my enemy, still young and rash with boyhood, having a heroic change of heart the very night his family tried to murder us? Absurd, laughable. A flowery fantasy pulled out of one of Gemma’s romantic novels. And yet vestiges of the idea lingered, annoyingly. I imagined batting them aside like a cloud of gnats and focused my attention back on the crown.
It was as if some mechanism buried within it had activated and pieces of it had unfolded, distorting its shape and exposing its inner workings. It hummed quietly as it moved through a cycle. First the crown’s band split open along its carvings into ten different squares. They popped out randomly until the whole circumference was broken into pieces. They remained that way while the great metal shards that thrust up from the band, a parody of royal splendor, sprung outward one by one, expanding, lethal, like a series of traps to catch small animals. The three amber gems embedded in the band spun wildly in their prongs. Then the crown reassembled itself piece by piece until it sat quietly on the table, its familiar horrid self once more. And then, after a moment, the cycle began again.
“Fascinating,” Ryder murmured.
“Isn’t it?” Gareth was practically bursting. “I don’t know what triggered this behavior, but it’s been going on for two days. I’m inclined to be grateful. It’s much easier to study its inner workings when they’re literally presenting themselves for inspection.”
Talan approached the crown, stone-faced, deathly pale. “I don’t sense Kilraith here. If he were manipulating the crown, I would know.” He paused, then shook his head. “It’s not pulling at me either. I don’t feel drawn to it more than any of you probably do. I can regard it coldly.” His expression darkened. “Or coldly enough, anyway.”
“No, I agree that whatever force is behind this doesn’t seem malevolent,” Gareth said. “Nor does it seem benevolent. It just is . Some sort of mechanical malfunction.”
“It’s revolting,” Gemma murmured, staring at it with an expression of utter hatred.
I agreed with her sentiment. I took a step back from the awful thing. Its very design, all those sharp edges and grinning carvings, was one of cruelty. “And you say you’ve been able to study it more easily?”
“Indeed,” said Gareth. “When it’s fully intact, the crown is difficult to inspect with even the most aggressive uncloaking spellwork—and of course it would, as a defensive measure—but when it opens up, it’s far less resistant to examination.”
“Spellwork?” I threw him a suspicious look. “But you’re no beguiler.”
He winced a little. “No, but Heldine is.”
Ryder straightened up to glare at Gareth. “You allowed your assistant to see the crown?”
“I was getting nowhere on my own. Or I suppose I was getting somewhere , but far too slowly. I’m an Anointed sage. My power is limited to intellect and memory—which,” he added, with a roguish sort of grin, “are no small things, mind you.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Gareth.”
“But, my astonishing brain notwithstanding, I can only observe so much without the assistance of other kinds of magic. That’s the wonderful thing about working at a university—professors and students with specific talents all collected in one place and books everywhere you look. We learn best by working together, but I can’t work with my colleagues as I normally would, not on something so sensitive. I can, however, work with Heldine. There’s a reason I hired a beguiler as my assistant. The stodgier of my peers thought I was mad. Only sages will do, in their opinion. So many of them are narrow-minded snobs.”
“And you trust this person?” Ryder said, a bit of a growl in his voice.
“With my life,” Gareth replied at once. “She’s a paragon of discretion, and you wouldn’t know it by looking at her, but her spellcraft is sharp as daggers.”
Ryder grunted. “A clumsy metaphor. If not properly maintained, a dagger can in fact go quite dull.”
Gareth waved his hand. “You know what I mean. The point is, she’s a vault. She won’t tell anyone a thing. And together—my translation of these arcane carvings on the crown’s surface, her investigative spellwork—we think we’ve landed upon something very exciting.”
He rifled through a stack of papers on the floor and then, with a flourish, presented a particularly long one, marked from top to bottom with indecipherable scribbles.
We stared at it, bewildered. In the silence, the crown began another cycle, unfolding itself sharply, humming quietly on the table.
“Gareth,” Gemma said, clearly annoyed, “that means nothing to us. It’s gibberish.”
“No,” Talan said quietly. “It’s not.” He took a step toward the paper, then glanced at Gareth. “May I?”
“Of course,” Gareth said, handing it to him.
Talan squinted at the paper for a long moment. “I don’t understand all of this. Your handwriting’s atrocious.”
Gareth nodded, sheepish. “It just takes too much time to write neatly, I find.”
“And I’m unfamiliar with some of these languages.”
“That’s the interesting thing,” Gareth replied eagerly. “These carvings on the crown, they’re words from hundreds of different languages. Arcane, holy, bestial. Some are so obscure I can only guess at their translations because I have no official dictionaries to use as references. But the ones I can translate all say essentially the same thing.”
“Three,” Talan murmured. “They all say three .”
I felt myself growing impatient. I’d never liked riddles, and suddenly they were everywhere. “What does that mean? Three what? Three jewels on the crown?”
“Three curses?” Gemma mused. “Three different ways of binding servants to Kilraith?”
“Or is it a label?” Ryder said. “There are multiple crowns, and this is the third one?”
Then I saw Gareth’s expression, how eager he was to tell us the answer, and my skin turned to ice.
“You think three refers to the ytheliad ,” I said quietly. “The curse that bound Talan to Kilraith, the curse powerful enough to transcend the boundary between our world and the Old Country. The curse so dangerous that the gods themselves wanted to destroy all knowledge of it. And it’s…”
I trailed off, too horrified by my own theory to voice it aloud.
Gareth did it for me.
“What I believe,” he said slowly, “is that this iteration of the ytheliad is far larger than a single curse that existed only to bind Talan to Kilraith. The crown served as a magical anchor, as we suspected, allowing Kilraith a dependable servant who could travel from one world to another and carry out his bidding. But I think it was only one such anchor, and the ytheliad Kilraith has created is vast. A curse with many parts, many functions.”
“You think there are multiple anchors,” Talan murmured, looking sick, “all of them linked to create a nexus of power for him, all of them scattered gods know where.”
“Across this world and the Old Country?” Gemma asked faintly.
“And you think this is only the third of them,” Ryder said. His frown was fearsome, his voice grave.
“Three of how many?” I whispered.
Gareth shook his head. “That’s what Heldine and I are working to find out, though the images and words she’s uncovered through her spellwork are mere fragments, like pieces of glass you’d find after something massive has shattered.” He glanced at Gemma’s gloved left hand, no doubt thinking of how her whole body had been pocked with glass not so long ago. “When you pick up a piece of glass at the site of a disaster, you don’t immediately know how many others there are, how big a thing was broken. It will take time to decipher what she’s found and to find more. But…”
“But how much time, you can’t say,” Gemma finished for him.
“No,” he agreed, and then looked up at me, and I knew at once what he would say.
I felt so tired it hurt. “But it would take less time if you had access to the royal archives.”
“We’re going to the queen anyway,” he pointed out, “and she has given us access before, whether she meant to or not. Remember that book that appeared in my hands the day the chimaera invaded the palace? The book that told us about the ytheliad , the book without which I might not have ever known this particular curse existed —”
“Yes, yes, I hear you,” I snapped, cutting him off.
An expectant silence fell. I knew they were waiting for me to say something, that what happened next depended entirely on me—and knowing that filled me with such a sudden seething anger that I had to stand there for a moment and bite down against a dozen petulant instincts, all of them telling me to run away or refuse to act or insult people who didn’t deserve it.
I felt Ryder’s eyes on me and remembered his words from the day before. You’re allowed to be frightened, but you’re not allowed to be a coward. You’re better than that.
And he was right. I was better than that. Or at least I would try to be, no matter how angry it made me that I had to try at all. I was tired of trying so hard to be everything, to do everything. So often, trying felt like climbing a distant northern mountain that never ended.
But if I didn’t climb, then what? I’d sit in the freezing snow and let it kill me?
The thought was appealing. I shook myself a little, frightened of my own mind and its capacity to conjure up all manner of dangerous fantasies.
“Well, then,” I said briskly, ignoring Ryder with extraordinary effort, “we can’t waste any more time. We’ll go to the Citadel at once. If they’ll let us through the gates, that is.”
I turned and left the room, and the others hurried to follow me.