Chapter 27
Father went to Rosewarren to bring back Mara, for which I was immensely glad. The last thing I wanted to do at that moment was argue with the Warden. I couldn’t even imagine how I would explain the impossible danger of what we must do.
When at last Gemma and Mara and I were alone in my rooms, I realized with a quiet thrum of shock that this was the first time Mara had been back to Ivyhill since she was ten years old, the day the Warden had taken her away.
She sat rigidly in one of the chairs by my hearth, Osmund purring in her lap and Una lying contentedly upon her boots. She rested her hands lightly on Osmund’s head and back, not petting him, not even moving. I couldn’t read her face, stoic and stony as it was, but when I tried to imagine what she might be thinking, how it must feel to sit in that chair in a house she knew and yet did not, my heart filled with sadness so fresh and sharp that it hurt to breathe.
But there wasn’t time for sadness. Gemma and I told her what had happened. I recited to her what the invitation had said, hating the feel of the words on my tongue. Una gave a low whine from her position on Mara’s feet.
It was the best thing I could have done. A threat, a mission, planning how best to accomplish it: this was Mara’s life. She listened hard, and when we’d finished, she said, “‘Bring any guests you desire.’” She looked wryly at me. “A pity we don’t yet have the armies ready to deploy. What a sight they would make, marching in after us. Guests indeed.”
“Who will we bring?” Gemma asked. “Talan will insist on going, and so will Father.”
“Even in his current state, yes, Talan must come.” Mara frowned. “I hate to put him anywhere near Kilraith, but of course his past experience with him could be an asset.”
“And perhaps having another sentinel to help us is an advantage we can’t ignore.”
“As long as Father can keep his temper in check,” I said, “or at least directed at the right people. That’s the thing that worries me most of all. This is Kilraith we’re talking about. He already had a talent for mind games.” I shivered a little, remembering the house of horrors we’d navigated by the Far Sea, all the cruel things those walls had whispered. “And now his arsenal includes Jaetris, god of the mind. Father has not been well, and his moods have been unpredictable. Fertile ground for Kilraith to play with, I’d say.”
“But Philippa said there are three thousand souls in Mhorghast,” Mara pointed out. “In my estimation, we need Father. We need an army.”
“Alastrina certainly thought so,” I said, remembering her dismay when she had realized Ryder and I had come to Mhorghast alone.
“Could you convince the Warden to send at least your own unit down here to join us?” Gemma asked.
Mara shook her head grimly. “Father barely managed to convince her to let me go, and I think he did so only because she’s too exhausted to fight yet another battle. If we go back and ask for more, she might forget how tired she is and become angry. At most, I could perhaps persuade her to send Nesset.”
Gemma’s face brightened at the mention of her resurrected Vilia friend. “She did say in her last letter that she’s now been on, what, twenty missions with the Roses?”
Mara nodded with a fond little smile. “Her body’s held up well, even in the thick of the Mist. If she’s not careful, the Warden might officially induct her into the Order.”
Finally I voiced a thought that had been turning slowly in my mind since I’d first read Kilraith’s invitation. “Maybe we’re thinking about this all wrong—as a battle, not a game. He’ll expect us to come ready for a fight.” I looked at Mara. “What if we did the opposite?”
She frowned. “You mean surrender immediately?”
But Gemma seemed to catch on, her eyes sparkling. “You mean arrive not with our swords drawn but with our dancing shoes on. A celebration, the invitation said. A glorification.”
“So we celebrate,” I said. “We dance and enjoy the party, entertain the revelers. Kilraith has invited us into his city. He’s even going to send the road for us, if that letter can be believed, and I think it can. Based on how strange Gilroy was acting, Kilraith delivered his invitation in person. If he wanted to kill us, he would have done it already. Talan said he likes games. I think he’s curious about us. I think he wants to show off what he can do and see how we respond.”
Mara looked at me thoughtfully. “An experiment.”
“Something like that. We’ll bring Talan. He won’t expect that, not when Talan’s been constantly on the move specifically to elude him. We’ll join in the fun. He won’t expect that either.”
“Surprise will be our weapon,” Mara agreed. “Defiance of expectations.”
“He might think we’ll come with an army at our backs,” Gemma said, “or bring no one at all so as not to endanger anyone else’s lives.”
“How noble of us,” Mara said drily.
“And so we’ll do neither of those things,” I said. “No army, and we won’t go alone either. A single companion each?”
“Like proper, polite guests,” Gemma said, amused.
“Nesset, Talan.” Mara looked at me. “Father?”
I sighed. It was the right thing to do, and yet the thought of Father at my side during such a mission left me uneasy. “I suppose. If we can’t have an army, at least we’ll have him.”
Mara looked at me keenly. “Do you really believe what you said earlier? That his temper could be a liability?”
“To be perfectly honest, when it comes to Father these days, I don’t know what to think. He’s at his best when he’s fighting.” I smiled sadly. “Maybe this will give him the outlet he’s been craving since we all stopped trying to kill each other.”
Another silence fell. The name Bask hung in the air, and suddenly I found it hard to swallow past the dull pain in my throat. Ryder. I closed my eyes. Ryder, hold on. Gareth, stay strong. We’re coming.
After a moment, Gemma asked, “Do you think Kilraith knew Mother was here when he sent that invitation?”
“If he didn’t before, he does now,” Mara said. “That invitation was a spy. Hopefully Wardwell’s magic remains strong enough to hide her.”
“He may have realized Kerezen was here,” I mused, “but not who she is besides that.”
“In other words, he may not realize who we are,” Gemma added. “ What we are. Though he may suspect, or at least wonder.”
“Hence the invitation,” Mara said, nodding. “He wants to observe us, test us, show us he’s not afraid. We beat him once. Can we do it again, now that he has a god to use as a weapon? What’s the limit of our strength?” She began to pet Osmund at last. “Once he has his answer, he may strike to kill.”
“Or he’ll tell Jaetris to do it,” Gemma said darkly. “Maneuver him into our minds and make us do the killing for him. Just as he did to Talan.”
“So we’ll keep surprising him,” I said. “We’ll keep him guessing, entertained, distracted.”
“And while he’s distracted, we’ll find the egg.”
“If the egg in fact exists,” Mara pointed out, “and if its function is what we think it is.”
“I choose to believe it does,” Gemma said, “and that our suspicions are correct. It makes too much sense not to. So we’ll destroy it, break his hold on Jaetris and thereby his hold on everyone else.”
Mara made a thoughtful noise. “It’ll be a shame not to be able to study the egg as we’ve done with the crown.”
“But anything that’s been used to control a god…” I said.
“Exactly,” Gemma agreed. “It must be destroyed. Hopefully we’ll be able to gather any information we need by questioning the freed prisoners.”
Right away, I thought of the harpy, Nerys, and the ruthlessness on Mara’s face as she’d interrogated her. An awkward silence fell.
Mara met each of our gazes evenly. “You’re thinking of Nerys. She’s still alive, you know, kept under tight guard. It’s a drain on our resources, and the Warden wants to execute her, but I won’t allow it.”
I bit my tongue, thinking that Mara had allowed quite enough to happen to Nerys. I lightly touched the pocket of my dress, inside which Ankaret’s feather rested. I hadn’t used it that day to help Nerys, and I’d regretted it ever since.
Mara considered Osmund’s silky ears, petting each one with reverent care. Whatever she felt about Nerys, she kept it well hidden. “‘A storm that sometimes lives in the walls,’” she murmured. “And he took the form of a bird while attacking the capital?”
“Among other things, yes,” I answered.
“Hmm. Where do birds keep their eggs?”
“In their nests,” Gemma answered, frowning. Then her face lit up. “The palace in Mhorghast. He’s hidden it there, and part of him lives in the walls, guarding it.”
“It’s only possible that it’s there,” Mara said. “We can’t know that for sure. And we don’t know where in the palace it would be. It seems a good place to start, at least, but it will be well guarded.”
“Jaetris could be there too,” I guessed. “All Kilraith’s most valuable treasures, tucked away where he goes home to roost.”
“He’ll do everything in his power to stop us before we get that far,” Gemma said. “And he’ll want to separate us. The last time we faced him, all of us together, we bested him.”
Barely , I thought, with a frisson of fear that I pushed past with no small effort. “So we’ll not let each other out of our sights,” I said. “That way, if someone starts to stray, the others can reel them back in.”
“Which may be difficult. He may want to play a game, but he’s not a fool. He’s dealt in lies and cruelties for longer than any of us have been alive. The stories Talan has told me…” Gemma shuddered. “At his core, he’s impatient, capricious.”
“And boastful,” Mara added. “Everything you’ve told us of Mhorghast, Farrin, screams of decadence and swagger. In such pride lies the potential for great error.”
“Then we’ll take advantage of that,” I said. “Entertain him so completely that he won’t notice how close we are until it’s too late.”
Gemma looked doubtful. “How are we supposed to do that?”
“I have some ideas,” Mara mused, her gaze distant.
I took a breath, then withdrew Ankaret’s feather from my dress and held it gingerly in my palms. It was the strangest thing I owned, and perhaps our greatest advantage. I could no longer keep it for myself. I remembered how Kilraith had pleaded with Ankaret as they had battled above the capital. Beloved , he’d called her.
I looked up at my sisters, who stared at the feather in wonder.
“So do I,” I said.
***
Two days later, the moonlight road came without warning.
We were all in the dining room, dressed and ready, existing in a sort of tense daze. The table was scattered with daggers and small pistols from Father’s collection of Lower Army gear—weapons we could easily hide in our boots and under our coats to maintain the appearance of revelry rather than combat. We had no way of knowing when Kilraith would send for us, or if he would even send for us at all. My mind raced with doubts. What if this entire thing was a trick? The road would never come, and while we were here waiting for it, something terrible would happen elsewhere. We were fools to enter Mhorghast without an army, without even a proper arsenal of weapons. Weeks ago, Gemma had described her panic to me, how episodes of it could render her numb with dread or frantic with fear. I thought I was beginning to understand what that felt like.
I sparred with Mara, desperate to calm my nerves. Nesset sat nearby, appraising us with narrowed eyes. The Warden had allowed her to leave Rosewarren after all. “A little too hastily,” Nesset had commented wryly. “She doesn’t care if I come back, but she’s more than happy for me to look after her favorite.”
She’d said it without any real feeling other than amusement, and ever since she had hovered around Mara with the air of a fussy nanny, hardly leaving her side. I was glad for her looming presence. She was tall and muscular and fearsome, her gnarled flower-woven skin as rough and gray as it had been when I’d first met her. She wore a plain dress with a bodice of tough leather, and her eyes darted everywhere—calculating, eager. Ready to fight.
Glad as I was of her presence, I tried not to look at her as she watched me. I knew I was clumsy, that next to Mara I looked like a tottering kitten, especially with my fiddle strapped to my back. But I would have it with me in Mhorghast, and I needed the practice.
Talan sat with Father, both of them poring over the map of Mhorghast I’d drawn. We had studied it for nearly two days straight, and the longer everyone looked at it, the more nervous I became. What if I had misremembered something? What if the layout of the place had changed entirely and all our studying was for naught? I wished I’d been able to consult with Alastrina, but since Philippa’s departure, she’d fallen insensate, not responding to my singing, not speaking even to Illaria, who sat tirelessly with her upstairs. Gemma fussed around everyone, adjusting our fine dresses and suits and honing the minor glamours she’d put on our faces and hair. Every now and then, she sat to catch her breath, looking a little pale, and in those moments, no matter where she was, Talan found her at once and held her, murmuring to her until she’d regained her strength.
Watching them was a dual torment. I was worried for them both. Thanks to Talan’s demon blood, Madam Moreen’s excellent care, and Philippa’s careful, quiet power, he had healed quickly from his wounds. But for all his bravery, asking him to go to Mhorghast felt like asking a boy to return to a nightmare from which he’d only just awoken. And then there was Gemma. In Kilraith’s house of horrors at the Far Sea, she’d been extraordinary, pushing past her pain to fight as fiercely as any Rose. Even at the Citadel, without the Old Country enhancing her power, she’d torn trees from the grounds when Yvaine had attacked me, commanding their sprawling roots with ease. But I knew my sister. She was expert at hiding her hurts, and none of us knew what Mhorghast, what Kilraith, would demand of her, or of any of us.
Worst of all was the agony of seeing Gemma and Talan together—how sweetly they touched each other, how they huddled together as if they existed in a world that belonged to them alone. How easily Talan could make Gemma smile and ease her pain. How soft his eyes were when he looked at her.
Not so long ago, I’d known what that felt like. I’d known passion, tenderness, devotion, and then I’d pushed it away. My reason for doing so seemed even more foolish now, with Ryder gone. If I had known what would soon happen to him, I would have forgiven him at once, maybe even forgiven myself. I would have held him to me and never let him go, not until the turning of the world forced us apart. And now he was gone, and though I tried for fierce hope, it kept slipping from me, dislodged by horrible images. Ryder afraid and in chains; Ryder with his throat slit; Ryder with white eyes that didn’t know me.
Distracted, I didn’t see Mara’s staff coming at me. It clipped my leg and sent me stumbling to the floor.
Nesset clucked her tongue. “Good thing you fell on your knees and not on your back. That fiddle’s far too fragile for battle, and you’re such a slight thing, and too slow. You don’t need any extraneous weight dragging you down.”
I glared at her as Mara helped me up. I heard the judgment in her voice and her true criticism—not unkind, simply assessing. I was too fragile for battle, she meant. Yet another doubt slithered into my mind to join the countless others.
“I don’t know, Nesset,” Mara said briskly, readying her staff. “Cira’s fifteen and thin as a reed, and she’s knocked you on your ass more than a few times. I’d think you’d know better by now than to judge every fighter’s abilities by the same measure. And I think you’ll be glad to have Farrin’s fiddle with you, before the end. Not every weapon looks like yours.”
Mara shot me a small smile, and I returned it, raising my staff once more. I thought of Ryder’s steadiness, the solid bulk of him a ballast against the world, and tried to find some of that steadiness within my own teetering nerves. Ryder would want that for me; he’d want me to be sharp and alert. He would believe me capable of it. I took a step toward Mara, gripping my staff hard with both hands.
But before I could let it fly, Talan spoke softly from the table. “Wait,” he said. He stood, an odd expression on his face. He looked to Gemma, then took a breath. He looked remarkably unafraid. “It’s here.”
And it was, the shimmering length of the moonlight road unfurling down the front steps of Ivyhill like a silver banner. We loaded ourselves with weapons and went to it in silence. The household had been prepared for the lure of this eerie, gleaming path. Carbreigh and his crew of elementals, as well as our house guards, sternly held back the other servants and the few refugees from neighboring towns whom we’d welcomed into the house after the most recent wave of abductions. There were only six of them so far, but the lostness on their faces, the grief and fear they dragged through Ivyhill like stones, told me more would come. Whatever was happening, whatever Kilraith had planned, was only just beginning.
Nesset went first, followed by Mara. Talan took Gemma’s hand and followed. Unease coiled tightly inside me as I watched their shapes glimmer, fold in on themselves, and disappear. I felt none of the giddiness that had come with my first sighting of the road. It was simply there before me, a beam of light, waiting. No tricks, no coy glimmers at the corner of my eye. It had been sent with clear intent.
Father stepped up beside me. He was brimming with energy, the air around him snapping hot with sentinel power. It was a reassuring sight—the familiar neat cut of his beard, his flinty brown eyes, the grim set of his jaw; he was a soldier, and I was glad to have him with us—but when our gazes locked, a whole current of unsaid things passed between us, memories that hurt me to think of, even if I only looked at them sidelong. My wrists twinged with phantom pain, and the tender parts of my heart that had only just begun to heal with the balm of Ryder’s love ached anew. They remembered, and they always would, every fit of temper, every drunken stupor. Every blurry month of grief when Gemma and I hadn’t had a father, only a distant, brooding man stuck in the mire of his own sorrow and anger, forgetting he had daughters at all.
If we made it through this, would I somehow find the courage to tell him this? To confess how he’d hurt me, to tell him how close he was to losing me? Looking at him, I thought of Alaster Bask in his cold black house, little Ryder and Alastrina hiding in the cupboards. My eyes burned with tears I couldn’t afford.
“What is it, Farrin?” Father asked. The promise of conflict had brought him a clarity that had been all too rare in recent months. His voice was full of concern, and his gaze was bright and sharp. There were lines around his eyes, and I noticed for the first time that his golden-brown hair was beginning to gray at the temples. If anyone tried to hurt me, he would fight them to his death.
There was a lump in my throat—a knot of love, fierce and frustrated and tender. I gave my father a small smile. “Nothing,” I said. “I’m ready.”
Then I took a breath and stepped onto the moonlight road, expecting to find what I had seen before: a glittering city, gardens, a palace. Houses full of music and dancing; Olden creatures everywhere, both gorgeous and grotesque.
But the passage was swift, uneventful, and all that awaited us on the other side was a great dark expanse with seemingly no end. The ground was neatly cobbled, each stone glimmering with faint white light. Overhead shone the eternal moon. And beneath it stood three distinct shapes. Two of them I recognized. One was Talan’s house by the Far Sea. One was Ivyhill, its turreted silhouette unmistakable.
The third thing I’d never seen, but I felt a chill of recognition nonetheless. It was a black lake, huge and calm, the moon reflecting off its surface like light on glass. The full moon.
A goblet, a key, an egg. A black lake under a full moon.
The others stood nearby in their finery, all of them frozen like I was. My sisters were breathtaking, each line of their bodies gilded from the inside out. Their hair was thick and streaming, streaked with starlight. Specks of gold made their eyes shine, and the air around them rippled softly, as if they moved through shallow water so clear it was impossible to see. Their gowns shone of moonlit silk, each pleat and fold casting soft starbursts of light across the road.
Seeing them, seeing me , Father took a stunned step back.
“Gods, it’s true,” he whispered.
“I don’t understand,” Gemma said unsteadily. “This is Mhorghast?”
They were all waiting for me to say something; I’d been here before, I’d drawn the map. But my shock at seeing Mhorghast so changed left me speechless. Everything I’d told them had been rendered useless the moment we arrived.
“Someone’s here,” Talan breathed. In the Olden air, he stood taller, his dramatic beauty startling. “Can’t you hear them?”
And suddenly, hardly daring to breathe, I could—faint whispers, a distant chorus of voices. I closed my eyes, straining to listen. Laughter, music, drums. A tambourine?
“It’s a trick,” Nesset growled. With her hard gray fingers, she pried loose a stone from the cobbled road and tossed it, fuming. A wave of laughter, whisper-soft, cascaded over us in response.
I remembered how the shape and breadth of Mhorghast had shifted when Ryder and I had last been here—how the towering palace had been itself one moment and the next a mountain had stood in its place—and struggled against my rising terror for composure. “It is a trick. The city changed often when we were here. The shape and substance of the road, the size of the city, the placement of things. They shifted without warning.”
“Perhaps the whole thing is an illusion,” Father said, glaring around. “Not a true city at all, just a construction of magic.”
“Magic bolstered by Jaetris, no doubt,” Gemma whispered. She looked back at me. “We thought ourselves so clever, coming here dressed to celebrate, not to fight. But this is…” She gestured miserably at Talan’s house. “This is another kind of game entirely.”
“A game,” Talan suggested, his voice hard and angry, “or a show.”
My heart racing, I began to hum under my breath. As I did, I concentrated on the sensation of Ankaret’s feather against my skin and thought one word: truth . I infused every crystalline note with it, and as I sang, vague shapes shimmered into being. Each one was brief, disappearing as soon as I looked directly at it. But I saw enough. We were being watched by thousands of staring eyes situated hundreds of feet above us. It was like Alastrina’s arena, I realized with a cold twist of fear. We were on some grand stage for the entertainment of the entire city. I saw only fuzzy shapes, blurs of color, but I could guess who was there—every smiling vampyr I’d seen in Mhorghast, every glittering nymph, every desperate human. Somewhere in the crowd was Luthaes, Alastrina’s dazzling fae keeper with the burnished copper skin.
I stopped singing, my mouth suddenly dry. “They’re all watching us,” I whispered. “Thousands of them, seated above us.”
“Waiting for us to do what ?” Nesset snapped. “Dance for them? Play your fiddle?”
“No,” Mara said quietly. She was staring at the lake, breathing hard. Seldom had I seen my warrior sister afraid, but the look on her face now was one of abject terror. “No, not again. No. No. ”
A glint of light caught my eye, drawing my attention back to the silhouette of Ivyhill. My heart sank as I saw flames shooting out of a first-floor window. At the same moment, the windows of Talan’s house lit up all at once, and a bonfire sprang to life on the shore of the lake—an odd one with an eerie, still light that was hard to look away from and seemed somehow to smile.
I turned to Mara, a question on my lips, but she was drifting away from us toward the lake, her gait stiff and strained. A faint path of moonlight unfurled at her feet.
“Nesset,” she said tightly. “Do you feel that?”
“Yes,” said the Vilia, her voice suddenly small. “What is that?”
I felt it too, my legs suddenly carrying me forward without my permission, some invisible force—an unignorable compulsion—crackling impatiently at the backs of my thighs.
“Father, dig in your heels,” I told him, taking the fiddle from my back. He obeyed, the stubborn force of his sentinel power rooting him in place—for now. “Hold on to my waist,” I said. “Keep me here for just a moment longer.” He obeyed, and I cradled the fiddle under my chin and began to play.
Wait , I thought, drawing the bow across the strings with ease. Hold. A mule refusing to move. Beautiful Jet, back home at Ivyhill, snapping at anyone who dared come close with a lead rope. A mountain, a wall of stone. My fingers knew what to do, even as they shook with terror. A lilting waltz, popular at weddings. Easy, cheerful.
“Everyone listen to me,” I called out. “Listen to the music and remember yourselves, no matter what he shows you. We’ve done this before. We’ve faced Kilraith, we’ve seen through his deceptions, and we survived. We can do it again.”
It was a desperate guess at what Kilraith intended. He liked games, and Jaetris was the master of illusions. What better way to torment us than to separate us and force us to relive our worst nightmares? A grand game for the spectators, and for Kilraith most of all. I watched helplessly as they staggered away from me—Gemma and Talan toward his lonesome seaside house, Mara and Nesset toward the lake. Warring noises pulled at me from both directions. From the house on the Far Sea came a crash of waves; from the lake, pounding drums. On the lake’s distant shores, I saw dark flittering shapes. As afraid as I was, I still felt a twinge of curiosity. What was Mara seeing? What memory had Kilraith conjured for her?
In the distance, Ivyhill’s fire was growing fast. Father blew out a furious breath. I could feel him fighting to hold on to me, fighting the force that commanded us to move.
“You’ve done this before!” I called out once more. “You can do it again. Trust yourselves, not him!”
A low rumble grew all around me, like the climb of a cresting wave. Its roar swallowed my voice. Ivyhill’s flames spilled orange and gold across the world. Father let out a pained grunt and released me. The fiddle and bow flew out of my hands and disappeared, and the world raced forward beneath me. I had to run to keep from falling, but I couldn’t run fast enough, and soon the ground reared up beneath me, bucking me off my feet. I flew forward into a yawning black void.