Page 2 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

Farrin loved plans. Music was full of them, and once you understood what the composer’s plan was—how all the notes fit together and why—the whole of the music became clear to you, laid out in tidy lines and phrases, like bricks set one by one until a house was made. And then it was up to you, the musician, to expand upon that plan laid out before you and make it your own. Fill it with furniture, adorn it with color.

The notes of Merrida Jan-Tokka’sSonata for an Autumn Morningraced through Farrin’s head: the third movement, joyous and urgent. Leaves spiraling on a brisk breeze, whirlwinds of orange, torrents of gold.

Farrin held on to the notes with her mind and her heart. She had learned that piece when she was five, and she’d performed it for the household staff—her first performance, euphoric, terrifically nerve-racking. A celebration, a perfect night. The house done up in shades of amber and tangerine and gilded scarlet, the windows thrown open to a black chilly sky, stars like snow flurries. Mara, three years old and overcome by the music, hiding her bashful face in Mama’s sleeve. Baby Gemma cooing with delight—gold curls and bright blue eyes, already a beauty—and waving her socked feet from her perch in Papa’s arms. Papa beaming with pride, so handsome with his broad smile and strong jaw, his golden-brown hair that looked just like Farrin’s.

And Mama—Gemma’s blue eyes, Mara’s brown hair, skin pale as the moon. She had pulled Farrin into her arms afterward, with the house all a-clamor, Gilroy wiping his eyes on his sleeve, Mrs. Rathmont—tearful, ruddy-cheeked—passing around tiny iced cakes, perfect domes of sugar. Everyone elated, everyone’s head full of Farrin’s music.

Mama had pressed her cool cheek to Farrin’s hot one and said quietly in her clear, clean voice, “Your music, little bird, will give the gods new life.”

Stumbling down the smoky hallway, pawing at the walls for a doorknob, Jan-Tokka’s sonata ringing in her memory, Farrin finally found one of the guest parlors and shoved hard at the door. It barely gave way, swollen and sweating, damp with heat and a crackling, sour magic, and when she tumbled inside, she fell forward onto her hands and knees, and she did not get up.

Shecouldnot get up. She could only crawl across the rug, and she did so, one-handed, holding poor Osmund to her chest. He was frighteningly still, his heartbeat faint. Could she even still feel it at all?Yes, he’s alive, she told herself, staring ahead at the far wall, stubbornly clawing her way forward.He’s alive, we’re alive, I’m alive.

Her head hit something solid. The wall. She’d made it. The wall held three windows, and the closest one was maybe two feet above her head.

Gasping, blinking hard, she reached for it. She would push it open. She would pound it to pieces if she had to.

Her hand shook; her arm buckled. She collapsed on the floor and stared at the red-and-blue floral wallpaper. It was peeling away from the wall in jagged strips. Each strip screamed as it unfurled, like the voice of a tiny log creaking in a fire. Woozy, coughing so hard she felt like her chest might burst open, Farrin laid her spinning head on the carpet and cried. Her sobs were weak, her lungs black, each breath harder than the last.

A single charred ivy leaf drifted down from the rafters and fell before her nose, and Farrin grabbed it and held it to her lips. It was a piece of her mother, and it was the last thing she would ever see. She tried to breathe, desperate to find some lingering scent of her mother’s perfume or the woodsy tang of her mother’s botanical magic, but breathing only made the blackness come faster. Farrin closed her eyes.

Then—a light, flickering and white. It shone even through her closed eyelids, and it was so strange, so clean and bright, that Farrin, trembling on the knife’s edge of her young life, found the strength to open her eyes.

A figure knelt beside her. Right there, impossibly, next to the screaming wallpaper. Gangly, graceless, all awkward elbows and long legs. Half boy, half almost-man.

And he wasshining, a glow radiating from him as if some Anointed artisan had devised a way to paint a living being with starlight. Luminous, a beacon. A shining boy.

Stranger even than the light of him was the mask he wore—made of cloth, Farrin thought, with his nose and mouth covered and the eyes blacked out. Frightening, crude. The mask covered his face entirely, even hiding most of his hair, though Farrin could see a few damp, dark strands escaping the mask.

He reached for her. Pale hand, sweaty and soot-blackened.

“Don’t be afraid,” he told her. His voice was neither deep nor high, crackling somewhere in between. It was rough but kind, and his dirty hand was steady.

“I know the way out,” he said.

Farrin hesitated. The shining boy was bright and lovely, but the world around him was hot, shimmering, terrible. The house was furious; everything shook. The sound of shattering glass exploded far too close, and then came a great sucking noise like all the air in the room being gulped away. At the same moment, the boy lurched forward, knocked Farrin back to the ground, threw his body over hers, and held her there, tucked safely against the wall. Both of them shaking, both of them breathing hard.

When Farrin opened her eyes, she saw a floor glittering with glass. A terrible hopelessness flooded through her. The house was falling apart around them; they would never find a way out. The boy was lying; the boy wasn’t even real. She was dying; she was dead.

Just then, Osmund poked his head out of her nightgown and glared up at the shining boy—angry yellow slits for eyes—and he mewed, the plaintive cry he used to announce to the world that he was hungry. The squished, indignant sound gave Farrin strength.

She grabbed on to the shining boy’s hand and nodded against his chest.

He squeezed her hand tight, then pressed something to her mouth—a thick cloth, cool and damp, the most incredible thing Farrin had ever known.

“This will help you breathe,” the boy shouted, but Farrin was already gulping down whatever air she could find, leaning hard against the boy as he put his arm around her and hurried her out of the parlor, down the hallway. Which hallway? Which stairs? Farrin didn’t know, couldn’t follow the path they were taking. The house was a shifting labyrinth, the throat of a beast, and the blessed cloth against her mouth was drying up. Her lungs were choking her again—two black fists, twisting smaller and smaller in her chest. One hand cradling Osmund, the other held tight in the shining boy’s hand.

Something crashed overhead. The boy spit out a nasty curse, his hand so tight around hers that it hurt. He darted away, pulling her with him, just as a huge shadow fell out of the sky. A piece of charred ceiling, black and glowing, crowned with seared ivy.

“This way!” the boy shouted, as if Farrin had some choice in the matter. The boy’s grip was iron, his strength unending. Flames roared around them, spitting smoke and sparks. Collapsing walls chased them down hallways that seemed never to end.

And through it all, not once did the shining boy flinch. He was like some great eagle, Farrin thought dreamily, colors spinning in her eyes. Orange, gold, throbbing red, blots of black. A great eagle with her held safely under his wing, flying her all the way out to the ocean. No wind could stop him, no storm, no shadow. His eyes were bright and clear, and he knew the way home.

“Farrin!” he screamed from very far away. “Farrin, come on! Keep walking!”

But she couldn’t keep walking. Her feet were made of stone, and besides, feet needed lungs to work, and lungs needed air, and therewas no longer air to be had.

The world spun around her, lifting her, jostling her. She was running; no, the world was ending, splitting open.

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