Page 38 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

An awful idea began to form in my mind, one so appalling I couldn’t look at it straight on.

Ryder broke the silence. “Saska’s right.” He jerked his head at the old woman. “We should leave now, with the fight still all over us. And…” His mouth twisted; he looked furiously sad. “We should bring the child’s body, if the parents will allow it. We should bring every body we can. They might give us the strength to…”

He fell silent then, as if whatever he’d been pushing against to speak had suddenly overwhelmed him.

We began gathering the dead as the flames at the Mistline crackled on. Sobs from the villagers floated through the air like ashes. Ryder led us to the empty house of the missing Lords Wynn and Moris, where the Order’s greenway awaited us in a small garden of autumn flowers. A trowel and pail full of weeds sat abandoned among the blooms; a pitcher of cider and two half-empty glasses stood on a nearby table. I turned quickly away from the sight of them; each step I took felt loud and invasive, as though I were treading on bones.

The greenway thrummed quietly in the garden’s corner, a dark mouth of ferns and tangled vines. The old woman, Saska, had told us that the greenway permitted passage only when the Order allowedit. I glanced at Ryder, a morbid question on my lips.. “It should allow the dead to pass through unhindered,” he answered flatly, his eyes burning with quiet anger.

My stomach turned, the awful idea in my mind solidifying. Was it even possible for the Warden to keep such a secret? To bind people with magic so they couldn’t speak about the true state of the Middlemist? The idea seemed ludicrous—I’d never heard of such spellcraft—and yet everything I’d seen made me think it was true. I thought of the tapestry in the Ravenswood dining hall, all those northerners racing toward the Mist to fight monsters, and felt a fresh wave of nausea. How old was that tapestry? How long had this been happening? The unopened letters from Ryder that I’d tossed away so angrily—had he spoken of this in those notes, at least as much as he could? And the northern chants his soldiers had shouted as the royal guard took them from the midsummer ball down to the palace prison—Ariinya voshte, ariinya voshte!Had that been a message, some cryptic way to circumvent the Warden’s magic and tell everyone present what was happening? And there we had all stood, understanding nothing. And there I’d been at home, throwing Ryder’s letters into the fire.

I couldn’t look at him as we gathered at the greenway; I burned with shame, and with a desperate hope that the scenario painting itself in my mind was merely a deranged fantasy brought on by the stress of fighting chimaera.

But then an even more horrible question lodged in me, one I couldn’t shake. If this was truly the state of things, what did Mara know? What had she kept from us? Or worse, did she know nothing? Had the Warden managed to keep this a secret from her own shieldmaidens, and that was why they hadn’t come to help? I glanced at Gemma, at my father, and saw the same questions in their eyes. Gemma looked bleak; my father’s face was a mask of angry stone.

Saska and two other women from the village had to peel the quiet, dead-eyed girl from Gareth’s arms. She said nothing, but she fought them mightily, kicking with her bloody legs, reaching for Gareth with a desolate look on her face. Wordless protests burbled up from her throat; he had saved her from gods knew what during that battle, and now he was leaving her. How could he leave her? Gareth had to turn away, cover his mouth with his hand.

Once the villagers were gone, it was only us and the dead. I followed my father into the swirl of greening magic, looking back once to see Saska staring after us from the ruin of Devenmere. Beside her, Gareth’s girl sobbed, one arm stretched toward us. I turned away with eyes full of tears and let the magic take me.

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 carriedto 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 forus, your soldiers. Youpromised.”

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 ofthe 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.

Shedidknow.

Mara reached up to the falcon and stroked its breast, whispering something in an unfamiliar language. The only word I recognized wasFreyda, 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 overfrom 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.”

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