Page 42 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

“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 simplyis, 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 askallfamilies to—”

“No. I wantthe queentorequireservice 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 thehistory 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 physicallykeptfrom 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 Mistwantsthe Order to patrol it. No other army will do.”

“Thegodswanted 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 thatyou’llprotect 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—youbrought 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.Thatgives 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 mycountry 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.

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