Page 79 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

“She might already know. Her ward magic might have alerted her to Ankaret’s presence.”

“If she asks, we’ll tell her. There’ll be no point in lying then. But I want to see what she’ll say when we return. If this is all some game of hers, maybe she’ll drop coy hints, pleased with herself. Or she’ll smell Ankaret on us and recognize the scent, give us information. Until then, though…”

He nodded. “We won’t say anything. Not yet.”

“Notever,” I added firmly. “That woman can’t be trusted, and neither can her home or anything she’s touched. We’ll tell the others, but not here. And meanwhile, we’ll observe her, see if she gives anything away.”

I stood, not allowing him the chance to argue, keeping my expression as fearless as I could manage, though in the crash of nerves following Ankaret’s departure, a hundred different questions boiled in my mind.War is coming, Ankaret had said. But when? And had I lost my senses to even for a moment give weight to the broken riddles of a creature I did not understand?

I tucked the feather into my coat and started walking back the way we had come, Ryder following behind me. With every stride, I wondered if my new treasure would dissolve in my hands, or if we would step back into the sunlight of the Wardwell fields and forget all we’d seen. But the feather remained, a press of warm silk in my coat, and when I closed my eyes, Ankaret’s unblinking gaze stared back at me, seared into my eyelids like the glare of twin white-blue suns.

***

The others were still talking in the cottage’s main room when Ryder and I returned.

They fell silent as we walked in. I couldn’t bear to look at any of them, and I certainly didn’t want to talk any further about gods and demigods, and mothers who weren’t entirely mothers. The walk back to the cottage had utterly drained me; I couldn’t even bring myself to observe Philippa for signs that she recognized the traces of Ankaret’s flames, or a telltale twinkle in her eye that would tell me this had been some terrible game of her design. Ryder was paying better attention than I was, I hoped. I had only the capacity to stay upright.

Philippa seemed to sense my exhaustion. She watched me quietly from her chair, the air around her hazy with pipe smoke. “Upstairs and on the left is a room you can use. The bed is clean and comfortable.”

I didn’t even acknowledge her. Gareth stood as if to join me, but someone stopped him—Ryder, probably—and I walked past them all and up the stairs. Alone in the little wood-paneled room, I took off my coat, tucked Ankaret’s feather into my bodice, and curled up on the bed, which looked very much like my bed at home: plain white linens, crisply made. I pressed my palm against the place where the feather lay and let its warmth soothe me to sleep.

When I awoke, it was night, and the house was quiet. I saw a shape across the room: Ryder, his bulk crammed onto the too-small sofa by the window, a quilt of green patchwork covering only his legs. Even in sleep, he was frowning. I was tempted to go to him, press a kiss to his brow, but I instead rose and left the room as quietly as I could. The upper floor contained three other rooms, all with closed doors, and for a moment I stood in the dark hallway, considering retreating to my bed. But I was stiff and dirty, I needed to stretch, and my growling stomach could no longer be ignored.

I crept downstairs, hardly breathing, hoping no step would creak, but my stealth was for naught. Philippa was in the kitchen, sitting alone at a small table of polished wood with elaborately carved legs, each adorned with leafy wooden vines. It was far too fine a thing to decorate a plain cottage in the middle of nowhere. The very sight of it enraged me; any hope I had of getting back to some kind of peaceful sleep was gone.

I started to leave, but of course she’d already heard me.

“You can come and eat something,” she said. She held a steaming cup of tea in her hands and stared over its rim at nothing in particular: the shadowed wall, a clock softly ticking. “There’s bread and cheese, fruit, honey. I won’t bother you.”

To leave seemed childishly stubborn; to stay felt like a concession. In the end, I obeyed my stomach. I gathered a plate of food and stood at a window eating it. Minutes passed in uncomfortable silence, and as I ate, I considered all that had happened. Ankaret’s feather seemed to pulse against my skin, as if it contained its own heartbeat. The warmth of it gave me courage; the food gave me clarity. And suddenly it seemed unimportant to examine Philippa for some sign that she knew Ankaret. If she did, so be it. A more important mission had presented itself to me, one that made me sick to consider.

I sat at the table and clasped my hands atop it. I looked at myfingers, not at her. “Come back with us. We need your help. If you are who and what you say you are, that is.”

“The others have already told me what’s happening,” Philippa said quietly, “and though it disturbs me very much—a dying Mist, a dying queen—I cannot leave Wardwell, Farrin. I’m sorry.”

She sounded sad, extraordinarily tired. I could feel her looking at me, and for a moment, a lonely part of me—perhaps a part untouched by anger, even after all these years—imagined that we were simply a mother and her daughter, unable to sleep, enjoying a quiet conversation over midnight tea.

I ripped myself from the foolish reverie and dared to look across the table at her. “Youcan’tleave Wardwell? Or you won’t?”

“It’s more complicated than that simple distinction.”

“It isn’t. Something is deeply wrong in our world. A monster is roaming free, perhaps the force behind it all. You claim to be a god reborn. And yet you’ll sit here and do nothing?”

“A god reborn, yes,” she replied wearily, “and yet even after years alone, learning how to exist in my human body, I am a mere shadow of what I once was. My power is still a child who has only just learned how to walk. And none of you can tell me who or what Kilraith is, nor the true extent of his power. What you do know is that he bound a demon to his service for years, and that this demon was the last one of many. A demon—one of the strongest Olden beings we ever created. This Kilraith possessed his mind and body, nearly defeated all of you fighting him at once, and managed this when he was not even in his true form. It was him, yes, but diluted through his possession of Talan. His real self was likely hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles away. Perhaps he was not even in the Old Country that night. And this is the sort of power he can wield? One that can transcend the boundary between the realms?”

She fell silent, as if waiting for me to answer the question. But Icouldn’t, of course; I could say nothing. My heart raced as I listened to her, this creature speaking godly words with my mother’s voice. For theyweregodly—every sentence shivered against my skin with the weight of ages.

“Gareth told me of this curse, thisytheliad,” she went on. She shook her head, her mouth thin. “I don’t doubt that we created such an abomination when we were young and stupid, drunk for millennia on our own power. But I remember nothing of it now, nothing that can help you. Whatever knowledge I hold of it is buried deep within me, perhaps lost forever, or else it might take years for me to uncover it. And what would this monster do, I wonder, this Kilraith, if he discovered there was a resurrected god in Edyn? A god who is still remembering how to be a god? Would he try to bind me as he did Talan? Or would he kill me outright? I would rather be dead than bound. But from what the others told me, I do not think he would kill me. I think he would want to use me.”

She closed her eyes, set down her cup. “Poor Talan,” she said quietly. “The things he has seen, the things he was made to do…those wounds will never heal.”

I bristled at the hopelessness in her voice. “You underestimate the strength of his love for Gemma, and hers for him. Whatever wounds they live with—some of which you yourself inflicted—they will learn from each other how to heal. They already are.”

Philippa opened her eyes and looked at me. “You speak of love with such conviction. It warms me to hear it. My little bird, with her song of starlight.”

Her expression was soft with affection, and the sight of it revolted me. A woman and a god; my mother and yet not. The contradictions were too many and too overwhelming: my mother’s voice, my mother’s body, Kerezen’s words of portent, her ability to heal a shattered physical form. Wardwell, hidden from everyone and everythingexcept for us, her daughters, because our human bodies carried, as hers did, the blood of a god. Her ward magic had admitted us easily, had called to us in that northern forest.

And Ankaret? How did she fit into this puzzle? The ward magic of my mother’s secret home had either allowed her passage, or she was powerful enough to override it.

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