Page 12 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

Its words burst out of me. “I suppose you were too busy bedding barmaids and getting in pissing contests with your colleagues over whose brain is bigger to send me a note reminding me of your visit? But I shouldn’t expect you to extend such a common courtesy to me if you can’t even find it in you to send a letter to your poor mother.”

Silence fell between us like an ax. After a long moment, too horrified to apologize, I dared a look up at Gareth and felt sick. He was smiling, but his eyes, normally so full of mirth, were ice cold.

“You know, Farrin,” he said evenly, “bedding barmaids can be a fantastically fun time for all involved. Maybe if you tried it on occasion, you’d actually be pleasant to be around.”

We stared at each other, and I saw the regret on his face, and the hurt. He hadn’t wanted to say that to me, not really, but I didn’tblame him for it. We knew better than perhaps anyone else in the world how to hurt each other, and we’d done it—fast and lethal, like knives thrown by a sure hand.

He broke first, blowing out a soft breath. “Farrin.” He rubbed a hand across his brow. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Tell me what’s happened. You’re clearly not yourself today.”

But I was. Iwasmyself, whatever that meant. This muddled, angry, sad woman was me, and I couldn’t bear for her to be in the same room as Gareth for another second.

I found my notebook on the floor, stood shakily, and put my hand on Gareth’s sleeve.I’m sorry.I squeezed his shoulder; I couldn’t yet speak. I hoped he would understand. I fled upstairs, clutching my notebook to my chest.

***

That night, I tried it. Itried, as I hadn’t in ages.

Maybe if you bedded a barmaid.

I lay in my bed, naked, sweating—not with desire but with nerves, with exhaustion. I’d been touching myself for nearly an hour, and all I’d earned for my trouble was soreness. My fingers were shriveled and clammy, my cunt dry and tired.Cunt. I forced myself to say the word into my pillow, hoping the vulgar shock of it would do something, awaken some latent spellwork buried deep within me. I imagined bedding a barmaid, Gareth, Talan, poor sweet Emry, my stolid lady’s maid, Hetty. Even Byrn, our whiskered groom. My mind was a fever of bodies and mouths, hands and whispers, none of it focused, all of it frantic.

But even though every muscle in my body felt wound tight with desperation, the feeling of release everyone went wild about—the feeling I’d read about exhaustively, the feeling Icraved—remained, as ever, out of reach.

At last I subsided, damp and miserable in my bed, my chest litup with remnants of the day’s anger. I curled into a knot and burned quietly, watching the dying fire in the hearth, listening to Osmund’s cat snores at my feet.

Tomorrow I would wake before the dawn, and it would all begin again.

Exhaustion at the thought of enduring such a thing brought me the oblivion that touching myself never did. I fell asleep hoping I would dream of ecstasy, and knowing from experience that I would not.

Chapter 3

Normally, when I had occasion to visit the capital city of Fairhaven, it was cause for celebration, for a visit there meant I would see Yvaine Ballantere, queen of our world of Edyn and one of my dearest friends. Between her and Gareth, I was spoiled rotten with friendship, both of them good and kind and beautiful, both with rascally senses of humor and excellent taste in food. But on this particular day in Fairhaven, at the Citadel in the city’s center, with everything done up gloriously in blue and charcoal and silver, in green and ivory and gold, I entered the Pearl of the Sea Ballroom feeling cold with dread from head to toe.

Gareth and I had hardly spoken since that day at Ivyhill a week prior. He’d kept mostly to the library, poring through our collections for information about theytheliad—the curse that had bound Talan to the creature Kilraith. Gemma had kept him company, equally curious about theytheliad, I suppose, though I was too busy to ask her about it, or else used that as an excuse to avoid both of them.

And besides Gareth, there was the matter of my father.

Nothing out of the ordinary had happened since the day we had argued; it was as though the two strangers he’d met with had never existed. In fact, he had spent the week leading up to the ball moreengaged in the estate than he’d been in some time. He’d visited the tenant farmers, worked alongside Mr. Carbreigh in the gardens, even taken every last one of our horses out for a long ride about the grounds.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible was about to happen. A kernel of worry turned over and over in my stomach—a small thing, and yet it sent uneasy ripples all through me.

“What’s wrong with you?” Gemma whispered at my side. “You look like you’re about to be walked over the edge of a cliff.”

I glanced at my sister. She, of course, was resplendent, wearing a diaphanous gown the color of pink rose petals, the entire thing overlaid with delicate, diamond-spangled lace. Her golden curls were piled on top of her head. Shimmering peach powder dusted her cheeks, lips, and collarbones. And she wore gloves, of course—intricate lace, with coy ribbons winding up her forearms. She wasn’t yet comfortable baring her net of lightning-white scars to the world.

I didn’t blame her. Lovely as they were, and as proud of her as I was for what she’d endured to get them, it didn’t feel safe to have anyone’s eyes upon them but ours.

Nothing felt safe at the moment.

“I feel unhinged,” I muttered to her. “Father’s been strange all day. Too cheerful. Evenrosy. There are so many people here. And I hate this dress.”

“Rubbish. You look marvelous.”

“A subjective assessment that doesn’t change my hatred.”

Gemma sighed, placed a hand on my lower back, and guided me to a small, curtained anteroom on the ballroom’s perimeter. I was so grateful to be led away from the crush of people crowding the dance floor, the feast tables, and the wide veranda with its doors flung open to the evening that I didn’t even protest her bossing me around without explanation. Inside the anteroom were two low, tufted benchesand, hanging on the wall, a tall mirror in a gilded frame.

I immediately tried to turn away from the thing, but Gemma stopped me, her grip surprisingly firm on my shoulders. “We’re going to stand here,” she said, “until you can look at yourself and tell me how beautiful you are.”

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