Page 20 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

I pressed my cheek against her hair. She was so hot and small in my arms. I cupped the back of her head, chaotic magic battering me head to toe. I thought of Gemma and how agonizing this must be for her; I ached to go to her but instead held on to the queen with all my meager strength. I sang into the buzzing cloud of her hair: no words, just melody. The sweetest tune I could compose, using only the solid, whole notes, full and warm—all the pretty notes, I’d called them as a child, the ones that fill the listener’s body with blooming light.

At last, slowly, Yvaine began to relax. Her screams became whispers; her body sagged against mine. She clung to me, her face turned into my neck, and drew a long, deep breath, and was quiet.

Alastrina released her and fell back to the floor, swearing robustly, drenched with sweat. Ryder staggered a little where he crouched and then came over to me. His strong hand at my back was welcome; I wasn’t sure my shaking legs would hold up both Yvaine and me, not on their own. I wanted dearly to sit but was afraid any movement would jar Yvaine, set her screaming again.

In the sudden deafening quiet, I heard the faint sounds of a beguiler weeping and another’s wheezing breaths.

“What in the name of all the gods just happened?” Gemma whispered somewhere behind me.

“Nothing good,” Ryder answered darkly.

Before anyone could say or do anything else, a huge clamor erupted. Bells, some distant and others jarringly near, sent urgent clarion tones echoing through the cold expanse of this vast, ruined room.

Brogan rose shakily to his feet and looked wearily at the corridor that had brought us here—the corridor down which Thirsk had fled.

“If you’ll all please leave here at once and take the queen to her rooms,” he said, his voice thin and his face newly gaunt, as if keeping the ward magic intact during Yvaine’s outburst had knocked years off his life. “It seems that Councilor Thirsk has decided to implementlockdown procedures. Soon the royal guard will flood down here by the dozens, and they cannot see the queen in this state.” Then he looked right at me. “I trust you know how best to reach the queen’s chambers discreetly?”

I nodded, bristling a little to hear the suggestive tone in his voice.

“Then take her and go, and don’t be alarmed if you hear a crackling noise behind you as you depart. We must erect deflective spells to confuse the guard, and it’s complicated work.” He laughed a little, looking sadly at the sinkhole. It seemed impossible that they would be able to keep this place a secret for much longer. How many guards and advisers and palace staff already knew about it? How many kept their mouths shut only because Yvaine’s power told them to? And how many of these exhausted beguilers would soon tire of their endless work and decide to mutiny? Could they even do such a thing? Or did Yvaine have their wills too tightly bound up in her own?

These were questions I didn’t want answered. I shifted Yvaine into Ryder’s arms, noting with relief how easily he could carry her, and led everyone upstairs.

Chapter 5

For as long as I could remember, my family had visited the Citadel every month or so as guests of the queen, but it wasn’t until I was twelve years old that I understood this was because Yvaine was lonely.

Ours wasn’t the only family she regularly entertained, of course. She invited the Basks too, and every other Anointed family in the world, and low-magic families, and families who possessed no magic at all. Not a day went by when there weren’t at least half a dozen families being hosted at the Citadel, each with their own lavishly appointed apartments, supper with the queen every day, and unchecked use of every luxury the Citadel had to offer: the royal baths, the stables full of gleaming horses, the acres upon acres of royal gardens. You could spend an entire day wandering the palace grounds and see only a sliver of their splendor. Then you would stumble to your bed feeling giddy and blissfully tired, your eyes sore from drinking in every bit of grandeur they could find.

But not every family was gifted an entire house of its own, as my ancestors had been. We called it the Green House, and it was a pretty cottage on the edge of the city, large enough to hold our family and any guests who accompanied us. In the center of the cottage was agorgeous winter garden, which the queen had commissioned for my mother when I was very small. They were good friends, the two of them, always strolling about the grounds in private conference while my sisters and I romped at their feet. No one understood it. What did the queen of Edyn, the most powerful creature in the world, chosen by the gods, find fascinating about Philippa Ashbourne? My mother was only an elemental from a low-magic family; she had an admittedly keen eye for botanical magic, but that was the extent of her power.

Yvaine loved her, though. As a child I didn’t know why; I simply accepted it as the way my world worked. But as I grew older and started paying attention to such things, I noticed that the queen was more relaxed in my mother’s presence. She was more like a child, more open and funny, less regal, less frightening. She would sit in the dirt with all of us when Mother started teaching little Gemma about seeds, and she would play our silly card games like Slap the Rat and Jill-in-the-Dale and shriek and laugh just like the rest of us. I grew suspicious and started watching the queen closely; was she seducing my mother? Were they having an affair under my father’s nose? I was relentlessly sneaky. I eavesdropped on their conversations when I was supposed to be watching my sisters; after we’d all been put to bed, I crept down the stairs and listened to them chat easily by the fireside over tea and cookies. Sometimes Father would talk with them late into the night; sometimes he would sleep on the couch beside them, snoring; sometimes he would go out, and they would be alone.

But Mother and Yvaine never spoke of anything untoward, and I never caught them in a compromising position. After a long while, I felt satisfied that it wasn’t like that between them. And then, when I was twelve years old, I finally understood why Yvaine clung to us so fiercely.

Mother left us in the middle of the night that year. One morning, I woke up to find the house feeling tense and strange, an echo ofthunder pulsing in my ears. At first I thought perhaps a nightmare had followed me out of sleep; maybe it was yet another dream about the shining boy and the fire and all that smoke choking my lungs. I picked up a sleepy Osmund, tucked him into my robe, and hurried down the long corridor to my parents’ bedroom, but it was empty. The bed linens were mussed; broken glass glittered across the rug.

I stood there feeling sick, staring at the shards of glass, terrified of their wrongness. Osmund poked his head out of my robe and meowed at me unhappily.

And then I heard my father roaring downstairs, and more glass shattering, and doors being slammed open. I raced down to find the source of the noise, thinking someone or something had invaded our home and my father was fighting them. The Basks, maybe, though I knew they were trapped in a forest; my parents had told us all about it, hoping it would comfort us in the wake of the fire. Though they hadn’t confessed to hiring the elementals and beguilers who had crafted the cursed forest, I could see it plainly on their faces, and the truth sat like a slimy thing in my chest. I was glad the hated Basks couldn’t hurt us, and I took great pleasure in imagining them trying and failing to hack through trees that wouldn’t break, but at the same time it frightened me that my parents possessed the capacity for such cruelty. I blamed the Basks for that too; my parents wouldn’t need to be cruel if the Basks hadn’t forced their hand.

But that morning, the thing making my father crash through the house wasn’t the Basks or any sort of invader; it was grief. I watched from the shadows under the entrance hall stairs as he tore through every room, looking for my mother and shouting her name again and again in great booming tones: “Philippa!Philippa!” Standing there shivering, Osmund tucked under my chin, I realized that the echo of thunder in my ears hadn’t been the remnant of a bad dream. In my sleep, I’d heard the cracked roar of Father’s voice calling my mother’sname, and the sound had pulled me into an actual, true nightmare, one from which I would never wake. Only a few weeks prior, the Warden had taken Mara from us; now my mother was gone too.

When we visited the Citadel for the first time after that dreadful day, Father refused to stay at the Green House. It held too much of my mother in it; the winter garden was bursting with greenery she had coaxed into brilliant life. Instead, he dumped Gemma and me at the palace and left us to entertain ourselves while he wandered from tavern to tavern. He came home every morning stinking of smoke and drink, and he never woke until late afternoon.

The first time this happened, I was so unspeakably angry for too many reasons to name that I broke my father’s rules for the first time in my life. I fled to the Green House and took Gemma with me. She didn’t want to go, the poor thing; I think I must have frightened her, silent and furious as I was. But I dragged her there anyway and then sat in the unlit parlor for hours, dry-eyed, Osmund sleeping in my lap, while Gemma wandered the cottage grounds, crying and miserable, little Una anxiously trotting alongside her. Gemma was only eight at the time; it was terrible of me to abandon her to her own despair like that. But I was too mired in my own to care.

And then the queen came, right as the parlor clock chimed the nine o’clock hour. Gemma had fallen asleep in the grass at last, she and Una a pile of blond curls and stained skirts and gleaming white fur just outside the windows. I hadn’t moved from my spot all day, as if keeping vigil over the parlor my mother had loved would somehow summon her back to us.

Yvaine joined me in silence, her long white hair tangled and dull, her eyes red from crying. She wore a plain gray gown, and her feet were bare. She sat on the divan opposite me, hands clasped tightly in her lap, and stared at the fire. I watched her for a long time, refusing to speak. In that moment, I hated her; this was our grief, not hers. Andanyway, wasn’t she high queen of Edyn? If she wanted to, she could find where our mother had gone and bring her home.

But then Yvaine said, very quietly, “I’ve tried to find her, and I can’t. What do you suppose that means?”

I could only blink at her in astonishment. Had she heard my thoughts? Beings who could do such things existed in the Old Country—they were called readers—and perhaps the gods had given the queen that power too, along with all her other ones.

“I know it’s terrible of me to be here,” she continued. “She’s your mother, not mine. I should grant you privacy. But you see, I’m supremely selfish.” She looked up at me, and then her face did that extraordinary thing it so often did, when the strange frozen years she had lived melted away, and all that was left was a child not much older than me, looking lost and afraid.

“If I once had a family,” she told me, “I don’t remember them. Maybe I did. Maybe I was an orphan. I don’t know how old I was when the gods chose me. I remember nothing before that, except that I felt very small.”

---