Page 122 of The Iron Flower

I gape at her. “Yes!”

Sage pulls her wand out with a practiced air and presses it lightly to the fabric of my sleeve. “What color do you want your tunic to be?” she asks mischievously.

The thought of altering my sacred black garb sends an unexpected surge of rebellious delight straight through me. I think of the most blasphemous color imaginable, laughing when I realize what it is.

“Purple!”

Sage gives a low chuckle. She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes and lets the breath out.

A vivid amethyst streams from her wand’s tip, like liquid running through the cloth, until my entire tunic is washed in the color.

I lift up a portion of my long skirt. “The skirt, too,” I seditiously urge.

Sage’s head bobs with another laugh, and she pushes amethyst into the skirt.

I stand up and twirl around for her, dressed in garb that could get me imprisoned in Gardneria. “How do I look?”

“Gloriously disobedient,” she says, a hard, subversive light in her eyes.

“What else can you do?” I ask, eager to see more.

Sage presses her wand to her shoulder and suddenly disappears. I jump in alarm for a moment, but then I see her eyes blinking, suspended in the air and camouflaged into the colors of the tapestry behind her. Sage shimmies a bit, and I can just make out the outlines of her body. Then she stills, closing her eyes, and she’s gone again.

“Holy Ancient One,” I say, both amazed and spooked. “Stop that. It’s eerie.”

Sage laughs and blinks back into existence. She twirls her wand in the air. “I can focus light and cut things with it,” she says with a grin. “Even stone.”

“That’s amazing.” I nod, impressed and heartened by the level of her power. “That could come in handy.”

“It could,” she agrees, and I notice how she carries herself with a newfound sense of her own blossoming power. Gone is the meek Sage I used to know, drawn into herself protectively, as if always bracing herself for censure.

This is a new Sage before me. Sagellyn the Light Mage.

“What happened to your sisters?” I ask, remembering that they escaped with her after Sage gave me the Wand.

“They’re here, too,” she says. “Clover is in love with this place. She’s already made a large number of soldier friends and is in weapons training.” She gives a rueful smile. “I don’t know how I’m ever going to get her to leave.”

That doesn’t surprise me. Clover was always a combative, easily stressed child. I can readily imagine her wielding a weapon. Or several. “And Retta?”

Her brow knots with tension as she considers her gentler sister. “She misses Mother Eliss. But the weavers have taken her in, and they mother her, so I think she’s as happy as she can be.” She lets out a deep sigh and sends me a sober look. “In any case, there was no way I could leave them in Gardneria to be fasted into that family of monsters.”

Fyn’ir rustles under her tunic, and she gently pulls him out, kissing him on both cheeks before cradling him in her arms.

He’s beautiful. Pudgy and drowsy and sweet. I can’t help but wonder if Ariel was cute like this before they threw her into a cage.

“I can’t believe the Vu Trin actually thought I was the Black Witch, here to kill your baby.”

Sage frowns at me as Fyn’ir snuggles against her. “It’s completely horrifying.”

I look to her worriedly. “Do you think there could be any truth to the Prophecy?”

“I don’t know,” she says, her expression edged with an anxious fear. “Everyone seems to believe in it because so many seers have scried the same thing.” Sage grows silent for a moment. “It worries me. How they don’t call Fyn’ir by his name. They call him ‘The Icaral of Prophecy’ and discuss him like he’s nothing but a weapon.”

“The Gardnerians are looking at him like a weapon, too,” I tell her. “And there’s a Mage... Her name is Fallon Bane. She’s cruel and she’s growing in power. The Gardnerians think she’s the other point of the Prophecy.”

Sage meets my ominous stare. “The next Black Witch.”

I nod. “She might be.”

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