Page 82 of Fortress of Ambrose
Yagrin distanced himself from the commotion, and the shade of ancestors shifted, rushing his way. But when they reached him, they stopped.
Ellery grabbed Isla by the collar. She clawed at his wrists. “Your reign as Headmistress has ended, Mother.” He raised the dagger above Isla, and something shot past them in a blur, slamming into Ellery’s side. The redhead tumbled sideways, bleeding, a dagger stuck in his arm. He pulled it out and flung it aside.
“Drew!” Headmistress Oralia reappeared, dashing over. “We promised the Perls that he would besafehere.”
But they dusted themself off, meeting the malice in Ellery’s eyes. “No one’s committing murder on these grounds.” They pointed. “You can leave.Anyone else with you isn’t welcome here. House of Perl be damned.”
Litze looked like she’d seen a ghost.
Drew dusted themself off. “I’m nothing like you, and I’m done hiding that. Try standing for something for a change. Oralians not interested in cosigning murder, with me.”
Yagrin moved closer to Isla, who watched breathlessly as the crowd thinned. Nore said she needed her mother alive.He tugged at Isla’s sleeve, pulling her toward him, when Nore gasped, like a drowned person coming back to life.
Her eyes batted open. “Yagrin?”
As Nore came to, the ancestors closed in around their trio. It felt like standing in the eye of a hurricane. He searched for the right words to describe what he felt for the disguised girl who he’d had an entire relationship with. Tears welled in his eyes. He’d betrayed someone who trusted him by using an alternate persona, too, once. Red gave Nore the chance to live without magic, without the guillotine of people-pleasing hanging over her head, away from the pressures of Order life. He understood what that felt like. He knew it, and loathed it just as much. She gazed at him, and the knot of frustration in his chest melted away the longer he stared into her gray eyes. Knowing what he knew now, how could he be anything but relieved? A tear rolled down his cheek. He loved her. And for the first time in his life, he was holding the person he loved with no lies between them.
He set her on her feet, keeping an arm around her. Isla watched without a word. The ancestors tightened the circle, protecting them from Ellery’s fury beyond their shadows as they held fiercely to the glass box with Nore’s heart.
He traced her features with his fingers. Red wasn’t real.Thiswas who he loved. It felt like the sky parted just then and the sun was shining right into him, brightening the shadowed crevices of his soul.
“Nore, I know about you being Red. And it’s okay.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“You’re alive. That’s what matters.”
Her mother stifled a sob.
“How? How am I alive?” She felt her chest. Suddenly, the shadowed bodies around them thinned, and the air began to clear, the ancestors shifting their position. The party around them quickly became less of a haze. Nore pulled herself away from Yagrin completely. Isla was sobbing harder. The dead formed up behind them, and it felt like a wall of ice at their back.
Ellery was pulling himself up off the ground, staggering, when he spotted Nore on her feet, not dead. He glared. She backed up into Yagrin. He stood firm beside her.
Nore held out her arms, staring at them as if she was seeing herself for the first time.
“Yagrin, it’shappening,” she breathed. “I feel strange.” She was becoming Headmistress of House Ambrose.
“Youwitch,” her brother roared. “You don’t even have—”
Then the tiniest drip of black bled from Nore’s hands. She shuddered against him.Her toushana.The truth struck him like an axe.
“The seed of toushana in you was enough to fulfill the Pact,” Yagrin said.
“The ancestors accepted it,” Isla muttered with relief.
“An immature, undeveloped, infinitesimal amount of poison that wasn’t even mine,” Nore said.
“It was enough,” Yagrin said, reassuring her. “Youare enough.” But she ignored him. Ellery struggled to stand, bleeding more, as Nore played with the darkness between her fingers. Her expression scrunched in curiosity, then in disgust.
Ellery raised his dagger, but fear flickered in his eyes.
“Imagine the cold growing,” Yagrin told her, wary of an impending attack. “Cling to it. Channel its power through you.” He called on his as well.
But Nore stiffened as the dark magic bleeding out of her thickened.
Thirty-Four
Nore
