by Bree Barton
Mia stumbled into her father’s back as the tunnel dumped them out onto a narrow ledge outside the castle. The icy night wind bit into her skin.
“You’re cold.” He dropped his thick cloak over her shoulders before she could object. “Funny, isn’t it? For all our study of human physiology, we cannot master the simple act of insulating our own bodies against the cold.”
He gestured for her to sit on the edge of the cliff. He wasn’t the kind of parent to yank his children back from a precipice—she’d always appreciated that about him. Though at the moment she was firmly committed to her outrage.
“The Gwyrach can warm anyone they want,” she said pertly. “They can set fire to human flesh if they’re so inclined.”
She sat roughly and he sat beside her. In the yellow moonlight, she could see Killian Village, the cottages, taverns, shops, and brothels flanking the Natha River. In the old language, Natha meant “snake,” and the name fit; the river coiled through the kingdom like a nest of vipers, slippery and black. The tributaries of the Natha stitched a hundred isolated villages together. Glas Ddir meant “land of rivers.”
If Mia squinted, she could just make out the snow-dusted peaks and verdant groves of Ilwysion to the east, the alpine woods where she’d grown up. Beyond it, the river curved to the southeast and climbed into Foraois Swyn, the Twisted Forest.
Her father followed her gaze. “I should have taken you to see it. The Twisted Forest is a marvel to behold.”
She almost laughed. Girls were not permitted to wander in Foraois Swyn, where both water and wood broke the natural laws. The Natha forked into a thousand smaller serpents coursing up the mountain instead of down, and the misshapen swyn trees bowed uniformly to the north, then braided themselves together under a canopy of blue needles. No one knew why the trees bent or why the water flowed upward, but girls were strictly forbidden to enter the forest, for fear they would be tainted by this most unnatural magic.
Mia’s father pointed to the craggy peak a short way above them. To her surprise, a dusty bronze carriage hung from a parapet, bobbing slightly in the breeze. “That’s the old laghdú. When I was a child, they used it for royal weddings. See the cable?” He pointed to a streak of black stretched across the sky. “They would drape the bride in heavy silks, saddle her with jewels, and lower her down the cable over the village, inch by inch. A glittering tableau of wealth and power.”
In which the bride played the part of sparkly ornament, Mia thought.
“They called it the Bridalaghdú,” he said. “In the old language it means ‘flight of the bride.’”
“Fall of the bride, actually.” She couldn’t help but feel a swell of pride. For once, she knew more than her father.
He smiled. “Your mind is dazzling, little rose.”
“Why did they stop doing the ceremony?” She hadn’t meant to engage, but she was too curious not to. Her father was good at dangling the right bait.
“A bride fell. She was shrouded in so many pounds of cloth and precious stones, she tipped right out of the carriage in a puff of velvet and splintered bones. The next day, instead of a royal wedding, the Chapel held a royal funeral.”
Mia shivered. In Glas Ddir, girls were expendable. She wondered how long the royal family had waited before scrounging up another bride.
“The Bridalaghdú was one of the first rituals Bronwynis revoked when she became queen.” Her father sounded wistful. “She found it archaic and demeaning.”
Mia had heard plenty about Queen Bronwynis. Nearly twenty years before, when Glas Ddir was poised on the shimmering cusp of progress, Mia’s father and mother had stood shoulder to shoulder in a crush of people outside Kaer Killian, some laughing, some weeping, on the day Bronwynis was crowned queen. Not in all of recorded history had a woman ever sat on the river throne.
Her reign was brief. The Gwyrach killed Bronwynis shortly before Mia was born, and her younger brother inherited the throne. Her brother was, of course, Ronan. The first thing he’d done as king was reinstate the old laws to ensure only men had the right of succession.
Mia’s father sighed. “I’ve taught you a great many things, have I not?”
“Let’s see.” Mia ticked them off on her fingers. “Hunting Gwyrach. Catching Gwyrach. Never letting my body be controlled by anyone. Oh, and surrendering my body to a boy I don’t even know, all because my father told me to.”
He was silent a moment. “I know you’ve been mapping the tunnels. Always my little explorer. But I also know you would never leave your sister behind.”
Her face burned hot. So he’d known all along. The gentle affection with which he said “my little explorer” stung—as if she were a curious child with a spyglass and a weathered pocket map. She’d been that girl long ago, back when the world was still a rosy plum waiting to be plucked. Her mother and father had told her she could craft whatever future she wanted, but that she’d have to leave Glas Ddir to do it. Mia remembered the ripe sense of longing, how she ached to sail the other three kingdoms, drinking in the colors, scents, and flavors her father brought back in glass vials and crisp brown packages.
That dream had died with her mother. Almost overnight, Mia traded in her geographical maps for another kind of map: an atlas of the human body. She spent every waking hour poring over her anatomy books and plates, examining the vulnerability of heart valves, tracing blue tributaries of veins, studying her Wound Man diagram for a better grasp of wound theory. If she could reduce the body to a system of cohesive parts, she could master it—and fortify hers against the Gwyrach.
But there was another reason. Mia couldn’t shake the feeling that, if she’d known more about the body—if she had understood the way blood flowed through the vena arteriosa to the heart’s left chamber, or known how to invoke the subtle rhythm of the cardiac systole—she might have saved her mother’s life.
“You said you had something for me,” she said to her father, struggling to keep her voice even.
He pulled a thin parcel from his cloak and handed it to her. The paper crinkled as she untied the waxy twine, lifting a small leather book from its trappings.
It was no larger than her hand, full to bursting with ivory pages and bound together by a scarlet stone clasp. The brown leather had gone soft with age, worn clean through in spots like the knees of a well-loved pair of trousers.
She ran her fingers down the book’s cracked veins. Slashed into the cover were the initials W.M., two bundles of white scars. Wynna Merth. Her mother’s name before she married Griffin and joined Clan Rose.
Mia’s heart pounded against her rib cage. “Mother’s journal.”
How many times had she seen her mother curled up in the window seat of their cottage, scribbling furiously? Wynna often looked peaceful as she gazed out into the forest, watching the birds flit through the plum trees and blackthorn brambles. But her face would darken as she turned back to the journal, ink spilling onto the page, sometimes tears spilling along with it.
Mia still remembered the time she mustered enough courage to ask her mother if it caused her pain, the things she wrote about. “Oh yes,” she’d said. “I write about the most painful thing of all.” When Mia asked what it was, she answered simply, “Myself.”
“Your mother wanted you to have it,” her father said. “When you were ready. I believe you are ready.”
Mia pressed the journal to her chest. Her mother’s history had always been enshrouded in mystery, a heavy veil drawn across some unspoken horror of the past. What secrets had she buried in these pages?
A half-formed memory flashed through Mia’s mind. “There was a key.”
“Yes.” Her father drew a carved red stone out of his pocket. It was small and winged, head cocked slightly and beak open as if in song. A ruby wren. Mia had studied the species with great interest: native to the snow kingdom, the ruby wren was the only bird known to hibernate in winter, when the females built domed, tightly woven nests in the branches of the snow plum trees. Mia’s mother
had always loved them. She was destined to: in the old language, Wynna meant “wren.”
“The little ruby wren,” her father said, pressing the stone into Mia’s palm. She felt an instant flutter, as if the bird had melted through her skin and spread wings inside her chest, desperate to escape.
Again Mia heard her mother’s voice, calling her birdlings home to roost. Mia, my red raven. Angie, my little swan.
The memory was too tender, so she pushed it aside. Her fingers worried the red stone. More vitreous than carmine quartz, luster almost like glass; brittle tenacity with imperfect cleavage. She’d studied the physical properties of dozens of minerals, but her mother had never let her study this one.
“Do you know the stone?” her father asked, watching her closely.
“Is this a test?”
He nodded. “Perhaps the most important one you’ll ever take.”
She paused, thumbing through her mental catalog.
“Fojuen,” her father said.
“If you had just given me a second!” she snapped. The only thing she hated more than not knowing the answer was when her father answered for her.
She had read about the fojuen craters in the fire kingdom to the east. Fojo Karação was where her parents had met as students: an archipelago of islands forged from the molten magma of volqanoes, spewed out centuries ago and hardened into dazzling red rock. Thanks to her father’s language lessons, she knew fojuen meant “fire-forged.” Fojuen was also the official language of Fojo. How interesting to think of language as a kind of volqanic glass, a history told in the remnants of what once was.
Mia knew something else about fojuen: once cut and polished, it was deadly sharp. Her mother, who had studied medicine in Fojo, had told her how physicians in the fire kingdom carved the red stone into swords and arrowheads. Surgeons performed surgery with fojuen scalpel blades. The glass made clean, minuscule incisions, barely visible to the human eye.
“Don’t make me do this, Father.” She closed her fingers around the bird, its sharp beak digging into the soft flesh of her palm. She felt both dizzy and ferocious, closer to her mother than she’d felt in years. Braver, too. “Don’t make me marry Quin.”
He wouldn’t look at her. “I’m protecting you, little rose.”
“From what? I know your life has no value since Mother died. But my life does. I want to fight with the Circle. I want to find her killer. The father I knew would never hand me off like this, a pretty princess for a petty prince.”
“Perhaps your union with the prince will surprise you.”
“I don’t want to marry him! I don’t want to marry anyone. But if I someday choose marriage—of my own volition—I want what you and Mother had.” Her parents’ love had exploded like a shower of sparks in the sky, casting off cosmic dust that still glimmered. It had also led to misery and grief. Wynna’s death left a gaping crater no one could ever fill.
Her father stood stiffly. “I have promised a daughter to the royal family. Perhaps it should be Angelyne. The royal family will ensure she receives the very best of care.”
“No. Don’t put this on her.” Mia drew herself up. “It has to be me.”
“Very well then.” He clasped her gently by the shoulders. His hands were blocks of ice searing through the cloak. “The bridal feast awaits the bride.”
He disappeared into the tunnel, leaving her alone.
Mia refused to cry. She hadn’t cried since the day she held her mother’s lifeless body. Tears were mercurial and untrustworthy. Feelings of any kind made a person vulnerable, weak. Sometimes she wondered if her body even remembered how to cry. Did she have whole mines of unwept salt stored up inside her? Maybe someday, like a pillar, she would crumble to the earth.
What was the good of loving anyone if they’d only be taken from you? If loss were bound up in love, perhaps it was easier to seal her heart to both.
And yet Mia’s love for her sister welled up inside her, like salt water, like bile. The illogic of love infuriated her. What was love if not a rippling bunch of nerves and valves misfiring? An equation with no known variables? An incalculable contraction of the heart?
Saving Angelyne meant sacrificing herself. Was love a willing sacrifice?
Sometimes love is the stronger choice.
Mia had never missed her mother more. She was starved for comfort. Perhaps her mother’s words would soothe her soul.
She slid the ruby wren into the lock and turned the key. The book whiffled open.
She sucked in her breath.
The pages were blank.
Chapter 5
A Common Enemy
“LADY MIA. HOW KIND of you to join us.”
King Ronan had a way of injecting every word with simmering menace. One look at him lording over the feasting table and Mia’s headache came raging back. His skin had a grayish pallor, his gaunt form swathed in plush robes of lynx and ermine. Ronan’s plate was piled high with roast duck, boar fritters, cream of almond, green goose jelly, venison paste—and he hadn’t touched a morsel. His steely blue eyes bored into Mia so savagely that for a moment she worried she had forgotten her gloves. She dragged her fingers over her wrist, confirming the slinkskin was still in place.
“My apologies, Your Grace. After all these weeks, I still find myself dizzied by the intricate corridors. The Kaer is beautiful but bewitching.”
Immediately she regretted her choice of words. Bewitch was not a term to be used lightly. She watched the king’s face harden.
“We wondered what tragedy had befallen you.” Queen Rowena’s lips curled into a smile so cultured, Mia expected a string of pearls to pop out. The queen was beautiful but brittle, with silvery blond hair thinning at the temples, eggshell skin, and haunted violet eyes. There was no love lost between Rowena and Ronan—if passion had ever spiced the air between them, it had long since cooled.
The queen motioned toward the feasting table, gesturing to the chair at the prince’s side. “My son has been so anxious.”
Quin didn’t look anxious. He looked annoyed.
“Four gods! Let the girl be.” Princess Karri, Quin’s older sister, raised her pint of stonemalt and winked. “You’ve missed nothing but mindless prattle, Mia. Drink! Be merry! You’re just in time for the stoneberry flambé.”
Mia sank into her chair, grateful to the princess for intervening. She thought, not for the first time, that Karri would make an excellent queen. She was both proud and unassuming, and she seemed older than nineteen, a bold, spirited girl who could eat, drink, and fight with the best of them. Many Glasddirans considered her blunt and impolitic (including her own mother), but Mia was in awe of her. Karri’s fair skin was reliably sunburnt; she dyed her hair bright white and kept it clipped short, wore unadorned tunics and trousers, and could easily command a room.
But despite being a year older than Quin—and infinitely more qualified—Karri would never rule the river kingdom. Ronan had seen to that.
Mia stared at the prince. He was currently hard at work spearing a fresh green pea on the end of his fork. This was the heir apparent.
“Perhaps,” Quin said, keeping his voice low, “instead of a ring, I should give you a pocket watch.”
A servant fluttered a cloth napkin in Mia’s lap and set a goblet of blackthorn wine before her. She took a not-very-ladylike gulp and shut her eyes, hoping it would dissolve the knot of pain inside her head. Perhaps it would make Quin disappear, too.
She opened her eyes. He was still there.
“Some good it would do me,” she muttered, “since I don’t have a single pocket in these doll clothes your mother insists I wear.”
The prince swiveled in his chair. “Wulf!” he called. “Beo!” His two dogs trotted eagerly to the feasting table, and he bent down to scratch their ears. Their dusty fur was Killian gold, or—if you preferred—the color of Quin’s mop of curls.
Wulf rested his chin on Mia’s knee and stared up at her with doleful brown eyes. “They like you,” Quin said. “
And they don’t like anyone.”
She might have smiled, if not for the tiny monsters lighting sulfyr sticks inside her skull. Perhaps the Grand Gallery was to blame. It boasted two gigantic stone hearths on either end, and the walls, floors, and ceiling were all lustrous black. The onyx didn’t just reflect the fires and people; it magnified them, giving Mia the distinct feeling she was trapped in a giant black die.
She pressed her hand to her chest and felt the fojuen wren. After leaving her father, she’d made a brief stop in her chambers to stash the journal, slip on a velvet gown, and tuck the key into her corset. She wasn’t sure why, but it gave her comfort to have her mother’s ruby wren so close to her heart.
Mia noted thirteen familiar faces at the far end of the Gallery. The twelve Hunters—and one Huntress—were clustered around a gray slab table, eating in tense silence. They had quivers of arrows slung over their shoulders and daggers tucked beneath their plates. Any good Hunter knew to keep his weapons close. Spot a Gwyrach from across the room and you might stand a chance. But if she were close enough to touch you, you were close enough to die.
Mia’s eyes came to rest on Domeniq du Zol, her childhood friend. Dom had started training with the Circle around the same time she did. They shared a common wound: the Gwyrach had killed his father. Yet even in the wake of that earth-shattering loss, Dom’s wide, crooked smile could light up a room.
He was smiling now, laughing at something one of the other Hunters had said, the firelight warming his dark, mellow-brown skin. Mia’s gaze fell to the silver dagger at his fingertips. The blade was serrated, the scabbard limned in pale-green stone. Was it aventurine? Jade? What other surprises had Dom dug up while she was trapped in the castle playing damsel-in-distress?
Mia was flooded by longing. She didn’t crave Dom; she craved the life he was about to live. She was meant to be with them, on the cusp of a great adventure, soon to bring her mother’s killer to justice. She should have been at that table with a pack of Hunters by her side, not Prince Quin forking peas.
