The Tears of the Rose

by Jeffe Kennedy

  I turned and there she stood, smiling tentatively at me. My first impulse—born of long habit—sent me running toward her, for one of our gleeful, squealing hugs. But that was before, and I managed to yank myself up short before she, too, could reject me.

  No, I rejected her! She had murdered Hugh. I hated her. I didn’t care about her guilt in planting that flower.

  And she looked so amazingly beautiful. Had she always been this way? She looked . . . taller somehow. Her hair, which had always seemed a muddy brown mix somewhere between my red-gold and Ursula’s deep auburn, now seemed a deeper, richer color, the crimson-black of banked coals. Her gray eyes, not cloudy anymore, were the color of thunderheads, shimmering full of ominous power, large in her face and fringed with thick, dark lashes.

  Worse, that thing, that strange prickle she’d always had, loomed large in the air, the static charge of lightning about to strike. And when she tipped her head to the side to study me, an oddly animal movement, a kind of unearthly light shimmered over the gray in her eyes.

  “I’m glad you came,” she ventured, her smile fading.

  “I’m not here because you said to come,” I said with defiance.

  “All right.” She considered me, gaze flicking to the White Monk, who was, at long last, living up to his reputation of silence. “Why are you here?”

  To begin the process of invading your country and destroying you. To wrest from you the one legacy my mother left to me. To defeat Moranu and win Annfwn for Glorianna. To see if paradise is real.

  All of these answers stuck in my throat with the rest of my grief, rage, and uncertainty—and an odd longing. It was mixed up somehow with the plaguing desire for the White Monk and the hurt that he didn’t want me, that no one loved me, that Hugh hadn’t even seen me for myself and the jealousy that Andi had a real home, where I . . . I didn’t somehow.

  She nodded, as if I had said something. “Are you ready to hear my apology, perhaps?”

  “No!” I flung it at her. “There is no apologizing for what you did. You destroyed Hugh and thus may as well have plunged the knife in my breast yourself. You killed me, too.”

  She continued nodding, her gorgeous witchy eyes filling with tears that then poured down her face with enviable ease. “I understand.”

  “Why did you do it? How could you do it?” Without realizing, I’d been moving closer to her, drawn by our old connection. I missed her as much as I hated her as much as I loved her as much as I wanted to destroy her and everything she cared about.

  She twisted her hands together, weeping still. “It was a horrible, terrible accident. If I had the power, I would change it. As it is, I go back over and over that moment, wishing that I could make it so it never happened. But I can’t.”

  “You’re not so powerful, then,” I sneered at her.

  She shook her head, long, thick hair roping over her shoulders, gleaming and vibrant. “No one has the power over death. No one should, much as we might long for it.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “No.” Her gaze cleared and sharpened, though the tears still fell. “Never think it’s easy.”

  “You have everything and I have nothing.” My voice cracked, pain oozing through my heart. A comforting hand touched the small of my back, rested there. I looked up and the White Monk stood right behind me.

  “You’re not real,” he said to Andi, surprising me.

  She tilted her head, that movement like a predator seeing potential prey, and wiped her face clear of tears, assessing him with keen interest.

  “Who are you?”

  “Queen Andromeda.” He bowed. “I am the White Monk.”

  “That’s a title, not a name,” she observed.

  “That’s what I keep saying,” I muttered. “What do you mean she’s not real?”

  “Try touching her.”

  I reached out to touch her sleeve, a gorgeous, filmy aqua that reminded me of the summer ocean at Windroven. My hand passed through it as easily as it had the magical barriers.

  She smiled, rueful. “It’s true, I’m not physically here. I’m sort of—making an image of myself from far away. When I sensed you cross the barrier, it would have taken me too long to reach you physically. I wanted to be here to greet you.”

  “You’ve been watching me?”

  “Only since you crossed the border.”

  “The first time.”

  She smoothed her expression and gave me a slight nod, studiously not looking at the White Monk. She’d seen, then. She’d seen him kiss me and how I’d responded. My cheeks burned, the skin tight and hot. So much for my impassioned righteousness over losing Hugh.

  “I don’t judge, Ami,” she said with gentle forgiveness that only fueled my embarrassed anger. “It’s good for people to move on, to live life. We have only a short time—”

  “Spare me your philosophy, murderer,” I snarled.

  She flinched. Some buried part of me was sorry. Still, rage felt better than being naïve and pitiful.

  “I want you to know that I’ll never send my child to you. Never! More, I will find a way to destroy you. You won’t benefit from your ill deeds. Glorianna seeks justice. Annfwn belongs to her, and I am her avatar!” I finished on a triumphant shout, but Andi seemed only confused.

  “And this is what you journeyed here for? To tell me these things?”

  It seemed stupid, put that way.

  Well, and I wanted to see if I could cross into Annfwn. I didn’t expect to run into you. Couldn’t say that.

  “Annfwn will always be here for you, Ami. For you and your blood. This is your legacy, too. You and your daughter.”

  Her and the “daughter” thing. I couldn’t answer, grinding my teeth over the desire to tell her to keep her trumped-up prophecies, generosity, and our mother’s legacy. That I didn’t want it. Oh, but I did . . .

  “But you”—she studied the White Monk again—“you should not have been able to cross.”

  He slid the hand up my back to rest on my shoulder. “Princess Amelia’s ability brought me over with her.”

  “No.” Andi sounded very sure of herself, imperious. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “I beg your pardon, Your Highness, but that’s what happened.” The White Monk spoke the respectful words, as he did with me, but he didn’t mean them any more than he did with me. Was he such an outlaw that he kneeled to no one?

  She narrowed her eyes, looking through him. “You’re Tala part-blood. Not enough to cross on your own, but enough that Ami’s blood could add to yours, to bring you over.”

  “My father—he was Tala and always seeking a way to return. He’d been separated from his warrior brethren during the Great War, making his way west. Then he met my mother. He stayed with her, but she said he never forgot Annfwn.”

  “Where was this?”

  “In Nebeltfens—about as far from Annfwn as you can get and still be in the Twelve.”

  “Did he find his way back?”

  Grief flowed through the air, redolent of stagnant anger. “No. The village priest accused him of being a demon, and they . . . burned him alive.”

  The horror of it choked me. I reached out to touch his arm, but he yanked it away, wanting none of my comfort. Andi, though, his gaze was glued to her, telling her what he wouldn’t tell me in all those times we spoke.

  “How old were you?” Andi sounded genuinely sorrowful for him.

  “Thirteen. I tried to save him, but . . .”

  “You could not.”

  “No. No one could, least of all a skinny half-breed boy terrified they’d turn on him next.” Bitterness now. Self-hatred. The ground grew boggy with the swampy scent of it.

  “So you came instead. Since he never could.”

  “Yes. I’ve tried before, but I could never cross on my own.”

  That startled me. He’d acted as if he’d never seen the border before. He’d played me. Probably all of it, taunting and teasing me, the healing and the touching, even tha
t kiss—all to get me to do what he really wanted. My nails dug into my palms painfully.

  Andi seemed to fall into deep thought. “I shall have to discuss the implications of this with Rayfe.”

  “Must be nice to have a husband who’s alive to talk to.” The snipe escaped me, and I regretted it. I seemed to be trapped in the role of petulant baby sister, sounding like she’d taken my toy instead of the center of my world. Instead I wanted to be Ursula, swinging my sword to kill them both.

  Andi sighed. “You say you’re not ready to hear this, Ami, but I’m going to say it. I’ll say it as many times as it needs to be said.” She held out her hands, palms up. “I made so many choices to try to save others during that horrible time, and I ended up destroying the life of a good man who wanted only to protect me and irreversibly damaging one of the people I love most in the world, depriving my niece of a father. I cannot make it up to you. All I can offer is my remorse. I will regret what happened until the end of my days and likely beyond. I rue it, now and forever. I offer you my apology, Amelia, from the bottom of my heart and soul and mind.”

  Something glittered in the air around us, as if something magical had occurred. But I felt no different. This changed nothing. They were words. Nothing more.

  “I don’t forgive you.”

  “I don’t ask for it. I don’t seek pardon for my actions. They are done and I cannot take them back.”

  “You could return to Ordnung and face justice for your actions. That would show true remorse for your sins. And your betrayal of your family and your kingdom.”

  “I can’t.” She said it in the tone of someone who’d weighed that very thing and made a hard decision. “That might be the easier path for me, but I have people depending on me. I can’t speak of it to you, but I must stay in Annfwn. This is all I can offer, paltry as it is.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “No. Nothing ever will be.”

  “And yet you seek to take more from me.”

  Andi was already shaking her head before I finished. “Not take. Give. You could be happy here. Ami—I wish you could see it. Annfwn is like . . . no other place.”

  I gestured to the summery forest. “I see it. Okay, it’s warm when it shouldn’t be, but it will be the same at Ordnung or Windroven come summer. So far I’m unimpressed by this so-called paradise.”

  She smiled, laughing at my ignorance. “This is but the gateway. A sort of . . . buffer zone. Come with me, if only for a day. There is so much more. People dream their entire lives of having what Annfwn offers. It could be yours, too. And your daughter’s.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  The White Monk brushed his hand over my back again, and I glanced at him. His face showed that longing he’d had before, that desperate hope. He wanted to see it. More than he wanted anything else in the world. It ran bright and strong in him. Well, welcome to longing for what you can’t have. He hadn’t cared for my feelings. I didn’t care for his.

  “We have people waiting for us. People depend on me, too. We must return.”

  Andi inclined her head but seemed saddened. Then she held out a hand to the White Monk. “And you? I regret that you could not cross without Ami, but the fact that you could cross at all means you belong here. You are welcome to stay. Perhaps find your father’s family, as I found my mother’s.”

  18

  I stepped away from him. Away from the surging, fierce, and triumphant joy that saturated the ground, firming and steadying it. All this time he’d dogged me just to get this. And now he’d walk away without a backward glance, leaving me as they all did. Who cared about stupid, pretty little Ami?

  Then the joy dimmed. He looked at me, but I refused to meet his gaze.

  “Thank you, Queen Andromeda. What you offer is all I ever wanted. But I must go with the Princess. I could not abandon her.”

  “Sure you could,” I said in a bright tone. After all, everyone else does. “I don’t need you.”

  “Regardless, I will stay with you.”

  I finally spun on him. “I can walk down a hill by myself.”

  “Are you sure?” He mocked me. “You weren’t so great at riding a horse.”

  A funny sound—Andi snorting with laughter—interrupted my furious rebuttal. For the first time, I recognized the old Andi in that odd, unattractive laugh of hers. Our nurse had despaired of ever getting her over it and simply urged her never to laugh at court functions. She pointed a finger at me even as she covered her nose and mouth with the other hand.

  “What?” I demanded, further enraged that she was laughing at me, yet again.

  “You’ve met your match, Miss Ami.” She tried to stop laughing and snorted again. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

  “Hugh was my perfect match! My one true love. He”—I flung a hand at the White Monk—“is a low-life former convict, without royal blood, who means nothing to me.”

  He froze, face going impassive, eyes congealing in that apple-green hatred. “Just so,” he agreed in a cold tone. The ground had frozen and he bowed formally to me. “I shall await you on the other side of the border, Your Highness. I presume I can exit on my own, Queen Andromeda?”

  Andi nodded. “Yes. Easier for me to do that way. If you ever wish to return, do this. Test the border and wait. I’ll remember you and send someone to bring you over. We’ll figure out a way to manage this. Also—if you meet other part-bloods or stranded warriors who cannot cross, tell them we’re working on bringing them home, too. My solemn promise as Queen of Annfwn.”

  Others? So there were other Tala out in the Twelve Kingdoms. Did Kir know?

  The White Monk took a few steps, then knelt at her feet, bowing his head. “Thank you, my queen.” He spoke with a heartfelt reverence that burned in my gut. How I hated them both.

  “This is a traitorous conversation,” I declared.

  They both looked at me as if they’d forgotten I was there.

  “Do you believe High King Uorsin wishes there to be Tala hiding among the people of the Twelve Kingdoms?” Andi asked me in a reasonable tone.

  “Of course not. He’s issued an edict that they be killed on sight.” I bit down on my words, realizing suddenly that the law applied to the White Monk, too. He was twice dead—for escaping prison and for his dirtied blood. He rose from his ridiculous obeisance, bowed to Andi, and strode back for our crossing place in rigid, angry strides. I refused to watch him go.

  “And you?” Andi turned on me. “Ursula?”

  It took me a moment to understand what she meant. “We are not Tala.”

  “You’re as much as the White Monk is—more so, actually. Same as I am.”

  “I am not like you. You’re the one who bears the mark. Ursula and I escaped the taint.”

  She laced her fingers together. “It doesn’t work that way. The mark only means that I have our mother’s magic. Please listen to this, Ami—you will breed true, because our mother’s blood was so strong, and for other reasons I can’t tell you. Your daughter also bears the mark.”

  My hand covered my belly. “I carry a son. I have no daughter.”

  She tilted her head in that uncanny way again, looking into me somehow. “Your daughter bears the mark. She grows strong, already full of magic.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Have you noticed anything unusual?”

  “Like barfing my brains out every morning or if someone boils fish?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I’m sorry. That must be awful.”

  “Save your sympathy.” I felt brittle. I’d wanted her with me, to say exactly that, and now here she was. Who knew it would be so hard to keep hating her?

  Taking one of the long skeins of her glossy hair, she thoughtfully wound it around her fingers. “I mean more—do you sense things you never did before? Maybe heightened perceptions in some way?”

  “I saw . . . things. In the woods. On the way here.”

  “Staymachs,” she answered in an absent tone. “They won�
��t hurt you.”

  “They hurt the soldiers escorting me. Killed them and the horses.”

  Her dark brows winged up. “Oh! Oh, no—not unless the men resisted too fiercely. And never the horses. They were all likely relocated.”

  “What?” How was that possible without us seeing?

  “Taken somewhere else.”

  “I know what ‘relocated’ means.”

  “Sorry—it’s a new program. We’ve been retraining the staymachs to lead interlopers away instead of killing them outright, whenever possible. But they always would have let the horses free. The Tala love horses.” She smiled, a secret, loving curve of her mouth, and I recalled what Ursula had said, about Rayfe rescuing Andi’s mare. How had he done that?

  “I don’t see how that’s physically possible. We were right down the hill and didn’t see them.”

  “Oh, well.” She looked chagrined and waved her hands in the air. “Magic. It takes some getting used to.”

  “I’ve seen staymachs, at the Battle of Ordnung, remember? They’re not very big.”

  “They change shape,” she assured me, as if promising the sky was really blue.

  An awkward silence fell between us, as we both acknowledged what a strange conversation this was. The great, unbridgeable distance between us. “Do you?” I asked into the space. “Change shape?”

  “Yes, Ami, I do.” She looked very grave. “That’s part of what the mark means. Your daughter will be able to shape-shift, too. That’s why you have to bring her here, before she becomes a woman. I might not be able to help her after that. It very well could mean life or death for her.”

  “You survived.”

  “I was lucky.”

  She looked bleak, and those years came back to me. Awkward, invisible Andi. My daughter would never be that way. She’d take after me and I would teach her what I knew. Except there would be no daughter; I was having a son. I mentally shook myself for falling into Andi’s witchy wiles.

  “More than that”—Andi drifted closer, the sunlight clearly streaming through her image, her gray eyes turbulent—“if she never learns, she’ll be forever a shadow of who she could become, half a person.”