by Kaylin Lee
“Why would you ever say that?” Grandmother sounded shocked.
“I see the way people watch me. They look at me like I’m the one who personally caused the plague, like they expect me to infect them with the plague at any moment.”
Grandmother sighed. “They watch you, I know. But not because they hate you! Oh, my sweet girl. Has it never occurred to you that they watch you because you’re lovely?”
Definitely not. “Um …”
“Silly girl!” She gripped my hand in hers and held our hands up in front of my face, my pale, freckled hand beside her lined, ink-stained one. “Perhaps some think of the plague when they see you. There will always be those who can’t forget the past, but … Well, that’s their own concern, not yours.” She dropped my hand and smoothed my hair away from my forehead in a soft, repetitive motion. “Many more people see your beauty and kindness, your intelligence and determination. They see your respect for everyone you meet, no matter how lowly. Of course they watch you, Ruby! You’re worth watching.”
Fire licking the sky. Piles of Western books. “You! Western scum.” Fingers digging into my shoulder, pulling me toward the—
“Then why did they try to burn me alive?”
Grandmother’s hand on my back froze. “You remember that?”
“Of course,” I whispered.
“You never said anything. I thought you’d blocked the memory out completely.”
“I didn’t.”
“Well …” Grandmother resumed smoothing my hair. I felt my anger subside at her touch, though for some reason, I didn’t want it to. “Do you remember what happened afterward?”
I shook my head. The entire, blurry memory consisted of a smoky street and fingers on my shoulder.
“Yes, a foolish, old drunk tried to toss you into a fire.” Grandmother’s voice was hard. “He made it about three steps with you before our neighbor caught sight of him and clocked him in the jaw. Knocked him out cold. Another neighbor got the quarter guards, who took him into custody. At his sentencing hour, there was a long line of witnesses who testified that they’d seen him assault a child. They were that determined to see that he got justice.” She laughed dryly. “I couldn’t go anywhere after that without folks asking after you, wanting to make sure you were healthy and safe. For months, everyone I met wanted to check in on you. I took to bringing you with me everywhere I went, just so they could see firsthand that you were fine.”
“Oh.” My chest felt funny. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to laugh or weep.
“Oh, indeed.” Grandmother sat up and tucked wisps of stray hair back into her bun. “Now, let’s pull ourselves together, dear. You have quite a few visitors waiting to see you.”
Chapter 44
Prince Estevan entered first, his jaw covered with stubble and his purple armband askew. “Ruby.” He nodded to me. “Welcome home.”
I tried to stand. “Thank you, Your Highness.”
“No, no.” He waved a hand. “Sit comfortably.” A beautiful young woman with sculpted cheekbones and flawless, golden skin stood at his side, her eyes oddly bloodshot. He invited her forward. “This is Belle, my fiancé.”
Belle Argentarius. I recognized her from etchings in the Procus Society section of the Herald. She offered me a tired smile. “Thank you for all that you’ve done for this city, Miss Contos. Without your note, I shudder to think what would have happened.”
“I …” I shook my head. “I didn’t—”
“Ruby!” Mage Fortis darted around Prince Estevan, Lord Falconus at her side. Like Prince Estevan and his fiancé, they looked like they hadn’t slept in days. “You’re well.” She leaned forward and hugged me, squeezing me so tight I squeaked. “Oh, sorry!” Leaning back, she beamed at me. “You are amazing. A real-life heroine, darling. Just like in our stories.”
“We’re honored to know you, Ruby.” Lord Falconus gave me a solemn nod. “Thank you for everything you’ve done.”
“Well—”
“Hello, Ruby.” Sebastian appeared beside Belle, his cheeks red. “How are you feeling?”
I looked between Sebastian and Grandmother, who was eyeing us both speculatively. “Um … well.” I rubbed my hands over my face. The healers had taken care of the glass cuts, too. “Thank you.”
He shifted. “I’m sorry I didn’t come with—”
“Hello, Ruby!” A soft, feminine voice cut him off. “You probably don’t remember me, but we met at Zel’s villa a few months ago.”
“Ella, it’s good to see you again.” How could I forget her?
The tired-looking girl with the long scar on the side of her face edged alongside my bed next to Sebastian. She smiled kindly. “You are my sisters’ favorite person in the city, by the way, and not just because you saved our lives.” She winked. “Just wanted to say thank you for everything.”
A broad-shouldered young man stood behind her, his hand resting on her back, deep creases under his eyes. “Right. Thank you, Ruby.” Mage Fortis’s infamous, rebellious son, Weslan ran a hand through his blond hair, making it stand up straight. “You probably don’t know what we’re talking about, do you?”
“Um …” I stared at the group of semi-familiar people, feeling a strange combination of happy, exhausted, and overwhelmed. “No. Not really.”
Prince Estevan heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Well, Belle and I are here to debrief with you. The rest of these loiterers are here because they won’t leave.”
“Exactly.” Ella pulled a chair over to my bedside and sat. “So, go ahead and—”
“We’re here, we’re here! Sorry for the delay.” Zel slipped through the door, looking harried. A muscular man with a black uniform and a grizzled beard entered behind her. Darien. I’d met Zel’s husband the same day I’d interviewed her. “Apologies, Your Highness.” He grimaced. “There was some confusion at the south gate. The guards thought those mages had returned, but it was just a heavy gust of wind. Everyone’s a bit on edge right now. To say the least.”
Prince Estevan rubbed his temples. “Let’s get started, then. We need to know everything you know, Ruby. Start at the beginning.”
“Well … I guess I’ll start with the note we received.” I glanced at Grandmother, who nodded for me to continue. “A man from the Wolf clan sent the Herald a note asking for a reporter, saying he wanted his clan to pay for what they’d done. I met him in the Badlands north of the city and journeyed to Draicia from there.”
Belle’s eyes widened. “You walked all the way there with him?”
I nearly laughed, remembering my assumption that we would drive in a fomecoach. “Not with him, exactly. He was worried that Badlanders would see us together, and he wanted to be certain no one in Draicia would know he’d betrayed his clan. But he helped me along. I would not have survived the journey without him.”
I felt Grandmother’s gaze on me, but I tried to ignore her. “In Draicia, I found a job with the Wolf clan and used my position to investigate. I tried to. But I didn’t get very far, and things kept going wrong, so I replied to one of Hal Dukas’s letters.”
Sebastian scowled. “For the record, I did not think that was a good idea. He was a madman.”
You will. You’ve got that sadness they all have. “He was an honest madman,” I said, shivering at the way he’d seen into my soul. “And he had his own sort of code. He gave me the information I needed to link the Wolves to aurae. But there was still so much more I didn’t know.”
I told them about overhearing Demetrius and the mage woman speak through a magic mirror in his office, how she’d berated him for letting aurists die and insisted he bring questus to Asylia. Then I told them how she’d said there was a purpose for aurae. “It was a long time before I was able to get into Demetrius’s office a second time. I had a demicoach accident, and I was unconscious for two weeks.”
“A what?” Mage Fortis looked worried. “And why would you need so long to recover?”
I told her about the demicoach. “The
mage who healed me was untrained. She just wanted to be sure I was fully healed.”
Mage Fortis sniffed. “I’m so glad you’re back here, safe and sound, with proper healers to attend to you!” She gripped my hand. “I hope you never have to go back to that awful city.”
“I …” My throat tightened. Two months ago, I would have said the same thing. Now, the thought hit me like a physical blow. How could I never go back to Draicia again?
“And what did you learn during your second visit to Demetrius?” Prince Estevan looked impatient.
I hurried through the story of hearing Demetrius speak with the mage again, how she’d said that everyone would choose aurae, and that once they chose it, the curse would take hold.
“Demetrius caught me after that. He imprisoned me inside the Wolf compound, and the only way I could get word to you of the curse was through a message carried by a friend of mine. We all owe her a great deal.” My voice must have sounded off. Grandmother shifted closer and wrapped her arm around my shoulders. “And the note really made a difference?”
Ella nodded. “We didn’t know who’d created the curse or what it would do, but thanks to the article you sent and your source in the River Quarter, we knew of at least one way to break the curse.”
“The source you sent me to in the River Quarter hospital had discovered a way to save aurists on his own, but no one believed him,” Sebastian said. “Until your article.”
Weslan broke in, clearly energized by the topic. “He’d discovered that a purifier could remove the curse as long as a healer stood by to heal the aurist right away. There are ancient Kireth legends that hint at other ways to break curses, but those were lost to us.”
I rubbed my eyes. I still couldn’t wrap my head around the way the Masters had gathered aurists together outside Grandmother’s apartment. “Then why did all those people die?”
Grandmother fidgeted beside me. “We did our best, my girl. There weren’t enough purifiers and healers in the city to reach every aurist as quickly as they wanted to.”
Ella interrupted, sounding excited. “We figured out how to do the same thing with mage-craft crystals. We imbued them with magic that pulls the curse out of the aurist and sends a burst of healing magic out to preserve their life.”
“The crystals,” I murmured. “They looked familiar.”
“I contributed the whole stock of fabulator crystals to the cause,” Lord Falconus said.
Mage Fortis smiled sadly. “After you left, we didn’t have the heart to continue recording without you. The new batches were just sitting there unused.”
“Good thing they were,” Zel said, patting her arm. “I don’t know what we would have done without them. There were so many aurists among the city guards, those mages might have taken over the city without resistance.”
Darien coughed and raised an eyebrow.
She nudged him. “You know what I meant.”
I frowned. “So you turned the crystals into tools to break the curse.”
Grandmother pressed her lips together. “But we couldn’t get to every aurist in the city in time. Not every aurist came forward for healing. If they had, they could have been saved in time. But they kept quiet—ashamed, perhaps—and then …” She shook her head.
“Keep going, Ruby,” Prince Estevan said. “What happened when you left Draicia?”
I continued the story, telling them how my demicoach had crashed into a snowbank in the mountains. When I reached the part about the small community of Westerners living in the Badlands, Zel’s eyebrows shot up. “They’ve been out there this whole time? Why didn’t they come to Asylia when the gates opened?”
“They live a few hours’ walk from the Masters’ dwelling. The Masters—that’s what they call themselves—make every household in their village offer up one person as an aurist. I think they’re using them for something. The villagers probably can’t leave now, even if they wanted to. They are slaves.”
“The Masters …” Ella looked up at Weslan, her tone speculative. “Doesn’t that sound familiar?”
“Death’s Master.” Weslan’s words had a chilling effect on the room. “The creator of the True Name enslavement. Did you meet the Masters, Ruby?”
“Yes.” I didn’t know where to look. Legs kicking in the air while well-dressed, beautiful mages laughed below. Fire racing across my face and skin. I was dimly aware of Grandmother’s hand gripping mine. “I left the Western village and went to the Masters’ dwelling, and I …” I swallowed. “I asked them to tell me their story.”
Grandmother shifted as she subtly pressed a handkerchief to her eyes.
I squeezed her hand, forcing myself to maintain my composure for her sake, if not mine. I explained the way the Masters had seemed to be under someone else’s control. “They said something about finishing their master’s work. ‘Advance his studies. Control the land. Rule the weak.’ I remember because they kept repeating it, like puppets. And they boasted about creating the plague on purpose.” My throat felt raw. “That the Western lands had grown too rich and arrogant, they said, and so they brought them down with a single curse.”
The room went still. Silent tears streamed down Belle’s otherwise composed, beautiful face.
Prince Estevan tucked her under his arm. His expression was tortured. “All this time, we thought the Western lands sent the plague to us, when we … they …”
“The Masters caused it.” Zel’s voice was hollow. She glanced at Darien. “Remember when Drusilla came after me? She said something about her Masters wanting to meet me. The liquid she threw at me was a curse. That much is clear now. But when I faced them, they called me Death’s Master.” She rubbed her arms, looking horrified. “They called me their sister. Ruby, why would they think such a thing?”
“They said you could resist your True Name, and that made you one of them. I suppose they all must …”
“Be able to do the same,” she finished for me. “But they’re under another Master’s control?”
I nodded. “It doesn’t make sense. But it truly seemed that way to me.”
“Could it be a curse?” Belle wiped the tears from her cheeks with cool efficiency, her eyes narrowing with speculation as she ticked off her points. “Aurae is a curse. The plague was a curse. They tried to curse Zel, right?”
Zel nodded.
“The ancient Kireths were obsessed with alchemy, and the legend goes that Death’s Master was a student of the ancients.” Weslan frowned and rubbed the back of his neck. “Perhaps they’re his followers. Perhaps they’re under a curse of their own, like Belle said. If he couldn’t control them with their True Names, could he have created something stronger before he was killed?”
“But that was seven hundred years ago.” Lord Falconus looked wary. “Surely, not even the ancient Kireth alchemists knew how to live for hundreds of years.”
“The only thing that’s certain, today, is that we don’t know anything we thought we knew,” Prince Estevan said sourly. “But ignorance can be fixed. We’ve got work to do. In the meantime, any guesses what the aurae curse was actually supposed to do?”
“From what we saw this morning,” Darien said, “they seemed to control every remaining aurist in the city when they appeared. When we drained the aurae from those we could reach, they decided to retreat.”
Much bright light, Tavar had said of his parents. Then gone. I thought of the mage in the violet dress, frowning as her magic disappeared. There goes another one. “The aurists are the source of their power, somehow.” I pressed a hand to my stomach, feeling sick at the thought. “That’s the curse. It allows the Masters to use them up, like the fuel in a demicoach or a fomecoach. When they’ve used all they can, the aurist dies.”
“That’s horrible.” Ella looked as ill as I felt. “Are you sure?”
“Draicia!” My pulse sped up. “They were planning to take over both Draicia and Asylia. Draicia is overrun with questus and aurae. The Draicians will be completely helpless, and no
w, they don’t even have Demetrius’s bargain to protect them.” I met Prince Estevan’s eyes, feeling frantic. “Please. We have to do something.”
He nodded curtly. “Already done. We sent a fomewagon full of purifying crystals and a team of Sentinels to Dracia earlier today. We’ll be sending another team to that mountaintop dwelling you described. Give directions to Darien in a moment.”
Zel and Darien exchanged a tense look. “I’m going with you and you know it,” Zel whispered to her husband.
“What happened after they told you about the plague?” Belle asked.
“Demetrius arrived and convinced them to spare my life. He said I’d be useful for finding Zel, and then …”
She’s barely begun to cry.
“Then they punished me for failing to show proper respect when I arrived.” I felt oddly numb as the matter-of-fact words slipped out. “And when that was done, Demetrius took me from their dwelling and brought me to Asylia along with his men.”
Silence reigned for a long moment.
“We’ll take those directions now, please.” Zel’s tone was icy, and she held her body like she was ready to leave for the Masters’ dwelling immediately.
I gave them my best description of the Western village and the dwelling by the frozen waterfall.
Prince Estevan offered Belle his arm. “We’ll let you get some rest, Ruby. Everyone with no relation to the recovering heroine, get out.”
“Wait!” The collective movement to the door paused. Nine pairs of eyes stared at me. “Um … Where is Lucien?” I felt my cheeks heat up.
“Who?” Prince Estevan raised one eyebrow.
“The Wolf. My source. He was with me when it all happened.”
“Only one Wolf survived the fight with the Masters,” Prince Estevan said slowly. “He’s locked up. You’re saying he was your source?”
My stomach plummeted. “He’s not one of them, not at all. He wanted to stop Demetrius from moving forward with the plan. Demetrius had an agreement with the Masters that the Wolf clan would be their agents when they took over Draicia. Lucien tried to stop him—he wanted me to expose Demetrius’ involvement in aurae.” My voice wobbled. “He’s a good man. Please, don’t punish him for being born in the wrong city.”
