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“I’ll get you to the castle library as soon as I can arrange it. I swear to you, if you help me do this, I will return the favor to you tenfold. Whatever you wish. I will find your family in Renalt, and I will retrieve them on a galleon ship and bring them here to be regaled with tales of your heroism. If you want your weight in gold, I will have it . . . melted into a sculpture of your likeness, with opals for eyes, rolled into the top of the eye sockets. Yes, just like that.” Quieter, he said. “Whatever you ask. Please.”
He was still holding my hand.
“And if all I wanted was to tell you something secret, something important, and have you believe me, would you do that, too? Could you promise me?” I imagined how that conversation would go: Hello, Zan. Surprise! I’m the real Renaltan princess. Please don’t execute Lisette; she only committed a little bit of treason.
Slowly, he said, “Yes. I think I could.”
If I meant to combat Toris and save my family’s rule, I’d need enough clout in Achleva to convince them to join me in my fight against the Tribunal. This could be my best—?perhaps only—?way to acquire it.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll help you.”
* * *
That night, after Kate and Nathaniel were asleep, I donned Kellan’s blue cloak and crept out, retracing the steps to Zan’s passage. The storm had dashed itself to pieces on Achlev’s invisible barrier, and when I broke from the tunnel onto the shore, the still fjord and sky were both a glittering cauldron of stars, one above and one below, making it hard to say which was reflecting the other. The castle windows were dark, and as I approached the western side, I wondered if any of them belonged to my brother. I knew he’d be long asleep, but I looked up wistfully, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.
I crept across the quiet terrace gardens and into the midnight fields on the other side. Falada whinnied at me as I approached, and I patted her head fondly. “Hello, my sweet,” I said, mimicking the way Kellan used to speak to her. “You thought I forgot about you, didn’t you? But how could I forget such a pretty horse as you?”
She nickered in reply, and I ran one hand down her sleek face while I pressed my nails into a half-healed cut on the other, wincing as it reopened and let out a tiny bead of blood. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I confessed to her as I let three small drops fall onto her forehead. “But I need to practice, and this seems like a good place to start.” I placed my hand over the blood and closed my eyes, searching inside myself; I knew the feel of magic well enough now to recognize its presence, like a constant low heat radiating from somewhere inside me. In order to access and direct it, however, I had to discover the source of it—?I had to find the coals.
After several fruitless minutes, I felt my frustration growing. “What am I thinking?” I asked aloud. “How am I going to help Zan if I can’t even do this?”
She gave a placid whinny, as if providing me with an obvious and sensible answer. “I’m very sorry, Falada. I’m not Kellan. I don’t speak your language.” I reached into my pocket and removed the bloodcloth. His faded drop of blood seemed darker somehow—?a trick of the light. When I touched it, sadness welled up in my center, pushing into the dark corners inside me; I could feel it in my every cell, from my crown to toes and into my fingertips.
I closed my eyes and placed my hand on Falada again, this time focusing the power with words. “Tu es autem nox atra.” Where there is white, they’ll see only night. Then I opened my eyes.
In Falada’s place stood a night-black mare. It was a rough illusion; if I squinted just the right way, I could see her true color layered underneath. But anyone passing by would never look twice. The relief I felt was immediate and immense; Falada would come to no harm now that no one could tell that she had ever been an Empyrean.
I brushed her gleaming black coat for a while, whispering sweet things to her and periodically slipping her pieces of the carrot I’d pocketed from dinner at Kate and Nathaniel’s table. She kept looking over my shoulder, as if waiting for someone.
“I know,” I said. “I miss him too.”
But she wasn’t anticipating Kellan; she was watching the Harbinger, who was standing in the circle of bloodleaf with her back to me, facing the base of the tower.
When I ventured into the perimeter of the creeping bloodleaf vine, my shoe snagged on one of the twisting tendrils and it snapped, oozing a viscous, black-red sap onto my foot and hem. I brushed it furiously away, unsure of whether the poison could be absorbed through the skin or if it had to be ingested or enter the body through a wound to work its evil. I went forward with extra care, though each step crushed more of the red-shot leaves and left behind a bloody stain in the shape of my footprint.
Bloodleaf was a ground-cover vine, but here it had coiled into the stones and climbed to the highest point of the tower. There was no door—?or if there was, it was impossible to find beneath the thick tangle of leaves. It must have been growing there for a very long time, because the new growth of the vine was laid over a brittle skeleton cage of long-dead shoots.
I picked my way to the ledge overlooking the fjord, where I experienced a familiar pricking on the back of my neck, starting at the nape and running down to the tops of my shoulders. The Harbinger was still facing the tower, staring up at the spire.
I took a step toward her. “What do you want from me? Why have you brought me here? How does Toris know you?” I gulped. “You used to show yourself only when someone was about to die. Is that still true? Is someone going to die?”
She was stock-still, save for the drag of her hair in an invisible wind, blowing in the opposite direction of the cold gust at my back.
“Aren?” I asked, trying her name aloud for the first time. She turned at the sound of it, and I had to stifle a scream.
It wasn’t the Harbinger at all but the spirit of another woman entirely, one whose visage was so bloodied and broken as to be rendered completely unrecognizable. She gave me a long, assessing stare, then shambled on oddly angled bones straight into the bloodleaf thicket and disappeared, as if she’d dissolved into the tower itself.
16
“You should have seen it,” Kate said, laughing as we walked the bustling market district the next morning. “Nathaniel looked like a big startled bear, standing there staring at his empty hands, the fish lifted right out of his grasp and up into the trees above him.”
She’d invited me to come along while she delivered finished sewing commissions to customers closer to the center of the city, and had spent the entire early morning animatedly recounting the story of how she and Nathaniel met. Though I still felt shy around her, I was rapt. “That’s when you fell in love with him? When a little boy hooked his fish and pulled it up into a tree?”
“Well, not at that exact moment,” she replied amiably. “Nathaniel chased the thief back to his home, hollering the entire way. He was all set to box the boy’s ears, too, when he caught him, but that’s when he saw the family waiting for him; a mother was bedridden and sick, and there were two younger siblings who’d been without food for days. Needless to say, Nathaniel and I did not retrieve the stolen fish. It was cold beans for us that night.”
“So that was it, then. It was when he gave your dinner away.”
She purs
