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“I figured it was only fair, after I stole this out of your pack.” She lifted Simon’s book in the air, its rose-gold branches glinting.
I tried to make a grab for it. “You went through my things? That is a gross invasion of privacy.”
She pulled it out of reach and said, “You are all grossly invading my privacy, are you not? Entering my woods, overtaking my home? And besides, this doesn’t belong to you. Where did you get it?”
“It was given to me.”
“What for?” She cracked it open and removed my hastily scribbled list of translations. “You obviously can’t read it.”
Sourly, I replied, “I don’t have any idea. Which is the same answer I’d give to you if you asked me why, in the name of all the stars and the Most Holy Empyrea, he wanted to send me to you.”
“So it was this Simon, then? The blood mage you killed.”
I took a deep breath, reaching for the last scraps of my serenity. “Yes. Simon sent it to me. And then, when he died, he told me to find you.”
“And you never showed this to Onal?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“I’m not sure she’d have recognized it, even if you had. She was young when Galantha died.”
“What do you mean?”
“This”—she held the book up—“is Galantha’s grimoire. I’d know it anywhere; she began compiling it the year after our mother died birthing Begonia and she moved up as next in line to serve as Warden of the Woods.”
“You mean . . . it’s a book of spells?”
Rosetta said, “What did you think it was? A bunch of fairy tales?”
“I hadn’t ruled it out,” I huffed.
“Every warden keeps one, and then they pass their knowledge on to their successor, who then writes her own.”
“You have one of your own, then?”
“Of a sort,” she said. “But my inheritance of the warden’s mantle came with no warning or training. Everything I know, I’ve had to figure out on my own.”
“Simon said it was hundreds of years old—”
“One hundred and sixteen years, give or take.”
“Maybe Simon knew you’d want it and sent it to me as . . . a payment, or something . . . to convince you to help me.” She looked skeptical, so I continued. “Maybe there’s a spell in there you can use to break the blood bond between Kellan and me.”
“There’s only one way I know of to break the bond,” Rosetta said, “and that is by using the Ilithiya’s Bell. Unfortunately for us both, that relic was lost at the same time as the grimoire. There’s no way of knowing where it went, or how to get it back, without going into the Gray. And there’s no way to go into the Gray without the Ilithiya’s Bell.” She brushed a few strands of her red hair out of her eyes. “Do you see the conundrum?”
“But I’ve been to the Gray,” I said. “Twice now. That’s where I was when Simon told me to find you.”
She gave me a skeptical look. “And you died to get there. Is that something you’re willing to risk again? No? I didn’t think so.”
“Simon told me you could help me. Why would he think that?”
“Wardens have been responsible for maintaining the balance between the planes. To fulfill this purpose, they had the Ilithiya’s Bell, which gave them the ability to cross the lines between planes without leaving an anchoring part of themselves behind.”
“What if a person does leave an anchoring part of herself behind? What then?”
She looked at me thoughtfully. “You said you had a dream about the homestead.”
“I did.”
