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“Have you had other dreams like that one?”
I hesitated. “A few.”
“I have heard of Assembly mages traveling the Gray while sleeping. Projecting, they called it. Your consciousness leaves your material body behind and occupies your subtle body instead. You are able to observe, but not be observed. Able to influence, but not physically affect. You are, essentially, a ghost.”
“If that was what I was doing, I didn’t know it. I didn’t do it purposefully.”
“But if you did . . .”
“I’ve never had any control of where I go or what I see,” I said. “Up until this moment, I thought they were just dreams. Or that I was dead. At least, I was supposed to be.” It was warm, but I still pulled the blanket tighter, finally bringing up the distressing subject that never left the back of my mind. “Looks like I’ll get another crack at dying pretty soon.”
“Death is part of nature, part of life. The true feral mage honors that process. We do not seek to thwart it. We do not interfere.”
With my tongue behind my teeth, I said, “That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t. It just means that you haven’t lost anyone you loved enough to try.”
“Or maybe,” she said, yellow eyes narrowing, “I loved them too much to try.”
“Why, then, did you help Kellan five months ago, if you didn’t have to? He’s alive because you interfered.”
“He was stabbed. That’s hardly ‘natural.’” She went quiet for a moment. “But, honestly? He looks like Mathuin.”
She looked down at her feet, her red mane ruffling in the night wind. I moved in closer, curious to see what she was looking at, and gave a start.
Her feet were planted on the edge of a bloodleaf island in the middle of the sombersweet ocean. A reminder of death amid this sacred monument to new life.
“How did this happen?” I asked, staring at the bloodleaf.
“Things are out of balance,” she said obliquely. “They have been for a very long time. I always believed that if I could just keep the forest at peace, the civilizations of man would ebb and flow the same way they always have, and the world would right itself again over time. But time, I’m afraid, is not on our side.” Rosetta crouched down among the flowers, pulling her knees up under her chin. After a moment, she spoke again, and I listened intently, unable to shake the sense that all of this was important. That I was supposed to be here, in this place, listening to this story at this moment.
I was no believer in fate, but if it was real, I imagined it would feel something like this.
A small breath of wind suddenly gusted across the blossoms of the sombersweet, and they bowed and swayed in response, as if to say yes.
“I was never meant to be warden,” Rosetta said quickly. “Galantha was the one who was chosen to inherit the mantle from Grandmother after our mother died. She was born for the task—bright, beautiful, loved by everyone and everything. When Begonia was little, I told her that crocuses would sprout wherever Galantha walked, and she used to watch Galantha’s footprints, waiting to see the flowers come up. Not because she believed me, but because Galantha was exactly the type of person for whom flowers would spring to life to follow.
“Galantha took on the mantle at sixteen. Warden of the Seventh Age—the Maiden Age. Grandmother’s stewardship had lasted four hundred years. Galantha could have had at least that long, maybe longer. Grandmother used to say that Galantha was going to be the strongest warden since Nola, and she was said to have lived for thousands of years.”
“What happened?” I asked quietly.
“Mathuin,” she said. “Mathu
in Greythorne.” She reached into her pocket and removed the figurine of the second sister, the one of Rosetta’s own likeness.
“I know that name. Kellan told me about him. Greythorne’s family shame. The deserter who was lured into the Ebonwilde by a witch and lost his head.”
“Not his head,” Rosetta said. “Just his heart. Mathuin was an artist; he was never meant to be a soldier. So when he abandoned his military post, the Tribunal went after him. He narrowly escaped with his life and tried to make a break for safety in Achlev, but he never made it that far. Galantha and I found him wandering the woods, mortally wounded and near death. We brought him back home to heal, and then he just . . . stayed.”
She smiled a little at the memories. “He’d carve his figurines and tell us beautiful stories about his life in this faraway oasis of magic and mazes called Greythorne. He made himself busy, fixing little things, working alongside us in the garden, taking us for rides through the woods on his beautiful horse. Argentus, the horse’s name was—a silver Empyrean. Grandmother was very frail by then, and she didn’t like strangers much, but she appreciated that he worked hard and kept us laughing. When Grandmother got ill, he helped us care for her. When she died, he helped us bury her in the family plot, helped us carve her a headstone.”
She heaved a deep sigh. “We all grew to care for him like a brother. Even Begonia, and she never cared much for anybody.”
I said nervously, “Onal once told me that she collected bloodleaf petals as a child, when her sister was murdered in the woods.” I looked down at the bloodleaf patch. “Is this where it happened?”
Rosetta nodded.
“Did Mathuin do it?” I whispered.
She gave a slight shake of her head. “I’ve never wanted to believe that, but what other answer could there be? She died, and he disappeared forever. And the worst part? I have no recollection of any of it, and I was there.”
