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Everything tilted for a split second, and I found myself looking at a web of knotted string. Galantha was bent over a body that had been laid in the web’s center. Her grimoire was lying open beside her while hex knots twirled on the boughs of the perimeter trees.
“I’m going to do it,” she was saying. “I’m going to bring her back.”
“Are you certain about this? You know the risks.” Mathuin was standing nearby, the reins of his horse in his hands. His face—so like Kellan’s—was a mask of pain. He was grieving Rosetta, but he was also grieving for Galantha, who’d lost her sister. “This is dangerous,” he said. “We don’t know what might happen, tampering with time like this. And Begonia . . . what will she say if she sees this?”
“I sent Begonia to pick mushrooms,” Galantha said. “And then I put her to sleep. It’ll last until the comet has passed. She won’t remember this, thank the Ilithiya.” She wiped a tear from her eye and then lifted a chain upon which swung a lovely pendant. It was small enough to fit fully into her palm and made of velvety red-violet-stained silver in the shape of a flower blossom, a teardrop jewel dangling from inside. This was the Ilithiya’s Bell. This was what I was looking for.
Galantha’s hands trembled as she raised the bell and rocked it in her hand. It sent out a peal of sound more beautiful and terrible than anything I’d ever heard. It was at once love and loss, a blessing and a curse, life and death.
It hit me like a blow. I gasped and doubled over.
Aurelia. Aurelia, listen to my voice.
I was so close to the bell. So close. Mere inches away. But I could feel the Gray slipping away, and with it, my chance to retrieve it.
No. Not yet.
The voice in the distance was more insistent. Aurelia! But I turned from it and ran, the names of the sisters’ flowers repeating in my head. Galantha. Rosetta. Begonia. I had to know what happened to them. I had to go back. Galantha. Rosetta. Begonia.
And then I was back in the castle at Syric, but not my mother’s bedchamber; I had tumbled into the Hall of Kings, where portraits of generations of former Renaltan monarchs looked loftily down upon their progeny from their high-mounted gilded picture frames. I came to a stop under the last portrait down the line. Unlike most of his predecessors, he had a hint of a smile curling in the corners of his lips that made his eyes seem to twinkle. I’d spent so many long hours staring at his portrait, missing him madly. He was a handsome sight: blue eyes, sunny golden hair, a regal blue robe, and his sapphire crown. King Regus Costin Altenar, my father.
His mother and father’s portraits preceded his: Queen Iresine and King Costin. I never got to know either of them, for they died before I was born. But I was struck, for the very first time, by how much my father looked like Costin, and how little he looked like Iresine, with her ivory skin and red-rose hair, silver flower-shaped earrings glinting from her ears.
A pair of Tribunal devotees meandered down the hall: Magistrate Toris de Lena and his astonishingly beautiful companion, Isobel Arceneaux.
They stood together in front of my family’s portraits, speaking in hushed tones that I couldn’t overhear. When they began to walk out of the hall, a small sprite of a girl with tangled hair and too-large eyes careened past them before crashing into the wall of her grandparents’ portrait.
Arceneaux was fixed in place, staring at the little girl with ice in her expression as she fiddled with the silver buttons sewn into her tribunal robes.
I watched as Onal came to see what the racket was and scolded me soundly for my recklessness, sending me away with a swat so that she could retrieve the fallen portrait and replace it on the wall.
She lingered there for several long moments afterward, and when she did move, it was only a few inches, so that she could gaze at my father’s picture.
Her son’s picture, as I now knew.
20
The Gray moved me again, a dizzying transition from the regal halls of Syric’s castle into the heavy darkness of the Ebonwilde.
I was with Galantha and Mathuin in the Cradle once more, but some time had passed, perhaps hours. Galantha was sitting tiredly next to Rosetta’s inert form, which was suspended in a disc of silver, when something caught her eye.
“No,” she said, clawing at the edge of the silver disc, yanking plants up by their roots. “No, no, no, no. No bloodleaf. Not here. Not yet.” But her efforts were futile, an
d as she realized this, she sagged, deflated. “It’s not working,” she said to Mathuin, looking up at the sky. “We have only until the comet has passed over, and it’s almost gone on the horizon. I can’t retrieve her from here. I have to go in.”
“It’s not safe, Gal,” he said. “You have to keep the portal open.” He sat up, pulling the leather strap of his pack over his head. “I’ll go.”
After a moment, Galantha nodded, lifting the bell from around her neck and placing it over his head. Mathuin crawled onto the mirrored plane and lay next to Rosetta’s prone body. He put his hand on her face, touching his forehead to hers. “I’m coming to find you, Little Fox,” he said, closing his eyes.
The Gray turned again, as if it wanted me to see where he would go.
It wasn’t far.
We were back by the cottage again. Inside, the first scream sounded.
This time, Mathuin burst through the door, eyes burning like coals.
He grabbed the first weapon he could see—a dull kitchen knife by the water basin, where a handful of potatoes sat, half-peeled—and charged at the men who were holding Rosetta down. The first one was dispatched with ease as Mathuin embedded the paring knife into the back of the man’s neck. But he lost his only weapon, and the second man was launching himself at him, letting out a scream like a war cry.
