“And yet you would kill me now, and all the other Roses, without explanation, without warning. And the others in Aidurra and Vauzanne—will you kill them too?”
“Dismantling only one branch of the Order would leave two others still in chains,” she replied evenly. “I am bound to my sister Wardens as surely as you are bound to me, and the Mist, the Wood, the Crescent are bound to each of us in turn.” Her eyes gleamed with triumph. “What I do, I do for us all.”
My stomach churned to think of it: hundreds of Roses dying in an instant. And with the Wardens gone, the Mist would vanish. Aidurra’s Crescent of Storms would disappear. The Knotwood of Vauzanne would shrivel up and die.
Edyn would have no protections left against the Old Country.
“The other Wardens,” I whispered. “Do they know?”
She laughed. “Of course not. They haven’t the spine for this.”
“But you’re connected, the three of you. Surely they’ve sensed your intentions!”
“Another advantage of working with the goddess of the unknowable. My hapless sisters sense only what I wish them to perceive.”
I was almost too furious to speak. “You’re evil. What you’re doing is evil.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Kilraith was supposed to win, and we would have been free. But now?” She laughed again, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Kilraith is dead. The war is over, or it will be soon enough, and our last chance at freedom is gone. Everything will go on exactly as it always has. And I can’t let that happen. I cannot condemn any more girls to this life of servitude. I will not.”
“Instead you’ll condemn them to death?”
“These Roses, yes, but no others. Isn’t that a beautiful thought, Mara? Don’t you see? We make this sacrifice so others won’t have to.”
“Neave is still alive,” I said tightly, “and Caiathos, and my mother. If this Order dies, they’ll create another one. They will build a new Middlemist and bind others to it in our stead. Thissacrificewill be a waste of life.”
“And these are the gods you were so intent upon saving?” The Warden couldn’t stop laughing. “No, they won’t bind any others. They are mere shadows of what they once were, even your precious mother. And even if they could, they won’t have the chance.”
“It wasn’t Kilraith destroying the Mist,” I whispered, realizing it with dreadful certainty. This was the worst revelation of all. “It was you. Everyone driven mad by the failing Mist, all the work we did to stem the bleeding—”
“Kilraith,” the Warden said, her voice curling. “Kilraith was abroken creature blinded by a desire for revenge. He could never have done what I did.”
Suddenly every strange behavior I’d observed over the last several months, every outburst, every sign of fatigue made a terrible kind of sense. The Warden had served as both an anchor to a curse and a host to a god. And with that power she had been unraveling the Mist from the inside, undoing gods-made magic as old as the world.
This was unthinkable, impossible. It was no wonder that she had been slowly falling apart.
She was watching me closely. “You don’t approve of what I’ve done. I’m not surprised. You havetheirblood in your veins. Of course you want to defend their decisions, continue their legacy of cruelty.”
I shook my head, my mind scrambling for a solution. “There has to be another way to reform the Order, something other than total destruction!”
“There isn’t.”
“I don’t believe it. You’re so lost in your own anger that you can only see paths forged by violence. You’re no better than Kilraith.”
“And if you refuse to see the truth—that what I’ve done, and what I will do, is the only acceptable response to generations of bondage—then you’re no better than the feckless gods who brought us here.”
She glared at me, her black eyes sunken in her white face. I held her gaze and refused to blink.
Finally the Warden sighed. A light somewhere inside her seemed to go out.
“I’m tired, Mara,” she said, all the vitriol gone from her voice. “Aren’t you? Help me do this. Release us both. The one thing Zelphenia has been good at since I found her is keeping me alive. Even with her meager strength, she manages that one thing because of what my body has given her. This body that has never been my own from the moment I was born. But now that you’re here, you can end this for me. She canstay my hand, but not yours. She can’t touch our binding magic. It’s too mighty for her, Mara.We’retoo mighty for her.”
Suddenly a scorching power spiked through my body, forcing me to move. I started pushing against the Warden’s wrist, driving the blade inexorably back toward her throat.
Panicked, I tried to yank my hand away from her, but the binding magic wouldn’t allow it. It was the same insistent feeling that changed my body from woman to bird and back again, the same sour charge that guided me back to the Warden when missions took me far from the priory.
I couldn’t fight it. The rose tattoo on my thigh burned like a brand. I smelled smoke, I smelled lightning. And I watched through furious tears as my hand pressed the blade into her neck. My strength was nothing compared to that of the magic that bound me to her.
“I hate you,” I whispered. “You’ve taken everything from me. And now you won’t even let me die by my own hand.”
