“If we were talking about any other human, I’d agree with you. But the Warden is…”
“A horror?” Posey offered sweetly. “A brute?”
I wasn’t in the mood to joke about the Warden. “She’s also the reason you’re here and not dead.”
That surprised her. A wave of hurt crossed her face before she could hide it, and she began fiddling with the small silver locket she always wore at her throat—a familiar nervous habit of hers. As impossible as it would have once seemed to me to befriend a fae, I had done it anyway over the last few weeks, after convincing the Warden to offer Posey asylum in exchange for aiding our intelligence efforts. During that time, I had seldom been short with her.
“I’m sorry,” I said after a moment. “That was unkind.”
I rubbed my forehead, wincing a little. I could feel a headache coming on. We’d all been getting headaches more frequently. Headaches, fevers, tremors, random stabbing pains. Soon those symptoms would spread far beyond the Mistlands. The gods had made the Middlemist, and they’d also made all of us who lived in the human world of Edyn. Now the Mist was falling, and if we couldn’t save it, so would we. It was inevitable.
All of this was inevitable. At least it felt that way to me. I hadn’t been able to make my own decisions since I was ten years old and the Warden had taken me from Ivyhill, with a few notable exceptions. And even those—going into the Old Country with my sisters the first time we fought Kilraith; sneaking them into Rosewarren for more visits than they were allowed—had felt like stumbling into decisions that someone else had made for me.
The only thing I’d done completely of my own volition was collect my morbid cave treasures: corpses affected by Mistfires, artifacts belonging to people who had been infected by the failing Mist and gone mad. I could barely stand to think about that Mara of months ago, so earnestly determined to shoulder some of the Warden’s burden and unravel the growing mystery behind the Mist’s condition herself.
A whole lot of good that had done.
Posey put a hand on my arm, wresting me from my dark thoughts. “You should ask the Warden for some time to yourself. You need rest.” Mischief curled her voice. “I wasn’t joking earlier. You do look terrible.”
I smiled a little. Teasing I could handle. “Rather unfair, coming from a fae. Is it even possible for you to look ugly?”
“Certainly not. I’m offended that you would even ask such a thing.”
The knots in my shoulders eased the slightest bit. I pushed aside the pain of my headache and took the Warden’s message from her.
Posey watched me with an uncharacteristically grave expression on her face. “I mean it, Mara. You’re no good to any of them if you’re exhausted.”
Them.The other Roses. The tired elders, the frightened littles. More and more littles these days. With our dwindling numbers, we could no longer afford to be choosy when recruiting, and the new draft law issued by the Royal Conclave told us we didn’t have to be.
“I’ll think about it,” I lied, giving Posey a reassuring smile.
“That is the worst fake smile I’ve ever seen.”
“Go have some breakfast. You’ll get the freshest rolls.”
Posey made a face. “Rolls. Good gods. How I miss fae food.”
As I strode across the stable yard back toward the main house, Freyda flew after me and landed lightly on my shoulder. The pinch of her talons reassured me. She gave a few strands of my hair one of her familiar sharp tugs. I’d been forgiven, it seemed.
I reached up to stroke her belly, wishing I could retreat to my room and draw her close, tuck her little head under mine, and breathe in the scent of her feathers. Most falcons would tolerate no such behavior. But like me, Freyda was far from ordinary.
“Thank you,” I whispered. It was so much easier to face the Warden when Freyda was with me—and easier to ignore thoughts of home, which seemed to arise much more swiftly when I was tired. Ivyhill, Farrin, Gemma, Father. Mother, sequestered up at Wardwell. I still wasn’t used to thinking of her as a god. For so long I’d tried not to think of her at all. I’d tried—and failed—not to think about any of them, though with every breath I missed them a little bit more. Over the years, they had come to visit me once a month, as all the Roses’ families were allowed to do, and every time they left, it was like they carved out a piece of me to take with them and I was left a little less whole.
Freyda’s talons squeezed my shoulder again, bringing me back to myself. She always knew when the shadows were coming for me.
I scratched her belly once more, then opened the Warden’s note, expecting it to be a summons to her office upstairs. But reading it made me stop short.
Come to the Stillhouse at once, it said in her precise, cramped penmanship. Nothing more.
Freyda ruffled her feathers and gave a soft chirp, disquieted by my sudden unease. The Stillhouse was cruelly named; there was nothing still about the place. It was where we kept our most dangerous prisoners. No matter how diligently we scrubbed its walls, we could never wash away the stains.
Thinking of those mean, dark rooms turned me cold. I stood at the edge of the stable yard and focused on the rhythm of my breathing until I’d squashed my rising dread and paved over it with stone.
The Warden’s message could mean only one thing. It was time, once again, to interrogate the harpy Nerys.
***
A horrible shriek burst through the air just as I stepped into Nerys’s cell. I was glad I’d left Freyda up above, though I’d almost been cowardly enough to bring her with me. The scream of a harpy is a terrible thing—multitonal, discordant, loud enough to make one’s ears bleed if the harpy is at full strength.
