Luckily for me, Nerys was hardly more than a deflated bag of skin and bones on the floor. She had few feathers left, her wings small, fleshy, and pocked with sores in their absence.
Even at the grisly sight of her, I didn’t break my stride once. What a model Rose I was. I closed the door behind me and headed down the stone stairs to join the Warden. She crouched over Nerys, staring into her cloudy yellow eye. In her hand she held a glass syringe of bright green liquid.
“The tip I received indicates that the creature Kilraith could behiding in the Cold Barrens,” the Warden said quietly, “building an army out of the scraps of Mhorghast. Planning his final offensive. That’s where you were born, isn’t it, Nerys? A hatchling harpy taking her first awkward flight among the frost-trees.”
If I closed my eyes, I’d be able to imagine her speaking to a small child. I could convince myself that perhaps she was telling a bedtime story.
I did not allow myself to close my eyes.
“Nerys,” the Warden said, wheedling, “I know you don’t want me to give you more of this serum. I know it hurts. I don’t like causing pain, if you can believe that. So don’t make me do it. Let’s have a conversation instead. Tell me where in the Barrens someone like Kilraith might hide.”
The Warden waited, statue-still. The only things that moved were her black eyes, darting across the harpy’s mangled skin. Cataloging every wound we’d inflicted on her, every infected scar.
What was she thinking? I wondered. What was shefeeling? If she felt anything, that is. After twelve years with the Warden, I still couldn’t be entirely sure what made her tick.
The only thing I knew for certain was that as frightened as I was of her, I loved her even more. And I wanted her to love me.
It was my greatest triumph—and the source of my deepest shame—to be the Warden’s favorite Rose.
“Nerys, talk to me about the Barrens,” she continued. “I’ve been there myself hundreds of times, but I know harpies love their secrets, and I know somewhere in that harpy mind of yours are hiding spots that even I’ve never seen. Describe to me exactly where they are.”
For a long time, Nerys was still. The silence was awful, heavy. The vials of poison sitting on the little wooden table to my right glowed like gems in the torchlight.
I fixed my gaze on the harpy’s unblinking eye. The flesh aroundit was ghastly, swollen and abused; she could barely open it. She was quiet for so long that I began to think she was dead, or close to it.Die, I thought, directing all my energy toward her. Maybe some scrap of my mother’s godly power would rise up within me and sap the life from this poor creature.Please die. Give up. There’s nothing left for you here.
Finally, Nerys shifted to look away from the Warden and right at me instead. Gemma would have been horrified to see the left half of the harpy’s face, where flesh and muscle had been scraped away to expose her bones. Farrin would have excoriated me for allowing such treatment.
But at the sight of Nerys’s wounds, I felt only a small ripple of disgust that I tamped down immediately.May all your thorns drip poison, came the thought.
And here we were—the Warden and me—dripping our poison just as we were supposed to.
Nerys cracked open her dry, lipless mouth. All her sharp teeth were gone. Her gums were black and green with infection.
“Kill me,” she rasped, looking right at me with the one eye she had left.
“Never,” the Warden snapped. “I will keep you alive for the rest of my life, and I have many decades left in this world.” Then she plunged the syringe’s needle into the sagging flesh of the harpy’s neck.
The Warden’s poisons worked quickly. Nerys’s body seized before I could draw another breath. Once she had been massive and powerful, requiring dozens of steel chains bolted to the floor to contain her. Now all the chains were gone. We’d broken her so thoroughly that they weren’t necessary. She twitched and screamed between us on the cold floor, each stone stained black with her blood. Weeks of it, layers upon layers.
The Warden leaned closer, put her mouth right above Nerys’sragged, tufted ear. “Tell me about the Barrens, Nerys,” she shouted, implacable. Harpy screams were nothing to her. “Tell me, and I’ll make it stop. Are there underground caves? Strongholds in the mountains? Vaults cloaked in Olden magic? The Great Mother Harpy has always been fascinated with fae. Did she strike a bargain with one of the clans? Are they hiding Kilraith? Are they hiding He Who Is All?”
“Please,” Nerys moaned. Her limbs bent unnaturally, jerked out of alignment by the poison. A wrist snapped; a wing inverted. “Kill me!”
I did not look away. I’d seen worse, and my dread was safe beneath all the stone inside me. I imagined a smooth winding road of it stretching from my tongue down to my throat and then to the panic bubbling in my gut. Quieting me. Coating me with cool stillness.
The Warden tossed away the syringe with a sharp curse. “Mara, get over here. And bring the Box.”
I was ready to obey until she mentioned the Box—the nickname for a poison so vile that I’d seen it used only once in all my years of service. That stopped me in my tracks, startling me out of the cool, still place I’d been standing in.
At my hesitation, the Warden rounded on me. “TheBox, Mara.”
I don’t know what made me do it. Maybe I harbored a scrap of my mother’s power after all, indignant at the treatment of one of her sister Neave’s creatures. Maybe it was my exhaustion, or the shadows on the Warden’s haggard face that betrayed her own. She was not herself. None of us were. The breach bells rang every hour. The Mist was falling. The queen was dead. And we trained new Roses every morning while burning the corpses of dead ones every night.
“Madam, we can’t,” I said quietly. “The Box is meant for—”
“I know what the Box is for,” she said, rising to her feet. Her voice was chillingly quiet. “I designed it. And I’m telling you to bring it to me right now.”
She could have easily retrieved it herself. It sat there on the tablewith the Warden’s other tools of torture: a single drop of dull purple liquid in a slender glass vial.
