More monks entered from side doors—another three, then an additional seven—but as more and more of them flooded the room, I only grew stronger, my power rising gleefully to meet the challenge. I spun and kicked, threw punches and flung dropped blades, and I was so fast and liquid, my senses so sharp, that the world boomed and flashed around me. Each small sound was amplified, each slight change in the air alerted me to a dagger flying at my head or a punch coming for my throat.
Suddenly the floor bucked beneath me, throwing me off my feet. I rolled to cushion my landing and looked up just in time to see a crack in the polished stone racing toward me.Elemental.One of the monks was an elemental.
I leapt out of the way just in time, then barely dodged a slab of stone dropping from the ceiling. It crashed to the floor in a cloud of dust. Fragments of stone skidded across the ruined tile.
A cry of despair tore through the room.
“What have youdone?” came Errik’s rasping voice. “No,no!”
I whirled around and saw chaos.
Five fresh chasms had cleaved the room into pieces. One of them ran through the fountain, splitting it in two. The statue of Zelphenia toppled over before my eyes; her head smashed into the fountain’s rim and shattered. Blood spilled out of the ruined fountain, painting the splintered floor red. I refused to let myself wonder how many people had been murdered to make that scrying pool.
And what Errik and his followers might have used the poolfor.
What had Kilraith promised them? And what would anyone who survived this night report to him once the dust settled?
But then I saw Gareth, and the sight of him wiped my mind clean of everything else.
He lay amid the ruins of the fountain, his body bent awkwardly over a slab of broken stone. The fountain’s spilled blood pooled around him, and he clutched at his throat with frantic red hands. Beside him, clinging to a shattered slab of stone, was Errik, brandishing his knife triumphantly. He grinned at me, wild-eyed and blood-splattered, then drew a rasping breath to speak, but before he could utter a sound, I was on him. One sharp kick to his temple, and he collapsed against the ruins of his beloved fountain, his skull shattered.
I hurried to Gareth and assessed his condition with a sinking heart. He’d lost his glasses somewhere, so nothing blocked my view of his eyes—glassy, terrified. Blood bubbled up between his fingers from a bright red gash on his throat. Not a fatal wound, not yet, but it would become one soon. He was losing too much blood.
“It’s all right,” I muttered, trying to keep my voice calm even as fear pounded a death knell along my spine. “You’re going to be all right. It’s not too bad. We just have to stop the bleeding.”
I grabbed Errik’s knife and used it to cut a strip of cloth from thepart of his robes that wasn’t soaked in blood. With shaking fingers I tied the cloth around Gareth’s neck, as tight as I could make it while still allowing him to breathe. Blood seeped through the cloth immediately. He was pale, gleaming with sweat, and his every breath rattled.
I picked him up as gingerly as I could, trying not to panic at how light he felt in my arms. I knew his body, knew how solid and strong it was, and how it felt to be held by him, loved by him. He felt so insubstantial only because my sentinel strength was at its peak, I told myself. I didn’t look at him again; I couldn’t, or I’d fall to my knees.
A noise behind me—someone stumbling through the mess of blood and stone. I whirled, rage painting my vision as red as the floor under my feet. I didn’t know how I would kill whoever attacked me next; I just knew that I would destroy them so completely that no one would be able to recover even a small piece of their body. I would kill everyone within these sacred walls if I had to.
“Wait! Mercy, please!” A young monk with dark brown skin stood there, her hands raised to ward me off. “I don’t want to hurt you!”
“You have three seconds to convince me not to kill you,” I said, fury making my voice tremble.
She glanced over my shoulder, then darted to the side and flicked her wrists downward. The floor split open at her feet, and the crack raced behind me, widening as it sped toward its target—another monk, dagger in hand, eyes bright with anger and lip swollen from the impact of my fist. But before he could make another move, the growing chasm reached him, opening up beneath his feet. He fell into it with a scream, and soon nothing was left of him but faint sounds of agony from somewhere below.
I turned back to the young monk—clearly the elemental who’d destroyed the fountain—and gave her a brisk nod. “Fine. I won’t kill you. Yet.”
“Follow me,” she said breathlessly, hurrying past me. “I’ll show you the way out.”
I obeyed; what choice did I have? Gareth was wheezing in my arms, and I couldn’t hold him and keep him alive and fight off more monks at the same time. We needed help; we needed a healer, or at least a quiet, clean room where I could try to stitch his wound closed.
I followed the monk silently through twisting dark corridors, my eyes burning and my throat tight with tears I refused to let fall. We entered a dank passage with stone walls and an earthen floor. The monk took a torch from a bracket on the wall, lit it, and finally spoke again.
“No apology I could offer is enough for what’s happened here tonight,” she murmured. Her voice was thick with anger. “But I am sorry nevertheless, my lady. I am so sorry.”
“Not a lady,” I replied automatically.I’m a Rose.I said the words over and over to myself like a prayer.I’m a Rose, and I can save him.
“A radical sect of the fellowship led by Errik has been secretly serving Kilraith for several weeks now,” the monk went on. “I was one of them for a time. But now I see how foolish I was, and I’m doing everything I can to stop them.”
“They killed the Blessed Abbot.”
“Yes, and twelve others. Including my sister.”
Her voice was hard, flat. My chest twisted painfully. Gemma’s and Farrin’s faces flashed before my eyes.
We reached a heavy wooden door, which the monk unlatched and pushed open with no small effort. I soon saw why: a snowstorm had descended upon the island. Several inches had piled up against the door, and past the glow of our torch, I could see nothing but sheets of snow swirling through the thick black night.
