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I had always loved the night. It accepted who you were or allowed you to slip into a new persona entirely. When I was with other people, I was rarely myself. Even with Ember and Thorn, I’d held back. With Aster, I had always focused on being the perfect spy, the perfect rebel, the perfect lover… and yet it never felt… enough. He was always risking more than me, and that knowledge cut deep.

The pressure of the needle between my fingers reminded me of the last time I’d held one: the night I killed Frickel. The night I had signed my death warrant. It was only five nights ago, but it seemed worlds away. I was worlds away.

The little book’s leather was worn smooth where hands had touched it over and over, edges softened and curled. It had been used and loved by someone. This wasn’t a book that had been kept on a shelf, and so I wondered how it had come to be hidden away in the Grand Library with all the other treasures of Annatalia. Why had I been so drawn to it?

Sewing the pages back together didn’t take long, and then reattaching the pages to the worn leather only took an hour more. There was no sound on the mountain—no Aster, no Riders.

Unlike the codex, I didn’t have to coax the words onto the pages. It was as if the little book was desperate to be seen again, and the words flowed back.

The Ashen Grimoire

I ran my fingers over the words which prickled with magic and then turned the page. My shoulder burned, sharp enough that I clenched my fists and tried to fill my lungs. My hand flew to my shoulder before I could stop myself, fingers pressing hard through the fabric as if I could hold still whatever was happening there by force.

A warning of danger, or was it recognition?

The words on the page grew bolder and then settled enough for me to see that, along with the main text, the margins were crowded with notes. Whoever had written this had been trying to fill every last space with every bit of knowledge they held.

I read.

This is my second Yule since bonding to my Ash Phoenix. There was trouble at court last week, and we were all summoned to the Barren to discuss the birth of the Low baby. I believed that there must have been other children born to Riders, but by the anger of the Barren King, I now assume not. I suppose we are some of the very first—the phoenixes were only ‘gifted’ to us by the Otherworld Gods four years ago. It ended the Old War, as was their intention, and you would think the Kings would be happy, but I believe the opposite is true. I am worried about what will happen if the Kings become threatened by the Riders’ Skyworld power of fire and light magic.

At first, the Choosing and the Bonding were chaotic. The wrong time, the wrong night, the wrong place. Many died trying, and the nobles and kings didn’t want to send their precious sons to the slaughter. So they sent the second daughters, who would have gone to the nunneries to worship the Gods of the Otherworld, anyway. That was how I came to be on that wagon to the mountains. And it wasn’t as if the Gods gave any directions, but once the Masters in Annatalia understood that the Phoenix cycle was connected to Yule and the losing of the light, they understood that Earthworlders could approach the birds then, and they would not be killed doing so.

I stood too quickly, and the wooden stool scraped noisily against the stone. The sound vibrated around the confined space along with my pounding heart.

It didn’t make sense. We were always told that women never made it through the bonding. But the writer of this journal was a Rider, and she was a… she. I flicked back and reread the section about the baby with new eyes. The baby was born between two Riders, and the King wasn’t happy about it. But why? What did it matter to the Kings of old?

Now that the Bonding is understood and the Sky Towers are built, more and more of us are chosen each year. We are thriving. Even though much of the land is still uninhabitable due to the toxic magic they created in the War.

After much negotiation, to which I have been privy, we have worked with the Wilds witches and mages to combine our powers. Mixing Sky and Earth magic has been a passion of mine. And we have stabilised the FootPaths now—passages between one kingdom and the other. This was one of our team’s greatest accomplishments. The Earthworlders and Skyworlders can move through these with the Cloud Amulet…

Then.

They say we were wrong. They lie. Women were always meant to fly. If we weren’t, why was each flock always six—three women and three men?

My whole body was trembling as I placed the book down. There were female Riders who had bonded, and I had never heard about it. I should have been more shocked than I was. I was used to the lies of men in power.

But the most valuable information was that this Rider was talking about the FootPaths. If you were going to wage a war, the one thing that would give you an immense advantage would be the ability to march huge numbers of soldiers straight into enemy lands. My hand was already gripping the Amulet hanging around my neck, and my mind was spinning. I flicked through some other pages and found a map and information on how the amulet could be used. There was also a comprehensive list of the nights of Yule and what each one meant.

Then…

As a scribe, the only way I can make sure that they don’t wipe out our history is this book. There are talks in the Towers about only a ‘chosen’ few being able to go into the mountains to the phoenix hatching grounds next Yule.

They are going to try to select who would be able to fly. It is madness, but no one is listening to our objections, and female Riders are going missing…

I scanned through a few more pages—through recipes for Yuletide feasts that the Riders made, runes that the Earthworlders gifted them. And then I hit gold. The Rider explained how the FootPaths were used and where some of the locations were—one was inside the mountain workshop. ‘Near the landing platform.’ Wherever that was. But if I could find it, I could get to Ember in the Wilds.

All I had to do was lose the men who were watching my every move.

I picked up the little book, wrapped the leather binding around it, and placed it in my pocket. The Rider was right. They had wiped the memory of female Riders from every book—all but one little book that had remained hidden with its pages blank. And what better way for the Barren to check that nothing remained from a fallen kingdom than by taking everything they had ever written? But the prideful Masters had assumed that it was the big, beautiful books like the codex that held the power. When, really, it was one woman’s insistence that her voice needed to be recorded… preserved.

The little book pulsed and then vibrated with an almost happy hum. We needed to leave this place before anyone discovered my book and read what was inside. My uncle worshipped the Skyworld and the Phoenix Riders, but he also commanded them as a unit in his army. What would happen if every woman in every kingdom realised that there had been female Riders in the past? That it wasn’t because they died on bonding; they were sent to the slaughter. Test subjects. The women who joined the nunneries to worship the ten Otherworld Gods sacrificed themselves for their families’ indiscretions. The women whom the lesser nobles shipped off, so they didn’t have to pay more dowries.

The rage pumped through me with every lie that surfaced and shattered one by one, and not just by the Barren education; no, this went far, far deeper. Everyone in the Annatalian Court’s Library knew of this—they had to. And…

“Wren?” Aster was almost at the table, and I turned away from him and checked that the book was safely out of sight. I picked up the codex. I needed him to believe that it was the codex that I didn’t want him to have. “What’s wrong?” He froze, and his gaze landed on the book in my arms. “You’ve read it.” I would have expected him to reach out for it or demand to know why it was so important, but instead he crossed his arms over his chest and sighed.

“You knew what was in it?”