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I remember the inside of Alder Tower as a castle of gleaming, polished wood and greenery. The oak and alder rooms were filled with trees in ornate pots, enormous ferns grafted into the walls, and reliefs of carefully arranged lichens in many colors and textures. The floors were covered in woven rugs, and candelabras of bright gold and silver lit the rooms. The blooming green and red crest of Zelen was emblazoned upon countless doors and surfaces, embroidered on tapestries, and painted on shields and suits of arms, a constant reminder that I was the ward from a lesser kingdom, subservient to Zelen’s military might and lush crops. There to learn magic and combat and riding from teachers superior to our own, and to foster goodwill between our countries.
None of that mattered to Dette and me. We were just two young girls. All we cared about was our friendship. I once thought marrying her would continue our equal footing, uniting our two kingdoms, as my father loved to say, under one common banner.
Rothbart destroyed that hope when he killed my mother. It took the heart right out of me. My thoughts of spending days training elementals while Dette saw to matters of state were replaced by ones of sadness and retribution. Akina feared my dogged one-mindedness would interfere with my ability to rule.
Maybe that’s one reason I want to kill Rothbart. Not only did he kill my mother, he ruined my carefully laid plans for my future. Is my motivation that selfish? Am I that much like my father, who I’ve always judged for being too self-interested? Sometimes, going by history books, it seems an egotistical, reluctant ruler is worse than a tyrannical one, and that’s another reason I’m reluctant to take the throne of Lazul. I don’t want to fail.
The entrance hall is dark and cool. Dead vines and fronds crunch under the soles of my boots. The clean scent of heartwood and plants I recall from my summers here has been replaced by stale, musty air. Dette pulls a torch out of a wall sconce and we follow her through the hall into a side room, and then another, through the many doors and rooms winding toward the servant quarters and the large kitchen, our escape route.
My mind races with the futility of it all. The weeks spent traveling here in the slowest way imaginable, putting ourselves in harm’s way again and again. Neev’s disappearance. Trying to take Dette with us without killing Rothbart first when I want to rid the kingdom of his scourge once and for all.
“Stop.” I put my hand on Dette’s arm, and where there should be fine hairs, I feel soft downy feathers. “Is the only way to break the spell to kill him?”
“I know of no other. I’ve tried. At night, sometimes, I sneak into the library and look for cures.”
“And you found nothing to rid one of a transfiguration spell?”
She shakes her head. “It’s not just a simple reversal spell. It’s...part of me. It’s connected to my own being.”
“I don’t understand.”
She runs her hand along the smooth column of her neck and touches the planes of her face. “If you’re here when the sun rises, you will.”
“I won’t be, and neither will you.”
“We don’t have time to argue.”
“Dette, I didn’t survive Thornewood, an infected wound, and an attack by quill spiders to leave you in the clutches of the madman who killed my mother!”
Dette’s lips tremble, but I can’t tell if it’s from anger or an effort to hold back tears.
“I knew this would happen.” She sounds relieved and angry at once. “I knew you’d come for me, and that you’d be pigheaded and foolish when I told you to leave!”
She steps forward and I think she’s going to fly at me in a rage, but she throws herself into my arms, clutching me in a hug so tight it hurts. I hug her back. Her embrace is soft and familiar, like the memory of a childhood summer. I don’t want to leave her here. I can’t.
She pulls away first. Her eyes are glassy with tears, but her face is like stone. “I know I am lost, Thedra. I can accept my fate if it means you’ll go free. But if you can return one day, promise me you’ll kill him.”
She squares her shoulders, tilting her chin, and the Dette of our childhood who was in my arms only a moment ago vanishes before my eyes. Now she is every inch a queen. The kind I can never be. One who would willingly, not begrudgingly, give all for her people. In her place, I might do the same, but only for a loved one. When it comes to an entire kingdom, I think I’d want to save my own skin long before I gave it up for someone else. Just like Thede the Opulent.
“She’s right,” says Gate.
I whirl to him, stung by this betrayal. “No, she isn’t!”
He groans. “Is it always like this? If you two spend any more time fighting, the mage is going to show up and turn us all to rot and ice. Hurry!”
Dette leads the way into the kitchen, which has been barred from the inside. I wonder why Rothbart didn’t take more precautions to keep her locked up before remembering he doesn’t need to.
She unbars the door and turns a brass key to unlock it, but just as her fingers lift the latch, the key turns in the lock, clicking back into place. The latch slams down with such force that Dette throws herself backward, and I know that if her hand had been anywhere near it when it closed, she’d have lost a finger.
I realize I can see the fading pattern on the traveling gown she wears and the mosaic in the center of the tiled floor. The light in the kitchen is pale gray now, and it’s coming from the curtained windows, not the torch.
“It can’t be dawn,” whispers Dette. “Not yet.”
Gate’s head snaps toward the shaded windows. “Whatever you do, don’t open the shades,” says Dette.
A massive, brindled cat with long legs and tufted ears saunters into the kitchen, its large, velvet paws nearly silent on the tiles. It rubs itself against one of the table legs before padding over to Dette. It wears a silver collar and reaches the height of her hip, and it nudges her skirts with its head as if wanting a pat, but she looks at it with unveiled dislike.
The cat has a knowing face, so thoughtful and cunning I’m barely surprised when it speaks. “Time to go back to your cage, little bird,” it purrs.
With a leisurely stretch, it sits back on its haunches and licks a paw before standing up on its hind legs. Its long body lengthens and stretches, like the wolf when he turned into his goblin form. In a trice, the thing standing before us is no longer a cat, but a creature of shadow with a grinning feline face filled with too many sharp teeth and round gleaming eyes devoid of kindness.
“Step back,” it hisses at me, and I retreat from the door because I’m unsure what it will do to me if I don’t.
It turns at the sound of Plover’s bowstring being drawn and laughs sibilantly. “Arrows can’t kill me, bird-boy. I’m not made of bones that crack or feathers that snap.”
It clearly finds joy in enunciating the words crack and snap. I can hear Plover’s frightened breaths, and the bow and arrow are quivering in his hands. It’s the first time I’ve seen him truly terrified, and I force myself to laugh, scorning the goblin’s fear mongering.
“Don’t listen to it, Plover. A being of smoke and shadow.”
“And claws and teeth,” whispers the cat-thing. “I’m living death. I’ll suck out your every breath.”
He reaches out a clawed hand with fingers of tawny fog and sweeps away the dusty window hangings, letting in the morning light. Dette groans and bends at the waist as if she has a cramp in her belly. The sunlight dapples over her body and she throws her head back and arches her spine so far in the wrong direction I fear it will snap like a twig. Her spine stretches and ripples, lengthening her neck. The feathers I felt when I touched her arm begin to lengthen, sprouting from her hands and fingertips, bloody and wet.
She screams, quaking as her arms and wings join and grow into one another, and her legs shrivel and gnarl into bony stalks. The scream becomes a grating, strangled keening until it dies in her throat, a sound I know will haunt me forever.
She is still Dette, but she is something else now, too. Before, she was half-woman, half-sylph, but now she is more bird than either, a massive swanlike thing with hulking white wings and spindly legs. Rothbart has turned her into something gorgeous but wrong. She’s not maimed like the sylph-girl, but the hands she so often used to heal are now wing tips. Her mouth can’t speak human words, and her eyes are full of pain. I didn’t believe it possible to hate Rothbart any more than I did, but I think for the thousandth time since I set out on the trade road that I will gladly kill him for this.
The cat-thing moves like mist dispersed by the wind, coiling itself around Dette’s body in a binding black and gilded spiral.
“It’s horribly painful, transfiguration. Not for the faint of heart. I prefer watching it to doing it myself.” Rothbart is leaning in the doorway. “I always admired Mora’s stoicism over the agony. You’re so like her, Thedra. Of course, you lack some of her finer qualities.”
He enters the room elegantly, with the manner of a man pretending to behave humbly at a party thrown in his honor. Plover looses an arrow without waiting a beat. It goes straight toward Rothbart’s heart, and for one triumphant moment I think it will hit its mark, but Rothbart puts up a hand and waves it away.
The arrow stops, thrumming in midair as if it has hit an invisible wall before turning in a graceful arc. The arrow flies at Plover, striking him in the wing. He staggers backward into the wall, and Gate grabs him, supporting him under his arms so he doesn’t slump to the ground.
“Discernment, for instance,” continues Rothbart. “You’d be halfway to the shore of Swan Lake by now, if you hadn’t hung back trying to be valiant.”
No one was more valiant than my mother, and I want to take his bait so badly, but I don’t.
“I’ve come here for Princess Dette. You must release her from this enchantment.”
“Of course, there’s a difference between bravery and stupidity,” muses Rothbart, ignoring me. “You have a willful sort of blindness and poor judgement.” He beckons to the open door and says in a different voice, as if speaking to someone in another room, “Stop being shy, my dear.”
Neev steps into the kitchen. He extends his hand to her, and she goes to him, slowly. He embraces her, turning her until I can see her face in the early morning light that’s making the room brighter every moment.
“I believe you know my daughter.”
Neev won’t look at me. Her face is a blank slate. I’ve never seen her so closed off, unreadable. It makes me question all I thought I’d come to know of her. Of myself.
I can’t seem to wrap my mind around this. I can’t fathom how the gentle, kind girl I’ve come to love so quickly could also be a cold-blooded traitor. “Why?” I ask her. “How?”
She doesn’t answer me.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” says Rothbart. “My sister a powerful water elemental, and my daughter a heat-wielder, although untrained. Yet I was born with no power myself.”
I watch him, hearing the deep resentment in his words. I don’t know how I never realized it before, how bitter he is. It drips from him like poison from an adder’s fangs.
“She was supposed to either mislead you in Thornewood and leave you to die,” he continues, “or seduce you into marrying her instead of Dette. In King Cygnus’ palace, she had the chance to kill you, but didn’t. Instead, she brought you here to me. So now I have three women with power.” He strokes one of the short locks of hair beside Neev’s rounded cheek, but there’s no affection in the gesture. Only possessiveness. It makes me sick. Not her, too, I think. Not everyone I love.
“I didn’t ask you,” I say. “I asked her. She owes me an explanation. Because she’s either the greatest actress to ever live, or one of us has been deceived.”
“It’s you who was deceived, Thedra. The explanation is simple.”
“That’s enough talking,” says Gate. “You are going to let us go now.”
Rothbart appears to consider this for a moment, then casts out an open hand. Something like a web of silver appears, sparkling in the air above his palm. He makes a throwing motion and the web glides through the air and lands on Gate’s mouth, rapidly thickening into a solid mass as he tries to pry it off with his fingers.
“That’s better. Now. Give me your vial, Thedra. I know it’s hidden in your palm. Your fist has been clenched since I came into the room.”
The vial is actually hidden in the toe of my boot. My fist is clenched because I’ve been watching everything proceed but am powerless to stop it, frozen like a spectator in a nightmare. It’s like being back in Poison Forest, wandering through cold and darkness with no chance of escape.
I keep my fist in a tight ball. Let him think I’m clutching the vial, that I’m about to unleash my power and fry him and everyone in the room to a crisp.
“Take it from me,” I challenge him.
Rothbart sucks his teeth at me. “This would all be so much easier if you’d just give it to me.”
“She may have submitted to you” —I nod to Neev— “but I’m not that easily led.”
“Oh, Thedra, don’t think you’re being noble. Neev has made the wiser choice. Think what I said about you being like Mora. You may not be fair, or cunning for that matter, but your magic is strong, and even bottled, it’s wild and potent. Join me and—”
“You don’t understand women at all, do you?” I interrupt, realizing his meaning. “You think we all want power, like you? We want room. The safety to be ourselves. And when the gods give some of us the power to take it, men like you still find a way to steal it.”
He clucks his tongue and laughs. “The godsgift. They gifted my sister with power. And she was my father’s favorite for it. A poor man like him, with no magic in his bloodline, siring a powerful water elemental. It didn’t matter that they took her away, and I was the one who stayed behind. Next to her, I was nothing. Not worthy of love, or even decency.” His eyes grow dark. “I killed him, so he never knew I joined the court at Lazul, but I doubt even that would have gained his approval.”
“Your solution for being born without power is to steal it?”
“The hoarding of magical power among the women and nobles in the Triumvir is unjust. Do you know your history, Thedra? In the beginning, for every four women born with elemental power, there was one man born with it. But then they bred them, one powered man with two or three women. Then they killed the male children until it was outlawed. And even then, sometimes, they did it in secret. Because they were afraid.”
“Why do you think they were afraid?” I ask. There’s no justifying what was done in Zelen a thousand years ago, but he needs to understand why.
“Because women always are,” he answers.
I shake my head. “They were afraid because of how often men use strength for evil. But...maybe we can change it.”
I can’t believe I’m saying this. I came here to kill him for using my mother and kidnapping Dette. But it’s so obvious now what led him here. If he thinks I’ll give him what he wants, compromise with him, he might agree to come with us.
“Perhaps we can come to a new understanding,” I say. “I’m meant to take my father’s throne, and I know the laws are unjust. They’re said to protect everyone, but they only benefit a few.”
He studies me. “Then you can see the only solution is to take back power, as I have done. I’m an opportunist, Thedra. Are you?”
“Not like this. You’d have to let us go for me to consider your propositions.”
He shrugs, brushing off my refusal. “I don’t have to do anything.” He claps his palms together and then draws them away from one another, extending his arms to their full width. When his hands come apart, a silver thread like the web he silenced Gate with is strung between his palms, glittering in the sunlight.
“Fen, bring the princess to a room in the north wing. But first, find and take the vial she carries.”
The goblin obediently uncoils itself from Dette and Rothbart tosses the thread to him. I snap my fingers and a branch of lightning snakes from my boot, but it passes right through the goblin’s body.
He grapples with me and I fight him, but he is twice my height and overpowers me easily. His body, half solid, half vapor, covers my face and head like a pall. I smell wild cat and forest, and I taste silver. The last sound I hear is Gate’s muffled moaning as he tries to get the web off his mouth and Plover’s weeping.
When I come to, my hands are bound behind my back with a heavy chain. When I try to force open the door of the room where I’m trapped, it gives just a little, but I hear the clink of a chain on the other side.
I sit on the floor with my heels together, thinking. I go over my companions in my mind and their possible whereabouts, skipping over Neev like a bad tooth. If I think about her now, I’ll cry, and I don’t have time for that. I can wallow in sadness over her betrayal later.
The last glimpse I had of Gate was him bending over Plover’s wounded body, comforting him.
I wonder if they are both dead by now. Alder Tower is a small holding, but it’s vast enough I wouldn’t be able to hear them being tortured in a different wing. The fact that they both willingly accompanied me into danger doesn’t make me any less ashamed of botching the plan.
I sit on my chained hands and scoot them under my bottom, maneuvering my legs so my clasped hands are in front of me. The latch on the window is made of wood, and I kick it until it breaks and shove my shoulder against it to open it. The chill wind from an impending autumn storm gusts into the room, ruffling my hair.
The low clouds over the lake are churning, laced with lightning. Dette is there, swimming on the lake beneath the darkening sky. She glides on the water easily in her strange half-swan, half-sylphan body, a contrast to the jerky movements she made when she tried to walk in the kitchen. She always loved the water.
Fen stalks along the shore in his cat form—a dedicated jailer.
I reach toward the sky with my bound hands, focusing my whirling thoughts, curling my fingers like claws. A finger of electricity obeys my summons, stretching from the sky toward my palms. I grab hold of it. Then I hear the chains on the outside of the door clanking and sliding as they’re removed, and I lose my grip on the lightning.
I turn to face the door as Neev slides into the room, closing and bolting the door behind her. She rushes to my side and runs her hands all over me, as if searching for injuries. “Did he hurt you?”
I wrench away from her. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to make sure you’re all right.”
“Untie me, then.”
She stays where she is and I sneer at her hesitation and snap the fingers of both hands, forming them into fists. The static in the room grows until energy crackles across my skin and Neev’s hair floats away from her head. A glistening web of electricity grows between my palms. It’s just a spark at first, but I feed it with my anger and despair, and it grows to the size of a fig, an apple. “I can turn the air in a room into an inferno in a storm like this,” I say. “You underestimated me.”
Neev looks afraid. “I didn’t underestimate you,” she says. “I knew you’d find a way to—"
“It’s not your turn to talk.” Treacherous little snake. “If you’re on my side, then why aren’t you tied up, too?”
“You think he would leave me unchained? Not all chains are links of steel.”
There’s another peal of thunder, closer this time. She still won’t look me in the eye, and I say, “Don’t you dare. You’ve looked in my face this entire time as you told your lies and spun your web of treachery. Now look at me and explain why.”
I can make all the threats I want, but my palms are starting to blister. Agitated, I throw the web of lightning I’ve created out the window where it funnels into the roiling clouds, followed by a clap of thunder so close it shakes the castle’s foundation, making us both jump. I stride to Neev and grasp the front of her shirt, shaking her. Her head bobs loosely on her neck like a marionette’s.
Instead of answering me, she takes out a set of keys and starts trying each one on the lock that binds the chains around my wrists. “There isn’t time.”
“You have to, Neev.”
“You should leave me here,” she says, frantically trying one key after another. “I had no doubt you’d find some way to escape, but this is faster.”
“Oh, you had no doubt?” I say mockingly. “And that made your betrayal acceptable?”
She bites her lip until it turns white, like she did on the summit of Frostmead. Now I understand her strange behavior as we drew closer to Lebed. Maybe she felt some fraction of guilt.
“I tried to tell you to go back,” she says.
“You did, I’ll give you that. Though I thought you did it out of love for me.”
She slides a small key with a starburst end into the lock, and when she turns it, it clicks into place. She yanks at the lock, tosses it to the floor, and quickly unwinds the chains around my wrists, rubbing the feeling back into my arms with her scalding hands.
My arms tingle horribly as the feeling returns to them. Neev sits down on the bed and looks at me, her eyes sorrowful. “I do love you.”
“Is anything you told me about yourself true?”
“All of it. I just left out the part about Rothbart finding me begging on the streets when I was fifteen. And how he offered to save me from my growing magic if I went to the palace and fed him information.”
“And you accepted his offer that easily?”
“He threatened to kill me if I said no.”
“Your own father threatened to kill you?”
Neev’s voice is full of disgust. “He’s not my father. He just sired me. He calls me his Dendronian by-blow. Do you remember what I told you on the trade road from the city? That my grandmother was rumored to be fae?”
I nod.
“Well, there’s more to it than that. She wasn’t just fae. She was...well, is Opalista.”
I stare at her in disbelief. Dendronians worship a fire goddess who goes by that name. As a land of snow and ice, they hold fire sacred the way Lazul does death. “But that would make your mother a goddess as well. And goddesses can’t die.”
“Half-goddesses can. Especially when they choose to. Rothbart thought if he had a child by her, he might produce a powered heir.”
“You. And now he wants to use your power for himself.”
She nods. “He placed a spell on me. If you kill him, I’ll die too. He calls it a mortal troth. He found it in some book of forbidden magic.”
“Why would he do that?”
“So that if you made it this far, you wouldn’t kill him. I think he fears your power, Thedra. He knew your mother, after all. He must have feared her power, too.”
My mother was fearsome, but Rothbart still destroyed her. And now he’ll destroy Neev, too. Rage sparks and simmers under my skin, threatening to turn me into a whirlwind of lightning. I wish I could tear down this entire castle, stone by stone. I’d bury him beneath the rubble and incinerate the lot with fire from the sky.
“Why didn’t you tell Dette all this?” I ask, my voice cracking with desperation. “She would’ve helped you.”
“You’ve seen how powerful he is. He kept threatening me. Said if I didn’t spy on her and send him messages, he’d kill us both. In the beginning, I just wanted to survive. I had no idea what he was planning. The attack on the trade road was the first time I saw the extent of his power.”
I remember how I scorned her for saying Dette being taken was her fault. That makes sense now, too. “Did you know who he was? That he killed my mother?”
“I only knew he was a mage who wanted information about the court at Zelen. Please believe me, I didn’t know what he had done until it was too late.”
She reaches into the neck of her tunic and pulls out a golden chain with a locket on it. The Speaking Jewel.
I glare at her, my eyes burning with her betrayal. “I left that behind.”
“I know. I took it when you weren’t looking. He told me to make sure that you brought it. I didn’t know then, but I think he must have had a spell on it to track us. It’s how he kept finding us.”
Neev pulls the long chain over her head and throws it onto the bed beside her. “Do whatever you want with it.”
I throw the locket out the window. It means nothing to me now. “Is this why you slept with me? Because he told you to?”
“No.” Her face crumples as she shakes her head violently from side to side. “I swear by Thorne, the night we lay together at Cliff Sedge was the sweetest night of my life.”
Her lips tremble and she starts to cry, tears dripping into the cup of her gloved hands where they rest in her lap.
I sit beside her on the bed. For the first time, I feel like I can truly see her. Not just my Neev, the kind and gentle girl I fell in love with. The real Neev. Neev, the orphan, who would do anything to survive. Neev the brilliant girl of fire and light. Neev the demigoddess.
Knowing her flaws—her pain and deceit—and knowing her gifts, her kindness and strength, I only love her more. I take her face in my hands and make her look at me. “Listen, you stubborn girl. I’m going to defeat him. Even if it takes every ounce of my power. It’s the only way to free Dette, and make sure he doesn’t murder anyone else. It’s going to storm soon. I can hit him with my lightning and tie him up with his own silver chains. Then we can take him to Zelen for trial. Will you help me?”
She nods. “But I’m not as powerful as him.”
“Yes, you are. Your blood is divine and your power is magnificent. But first, we’re going to find Gate and Plover. And then the library.”
She blinks at me. “The library?”
“Every spell has a counter-spell.”
She shakes her head. “He told me there wasn’t one, but perhaps there is. Still, you don’t have time to pore through every book in the library. What’s left of them.”
“Left of them? What do you mean?”
“Rothbart burned those he didn’t find useful.”
“Of course he did.” I drag my fingers through my hair at the thought of what I’m about to face. Of what I may have to do. Has Rothbart cast a spell over everything and everyone I’ve ever loved?
Neev pulls the ring of keys out of her breeches pocket again. “I heard him tell Fen to put Plover and Gate in the dungeon. Show me where it is.”