I took Hecate to the Reverie, our hiding place. I put her in the glass coffin. I said some words over her. Impossibly . . . Thankfully . . . she came back to me in ash form. The soldiers came, and I ran like she told me to. I ran as far and as fast as I could, and I took refuge in the Enchanted Forest. There, I felt myself begin to crumble as the Reverie had when I was leaving it.
Everything was lost.
The tears began to flow. Again.
What would become of me?
Had my sisters somehow survived? Would they come back for me?
As the sun set, the dark crept in. The dark had never held any fear for me when I had a wand in my hand that could illuminate it in an instant. But now was a different story. It was scarier than I imagined. For the first time in my life, I was truly alone.
And there were sounds. The rustling of leaves. Or was it something else? I knew I couldn’t stay there forever. At most, I would be lucky to survive a few nights, especially with no magic. My useless wand could not make a fire or light the dark or make a bed of feathers. And it could not bring my sisters back to me.
As I curled up in the hollow of a large tree, my now-gray dress my only warmth, I told myself that I wouldn’t sleep. That maybe I would never sleep again. But somehow I finally gave in to the dark.
When the sun rose with a searing glare, the grief crashed in on me again. My sisters, gone. Hecate, ash. The Reverie, no longer home. But suddenly a shadow blocked the sun. I looked up and she was there. The ashes. Hecate as ashes had returned to me. She’d somehow found me in the middle of the forest.
“How can this be? How can you be?” I asked her.
This time there was no fear as I looked upon her.
“Are you really you?” I asked.
Hecate stood in front of me motionless for a beat. Did this mean she had no answers in death as she had in life, or was she keeping them close even now? I put my hand out, and she mirrored my gesture with her own. I moved my other, and she matched my hand. I stooped in one direction, and she followed. Somehow the small pantomime felt like comfort. But I still needed more.
“Hecate, please. Please speak again—please tell me something. Anything.”
The figure shook her head.
“Is it that you can’t or you won’t? Which is it? Can’t—” She nodded.
“Do you know why this happened? Do you know why you’re here?”
Her shoulders shrugged.
I reached out to touch her and the ashes made room for my finger, closing around it. I put my hand right through her. What madness was this? How?
She broke apart and made a question mark.
“You had to know—why didn’t you stop it? Why didn’t you save us all?” I demanded.
“Will I ever see the others again? Are they dead or just gone? Will they come back for me?”
Hecate did not answer. She just stood still.
She was as enigmatic in death as she had been in life. But she was still here. She was all I had.
That was the moment that something broke in me. I let myself fall to my knees. Hecate had come back to me from the Burning. She had somehow fought death itself to be here with me. If my sisters were alive, they would have done the same. Which meant they weren’t alive. They were gone.
The next morning, my grief was still there but it had a companion: vengeance. I didn’t just miss my sisters. I didn’t just want them back. I wanted the person responsible to pay for taking them from me. That want sharpened the dull ache in me into something new. Not a wand. A weapon.
Hungry and grieving, I had an errant thought. And I asked Hecate, “What if we could get to the Rookery?”
The ashes cocked their head as if they did not know what I was talking about. But when Hecate was alive, she knew.
The Rookery was an underground band of rebels who supposedly didn’t support the Queendoms or the Entente. It was said that they were tricksters who lived in the Thirteenth Queendom, on the outermost edge. It may as well have been the end of the world. But I didn’t know if the Rookery was even real or just a groom’s tale. When Hecate or Galatea spoke of them it always seemed it was in jest. I recalled a moment a few months ago, after Tere had not been paying attention in training. Hecate had warned, Perhaps you’d prefer to live with the Rooks . . . See how you like their rogue magic . . . You’ll end up with noses where your ears should be. My sisters and I laughed at the time, but now I considered the Rookery. Could the Rooks offer protection? Could they help me get my magic back? Could they help us get payback on the Queen?
But without an answer from Hecate and without magic, traveling between Queendoms seemed an impossible distance to venture for a rumor. So I pushed the thought of the Rooks aside and focused on my immediate survival.
I was alone in the world with only Hecate’s ashes to keep me company. But I knew what I needed to do.
The covenant between humans and Entente had been extinguished with my Hecate. There were no more rules. I would somehow get my magic back, and I would have my revenge.
Magrit had tried to put magic in the shadows. I was prepared to hide there until the moment I could strike.
When the men came with their dogs and their swords, the ashes seemed to know before I could say anything. They hid in the trees.
I feigned interest in the dirt as the soldiers came upon me, mistaking me for a normal girl.
“Leave her—she’s just a vagrant.”
“We can’t just leave her.”
“The Entente are all dust—no one could have survived that explosion. The Queen is just obsessed.”
“Well, she’ll have our heads if we don’t keep looking.”
The second guard sighed and repeated, “We can’t leave her like this.”
“Very well, but we’ll lose half a day.”
The guard grabbed my hand roughly and dragged me along.
Panic seized me—at first I did not want to leave Hecate. Then I remembered that she had walked through death itself to come back to me. I didn’t look back as I walked away with the men. I knew somehow that she would follow me anywhere.