Chapter Three

Was it weird to notice how blue the sky was, or how green the leaves? Leaves the color of Sean’s beautiful eyes. It was certainly weird to feel as alert and well rested as Gabriel did. He hadn’t felt this good in months, yet the hollow emptiness in his chest said he would never actually feel whole again.

“Oh, good. You’re up. Come have breakfast.”

Gabriel looked over at Ishiah and saw he and Zel still sitting together by the fire. This time Zel was stirring a pot, and he spooned something into a bowl Ishiah held out. Their movements were choreographed in such a way that said they had done something similar in front of a fire thousands of times. Gabriel and Sean could move like that. They had always somehow known where the other would be and could move to support each other without really thinking about it.

“Here. Sit up and eat,” Ishiah said. He held out the bowl for Gabriel to take, so Gabriel pushed back the bedroll and sat up.

“Why are you doing this for me?” Gabriel asked, staring down into the rough camp porridge.

Ishiah let out a breath and sat down next to Gabriel. “You’re family,” he explained softly. “I chose to leave Monrath with Zel, to make a different path for myself, but I promised to always come home when my family needed me.” He reached out and tapped the necklace resting below Gabriel’s collarbone. “That promise is important to me. Now hurry up with breakfast. It’s time to see what we can do about retaking the castle and bringing everything back to rights again.”

Ishiah patted Gabriel on the back, then stood. He went over to Zel, and Gabriel watched their dance as they put out the fire and packed up the camp. They left their packs tucked against a tree with their bedroll. Gabriel ate. He wasn’t hungry, but it was there and it was warm. When he was done, he took the bowl and went down to the nearby stream to wash it out. He splashed some water on his face while he was there, just trying to wake up and see about facing the day.

Maybe Ishiah and Zel could retake the castle, but even if they did, they couldn’t put everything back to rights again. It just wasn’t possible. Too much was gone forever.

Gabriel also knew he would be a terrible king. He was too flighty, and now too hollow. Everyone also already knew him as the younger brother who had fallen in love with the titleless knight. While Gabriel had a place and a role in the kingdom, it was only as support to Rory, and that was all he would ever be respected as. Even if he retook the castle and kingdom from the invaders, he would still face an uphill battle for the rest of his reign. It wasn’t a battle he was interested in fighting, especially not alone.

He walked back to the campsite in silence, trying to keep his thoughts as quiet as the rest of him. It really was a lovely day. The birds were out in force, chirping happily through the trees as sunlight dappled the ground below. A lovely day to start a war. Terrible king he might be, but Gabriel still had to save his people. It was his duty as part of the royal family. The rest of it he would figure out afterward.

When he walked back into the clearing, Ishiah and Zel were waiting for him. Ishiah took his dishes and tucked them away in one of the packs sitting under a tree next to both of the bedrolls. He muttered something under his breath, and the gear suddenly faded from view, replaced by an odd sort of sparkle Gabriel could only see out of the corner of his eye.

“Shall we?” Ishiah asked them as he stood and brushed off his hands on his thighs. He didn’t wait for an answer, instead leading the way toward the castle. He was wearing a sword, too, which he hadn’t been earlier.

It didn’t take long to walk to the edge of the forest, and before long they were looking at the castle. It hadn’t changed in the week Gabriel had been away. The towers and parapets still stood as they always did, and that hated gold-and-blue flag still flapped from the tallest point.

“How do we get in without being seen?” Zel asked as they looked across the manicured lawn. The grass was kept short by an army of goats to prevent an enemy from sneaking up on the walls, which meant any guards patrolling would see them long before they could get to a gate or try to climb the rough stone.

“The south servant’s gate,” Gabriel replied, remembering his original plan. It was still viable, even a week later. The single doorway was tucked away and hard to find, and Gabriel was certain the invaders had a few other things to take care of that were more important than finding a hidden door.

“What south servant’s gate?” Ishiah asked. “Did they construct a new gate?”

Gabriel shook his head and waved for them to follow his lead. He stuck to just inside the tree line, heading toward the point where the forest was closest to the wall.

“It’s a really, really old gate. I think most people have forgotten it, but Sean and I found it when we were kids.” It was how Gabriel had been able to sneak out to the lake every summer without getting caught. When he had been old enough to understand the danger, he had pointed the gate out to his father, but by then he hadn’t needed it any more to see Sean because Sean had moved into the castle page’s barracks. More than once, the page master had arrived in the barracks in the morning to find two heads sharing Sean’s pillow. When Sean achieved squire rank, and therefore the liberty of his own small room and considerably more autonomy, the quartermaster had complained about wasting a room that wasn’t being used. By then, Sean had essentially moved into Gabriel’s rooms, and when Sean was knighted no one had needed Father or the knight master to declare Sean was assigned as Gabriel’s sworn protector.

And now, all Gabriel could do for Sean was find his body and give him a proper burial. He had done his duty as knight protector; the one duty Gabriel had wished he would never have to perform. To die in protection of his sworn liege was the ultimate sacrifice, and Sean hadn’t understood that his death had taken half of Gabriel with him. Without Sean, Gabriel knew he was as good as dead anyway. It would have been better for them to have escaped together, to try to live on at each other’s side for as long as they could. Now they would never have that chance.

They reached the point where the wall was only fifty feet from the royal forest without any sounds of alarm erupting from the castle walls. Of course, Gabriel was traveling with Zel and Ishiah. No doubt one of them had used magic to shield them from sight. Still, Gabriel also hadn’t seen anyone on the walls, patrolling. It was odd to see the walls so empty. The captain had used a mix of stationary soldiers and roving guards along the walls. Even if the invading forces had a different sort of defense in mind, they still should have had someone patrolling the walls.

“Where’s the gate?” Zel asked.

Gabriel pointed just to the left, where thick ivy covered the door. He studied the wall one last time, searching for any hint of movement, but still saw nothing. He darted forward as quickly as his feet could take him, scrambling to get into the shade cast by the wall. It took a moment of fumbling under the ivy to find it, but a second later he had his hand on the latch and was pushing the door open.

A rush of sweet, perfumed air gently blew out of the open door. The smell was odd, and definitely didn’t belong, so Gabriel waited for Ishiah and Zel to catch up.

“What is it?” Gabriel asked after they had both taken a sniff. The door should have opened into the queen’s outer garden, the area where soldiers could patrol, but courtiers could also still walk through the carefully manicured hedges and flowerbeds. There was a second, smaller wall inside the garden that belonged to the queen’s garden. The last time Gabriel had seen that garden, the construction for the glass roof had just been completed and the door locked until a cure could be found.

“It smells like flowers,” Zel said.

Ishiah nodded in agreement. “Roses. Are the old rose gardens through here?”

Gabriel had to think for a moment, trying to remember what flowers were planted where. “I think the queen’s inner garden had a few rose bushes, but that’s where my sister is. Father completely enclosed the garden to make sure she would be safe until we could find a cure. There shouldn’t be anyone there unless the enemy did something to hurt her.” Which Gabriel expected. A sleeping woman protected by a measly locked door and a glass ceiling? She would have been the easiest of the entire castle to kill.

“Interesting,” Ishiah replied. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully while looking at the open door. Despite the flowery scent, Gabriel still hadn’t heard any sounds of alarm, so he wasn’t surprised when Ishiah placed one hand on his sword and stepped through the doorway.

“Roses,” Ishiah called back, his voice incredibly loud for someone supposed to be sneaking into a castle. “Come see. It’s really incredible.”

Zel followed immediately and Gabriel stuck close to his heels. They stepped out into a forest of red and pink roses with gigantic petals and equally gigantic thorns. They were everywhere. Gabriel barely had space to put his feet, and he was practically on top of Zel and Ishiah in the small space allowed by the doorway.

“That explains why there weren’t any guards,” Gabriel said, craning his neck to see if he could spot where the massive thicket ended.

“It’s one of the most beautiful spells I’ve seen in decades,” Zel agreed.

“Spells?” Gabriel asked, not because he was surprised—What else could cause rosebushes to grow like this aside from magic?—but it didn’t seem like something the enemy would do. They were more of the blast-the-gates-open-and-kill-everyone-in-sight style of magic users. Not that Gabriel could really generalize about magic since the only two wizards he had met were standing next to him, and he had barely seen them use magic yet.

“It’s got to be the kid,” Ishiah said. He turned to look at Zel for a brief moment, as if he were reading a silent message that Gabriel couldn’t interpret; then he turned toward Gabriel. “Try walking forward, see if the roses notice you. Please,” he added when Gabriel stared at him incredulously. Those thorns were huge!

Still, Ishiah hadn’t steered him wrong yet. Gabriel took a tentative step forward, reaching out with one foot more than taking a full step, and gasped when the roses pulled away from him.

“What’s going on?” he asked and had to stop a grimace from forming when Zel and Ishiah shared another look.

“Lead the way into the castle, and we’ll tell you on the way,” Ishiah said. He waved in the direction of the castle doors, right where Gabriel was hoping to go anyway, so Gabriel obeyed and started slowly walking through the roses. Each bush pulled aside as he grew close, then returned to its spot after they had passed. It was rather unnerving, so Gabriel instead focused on Zel as he started explaining.

“There was once a baby, maybe six months old, who was found floating objects over his bassinet. His mother didn’t know what to do, but luckily Wizard Bessie happened to be passing through the area and came to investigate the commotion. Bessie eventually took charge of the child and began to teach him magic. It was a delicate process, you have to understand,” Zel told Gabriel. “Using magic halts aging and the child had to grow up, but he also had to learn enough control to keep it from leaking out everywhere. I believe it took about fifty years before she was confident enough to start traveling with him again.”

“Yeah, I think it was fifty years,” Ishiah added in agreement. “We met him once, and as you can imagine he was a strange kid. Fifty years old, but still with the body and the mind of a child. At least, as much of a child’s mind as he could have.”

“Then, one day he told Bessie he wanted to give up magic entirely to live a normal life here in Monrath,” Zel continued. “How could she say no? The child never had a choice about becoming a wizard, and that is a choice wizards take very seriously. The child would never be entirely normal as he still had to use a little magic to prevent him from spilling out, but without working spells regularly, he would finally grow up and live a normal life. She had to let him go.”

Gabriel could see some stone starting to peek through the roses, so they had to be getting close to the door into the castle. He didn’t slow his steps, but he wanted to hear the rest of the story. Was it possible this wizard had been working with the enemy and that was why the castle had been taken so easily?

“That’s where it gets interesting,” Ishiah continued. “Zel and I received a letter, magically delivered right into our hands, asking for our help unravelling a sleeping spell. The wizard who sent the letter said he didn’t have the training to do more than ascertain that there was magic involved. He couldn’t break it on his own. Zel and I, of course, started traveling here immediately. Unfortunately, sea voyages take time, and we were late in arriving. However, we knew the child wizard was still here somewhere. These roses are more confirmation.”

“He might not have been able to stop a sleeping spell, but these roses are a nice bit of magic,” Zel added. “If your sister is somewhere in the middle of this, I’d say she’s probably safely sleeping still. The invaders wouldn’t have been able to get through the roses so easily.”

Rory might be alive? Gabriel’s knees shook, and he firmly planted his feet to keep from collapsing. The wizard might have saved his sister. Then what about everyone else in the castle? Could they be saved too?

No, Gabriel knew he couldn’t think like that. He couldn’t get his hopes up. He was here to avenge Sean, not look in every nook and cranny trying to find someone who no longer existed.

Gabriel kept walking, letting the roses move out of the way before each step. The castle’s stone wall was completely visible now, but it was hard to see the doorway. Gabriel thought the top of the arch might be poking through some of the oversized flowers to the left, but it could also be an imperfection in one of the stones.

“I need to get inside,” Gabriel said aloud, trying not to feel silly about talking to roses, especially since they were moving for him already. The roses rustled for a moment in a nonexistent breeze, as if they were speaking to each other in a voice Gabriel couldn’t hear. A moment later the roses started moving, opening up a path to the left that led directly to the archway in question. “Thank you,” Gabriel said as he hurried forward, Zel and Ishiah right behind him.