I began to see that this would go nowhere. I could command a ballroom of admirers but neither of my sisters.
I knelt before her, clasped her hands. A different, sweeter tack. “Mara, please tell me what’s happened. What did this to you? Is this sort of injury common? How often does it happen? Have you gone to see the healers?”
Mara freed one of her hands to cup my cheek, still wearing that maddening soft smile. “So many questions you have for me. Where to even begin?”
“Does it…does it hurt?”
That surprised her. I saw it on her face—a tiny flit of some great sadness that escaped before she could catch it.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Very much.”
The words blew something out of her. She sagged a little, and I noticed faint lines around her eyes and mouth that I hadn’t seen before. They frightened me even more than her wounds, aging her in an instant. Right before my eyes, I could see my twenty-two-year-old sister turning brittle and old, all the life pummeled out of her by this wretched place.
Then she began to speak, and her voice changed—careful, hushed. Her brown eyes fixed on mine, holding me rapt.
“I have to tell you something,” she began slowly. “Something you can’t tell Father. Not yet. But do tell Farrin. Ask her to summon Gareth from the university and tell them both at the same time—I don’t trust the post, nor even a wilder’s messenger, not with this. Make certain that no one is around to hear. Maybe the three of you together can do something before it’s too late.”
Mara laughed a little, quietly, like a hitched breath. “At the very least, the secrets I keep will weigh less on me once you and Farrin share the burden.” Then she frowned, her gaze drifting away. “All the weapons at my fingertips, and yet my hands have long been tied…”
Her expression was so distant and strange, shifting from fear to sadness to anger, that my blood turned cold with dread.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Before it’s too late? Too late for what?”
She fell silent, staring at the floor.
I touched her chin and made her look at me. “Mara, tell me right this instant what you need to say.”
But before she could, a clangor of bells exploded from the priory, so sudden and cacophonous that I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Mara was on her feet at once, her tiredness gone. She loomed over me, tense and coiled, palm hovering over the dagger at her waist. A falcon’s cry pierced the air, and Mara whispered, “Freyda.” Then, without looking at me, she barked, “Get inside the priory, Gemma. Now.”
With that, she ran out of the temple and down the mountain, her strides liquid and long, her footfalls nearly silent. I should have obeyed—oh, I should have obeyed—but I couldn’t forget that awful look on her face or the haunted quality of her voice. And I knew what those bells meant.
An intruder, as the Warden called them. A creature or being from the Old Country had slipped through the Middlemist somewhere along its thousand-mile length, breaching the rift between that realm and ours by accident or design.
To the Order of the Rose, the reason mattered not. Intruders were wrangled back to where they belonged or killed. No exceptions. No delays. When the bells rang, the Roses attacked.
And if I didn’t act immediately, I might never hear what Mara had to say. The moment would be lost—she would feign ignorance and never speak of it again, or something terrible would happen to her and she would lose the opportunity altogether.
Before it’s too late, she had said. Words I knew I must take seriously no matter what it cost me.
I ran down the mountain after my sister, clumsy in my boots and gown, pumping my thin legs as fast as I could. “Mara! Wait! What did you need to tell me?”
Mara whipped her head around and roared, “Go inside, Gemma!”
Other women were flooding out of the priory—some younger than Mara, some older, all of them impossibly graceful as they bounded through the trees toward the thick silver river that abutted the grounds.
The Middlemist.
My blood chilled as I watched them—faces flinty, hands clutching quivers of arrows, sabers, crossbows. I knew I should stop, that I wasn’t meant to see what would happen next, but I had to know what Mara needed to tell me. I couldn’t go back to that day twelve years ago and stop the Warden from taking her, but I could do this.
The Mist was not far now. My body seized up with fear as I approached its shimmering veil, but I pushed onward, ignoring the shouts of Farrin and Father some ways behind me. Their frantic voices ordered me to stop, begged me to stop.
Dozens of Roses launched themselves into the air or leapt through the trees, their bodies changing as I watched them—elongating, sharpening, swelling. Bare feet hardened into scaly claws. The hands clutching weapons sprouted wicked talons. Great wings of black, gray, and speckled brown erupted from each woman’s shoulder blades. Their transforming bodies shredded whatever garments they wore, the scraps of fabric fluttering to the ground like molted feathers, and it occurred to me then, startling a gasping laugh out of me, why all the Roses wore such plain, threadbare garments. What was the point of wearing fine clothes if they would be destroyed every time the bells rang?
Foolish girl that I was, I had never considered the practicality of their garb, only the dreariness of it.
Just before I plunged into the Mist, I drew in my breath and held it, bracing myself.
I was not disappointed.
As the Mist hit me, washing over me with a strange supple coolness, agony ripped through me like nothing I had ever felt before. Our greenway’s hungry pull was nothing in comparison. The Mist had a thousand relentless teeth, and all of them were digging into my skin, my muscle, my bone.
I staggered, dizzy and sick, and caught myself against a tree. Fighting through the shock of pain, I frantically searched for Mara, desperate to find her before the tingling blackness encroaching on my vision swallowed me whole.
But as I stood there, a horrible chorus of shrieks assailed my ears—first only a few, then dozens, vicious and clearly not of our world. The sound made my pain worse. I blacked out for an instant and came to in the dirt on my hand and knees. I gasped for breath, not understanding what I was hearing. I had thought Mara and the others would travel through one of the priory’s greenways to whatever distant expanse of the Mist had been breached, but these bestial cries were close and growing closer. Intruders so close to Rosewarren? Impossible. Unheard of. When the gods created the Middlemist just before their deaths on the day of the Unmaking, they had ensured that the expanse of Mist nearest the priory was doubly strong. A final pitying gift for those doomed to serve there.
Intruders had never managed to reach the grounds of Rosewarren, nor even the nearby town or any settlement within ten square miles. But they were here now, and that could mean only one thing:
The Middlemist, crafted and fortified by the gods themselves, was weakening.
But was it losing strength only here, near the priory? I hoped so, despite the danger to Mara. The alternative was too horrific to imagine.
All around me, the Roses called to each other in their strange language, a hybrid of the common tongue and whatever coded words the Warden had taught them. I recognized only a few: They want the girl! Get her out of here!
My stomach plummeted to my toes, and my instincts screamed at me to run. I knew without doubt that the girl they spoke of was me.