As I neared the stables, I saw Byrn, our oldest groomer, leaning against a paddock fence as one of his apprentices worked with a yearling colt. Byrn was a low-magic tamer and the favorite of all our horses—and of my dog, Una, a white fleethound who lay at his feet, her tufted ears pricked as she watched my approach. Byrn noticed me not long after. Quite a sight I must have looked—hair tumbling haphazardly, dress rumpled and stained, face red from crying.
Byrn’s bushy white eyebrows shot up, but he said nothing. We had an understanding, he and I. Farrin was forever occupied with managing the estate, and Father was obsessed with his little war. I actually listened to Byrn’s stories when I visited, and I was the same age as the beloved granddaughter he’d left back home in Lumyra, and any time our kitchen staff baked pastries, I brought him a steaming fresh batch. I avoided most of the servants; they had seen me sick from magic too many times for me to particularly enjoy meeting their eyes unless necessary.
But Byrn I liked. He was fresh air and easy silence and the smell of horses, and he never once looked at me differently from anyone else. On that day, then, he said nothing, asked no questions. He simply prepared my horse, a beautiful dapple-gray mare named Zephyr, and then stepped back to let me pass, his worried expression so sweet and sad that I felt like crying all over again.
Before I could, I looked away and urged Zephyr into a trot, then a smooth canter. Una followed us, her long fleethound legs easily keeping pace. With my father’s words ringing in my ears, I fled across the grounds and escaped into the blessed cool sanctuary of our wooded game park. Deer scattered at our thundering approach.
Senseless. Heedless. Foolish girl.
I blinked hard against the wind, saying the words to myself over and over. Better to relive Father’s temper than to remember the look on Mara’s face when I had recoiled from her, agape with horror I could not disguise.
When Illaria answered my knock at the door of her workshop later that afternoon, she took one wide-eyed look at me and whisked me into her house without a word.
Within ten minutes, my dearest friend had me settled in her reading room with a cup of fresh herbal tea, a plate of my favorite chocolate wafers dusted with icing sugar, and a soft old quilt tucked around my shoulders. Una chewed happily on a bone by the fire, and I knew Zephyr would be tended to in Illaria’s stables nearly as well as at home—which I would never admit to Byrn.
The chair I huddled in was enormous and upholstered with blue velvet. I had long ago claimed it as “mine.” As children, and then in all the years after, Illaria and I had devoured novel after novel in that room. Illaria’s parents were low-magic savants with keen talents for designing scents and a thriving business empire to run. Before they deemed Illaria old enough to begin her official apprenticeship, she and I were often left to our own devices—to read, gossip, practice dancing, practice kissing. This room, this house, had sometimes felt more like a home than my own. I settled into the soft cushions and nearly cried with relief.
Illaria reclined in the chair opposite mine, kicked off her work boots, and rested her bare feet on the tasseled stool at her feet. Even at the end of a long day of overseeing her workshop, her face bare and her clothes reeking with too many heady aromas to count—coffee, sandalwood, vanilla, rose—she was enviably gorgeous. Smooth honey-brown skin, a profusion of soft dark-brown ringlets, and sharp green eyes framed in thick lashes. She made even her plain work trousers and heavy leather apron seem the height of fashion.
“Well?” she said at last. “Out with it.”
I hid my face in my cup, reveling in the fragrant floral steam of my tea. “This blend is divine. Is it yours?”
“Of course. All the good teas are mine. All the good perfumes are mine.” Illaria waved her hand. “You won’t distract me with flattery. Tell me what’s happened. It’s not every day you appear on my doorstep looking as if you’ve just fought your way to the surface of some reeking bog.”
I took a long sip and stared at my bare toes. “Can we just sit here in silence for a while instead? I’m tired.”
Illaria arched one elegant eyebrow. “I can’t imagine why.”
“Please, Lari. Just for a while.”
“Very well.” For a moment she was quiet. Then she said briskly, “All right, that was a while.”
“Hardly.”
“By my reckoning, it was a while.”
“Well, your reckoning is wrong.”
“That is very seldom true.” Illaria set her cup on the table beside her and regarded me, her smile softening. “I’m only worried about my friend, is all.”
I drew in a breath, then let it out slowly. “We visited Mara today.”
Illaria nodded. “Never a good start.”
“And we were waiting for her to come back from patrol, lunching with the Warden—”
“Madam Insufferable,” Illaria interjected smoothly. “Continue.”
That made me smile a little. “I couldn’t bear it, sitting there in that ridiculous stuffy parlor while Mara was off in whatever gods-awful place they’d sent her to. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and the thoughts kept climbing and climbing, and…”
I looked away, waves of shame washing over me, shrinking me. I hated the feeling. I wasn’t some cowering worrywart. I was Lady Imogen Ashbourne.
But when the panic came, it reduced me to something else, something that felt utterly unfamiliar, as if a foreign force were taking possession of me, reshaping me.
“And then the panic came,” Illaria said, her voice gentle.
I nodded. “And then the panic came.”
I told her the rest—talking with Mara in the temple, the ringing bells. The Middlemist, the shrieks.
Mara, transformed.
Father yelling at me in the hedge maze.
After I finished, the silence seemed to stretch on forever. Then Illaria rose to her feet, shrugged off her apron, and climbed into my chair, tucking herself against me. I closed my eyes, letting the warmth of Illaria’s body soak into mine and listening to the popping fire. Una, now asleep on her back with her legs in the air, was in the thrall of a dream, whuffing quietly.
Mara sometimes held me like this during our visits, when her schedule allowed it. She and Illaria were the only ones who understood that often it was what I needed most of all—to sit in silence, to feel their touch, to breathe in tandem with them until I found myself again. No talking, no concerned questions, no looks of pity. I had endured more than enough of that in my life.
Finally Illaria cleared her throat and shifted against me. The aromas of her perfumery wafted up from her skin.
“Your father,” she declared, “is an ass.”
I laughed. Her indignation warmed me all the way through. “He isn’t always.”
“He was today.”
“I’ll concede that.”
“He should know better than to let loose his temper at you. He’s a grown man, for gods’ sake.”
Content, I snuggled against her. “My thoughts precisely.”
She fumed in silence for another few moments before I felt her slowly begin to relax. “What will you do about Mara? She said nothing else to indicate what she needed to tell you?”
I shook my head. “Part of me thinks she might have been glad that the bells rang just then. It was as though even beginning to speak about her secret was agony for her.”