Then she bowed, and I applauded her with such gusto that Una jumped to her feet and started barking, exuberant as a puppy. Illaria rang for fresh tea, and we drank and talked, laughing well into the night as Illaria regaled me with the latest gossip from the dramatic lives of her apprentices.
Even then, in the back of my mind, I fiercely gripped the steel cords of my resolve.
Promise or no, I was an Ashbourne. A sick Ashbourne, yes—breakable and exhausting and a liability and a disappointment and my middle sister’s unwitting executioner. The only one in my prestigious Anointed line to be born without magic since my ancestors were chosen centuries ago by the goddess Kerezen to receive a piece of her power.
But I was an Ashbourne nonetheless, rich and privileged, the great beauty of my generation. My party would be the talk of the continent, as my parties always were—and the shameful dread that lived inside me would remain no one’s burden but my own.
CHAPTER 3
Even on an ordinary day, my family’s estate of Ivyhill was a splendid place—twelve square miles of parks and gardens, farms and fields worked by our tenants, cottages for the groundskeepers, and temples built centuries ago to glorify the gods.
Then, of course, there was the house itself. Two hundred and fifty rooms and a staff of fifty; housing for all our servants, visiting nobility and diplomats and merchants, and our extended family—a passel of cousins, aunts, and uncles who came and went without much ceremony. Few of them, even those with reasonably diverting magical talents, interested me beyond whatever gossip they brought from elsewhere.
I hungered for gossip more than anything. Due to my debilitating sensitivity to magic, I was often confined to Ivyhill under my father’s watchful eye. During those periods, it felt as if the rest of the world no longer existed and I was alone, trapped inside the fraying web of my own frantic, frustrated thoughts. I had long ago resigned myself to eventually withering away in my lofty tower suite once I became too infirm to leave it.
There were, of course, worse places to be confined forever. I was not so oblivious to the rest of the world as to be unaware of that. But a breathtaking prison to which one has been relegated for one’s own benefit is still a prison.
Therefore, two weeks after the day I witnessed Mara transform, on the day of my party—a spring night, mild and sweet, the air scented with tender flowering trees, the entire country gathered with excitement at our doors—I made certain that Ivyhill shone as it never had before.
I took stock of it all as our guests arrived, breezing through the proper greetings and introductions despite most of my attention being focused on the silk window hangings, the octet’s song choices, the candles flickering in every sconce, the ornate chandeliers dripping with magicked light, the servants gliding expertly from ballroom to sitting room to receiving hall with platters of refreshments.
In each room—ornamenting every doorway, spilling down every banister, hanging from every rafter—were the glossy, lush ivy vines my mother had designed shortly after she married my father.
An elemental from a perfectly respectable low-magic family, young Philippa Wren was lovely and witty and could manipulate botanicals, as could many in her family. The Wrens had been fortunate enough to receive magic from Caiathos, god of the earth, just after the Unmaking. It was but a stray bit of magic flung across the world upon his death, bestowed by accident rather than by design, and so they were a low-magic family instead of an Anointed one, their power limited but dependable. Philippa, though, could only work her magic with great effort and with the help of others.
A poor match, everyone had thought of my parents, skeptical and amused; Gideon Ashbourne had, like many men before him, fallen prey to a pretty face and forgotten what really mattered. But then the new Lady Ashbourne had begun her work, starting with one sprig of ivy and growing it over a series of weeks into our house’s second skin. She had hired an alchemist and a spellcrafter to help ensure the vines’ longevity, and one could not argue with the results, nor with the flurry of awed visitors who’d streamed through the house for months afterward to admire Mother’s work and marvel at her savvy. Why, the sheer brazen artistry of the vines enhanced the already-impressive estate and added to the family’s mystique! How cunning, how shrewd. Philippa Wren—who ever would have guessed? And then she brought Farrin into the world, a perfect little songbird of a girl and as much a child of Kerezen as her sentinel father. No one dared doubt Philippa Ashbourne’s worth after that.
I ducked underneath a stone archway draped with said vines and skillfully maneuvered Lady Grattery away from her nemesis, Lady Keighline, by gushing over the stunning emerald earrings she wore. I steered her toward the Rose Room, where Colonel Mettalin of the Lower Army had begun a raucous game of cards, and only then did I allow myself a moment to catch my breath in one of the curtained sitting rooms along the Blue Ballroom’s perimeter.
I already felt battered head to toe by the proximity of so many guests with magic in their blood. I was always in some discomfort at Ivyhill; my Anointed father and sister made that inevitable, as did the presence of my mother’s vines, the removal of which I wouldn’t dare request, for they were all I had left of her. But my party had brought to Ivyhill not only several members of Anointed families, but also dozens who possessed low magic. I always made a point of inviting a vast number of low-magic citizens. After all, it wasn’t their fault that their ancestors had not been chosen by the gods. At the moment the gods died—an event known as the Unmaking—magic had scattered across the world in thousands of random shards, and those who had been fortunate enough to ingest, inhale, or simply lay eyes upon one of these shards had unwittingly claimed a piece of true, if diluted, magic. And now their descendants could claim such power as well, along with the quite useful abilities that came with it—animal taming, minor spellcrafting and elemental magic, a keen memory.
Ivyhill teemed with it tonight—the high magic of the Anointed and the lower magic of the lucky. To me the sound of it was like that of an apian swarm, and the odor of so many individual magicks left me feeling as though I were trapped in a steaming hothouse, the warring fragrances of a hundred different flowers weaving a rank tapestry. But I was not so green a hostess that I would allow myself to be conquered by such an onslaught.
I put two fingers to my left temple, willing my pounding head to calm, and slowly sipped my sparkling wine, a delicious fruity blend that brought a rush of warmth to my aching limbs. Once the glass was half drained, I began looking over my dance card for the evening. I had hardly paid attention to the flock of admirers requesting dances, merely scribbling each name down with a flirtatious laugh before continuing on my rounds.
The first name on the docket was Rasia Reest, which delighted me. A skilled low-magic artisan from the continent of Aidurra, renowned for her stunning oil paintings, Rasia would be sure to have the latest cultural news from across the Sea of the Dawn.
After her was Lieutenant Arkin Martel, a notorious rake who served in the Lower Army in Beroges, on Gallinor’s southern coast. By all accounts, it was a rather dull assignment; the boundary between worlds in Beroges was known to grow somewhat thin during high tide, but only somewhat, and only five times a year. Arkin was one of those unfortunate people whose family had neither received nor happened upon magic during the Unmaking, but what Arkin lacked in magic, he made up for with finesse of hands and tongue. I shivered in delight, remembering our first brief liaison when I was eighteen, during which the good lieutenant showed me how delicious it could feel when a girl’s lover kissed her between her legs.