The White Rose (16 page)

“What do you mean—”

Suddenly, thick brown ropes shoot up out of the ground,
twining themselves around my feet and ankles and up my calves.

“Stop!” I cry. But Sil has turned and is already walking back to the house.

“Sil!” I shout as I desperately try to free myself. “What are you doing?”

I bend down and see that the ropes are actually roots. She must have done this, called on the tree or whatever it is that she was trying to get me to do. The birch is holding me hostage.

“Sil, you can’t leave me here. Lucien!”

There’s no answer from the big farmhouse.

“Ash!” I shout again, louder this time. “Garnet! Raven!”

I think I hear a noise from the inside of the house but it’s so far away and honestly it’s probably wishful thinking on my part. I yank on the roots, clawing at them with my fingernails and pulling as hard as I can, trying to break them. If anything, I think it only makes the tree hold me tighter.

I finally give up, flop back against the birch, exhausted, tears of frustration pricking the corners of my eyes.

If this was meant to be my first lesson, I’ve most certainly failed.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

T
HE DAY SHIFTS SLOWLY INTO EVENING.

My stomach cramps from lack of food, the oatmeal this morning a distant memory. My mouth is painfully dry and when I touch my tongue it feels like sandpaper. I stuff my hands inside the sleeves of my sweater to keep them warm, but still, my fingers and toes are numb with cold.

I’m no closer to calling on an element than I was when Sil was hitting me with that twig. This feels like a giant waste of time.

My heart lifts when I see a light bobbing toward me. Lucien slowly comes into focus, carrying a lantern with him but no visible signs of food.

“How are you doing?” he says when he reaches me.

“How do you think?” I croak. My throat feels dusty. “When is she going to let me go? This isn’t working, whatever she’s trying to do.”

“Azalea said the same thing,” Lucien says.

“Did Sil lock her up like this?” I ask.

“She tied her to a different tree.” He glances off to his left.

“Why?” I ask. “What could she possibly hope to accomplish?”

“The only way Sil knows how to bring out the true Augury is based on her own experience,” Lucien says. “For you to comprehend it, she must . . . re-create that experience in you. She wants to break you down. Make you weak. So that this power, whatever it is, will be forced to save you.”

“And that’s how she taught Azalea? Why would you allow that?”

He shakes his head. “I didn’t know. I wasn’t here all the time. When I came to see her months later, Azalea was tied up, thin and starving. I was furious. But that was the day she understood. I’ll never forget the look in her eyes. I wished I could have seen the world the way she saw it.”

Lucien sits down and gazes up at the sky. The first stars are beginning to appear. “Azalea was always so frustrated with me. She thought I could be doing more, helping more people, not just her. But I was selfish. When she died, she said, ‘This is how it begins.’ She knew her death would spur me to action. And it did.”

The phrase shakes something loose in my memory. I see an image of a wild girl with bright blue eyes, her head being lowered onto the chopping block in front of Southgate.

I gasp. “I saw her.”

His brow furrows. “I beg your pardon?”

“You never told me how she died,” I say. “Was she . . . executed?”

“Yes,” he says quietly.

“Lucien, she was executed at my holding facility. She was so . . . strong, so brave. And when the magistrate asked her if she had any last words, she said, ‘This is how it begins. I am not afraid.’ And then she said, ‘Tell Cobalt I love him.’ Do you know who Cobalt is?”

A single tear falls onto Lucien’s cheek and glitters there like a diamond.

“Me,” he whispers.

“What?”

Lucien wipes his face with his hands and turns away from me. Very carefully, he unties his topknot. A sleek ribbon of chestnut hair falls to his shoulders.

“I was born Cobalt Rosling,” he says. “In the West Quarter of the Marsh. My father was a very ambitious man—it didn’t take him long to discover that his only son was different. I was reading the entire newspaper front to back by the age of five. I excelled with numbers. I loved taking apart the one clock in our house and putting it back together. The magistrate in our area began to take notice of me. He suggested that my father try and find employment for me in the Bank.

“But the Bank wasn’t enough for my father. The Jewel was where the
real
money was—not only money, but status. My father hated living in the Marsh. The Jewel pays a premium for ladies-in-waiting. They are the most revered of all
servants. But to be a man and a lady-in-waiting, one must first be castrated. I wouldn’t even be considered otherwise.” Lucien runs a hand over the shaved front of his head, then down the length of his hair. “Of course, I was not aware of any of this at the time. One day, a few months before my tenth birthday, my father came home early from work. There was a small shed in our backyard—my mother had cleaned it out years before so I could pretend it was my workstation. I used to make—”

Lucien’s voice breaks, and he shakes his head hard as if trying to rid himself of the memory. I feel strangely paralyzed. I can’t imagine a child Lucien. I had no idea he was from the Marsh, though of course if his sister was a surrogate he’d have to be. He has always seemed so confident, so cool under pressure, always knowing the right thing to do.

I never thought about the events that led him to become a lady-in-waiting. Maybe I didn’t want to know. Maybe it was easier to pretend he’d always been this way.

He looks at the ground when he speaks.

“My father called me into the house,” he says. “My mother was crying. Azalea was only two. The kitchen table had been cleaned off. My father said I was going to help the family. I didn’t see the two men he’d brought with him until it was too late.”

Lucien tugs hard, three times on his long rope of hair.

“They tied me to the table.” He’s talking faster now, the words pouring out of him, and I wonder whether he has ever told anyone this story before. “They tied me up while my mother screamed. And Azalea cried, even though she
didn’t know what was happening.” Lucien digs his fingers into the earth. “I couldn’t move. I felt someone unbuckle my pants and rip them off.” His shoulders tense. “And then there was a fire. And then there was a knife.”

His head drops into his hands and he sobs, his whole body convulsing.

I don’t know what to say. I don’t think I could say anything, even if the right words did come to me. My brain is fuzzy. I lay my hand gently on his back.

“Oh, Lucien,” I whisper.

He runs his hand over his face again. “He got what he wanted. He sold me to the Jewel in exchange for my family to be moved to the Farm.” Lucien finally raises his gaze to look at me. His eyes are red, but there is fire in them. “I should have died. He didn’t—he wasn’t a surgeon, he had no
idea
what he was doing. I should have died and Azalea should have lived.”

“It isn’t your fault she died,” I say. “Like it isn’t Ash’s fault Cinder is dying, or my fault that Raven . . .” I can’t finish that sentence, so I clear my throat. “This is
them
, Lucien. The royalty. And look what you’ve done. You’ve . . . infiltrated their system. Right under their noses. I’ve only met a handful of your supporters, in the Bank and the Smoke, but you’re giving people hope for something better, something different. You are changing people’s lives.” I squeeze his shoulder. “You changed mine.”

Suddenly, a piercing scream echoes across the field.

“Raven,” I gasp.

Lucien is on his feet and running, his hair flowing out in a chestnut ribbon behind him.

“Raven!” I yell, leaping up and then falling forward onto my hands and knees.

She screams again.

“No!” I can’t be stuck out here. Not now. Raven is hurt. Raven could be dying. She needs me.

I pull and pull until my knees ache, and still I keep pulling against the hold of the roots. I don’t care what happens to me. I’m getting to my friend.

Miraculously, I feel a tiny rip in the roots, the slightest give, and with a mighty yank, I get one foot free. It feels like I might have dislocated my knee joint in the process, but I’m too busy freeing my other foot to feel the pain.

“Let . . . me . . .
go
.” With another agonizing tear, I rip my other foot loose and run as fast as I can across the clearing. I’m sweating and out of breath by the time I throw open the back door of the house. There’s no one on the first floor. I fly up the stairs, my feet hammering against the hard wood as my heart pounds in my throat.

Ash and Garnet are outside Raven’s bedroom. Garnet paces nervously. Ash stands staring at the door.

They both look up as I skid to a halt.

“What’s happening?” I say.

There is another wail from behind the door.

“Raven!” I cry, lurching forward.

Ash and Garnet are on me in a second, grabbing my arms and holding me back.

“Let me go!” I shout, struggling against their grasp, but I used all my strength fighting the roots.

“Lucien is in there,” Ash says. “And Sil. They’re . . . they’re doing everything they can.”

“She needs me.” I kick at the door. “Raven, I’m here!”

“You can’t go in,” Garnet says. There’s blood on his shirt. “You don’t want to go in there.”

My face is wet with tears. I slump forward.

“Oh, please,” I whisper, “Don’t let her die . . .”

I don’t know how long we wait in that hallway. Ash and Garnet let me go eventually, though Ash keeps one arm firmly around my shoulders and Garnet hovers nearby. Every sound cuts through me. Lucien’s soothing murmurs. Raven’s weak cries. Then nothing but silence.

The door opens.

Lucien stands in the doorway. I don’t look at the blood on his hands. I don’t look at the expression on his face.

I look past him and all I can see is the body lying on the bed.
Raven.

“Violet—” Lucien begins, but I push by him and run to her.

Her skin is damp with sweat. Her eyes are closed, her face peaceful. I collapse beside her.

“Raven?” I whisper. “Wake up. Come on, now.” I shake her gently and her head lolls. Tears blur my vision. “You are Raven Stirling and you are stronger than this,” I say, louder because maybe she can’t hear me, maybe if I can just make her hear me she’ll open her eyes. “You’ve got to wake up now, Raven. You can’t . . . you can’t leave me.” I bury my face in her shoulder. “Please don’t leave me.”

“She’s gone.”

Sil is standing by the window.

“She miscarried,” Sil says. “We couldn’t . . .” She sighs. “There was nothing to be done.”

“Save her,” I say, standing up and wiping my nose on the sleeve of my sweater. “Save her like you saved yourself.”

“I can’t,” Sil says. “I don’t know how. Only she can save herself.”

“No.” I say the word with as much force as I can muster. “Someone has to
do
something because she was NOT meant for this. She was meant to be safe and happy. She was meant to grow old and fall in love and have a
life
.” So many people have died, and I have borne it all as best I could, but not her. I turn back to the broken, bloodied body of my best friend and I think—no, I
know
—that I would give my life to save her. I would do anything if she would open her eyes and look at me again.

If only someone would help me. If only someone would tell me what to do.

I kneel beside the bed, resting my head on her arm, holding her hand. And then I feel it.

It’s like a tiny rustling in the pit of my stomach, like autumn leaves, a small wind stirring inside me. It fills me up, whirling through my chest like a tornado, and with it comes a heat, lovely and warm, a natural heat, like there’s a small sun where my heart used to be. I look up and put my hands on either side of Raven’s face, and I feel something there, something faint and fragile, a little flutter, a miniscule pulse, and I know she’s still there.

The feeling shifts. It starts in my fingers and then spreads up into my arm, a tiny pitter-patter, like drops of rain on a warm summer evening. My skin tingles and Raven’s shaking, fluttery pulse gets infinitesimally smaller. She’s slipping away.

I close my eyes.

The White Rose is gone.

I am in a place that is at once completely foreign and yet strangely familiar. I know I’ve never been here before because the ocean spreads out before me, and I have never seen anything but pictures of the ocean. I can smell the briny tang in the air, hear the waves crashing below me. I am awed by the sight of it, this vast beauty of grayish blue.

I’m standing on a jutting cliff. There is no trace of the Great Wall that surrounds this island anywhere. Trees stretch out behind me. But in the center of the cliff is a statue of some kind. It’s made of a beautiful blue-gray stone, the same color as the ocean, and it curls up in a spiral, like a wave reaching for the sky. Markings are carved into it, symbols I don’t understand.

I take a step forward and it begins to rain. Big, fat, wet drops splash on my face and shoulders, and then the wind picks up and the trees behind me are twisting and writhing, like mad dancers caught up in a frenzy. I think I should be scared, but I just want to laugh, so I throw my head back and release a primal, animal yowl, and the wind yowls with me, and the air lifts up my voice and carries it off to the waves and the earth shivers beneath my feet.

Raven is standing on the other side of the stone statue, but it’s like I’m seeing her through a pane of glass—she is slightly blurry. But she is my Raven, the Raven before the Countess stole her and tortured her and left her for dead. The rustling inside me picks up again, leaping and spinning. Its joy is my joy, and I see it now, I see what Sil meant, that we are all connected, that this is a power that cannot be
controlled or manipulated because it is part of everything.

Yes
, the earth rumbles.

Yes
, the wind whispers.

Yes
, the ocean cries.

I see Raven mouth my name and I would give anything to have her with me, to touch her hand or hear her laugh.

And as soon as I have the thought, a massive bolt of lightning descends from the sky and hits the monument. Fire blazes up its edges before disappearing, leaving only the faint scent of burning behind. Raven shimmers like a mirage, then disappears.

I open my mouth to cry out, but the rustling fills my throat and the rain beats down harder and I know I have to hold on, to wait, to be patient. So I wait. And I think about every memory I have of Raven, every laugh we shared at Southgate, and all the adventures we’ve had, how she saved us in the sewers, and saved Ash in the marketplace. I remember the feel of her hand in mine. I remember her kiss on my cheek this morning. I pour out all of my love for this girl into the wide-open space. I share it with every fiber of my being.

The world around me reacts. The wind whips my hair about my face, the cliff quakes under my feet, the rain pounds against my back, and for a second it feels as if my body had disappeared. I become the earth, and the rain, and the wind. I am somewhere else, the same place where my music exists, a place without pain or fear or sadness, and I take all those feelings and pour them into one thought.