“We need to talk.”

Four words had never seemed so heavy.

Taryn was late heading into the city. She was finishing a lunch of soft, rolled flatbread filled with meat and beans when Rai, teary-eyed with an armful of hugs, found and recruited her. She needed an extra pair of legs in the search for one of her regular customers, a Countess Soren, whose address had been accidentally drenched in the chaos of the bakery. Taryn asked for the slip. It had been reduced to a moist square of paper covered in a drying glob of watery black ink. She pretended to trace the scratches the pen had made while she cast her Survey over Pine Keep.

Shava Soren, Countess of Mayville, Lothoria’s thirty-seventh county, was nowhere to be found in the city. Her staff and servants, however, were scattered throughout Pine Keep. Taryn found the Soren manor home was just a few blocks from the palace wall, west of the Prince’s Fall.

“But the bakery doesn’t deliver that far out,” Taryn added. “Why the exception?”

“Thank you,” Rai answered coolly. She plucked the useless slip from Taryn’s hands and continued past her.

Disturbed by Rai’s cool dismissal and remembering her friend’s reticence the night before, Taryn followed Rai back up the steps from the Market District into the Manor District. And despite all of Taryn’s attempts to lighten her friend’s mood, Rai remained cold. Not just cold, Taryn realized, but growing irritated with everything Taryn said. Until she became so frustrated that she turned off course and stopped in the middle of a quiet alley. The smell of perfumes and powders assaulted Taryn’s nostrils and she heard giggling actors rehearsing a play in the nearby theater when Rai spoke those heavy words.

“Okay,” Taryn said, preparing herself for the worst. She couldn’t stand still as Rai gathered her thoughts. “You were upset with me last night because I helped Denan. You still are.”

“The whole city is upset!” Rai snapped. “There are Black Knights on the streets and everyone is terrified. Or had it all escaped your notice?”

Taryn had noticed it. On high alert, there wasn’t much joy in the city. People were full of suspicion and kept away from the shadows. They said little and listened for everything. It was good, then, that Rai had led them where they would not be overheard. “I know today has been difficult for you.” A city living in fear of an uninhibited mutant was chaotic during the day, with everyone rushing to store up enough food and supplies so that they wouldn’t have to be out when the sun set – if at all – for the next few days. It was said that mutants thrived in the darkness. “And I’m sorry I couldn’t be here to help you earlier. But the Knights will figure out soon enough that he’s gone and the flags will fly green again. Then it’ll get better. Please, don’t be angry with me for this.”

“Galen says it’ll be a few days before they realize he’s gone. But in the meantime, I have more days like this one to look forward to. How was your day?”

Taryn was hurt by the resentment she heard in her friend. “My day was… somewhat… normal,” she answered.

“Of course it was,” Rai scoffed.

“Rai.” Taryn was confused. Rai couldn’t be this upset about Denan and Taryn hadn’t done anything else to make her so angry. “Please, I – I don’t understand how I’ve upset you.”

“Last night was the first time I’ve ever seen you angry and of all the things you should be angry about you choose mutants. Even after seeing all the fear they cause, you still don’t regret helping him.”

“No one in this city is afraid because of him. Denan didn’t hurt anyone.” Taryn refrained from adding that the mystic faiths had caused their fear. She didn’t want to argue with Rai.

“You could have died yesterday, Taryn! Died! But that doesn’t seem to bother you or scare you or anything. You may be accustomed to reacting to mutants like that, but it is not normal. People aren’t normally covered in a fresh batch of injuries every other day. They don’t normally deflect questions about their homes or families. You hate Galen, yet you know that much about him. We're supposed to be best friends but I don’t know anything about you – not really.”

Taryn wished she could be more open but her life was a royal secret. Vares had instructed her – and Dr. Seir had warned her – against saying too much about herself to people who didn’t already know what she was. She had lost friendships in the past after sharing too many truths about herself and she’d been so afraid of repeating that mistake that she shared nothing. All to avoid suspicion and the probing questions that she was forbidden to answer – questions that were revealing in themselves. But it seemed withholding too much would lead to the same result.

“Do you want to know what’s normal for me? Every day I pray to the gods that whoever gives you those injuries doesn’t kill you one day. I go to bed at night terrified that I’ll never see you again; that you’ll disappear from my life and I won’t know who to ask or blame or where to look for you. I watch you devour everything in sight and I wonder if you’re being starved at home – if you even have a home! Yet everyday you return to the bakery and behave as if you couldn’t be happier. And when you didn’t show up today…” Rai took gaping breaths to stave off the tears that pooled anew in her eyes.

Taryn reached to comfort her but her friend stepped away, holding a hand up against her.

“You ask us to keep your secret but you tell us nothing,” Rai went on, her sorrow turning now to anger. “You explain nothing. So what am I supposed to think when you disappear in the city and no one knows where you’ve gone to or what you’re doing? What am I to think when you get angry and rise to the defense of mutants, against your friends, who are only trying to protect you? What am I supposed to think when you hide your face from the Guard and help mutants escape the King's justice?”

Taryn’s mind raced to tell her that Rai did not think what she thought Rai had come to think. That Rai didn’t know – couldn’t know – else she would not have dragged Taryn into an alley to confront and accuse on her own. There was no need for Taryn to panic. “I don’t hate Galen,” Taryn ventured.

Rai turned away with a frustrated groan and headed back for the Prince’s Fall. Taryn ran after her. “Wait. Rai, wait!” Taryn called. She was usually good at redirecting a conversation. But now she wondered if Rai had only been allowing her to. “I’m sorry, but I –”

“You can’t say,” Rai finished for her. “And I think it’s time I accept that you never will.”

When Rai walked away this time, Taryn was desperate to stop her. She thought of telling her the lies Dr. Seir insisted she adapt as her life. She thought of the explanations and excuses that would not violate Vares’s trust in her. But the more she thought of all the things she could say to dismiss and belittle Rai’s concerns, the more she realized that they were empty words. Words that would cover the cracks of this delicate relationship but would not keep it from fracturing the next time the pressure built. They were not the words that would turn Rai around and make them true friends.

“My family died in Damville nine years ago.” Taryn’s voice came out in a croaked mix of shouts and gasps. The words were bloody in her mouth, the taste of betrayal and long suppressed pain. No one had survived the Disaster in Damville. That was the story that kept Taryn invisible. That was the story that allowed Taryn to believe that it had not happened to her, that someone else had gone on living after all that had supported her life had died. “I can’t remember… anything about that night.” Taryn couldn’t stop her hand reaching up to stroke the scar where her head had been split open. Of all the people, of all the lives, Taryn didn’t understand how she alone had survived.

“Oh, Taryn. I’m so sorry.”

Rai had moved closer but Taryn refused to look up at her friend, to see the sadness and pity in her eyes. She didn’t want to be comforted. Taryn pulled her hand down sharply. She beat back her sorrow and let the rest of her words rush from her. “The people who found me brought me here and they don’t – They aren’t mistreating me. My bruises are from my training.”

“But the Guard doesn’t train recruits in the city.”

“I’m not training for the Guard,” Taryn answered quietly.

A pause. “What else could you be training for?”

“Please don’t ask me that,” Taryn said, slowly raising her eyes to meet Rai’s. “I’m not allowed to explain it to you. Not yet,” she added, seeing the hurt flash across Rai’s freckled face.

Rai nodded. She was close enough now that Taryn could smell the bakery seeped into her stained apron. “But I don’t understand,” she said. “How can you continue to defend mutants after losing your family that way?”

Taryn’s head began to ache as she felt the twisted energy begin to stir in he. She smothered it with a deep breath. She couldn’t understand how anyone could make the leap from the Disaster in Damville to mutants. Well, she could; but not logically. She was certain the LAAMP had had something to do with the conviction everyone appeared to have of the connection. “All of mutant-kind cannot be punished for the crimes of a few,” she said. “That is injustice.”

Rai shook her head, her smile admiring. “That’s very noble of you. I doubt anyone else would feel that way.”

“Can we be friends again?”

Rai hugged her. “I’ll always be your friend, no matter how angry you make me,” she laughed. “I’m sorry I got upset with you. I just wish you’d give me the chance to be your friend. You can trust me.”

Four words had never been so daunting. “I’m sorry I have to keep secrets from you. But you don’t have to worry about me. I’m not going to be killed in a training session. If anything did happened and I was no longer able to come to the bakery, I’ll make sure that you know why.” And Taryn meant it. Even if she were imprisoned and inhibited, down to her last few drops of secarin, she could Echo a message to Rai.

Rai accepted this and the two left to find the Countess of Mayville.

Taryn knew Rai was not completely satisfied with the small truths she’d given; there would be another inquisition. She hoped, however, that it would be months in coming; then she would be better prepared. Because no matter how badly she wanted to tell her friends everything, no matter how much she told herself they could be trusted, she was still too afraid of being rejected for it.

“Is that why Mama Kebar is so generous with my meal allowance?” Taryn asked. “Because she thinks I’m being starved?”

“Mama actually thinks you live in an orphanage, fighting for scraps. But Kem makes a convincing case for your secret nobility.” Rai’s face broke into a smile. “You should hear him go on about the way you move, the perfumes you wear, even your clothes are finer than they appear. He’s actually quite poetic about it.”

Taryn could almost feel Rai itching to tell her more. And she wanted to ask for more. She wanted to hear what Kem said about her; what he thought of her and why. But he’d moved on and she just wanted them to be friends again. “I’ll instruct the team at my next fitting to use cheaper fabrics and bad stitching,” she said instead.

“Hmm. But a secret nobility doesn’t track with the hunger and the bruises. Galen put it out that you are actually a thief. Possibly part of a street gang. Which seemed more plausible given everything we could see.”

Taryn laughed with her. It warmed her heart to know that these were the conversations they were having when she wasn’t around. They weren’t plotting to kill her or trying to control her, they just wanted to understand her. They wanted to know her and she began to feel that perhaps she could finally be known. “What do you think?”

“Well, you hardly show up on time. When you do, you’re rarely where you need to be. And you never take the extra hours when we offer them, so you obviously don’t need the money. Apart from the food, I don’t know why you even agreed to take the job.”

“I’ve been told that the amount of food I eat in a day could feed several small children for a week.” That was an exact quote from Vares himself, and Lothor Kings do not tell lies. “It didn’t seem fair that the kitchen staff should carry that burden alone.”

“All jokes aside, I want you to know that if you need it, you will always have a bed at the Kebar home. No matter the reason or situation.”

Taryn smiled at her. “That is very kind of you.”

“I mean it. Now, I don’t think we’ll be able to feed you, but we can hide you from the Guard or street gangs or overbearing fosters. No questions asked.”

Taryn breathed slowly as she blinked tears from her eyes.

Rai took hold of her wrist and gave her a gentle squeeze. She filled the silence with more talk about her day while Taryn composed herself. And while she gushed over the new poem Galen had written for her, and laughed at Kem who had burned a whole tray of meat pies and been kicked out of the kitchen, Taryn decided that when the time came, Rai had to be the first one to know. It was the only comparable thing she had to give back.

“Is it alright if I ask you one thing?” Rai said.

“Anything,” Taryn said without thinking.

“Galen’s birthday is just a month after mine and Kem’s. They’re all coming up and I’ve been thinking about gifts. I realized that I didn’t know your birthday and it’s been nearly a year. So? When is it? Or has it already passed?”

“I’ll be sixteen on the Lady’s Day,” Taryn answered quietly.

For an instant, Rai froze and glanced at Taryn’s exposed wrists; checking for a mark. Taryn didn’t blame her. There was such a dark connotation ascribed to the Lady’s Day that even George had warned her against confessing it as her day of birth. Mutants were first created on the Lady’s Day; any mutant who managed to kill a Lothor King on the Lady’s Day would be chosen to become the Dark Prince, the unstoppable vessel of the Lady’s power, the bringer of the second age of darkness; and (this was Taryn’s favorite) the Dark Prince would be born on the Lady’s Day.

It was all malarkey. But there was little point in explaining that to mystics.

“That explains a lot,” Rai said. “We probably shouldn’t tell Galen, though.”

* * * * *

Before Vares the Great became the first King of Lothoria, before Lothoria united as an empire, the land was divided into seventy-five feudal states. Then came the War of the Royals. Centuries of constantly shifting alliances diminished seventy-five kingdoms to five, with territories managed by the noble families; descendants of once great kings who’d been too weak to keep their royal titles. When the Thousand Arm Warriors rose to join the fray, Vares the First united the kingdoms against them. With fear and hatred, the kingdom of Lothoria was born. Now, instead of ruling their territories with absolute authority, the noble families were allowed to govern their counties under the King’s peaceful authority. This most of them did from their miniature palaces in the city, where they resided to be close to their King; to better receive His grace, His favor, and all manner of mystic drivel they convinced themselves of.

Maroon and grey eagles of Mayville livery adorned the gates that granted Taryn and Rai entrance to the grounds of Soren Manor.

“No one is here.” Taryn said. She expected the property to be quiet. Countess Mayville wasn’t home and her staff were enjoying their vacations at home. But there should have been someone left behind to look after the place.

“She mentioned celebrating a trip when she placed the order a few days ago,” Rai said. “Maybe I misheard and she was talking about leaving.”

“If she were planning a trip out, she would not have placed an order for after her departure.”

Taryn became wary as they walked the decorated path directing them to the manor’s entrance. Here she noticed a tall shrub, trimmed and sculpted into a lean and graceful figure of a man. In his leafy hands was a branch or pole, sprouting floral spikes of red, yellow and orange blossoms. “Fortibrasto dextera,” she noted. It was a perfect effigy of the Defender and his flaming sword of Heaven.

Beyond she identified alitheia; tendril vines that grew layers of colored pedals that ranged from a russet brown to wheat. They made up the binding and pages of the Book of Truths held in the hands of the stone sculpture of the Scholar. Further still the sun lit upon the heart-shaped leaves of the Bleeding Heart, or caritas filan, its reddish-purple blossoms arranged in a heart-shaped alter of the Saint. She didn’t recognize the yellow and orange blossoms producing the Seat of the Gods in the King’s tribute but she couldn’t help the small smile that tugged at her lips as she recited the names of the plants she did recognized. As much as she despised the message of the Purist faith, she had to admire the cleverness of the garden’s floral arrangements. Each one matched the specific nature of the relics they represented.

“Did you just make all of that up?” Rai asked as they start climbing up the large stone steps to the double doors.

“No,” Taryn said. And since she had resolved to be less secretive about her life, she pulled the golden floral locket from around her neck. The disc was warm against her palm from being worn against her skin. “This was the last thing my father ever gave to me,” she explained. The crystal at the center of the blossomed petals carried a very faint green hue. Taryn opened the locket to expose that three withering pedals within. “These are from my mother’s favorite flower: Glow Blossoms. They’re supposed to glow in the dark. We had an entire bouquet when we left Damville nine years ago. When they started dying, I spent months and months trying to find a way to cultivate them. I still haven’t found anything that will make them bloom or restore their bioluminescent glow. But I did learn a lot about other flowers in the effort.”

Rai smiled. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”

Taryn shrugged and tucked the necklace away.

“So, you know history, you know flowers. You’re no stranger in a kitchen and you’re not training for the Guard,” Rai said. “Is there anything you don’t know?”

Taryn thought about it and gave her another honest answer. “I don’t understand the Purist faith.” Or any faith, for that matter. Most of the kingdom were Traditional Lorrics; believing that the Lothor line represented one of five gods at odds with a sixth, the Lady. The small minority of Extremists believed that the Darkness was a seventh god who had trapped the Lady and forced her to make his children. But the growing number of Purists believed that the five Lorric gods were the five faces of one true god; the patriarch of the Lothor line. They believed that it was humanity’s duty to aid the Lothors in their war against the Lady’s children and work their way into the Houses of Heaven. This is why the Caeltar Knight ‘purified’ mutants, why children born on the Lady’s Day were drowned, smothered, or abandoned. Purist were the worst offenders of the three denominations but they all believed and worshiped powerless men as gods. Taryn couldn’t fathom the rationale behind any of their faiths. And these were the kinds of people who governed the world and decided her fate.

“There are no gods,” Taryn said. “And the Lothor Kings have no divine power.”

“Then you are truly Faithless.” Rai sounded disappointed.

“And you’re a mystic. Yet here we are, best friends who don’t discuss such foolishness.”

Rai smiled, sad and small. “So, you don’t think the gods saved you, in Damville? You don’t believe that you were spared for a greater purpose?”

Taryn forced herself to smile. She didn’t want a disagreement to become an argument. “The King was here, in his palace while Damville was being swept away.” Taryn was not bitter or angry about this. The flood had been no one’s fault. No one could have stopped or prevented it. “Dr. Seir and George found me, after everyone else had already died. They saved me. There was no higher purpose or deeper meaning in it; only luck and human kindness.”

“I can understand why you would think that. But one day the Scholar will show you the truth of these things. I pray the gods will change your heart then.”

Taryn just smiled. Being open and honest wasn’t so bad. Now she knew that they could still be friends, even if one of them were wrong. She turned back to the garden while Rai continued up to the door. She watched a pair of small birds peck at the smooth stones of the gravel path. She marveled at how they bent their wings to their will and took flight, how their feathers ate up the light of the sun and threw back brilliant shades of blue and yellow as they flew over the wall of the property. And her heart sank.

From her position, halfway up the stairs, she could see the scenes at the far edge of the garden. Beyond the alters of the Scholar and King and back to where a fountain had been erected for the Prince. She could see the grey stone statue that captured the Prince mid-transformation, her human torso rising out of the pool, a hand growing feathers as it stretched to the sky. And strewn across the surface of the fountain’s pool were dozens of flowers. Taryn would have to be closer to confirm but she was certain that these were fero noctagia, or Unholy Night. It was a toxic plant known to make people feral. A plant with an unusual shade of blue.

“How well do you know this woman?” she asked Rai.

“Don’t judge her just because she’s a Purist,” Rai said, knocking on the door. “She’s actually very nice.”

It wasn’t her manners Taryn was concerned with. So many thoughts sped through her mind that she had to take a deep breath to shut them all up.

“I don’t think anyone’s here.” Rai pounded on the door.

“Let’s just go.” She couldn’t let her curiosity run with Rai there. Honesty or not, if she let her other life bleed into her identity as a baker’s apprentice, she would lose it, whether she wanted to or not. Her immunity demanded it.

“I think you were right,” Rai said as she joined her. “I must have misheard her.”

Taryn could always come back to investigate. She had the Countess’s name and address, as well as the minds of all her servants and staff. If there was a connection between Shava Soren and the King of the Lane, she would find it during her next watch.

Taryn hurried down the steps, Rai slogging less enthusiastically behind her. She turned to urge her along. That’s when she saw it.

Tucked somewhere near the northeastern corner of the manor, the mental flame was so faint, so fragile, that Taryn would have missed it if she weren’t alert for trouble. Yet there is was; a single speck of light amidst a constellation of torches. It was the smallest she’d ever seen, but it was also the most raw and pure beacon to ever touch her mind.

Taryn ran up the steps.

“Where are you going? I thought we were leaving.”

Taryn kept running when she hit the landing. She charged at the door in short steps and leapt into the air to deliver a double-heeled kick where the two doors met, leaping back into a flip and landing on her feet. She didn’t threw enough power to knock the door from its hinges. She was not yet ready for the level of honesty that would explain that. Only to break the lock and create a small opening where the doors had bent in and away from each other.

“What are you doing!?” Rai screamed behind her.

Taryn ignored her friend and ran at the door again. This time, she rammed it with her shoulder, adding enough push to break through and roll into the foyer. She was already up the maroon carpeted stairway by the time Rai stepped over the splintered remains. She’d broken through another six doors before she made it to the right one and Rai finally caught up to her in the master bedroom.

That’s where Shava Soren lay.

Everything was so serene she looked like she was sleeping. Heavy curtains were drawn over the wall of windows that opened to a balcony. A dying fire crackled its last waves of warmth into the room. She was tucked neatly beneath the warm blankets, like some cursed damsel awaiting the kiss of her beloved.

“Oh,” Rai said.

Taryn went to the woman’s side. A barely perceptible pulse beat at her wrist in a slow, dull rhythm. Her chest hardly moved as she breathed. Her eyes reflected a dull amber around dilated pupils and the tiny speck of her mind still cried out for strength.

“Is she okay?” Rai asked.

“No,” Taryn said. She linked her fingers around the woman’s shoulder and brought them down to her hands, pressing slightly to feel for injuries or breaks. She did the same with both legs and the other arm.

“Is she going to die?”

Taryn didn’t have an answer for that. If there had been any blood in the room, Taryn was sure she would not be able to remain conscious. But there were no other signs of injury; no tears in her green silk night gown to suggest fowl play, no bruises on her tan skin to suggest an accident, no breaks, no wounds. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

‘Please.’ Taryn eased her mind into the speck. ‘What’s happened to you? How do I help you?’ She thought she saw the shape of the speck shift but couldn’t read anything.

“Maybe it was something in here.” Rai stood beside a table in the corner of the room; a small writing desk angled to catch the sunlight. She held a tea cup to her face, inhaling freely of its contents.

The cup was still warm when Taryn took it. She held it away from her face and waved her free hand over it to encourage the aroma to waft her way. She noted a leafy scent that was common to all plants, undercut with a syrupy, sweet aroma; like a bit of rotting fruit dressed up in fragrant spices. As soon as it hit her nostrils, she didn’t think and consider that Rai was mere inches away from her. She threw the cup through a part in the curtains and it smashed the window on its way to the whatever lay beyond the balcony. They heard it shatter against a hard surface.

“Stop breaking things!” Rai hissed at her. “You’re scaring me.”

“I’m sorry,” Taryn said. “But that was crimen bey. Every part of that plant is toxic.”

“But it smelled so nice.”

Taryn studied Rai’s green eyes for dilation. “How much of it did you inhale?”

“Not much. I’m fine,” she said, pushing Taryn’s probing hands away. “I’m just uneasy with all of this. How are you so calm?”

Because the fight was over. She knew what the problem was and she knew that there was nothing anyone could do about it. Taryn moved back to the dying woman. Her chestnut brown hair flowed in waves from her head and Taryn swept it aside to pull the woman over the side of the bed. The only thing she could think to do was induce vomiting and hope it cleared enough of the poison to slow the process.

“That’s a good idea,” Rai said, her eyes big with hope. “She’ll be okay now?”

“Crimen bey,” Taryn repeated. “You would know it as Freya’s Tears.”

Anyone who claimed any knowledge of the Lorric faiths or Lothor legends knew about Freya’s Tears. Rai was no exception. Taryn watched the light die in her eyes, watched her face fall and the hope drain out of her entire body as she realized what Taryn knew as soon as that syrupy sweet smell hit her nostrils. “So there is nothing we can do?”

There was nothing. No cure had been found in the centuries since the toxicity of the fruit smelling plant was discovered. They weren’t going to find one in the next hour or so it would take to claim her.

“So she’ll just…” Rai sank to the floor between the writing desk and the hearth, where the tea pot hung on a spit over the cooling embers. And Taryn had an idea.

“Maybe not.” Crimen bey did not have a known cure; perhaps it had an unknown one. “Get that fire going,” she instructed Rai as she headed for the door. “And put some water to boil.”

“Why? Where are you going now?”

“To see if her faith can save her.”

* * * * *

Taryn reentered the manor a few minutes later, her fists full of the orange and yellow flowers. Her pockets, the blue. It would be a while yet before the water boiled enough. She kept an eye on Rai’s flame, pacing above, and took that time to allow her mind to voice her suspicions.

There was a blue powder in Larisport that was turning middlings into berserkers. Here was a blue plant that was capable of making people behave like wild animals. But one coincidence did not prove a connection.

Taryn sent her Survey out for the servants and staff scattered throughout Pine Keep and found the same story in their minds. When their mistress sent them away early that morning, they’d thought nothing of it. It was a thing she did often when she expected particular company. Company that demanded absolute privacy. And now she lay poisoned in her bed.

If the Countess was his supplier, it seemed plausible that the King of the Lane would sever any ties that could point back to him. Especially if he had no more use of her. That meant he must have all the plants and powders he wanted of her. So what did he plan to do with it?

There was one way Taryn could know for sure.

Normally, people near death were easy to read. They had no defenses and their minds gushed with all the information they stored. Until they crossed the threshold and were lost to Taryn, and the world, forever. The Countess was at the threshold. Taryn could see the light of her mind but it was as if there was nothing left to read, no sense of a human presence to explore. Taryn spent several minutes trying to breach her gently. But her mind was a wisp at the center of that speck and the more she tried to touch it, the more it dissolved away.

Taryn settled back into herself. If she wanted answers, she had to hope that these mysterious petals would do the impossible.

She stopped in the kitchen before she returned to the Countess’s bedroom. She supposed the home could be considered massive by most standards but after seven years in the palace, Taryn couldn’t imagine how everything one needed for a stately home could be fit into such a small space.

Rai was relieved to see her. “Don’t you dare leave me alone with a dying woman again.”

Taryn unloaded her spoils from the kitchen onto the bed: a tea cup uncontaminated by crimen bey, a long handled spoon to mix the petals into the boiling water and a sieve to filter them out again. “How is she?” she asked. From where she stood it looked like the speck had grown, but she was probably fooling herself.

“I spoke a Purist prayer,” Rai said. “I thought she moved but… nothing now. Did you find something in the garden? Will it help her?”

“I hope so.” Taryn pulled the flowers from the sieve and broke them apart in her hands. She used a towel to lift the hot pot from the flames and placed half into the bath; petal, stem and all. She used the spoon to stir and crush the plants to release their juices into the water, then covered the pot to let them steep.

“What do you mean you hope? Don’t you know?”

“I don’t know what it is.” Taryn sat on the floor next to the pot and studied the blossoms that remained. “They look like hydrangeas. But those only come in red, purple and blue. Not yellow and orange. If the soil is bad, you might get a small green flower but this thing is the size of a healthy plant. Its not a hydrangea. I’ve never seen it before.”

“Well, then why do you think it will help?”

“Fortibratso dextera is commonly called the Strong Right Arm,” Taryn explains. “Soldiers use it in training to enhance their energy and strength so they can perform better – like the Master is supposed to do. The alitheia is called the Confessor; anyone who ingests it can only tell the truth – like the Scholar does.”

“An homage to the gods.” Rai’s eyes grew wide. “Are they all like that?”

Taryn nodded. “These made up the King’s Seat of the Gods. It was the only plant I didn’t recognize.”

“But the Seat of the Gods is supposed to burn away darkness,” Rai said. “Its supposed to purify.”

Taryn shrugged. “I don’t know if it’ll work, but its the only thing I could think to do. How are you? You haven’t started feeling any weakness or nausea?” Rai’s eyes were red and puffed. Taryn wasn’t sure if that was a symptom of if she’d been crying.

Rai shook her head as she crouched beside Taryn. “I don’t think I breathed that much of it in.”

“It’ll be about ten minutes before the tea is steeped enough,” Taryn said. “Another several minutes for it to cool enough to trickle down her throat and who knows how long before we’ll see a result. You don’t have to stay for it all. I’ll stay until…” Until the Countess either died or didn’t. “There’s no use in everyone worrying about the both of us.” Taryn desperately wanted to search for clues that could point to the King of the Lane; both in the manor or in the Countess’s mind. She knew where the King of the Lane had been within the last hour or so. She could use it to track him. To learn where he’d come from and hopefully map out where he was now. She hadn’t been this close to him in years. She was eager to get started.

Then it hit her. The King of the Lane had just been there. She’d just missed him. Or rather, she and Rai. What might have happened if Rai hadn’t lost the address? If they’d gotten there sooner or if Rai had been alone to witness…

Taryn fought against the terror that seized her when she realized that she didn’t know that he had left. Her mind was blind to his presence. For all she knew, he could be in the manor with them now.

“We need to go,” Taryn said as she sprang to her feet. Her mind was in a full panic. “Now!”

“What? No. I’m not leaving you to deal with this alone.”

“Whoever did this might still be here.” Taryn pulled Rai to her feet. She had to get her to safety. “We need to notify the Guard.”

“I don’t think that’ll be an issue.” Rai pulled away to open a drawer of the writing desk. She drew a stack of papers, small squares that could fit neatly in the palm of her hand, and held them tight against her chest. “I found these while you were gone. I know it shouldn’t have been snooping but I was scared and worried and it calmed me down. I think she did this to herself.”

Taryn wouldn’t put it past Kol to leave behind evidence that would convince an investigator that the Countess had done this to herself. But she knew better.

Rai thrust the notes at Taryn, who took them warily.

Taryn read through the notes…

Eight weeks, no more. He should have been.

Four weeks, I’m sure. My life for his.

Can death be birth? Six weeks, blessed nausea.

… and the world went still around her. She felt like all the blood in her body had been summoned back to her heart to smother and squeeze until her knees grew weak and her limbs trembled. “This can’t be real,” she heard herself say.

“I can’t imagine anything worse than the loss of a child.” Rai sounded far away.

Not just any child. Taryn read two more notes, tears stinging her eyes. Four more. And they were all like that. Before the blood could flow back into her limbs, Taryn charged to where Shava Soren lay. She grabbed the Countess of Mayville by her green silk collar and growled into her still face, “Don’t you dare die.”

She was aware of Rai, pulling at her arm, begging her to stop as she forced petal, stem and all, piece by piece, into the woman’s mouth. But Taryn wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t. Not until she knew that Shava Soren would live. She had to live. Because those notes, every single one of them, were four words long.