Page 2 of A Court of Masks and Roses (Royal Scout #1)
KALI
T o the outside world, Lord Gapral is a cranky hermit who takes in the occasional orphan to live on his far-off, understaffed estate.
The grounds are chronically overgrown with weeds and brush; the servants are scarce, unfriendly, and silent; visitors are nonexistent.
To those of us who’ve grown up here, the estate is our womb.
Not because it’s warm or kind—the estate is neither—but because our identities are safe here.
On the estate, I can be Kali, the seventeen-year-old girl that I am. Outside, I’m always someone else.
Despite the late hour of my return, a scout on sentry duty appears beside me the moment I cross the invisible line marking the estate’s perimeter.
I freeze as the knife blade presses into my side, and I allow the sentry to examine my face.
His own is hooded and stays that way, though I catch a glimpse of his features, thanks to my light crystal.
A boy of fifteen who has been at Gapral’s estate for seven years now.
I don’t know his name or his specialty. There is a lonely look in the boy’s eyes, but I know better than to ask after his welfare, nor will he ask after mine.
Scouts are Lord Gapral’s commodities, and sharing our identities and personal details with each other is forbidden.
The boy nods and removes the blade.
“Leaf?” I ask. My sister is Lord Gapral’s one exception—everyone knows both her name and her specialty. She is a whisperer, a person born with the ability to tune living crystals.
“Training room.”
I nod my thanks and the sentry melts back into the shadows.
For a few moments, I deliberate the merits of interrupting Leaf, but my burning ribs make the decision for me.
Navigating the weeds and plants cultivated to conceal movement, I make my way to a small structure designed to look like a toolshed, where the scouts gifted with some hint of whispering can practice.
Having no such gift myself, I’d usually be forbidden from coming near the training room, but with Leaf being my sister, Lord Gapral is willing to look the other way—unless I create problems.
“No, no, no.” My sister’s exasperated voice escapes the door. “A light crystal can only make light . It can’t heal flesh or heat up or remember a song.”
“Can I change a light crystal into a healing crystal?” asks a young boy.
“No.” Leaf’s voice turns stern. “And don’t play with healing crystals; they are dangerous. Now concentrate, please. Why is the light crystal in your hands flickering and dim instead of steady and bright?”
“It’s out of tune—the magic inside the crystal is scattered. I need to focus the magic to make it glow.”
Opening the door a crack, I find a small hooded scout sitting on the floor, an egg-sized living crystal in his hand.
My sister crouches beside her student, her hand on the novice’s crystal too.
I can see the faint wisps of magic swirling inside the crystal, but whisperers like Leaf and the boy can feel and manipulate them.
“Do it,” says Leaf. “Feel the magic, imagine how it should weave together. Focused. Orderly. Now make it happen. Work inside the crystal. Don’t try to draw the magic out. Coax the outermost strands toward the middle. That’s not the middle! Yes, now that’s the middle.”
Inside the crystal, the strands of magic pull together into a tight ball, and the crystal’s glow becomes bright and steady. The young scout jumps up and lets out a whoop before seeing me in the doorway and freezing.
The room fills with fear. It’s a dangerous time for whisperers, though the child is safe enough here. Lord Gapral isn’t one to give up valuable skills just because some priest cries heresy.
“It’s all right,” I tell the youngster. “No one is in trouble, but I need the room.”
The young scout disappears in a rustle of cloak and shoes.
“Practice,” Leaf calls after the boy. “Next week we’ll weave triggers into the magic. With a trigger, a tuned crystal stays dormant until something specific—like a particular person—touches it. So you can make a light crystal stay dark until Lord Gapral picks it up.”
Turning her attention to me, Leaf hobbles forward, dragging her clubfoot behind her across the stone floor.
Despite being three years older, she is the smaller of us, the same birth affliction that crippled her right foot also keeping her body petite and frail.
A beautiful porcelain doll with pale skin, hazel eyes, and a longer, shinier version of my golden-brown hair.
Leaf is also the only person in the world with a mind to rival Lord Gapral’s, and the most talented and learned whisperer since our mother—though everyone at the estate is smart enough to keep that tidbit of information very, very quiet.
“Kali. What’s happened?” Leaf studies me critically.
I stumble to a bench and sit. “Stayed late watching Viva Sylthia goons and had a bad fall heading home.” I pick up a vial of something bright blue left standing beside the worktable.
“Put that down, it’s poisonous.” Leaf snatches her latest experiment from my hand and sits beside me to help extricate me from the boy’s clothing and chest bind that turn me from Kalianna into Kal.
My lightly angled jawline and slender but muscled frame make me especially well suited for a male disguise, which is invaluable in a scout’s world.
Not only can I turn into a lady or stable boy as the situation dictates, but I can do it mid-mission.
Unwinding the last layer of cloth, Leaf sucks a breath through her teeth. “That’s one bad fall.”
While Leaf holds a lantern up to conduct her examination, I focus on breathing and constructing a report I can deliver without Gapral smelling a rat.
The key is sticking to the truth as much as possible.
That, and giving him no reason to check my injuries.
He can differentiate marks from a fall and a beating as well as Leaf can. “The cuts look deep,” she says.
“They aren’t.”
Leaf uses a corner of my chest bind to dab a cut over my lower left ribs. “This one needs stitches.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
Leaf rises to hobble over to her toolkit.
My attention snaps free of Gapral and his inevitable interrogation, to address the more pressing matter. “I don’t need stitches, Leaf.”
“Are you seventeen or seven?” she calls over her shoulder. “I keep forgetting. If you don’t like needles, stop getting yourself pummeled.” Leaf’s voice darkens. “I thought your orders were to watch and report, Kali.”
My jaw tightens. “You don’t know what the alternative was.”
“I know that every time you step out the door, I worry whether it will be your coffin coming back.” Leaf returns to sit beside me again, her small frame trembling. “It’s not your bloody job to interfere. If Lord Gapral’s wrath doesn’t deter you, can you at least think of our future?”
“What future?” I rub my face. Viva Sylthia is my trade specialty, but it is the least of Leaf’s and my personal concerns.
After twenty years of two out of every three babies in Dansil being stillborn, people are desperate.
And desperate people do many things, including believing Bishop Bahir’s claim that whisperers are to blame for what is being called the Child Drought.
Whispering isn’t illegal, not yet, but that little stops people from hunting whisperers down like animals and handing them over to the bishop’s Order of the Goddess to be “cured.” Outside Lord Gapral’s estate, there is no future for an orphan girl and her crippled, whispering sister.
“The Drought is going to end,” says Leaf. “Magic has always been a vital resource, and once the Drought ends and the fear dies down, it will be vital once more. You and I—”
“I’m not a whisperer,” I say, a little too forcefully. Thank the stars I have at least that going for me.
“You are something , Kali. What you feel when you touch living crystals is unlike what anyone else feels.” She motions to the stack of books across the room, next to a large slate with the living crystals and their magic charted in hundreds of ordered squares.
“Believe me, I’ve checked.” I would ask Leaf to bloody stop checking, but I might as well ask her to stop breathing.
She tells me our mother was the same way, always studying and researching something, though I little remember the woman.
I sigh, rubbing my face. “Can you just patch me up now and we can argue about the future in the morning?”
Leaf takes out her sewing kit. A needle as long as my finger flashes in the lantern light, and I promptly black out.
Morning—dawn, rather—brings a summons from Lord Gapral.
I trudge uphill through the two fog-filled horse pastures separating my cabin from the main house, the frostbitten grass crunching underfoot.
This far from Delta, Dansil’s balmy capital city, it gets freezing cold at night.
It isn’t true winter weather—Dansil hasn’t seen snow in two decades—but it is cold enough to make me suitably miserable.
The main house, the only stone building on the estate, rises before me as I clear the second pasture, but I double back down the hill instead of approaching directly.
That’s one of Lord Gapral’s unbendable rules—always double back to ensure no one is following.
Never take a direct path. Not even from your own cabin to the main house.
The estate is safe from uninvited eyes, but Gapral pays his servants to report on the trainees’ movements—and woe to the scout who discovers his day’s activities accurately documented by Gapral’s gardener.
The only one excused from turning ten-minute walks into hour-long treks is Leaf, but she spends little time outdoors.