Page 34 of Fortress of Ambrose (House of Marionne #3)

Twenty-Seven

Quell

It takes my toushana nearly an hour to decay a way through the thicket of vines hiding the garden gate.

Jordan and I waited to start working until the lights were out for the night so that we won’t get any questions.

I have too much on my mind already. Like how to keep magic and Jordan safe.

What to do about Willam pressuring for support of a new House.

Or how to get Dimara to stop making snide, unhelpful comments to Knox and Willam behind my back.

Where in the world is Abby? And what in the world is taking Nore and Yagrin so long to send an update on the state of the Scroll?

Inside the garden gate, a worn path runs between the rows of roses. This is going to take a long while even with magic.

The toushana ripping out of my hands dissolves the garden’s sprawling branches into dust. The power feels like an answer to a question I’ve run from asking my entire life—Who is she, that girl in the mirror?

She is free.

She is no one’s pawn.

But loving her is destructive, choking the life out of everything, like the garden’s weeds. A burden. I rip out another root, savoring the way wafts of darkness rake the gnarly roots into nothingness.

Jordan wrestles vines beside me with his bare hands, hesitant to use the toushana inside him.

Every few branches that he chops, one sprouts into a thicker one.

As black bleeds from me, I shove down thoughts of my mother, the agony she faced in her final moments in that wolf lair at Hartsboro the last time I saw her things.

I swallow the lump in my throat and tug harder at the thread of ice worming its way through me.

And I remember my grandmother’s body lying near the breaking Sphere.

I make short work of a bush. Then another, until my fingers ache and they start to purple.

I shift my focus away from my hands full of bruises that pale in comparison to what she suffered. Destruction. That’s my goal.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” Jordan asks. For once he is in casual pants and a dark shirt that hugs his chiseled body, outlining his side where the wound is healed. The bruise has improved even just in the last few hours.

“My grandmother is intentional, even dead. There’s a reason these roses know me. And I’m going to find out.”

I claw and rip, and wrangle, and destroy branch after branch as my grandmother’s groan of pain when she died plays on repeat in my head. My fingers bleed, but I don’t care.

“Quell.” Jordan offers me water. “Are you alright? What are you really looking for out here?”

Confirmation that I meant more to my grandmother than it seemed.

I start on the next bush, and Jordan grabs a spade. My grandmother spent time with me as if I mattered to her. As if she saw something in me. She plotted to save me when she learned about my dark magic, but she ignored me as I grew up. She was a complicated woman. But she was also careful.

She loved me.

For as much as it cost her, and as bad as she was at it—she loved me in her own twisted way. She would not leave me without her help now. I know it like I know the magic humming in my bones.

We work in silence until I clear the whole row. And the next two.

The world sways as I realize there are dozens more rows to go.

“Both of us using toushana would be faster,” I tell him.

He lifts another pile of broken branches, walks it to the corner of the garden, and adds it to the mountainous stack.

“My hands are just fine.” They’re covered in cuts and scrapes.

We continue until my arms ache. My entire body throbs by the time we finish the next row.

Dirt is caked under my bloodied nails. He tosses back water, hands it to me, but I’m too busy roving through the empty rows, moving around the soil to feel for anything buried beneath it.

But there is nothing. There has to be something here.

“Quell?”

On my hands and knees I shove the dirt around, moving larger piles of it, searching, hoping, wishing. But there’s nothing but rocks and sticks underneath. I beat the ground with my fists.

“Quell, breathe.”

A knot rises in my throat, frustration and grief trying to choke me.

I rock back on my heels and try to inhale.

Jordan moves right next to me, and the nearness of him helps some.

But when I exhale, the disappointment welling up in my chest bursts out in a shaking sob.

Grief’s an unwieldy guest that arrives without notice and overstays its welcome.

I’m not sure I can lasso it into submission anymore.

I cry, then I scream, punching the dirt again and again until I can’t see my mother’s face in my mind anymore.

Until the memory of her voice fades and the longing ache for her touch dissipates.

“You need a break. We can finish tomorrow.” He holds his side where he has healed.

But the fatigue shadowing his gaze makes me look at the time.

He’s been awake for over a day. He was told to get lots of rest. How quickly I can become so selfish.

How easily I harm the one person alive who still dares to love me.

“You’re right. Sleep is important.”

He offers me a hand up, and it surprises me. Though he rips it away so quickly the touch is gone before I can savor it. He sets aside his shovel.

“I’m staying until everything here is destroyed. You should go.” I pull on my magic and grab the first plant on the next row, one of dozens still left.

“I’m not leaving you to do this alone.” He says something else, but as I approach the next row, its blooms turn toward me.

All at once.

I take another step toward the flowers. Their stems lengthen before my eyes, reaching toward me, and my heart skips a beat.

What if destruction isn’t the answer?

I extend a hand, and a petal grazes my fingertip.

I get close enough for the roses to explore me, slinking along my arms. One vine encircles me timidly, trailing along my chest, wrapping itself around my body.

Another vine follows, more confident than the blooms before it.

Then a whole section of blossoms stretches in my direction, reaching for and winding around me.

Suddenly everything stills.

The ground rumbles, and the earth beneath my feet shifts.

I gasp.

Jordan clings to my side as the ground opens up.

A gold chest inlaid with fleur-de-lis is buried deep below.

“Lift on three. One, two—” We dust it off. A thorny vine hugs the chest like a chain. Jordan touches it, and its thorns lengthen to razor-sharp tips. But the lock dissolves in my grasp, and the chest pops open.

Inside is a ring of gleaming brass keys.

Jordan tries his best to convince me to go to bed as we reenter the estate.

The morning sky ripples a soft blue with ribbons of orange.

I race up the stairs. These keys fit into a certain-shaped lock I’ve only ever seen on the private family floor of the estate.

The third floor, where my grandmother’s quarters are.

“Quell.” He takes the stairs two at a time to keep up with me. “You haven’t slept or eaten in hours. Your grandmother died to save you, but she was also full of trickery. What kind of legacy is she roping you into if you use those keys?”

I stop.

“You want to be free. What are the chances that key is a way to that?”

He isn’t wrong. More harrowing truths about my grandmother, about the Order, could be on the other side of those doors. Some way to tie me further into a life I never wanted. But I need to know. If I don’t, I’ll always wonder what my grandmother really wanted from me.

I feel his love. The ache in him to truly hold me rams in my chest. He would protect me from anything if he could. Even myself.

“Thank you. But I have to do this, and I need to face whatever it is alone.”

My hand is on the banister. He strokes it once more, gently. “I don’t trust her or any of her secrets.”

“She left this for me to find.”

“She’s done terrible things.”

“Yeah, well, so have we.” She was complicated.

But she was a part of me. If she’s made a way to help us after her death, it’s my responsibility to find it.

“The entire world wants what’s living inside your body, Jordan.

It’s just us, and a few others, against everyone.

We need as much help as we can get. Even from a monster. ” I leave him there.

And because I know him, I know he won’t move from that step until he sees me come back down.

The doors on the third floor are locked.

I start with the first door and slip in a key.

The room is bare, with patterned floral wallpaper and a stale smell.

The light switch doesn’t work anymore, but the window provides enough for me to see.

There is a small wardrobe in the closet.

I try the next bedroom, but it is completely empty.

I inspect three more rooms before I come to one piled with dusty furniture. There are labeled boxes stacked to the ceiling on one side of the room. And a bed, dresser, and small side table arranged to be used on the other side. The closet is full of old toys and storybooks with brittle pages.

But the strangest thing about the boxes in the bedroom is that none of them are taped closed.

Several are propped open, as if they were recently rummaged through.

On top of one box there is a neatly folded soft pink baby blanket embroidered with fleur-de-lis in golden thread. When I flip it over, I gasp.

R

Rhea, short for Rheanne. My mother. This was my mother’s room.

My knees are weak, so I sit on the bed, my mother’s bed when she was a girl. Yellow paint is peeling from one of its four posts. There are little ponies painted on the headboard. One of the posts unscrews when I touch it, two sleeps from broken. I smile, working the post back and forth.

The pillows are a soft satin, and I wonder if I ever slept here with her. For a moment I consider running down the hall and trying each key in every door. Maybe I have a room I never knew about, too. But I tuck my knees into my chest where my mother once sat.

Eventually, I pull open each drawer on a small bedside table and find a stack of old photographs.

In one picture, my mother is no more than seven or eight years old, in a frilly dress with a lace bodice and satin-capped sleeves, jeweled gloves on her tiny hands.

She wears an older-style bonnet hat, ornately decorated with bows, ribbons, and some flowers.

In one photograph she appears to be a young teenager.

She wears the house riband across her, a beautiful bonnet, and elbow-length gloves.

The joy in her smile is what strikes me most. There are creases around her eyes as she hugs Grandmom tightly. It makes mine sting with tears.

I grab the box with the pink blanket and settle on the floor with it to see what else is inside. But when I grab its top to open it, my feet go numb beneath me. I should stop. If I stay here too long, how will I ever leave? How can I heal if I keep ripping open the scab of the same wound?

How can I heal if I don’t?

I open the box.

Inside are paper dolls with crookedly drawn smiles, a pearl necklace, and several folded sweaters.

The next box of my mother’s things is easier to open.

This one is full of colored drawings and what appears to be my mother’s old schoolwork.

Something shines from the bottom of the box.

A hair clip with a butterfly made of pearls, similar to the one my grandmother always wore.

I make more space on the floor for another box. This one is full of diaries and folded letters teenage Rhea wrote to herself.

Apparently she used to go by the nickname “Rae,” and she had a best friend who failed out at Second Rite.

She never saw her again. My mother did induct when she was seventeen, a year later than Grandmom wanted her to because she was late to emerge.

There is a sketch of a diadem on the page with a date, and my heart skips a beat.

The drawing is painted gold like Grandmom’s, with clear-colored stones.

I drag a blanket to cover my legs and finish one diary before picking up a tattered covered book with a sticker on the front.

I don’t know what time it is. And I don’t care.

Her loopy handwriting is scrawled across the pages in every color ink, decorated with hearts and doodles.

She talks a lot about débutante training as something in her past on these pages, so this diary must be from when she was close to my age.

It’s unclear whether she passed or failed Third Rite, but she gave me her dagger, which means she can’t have passed.

She took up House duties, working as Grandmom’s assistant, I read in her diary.

She even mentions Dexler a few times, who apparently competed with Maezre Cuthers to be Grandmom’s right arm.

Cuthers walks around like she has a stick up her butt. But little does she know, my mother would much prefer it to be her foot.

I snort at a mother I never knew and never can know.

I scrounge through more boxes until I find another diary covered in sticker hearts.

A bunch of folded letters spill out. These are from someone special.

A boy. He always signed his letters: Yours, Teddy.

She snuck out to meet Teddy many times. Grandmom caught her once and locked her in her room for a week.

But Teddy visited her even then, posing as a House of Marionne student.

She ran away with him at some point after her Second Rite exam, but they were found and brought back by Draguns within days.

Teddy…

She’d never mentioned anyone by that name. Not even a friend. Any questions I ever asked about my father went unanswered, so I stopped asking.

He drew boxy little hearts by his name on each of the letters.

I stuff them back into the book and return it to the box.

That’s when I notice a hatbox wrapped in a mauve velvet ribbon tucked behind the door where I came in.

Its top has slipped off. This box shines with a newness that’s eerily out of place.

Inside is not one of my mother’s bonnets.

But instead a bouquet of dried black roses, tied with more ribbon. Attached to the flowers is a card.

For Rhea.

Upon my death.

Yours,

Mommy

But it’s the writing of the card that sends a shiver up my arms.

My life’s greatest work.

12 Sparrows Circle