Page 40 of Fortress of Ambrose (House of Marionne #3)

Thirty-Three

Yagrin

Red’s body lay collapsed on the ground, and Yagrin couldn’t move.

Isla’s hands roved her own chest, her mouth gaped open.

He stepped closer as deep red ringlets shortened and lightened to a rusty shade of auburn.

Red’s full lips faded into Nore’s as she lay there, eyes closed.

Yagrin couldn’t feel his heart beating. He watched her lashes change, her body morph, Ellery’s Anatomer magic wearing off.

The last several weeks tore through his mind.

The way Nore warmed up to him quicker than he did to her.

The way she seemed to know things she shouldn’t know as well as she did, like how he spent his time, his deep hatred of the Order.

The way she looked at him as if she knew the secret parts of his soul.

The way she kissed him. And the fury she ran off with last night when she told him that he loved her.

The world swayed. He looked for something to steady himself. It was her all along.

Red wasn’t real?

His throat was dry. Or was she? He stared back at the body on the ground, and his pulse skittered.

Isla peeled herself off Nore and charged at her son in a fit of sobbing rage.

“You! How could you?”

“I saved your life, and you would accuse me?” Ellery flinched, throwing the glove off his bruising hand. “You ruined her life.”

“I did all I could to break the Pact!” She gestured at the dark whirring above them, which were the ancestors, he now knew, circling overhead like a brewing storm.

A glass box floated in the air, held in their shadows.

Yagrin crept away from the argument, keeping an eye on the dead.

He checked Nore for a pulse. A thump beat in her wrist.

“I tried to protect her by helping her access her magic,” Isla went on.

“She doesn’t have magic, Mother. That’s the point you seemed to miss! Your desperation put that poison in her.”

Toushana. Yagrin went cold all over. Nore had toushana implanted in her? He’d never seen her use the dark magic. And judging by the way she watched him use it, she knew very little about it.

“By mistake.” She grabbed Ellery by the shoulders and shook.

“I have given my entire life to protect her. Can’t you see?

The private cottage. The lies about sabbaticals.

I knew this was coming. I knew they’d feast on her if her heart ever went in that box.

And you knew that too!” She jabbed his chest. Then she held her face, shaking with sobs.

Yagrin hovered a hand over Nore’s mouth. She was breathing deeply, as if she was sound asleep.

“She hardly had a life,” Ellery said, hooking his arms behind his back.

“I was trying to find a way to get it out of her.” She wailed. “I was truly trying, Ell. You’ve killed your sister! You’ve killed her.” She fell to her knees. But Ellery grabbed his mother by the arm, snatching her back to her feet.

“Pull yourself together, woman. You’re hardly recognizable. This is why I should be heir. I’m doing her a favor. When I find the Duncan piece of that Scroll, I’ll bring her back.”

Isla paled.

Yagrin’s heart leapt. Ellery was going to kill his mother.

Right there in front of everyone. I have to get Nore out of here.

The ancestors were moving closer to Ellery.

Nore’s heart pulsed inside their gold-rimmed glass box.

Maybe there was still something he could do.

He hated being lied to. It shredded his soul to know that he’d been deceived.

But his love for the girl he was holding, whatever skin she was in, burned hotter than his hate.

He eyed the glove Ellery used to reach into Nore’s chest on the ground. But when he reached for it, it vanished. He scooped Nore into his arms. When he turned, the scene around the argument had changed dramatically.

Ellery’s hands were still behind him, but silver hid between them.

“You have no idea what it’s like with your heart in that box,” Isla yelled as Yagrin tried to shake Nore awake. “This is the first time in a long time that I’ve seen the world clearly. When your father—”

“Don’t speak about my father,” Ellery shot back. “You shut him out of both our lives after Nore was born.” As Ellery spoke, the ancestors moved his way. Nore still didn’t move, unresponsive. But Yagrin focused on her gently beating pulse.

“I never wanted to,” Isla said as the cloud of dead shifted away from Ellery now and toward her.

Indecision. The ancestors weren’t sure who the Head of the House was. Nore’s heart was in the box, but she was unconscious. Isla was alive, so succession hadn’t happened. And Ellery brought them here. Yagrin’s grip on Nore tightened. He heaved her over his shoulder.

“You are not the logical choice anymore,” Ellery said.

Yagrin distanced himself from the commotion, and the shade of ancestors shifted, rushing his way. But when they reached him, they stopped.

Ellery grabbed Isla by the collar. She clawed at his wrists.

“Your reign as Headmistress has ended, Mother.” He raised the dagger above Isla, and something shot past them in a blur, slamming into Ellery’s side.

The redhead tumbled sideways, bleeding, a dagger stuck in his arm. He pulled it out and flung it aside.

“Drew!” Headmistress Oralia reappeared, dashing over. “We promised the Perls that he would be safe here.”

But they dusted themself off, meeting the malice in Ellery’s eyes. “No one’s committing murder on these grounds.” They pointed. “You can leave. Anyone else with you isn’t welcome here. House of Perl be damned.”

Litze looked like she’d seen a ghost.

Drew dusted themself off. “I’m nothing like you, and I’m done hiding that. Try standing for something for a change. Oralians not interested in cosigning murder, with me.”

Yagrin moved closer to Isla, who watched breathlessly as the crowd thinned. Nore said she needed her mother alive. He tugged at Isla’s sleeve, pulling her toward him, when Nore gasped, like a drowned person coming back to life.

Her eyes batted open. “Yagrin?”

As Nore came to, the ancestors closed in around their trio.

It felt like standing in the eye of a hurricane.

He searched for the right words to describe what he felt for the disguised girl who he’d had an entire relationship with.

Tears welled in his eyes. He’d betrayed someone who trusted him by using an alternate persona, too, once.

Red gave Nore the chance to live without magic, without the guillotine of people-pleasing hanging over her head, away from the pressures of Order life.

He understood what that felt like. He knew it, and loathed it just as much.

She gazed at him, and the knot of frustration in his chest melted away the longer he stared into her gray eyes.

Knowing what he knew now, how could he be anything but relieved?

A tear rolled down his cheek. He loved her.

And for the first time in his life, he was holding the person he loved with no lies between them.

He set her on her feet, keeping an arm around her. Isla watched without a word. The ancestors tightened the circle, protecting them from Ellery’s fury beyond their shadows as they held fiercely to the glass box with Nore’s heart.

He traced her features with his fingers. Red wasn’t real. This was who he loved. It felt like the sky parted just then and the sun was shining right into him, brightening the shadowed crevices of his soul.

“Nore, I know about you being Red. And it’s okay.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You’re alive. That’s what matters.”

Her mother stifled a sob.

“How? How am I alive?” She felt her chest. Suddenly, the shadowed bodies around them thinned, and the air began to clear, the ancestors shifting their position.

The party around them quickly became less of a haze.

Nore pulled herself away from Yagrin completely.

Isla was sobbing harder. The dead formed up behind them, and it felt like a wall of ice at their back.

Ellery was pulling himself up off the ground, staggering, when he spotted Nore on her feet, not dead. He glared. She backed up into Yagrin. He stood firm beside her.

Nore held out her arms, staring at them as if she was seeing herself for the first time.

“Yagrin, it’s happening,” she breathed. “I feel strange.” She was becoming Headmistress of House Ambrose.

“You witch,” her brother roared. “You don’t even have—”

Then the tiniest drip of black bled from Nore’s hands. She shuddered against him. Her toushana. The truth struck him like an axe.

“The seed of toushana in you was enough to fulfill the Pact,” Yagrin said.

“The ancestors accepted it,” Isla muttered with relief.

“An immature, undeveloped, infinitesimal amount of poison that wasn’t even mine,” Nore said.

“It was enough,” Yagrin said, reassuring her. “You are enough.” But she ignored him. Ellery struggled to stand, bleeding more, as Nore played with the darkness between her fingers. Her expression scrunched in curiosity, then in disgust.

Ellery raised his dagger, but fear flickered in his eyes.

“Imagine the cold growing,” Yagrin told her, wary of an impending attack. “Cling to it. Channel its power through you.” He called on his as well.

But Nore stiffened as the dark magic bleeding out of her thickened.