Page 50 of The Rebel and the Rose (The City of Fantome #2)

Andreas ducked his head out of the window.

His eyes lit up when he saw her, the sunlight bouncing off his hair. Unlike Marvale, the prince held up well in the morning. He seemed to shine, even as the village around him dimmed.

‘Where are you off to?’ he asked, with the casual nature of a friend.

Sera hesitated a beat. ‘I’m looking for Ransom.’

And clearly wasting my time .

‘Ah, your Dagger.’

‘I don’t suppose he’s made an attempt on your life in the last hour?’ She was only half joking.

Andreas’s chuckle warmed the air between them. ‘If he did, he was entirely unsuccessful.’

Sera summoned a wan smile. It was a foolish thought in the first place. The simplest explanation was probably the truest. Ransom and the others really were gone. She blew out a breath, feeling like a colossal fool.

The prince’s eyes darted, no doubt reading the shadows on her face. ‘Do you want to go for a ride? There’s much to talk about.’

It was certainly a better offer than wandering around Marvale like a lost fool, searching for a man who clearly didn’t want to be found. And anyway, wasn’t that why she had come here in the first place? Her questions about Ransom Hale would keep. Her magic had waited long enough.

‘All right,’ she said.

He popped open the door, and she clambered in, settling herself across from him. ‘It’s not for everyone, you know,’ he told her. ‘These grand matters of magic and destiny. When your own people are threatened by your power, they either fight you for it or they leave you.’

Her brows lifted. He was talking about Ransom, too easily sensing the hurt behind her smile, the bruise blooming on her heart.

‘Just look at how my own family abandoned me. My own uncle wants my head on a pike.’

‘Do you blame him?’ she asked without judgement. ‘Your rebels are ransacking Fantome, burning effigies of the king across Valterre.’

‘Perhaps my situation is a little more complex.’ He gave a mirthless chuckle. ‘In any case, it is the king’s grand folly thinking a handful of Daggers could ever put a stop to a thousand-year-old prophecy and the saint who means to see it through.’

Outside, the streets flew by. Gathering speed now, they passed the inn and continued east. Vaguely, Sera wondered where they were going, but she was too invested in the vital direction of their conversation to ask.

‘My uncle and I never did see eye to eye,’ Andreas went on. ‘Not that it was a problem before I was remade. Now the power balance has shifted. It frightens him that I have a different vision for this kingdom and the means to do something about it.’

‘What kind of vision is that?’ she asked carefully.

‘One without a king.’ There was no apology in the prince’s words, rather, a sense of impending inevitability.

‘One where soldiers don’t swarm the country like insects, threatening and harming whoever they like without fear of the consequences.

One where our prisons don’t heave with innocent folk.

A place that allows no room for monsters, nor the man-made shadow magic of thieves and assassins.

’ Curling his lip, he looked out of the window, his voice taking on a hard edge.

‘My uncle rules with fear. His iron fist holding tight to the noose above our kingdom. Without the might of his sword and his royal coffers, he would be nothing. No one.’

Wasn’t that what all powerful men were, though? Money and brute force? Wasn’t that a kind of power of its own? She kept these thoughts to herself.

Andreas’s voice swelled until it echoed from every corner of the carriage.

‘I will chase the terror from our kingdom. Destroy the Age of Darkness that has haunted our capital for centuries, keeping the people there kneeling under a shadowed boot, living every day in fear for their lives, for their children’s lives.

Their fear has been sown deep, but we are entering the Second Age of Saints. ’

A certain wildness gathered in his gaze, a kind of mania that made her nervous and excited in equal measure.

‘The future will be beautiful, filled with dancing and music and laughter and freedom .’ That word stirred the pool of her magic.

‘We will remake the kingdom as a place absent of pain and greed and corruption.’

Sera thought again of Fontaine’s tarot rose.

Of new beginnings. A new kind of kingdom.

A land without darkness, stripped of Shade and needless suffering, of assassins and thieves.

How desperately she wanted to be part of that world.

In Lightfire, she had discovered the magical antidote to Shade, had brewed and bottled it all winter long, but would that be enough for the prince’s grand vision?

Was there more she could do? Was there more she was supposed to do?

‘I want to help,’ she said, and she meant it, truly, with every thud of her eager, pounding heart. ‘But I don’t know how. I don’t even know what kind of saint I am.’

The carriage came to a sudden stop. Teeth gleaming in the dimness, Andreas leaned forward in his seat, and whispered, like he was confiding in her a grand and life-altering secret, ‘That’s because you are no saint, Seraphine. You are my rose.’

That word again, the tarot flashing in her mind. But still, she didn’t understand, not the gravitas in his voice nor the hunger in his eyes. ‘Your rose?’ she said weakly.

‘We’re here.’ The carriage door swung open, and he hopped out, beckoning for her to follow him. Ruled now by her own insatiable curiosity, Sera had no choice. It wasn’t until the door closed behind them that she realized they had returned to the graveyard.

She hesitated at the gate. ‘I don’t exactly have fond memories of this place.’

He grinned at her over his shoulder. ‘That’s about to change.’

Sera remained where she was, a thread of unease taking hold of her. ‘What do you mean when you call me a “rose”?’

‘I mean you are the key to the rebirth of Valterre.’ He said it so casually, as though he was commenting on the rain clouds moving in from the south. ‘You are the hand of Saint Oriel, Seraphine. The grand arbiter of the Second Age of Saints.’

Such wild words. So utterly unhinged. A laugh spluttered out of her. ‘You sound mad.’

Seeing that she was refusing to follow him, Andreas stopped walking. They stood with a row of tombstones between them, but Sera couldn’t take her eyes off his smile. The sureness in it when he told her, ‘You are not a saint, Seraphine. You are a maker of them.’

Sera didn’t know when it had happened, but her magic was wide awake now, streaming out from that door inside her. It climbed the notches in her spine and vibrated in her fingertips, like it was reaching for that word: Maker .

The one it had been whispering to her all along. In that moment, she couldn’t face it, refused to admit it. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

The world had fallen strangely quiet. The trees were no longer swaying, the wind dying out to listen in. Even in the sprawl of the graveyard, her own breath echoed back at her.

‘ Maker ,’ said Andreas, his voice hardening.

How did he know that secret word, the one her magic whispered to her in the dark?

‘The storm began something you must continue. A handful of saints is only the beginning. You are the key to creating the rest. You are the force that will allow our new kingdom to truly bloom.’

‘You’re wrong.’ You’re out of your mind .

Sera’s throat was bone dry, her magic painting golden rivers under her skin.

It was writhing, no, dancing to the prince’s words as though some ancient, distant part of her was telling her they were true.

That she was not one of the saints in Madame Fontaine’s cards but the Rose itself – a force greater than the might of the king, of the swords that covered the flower on the kingdom’s crest.

But she couldn’t square herself to the idea. It was too absurd.

‘I can’t make anything. Or anyone. That’s not what I am.’

‘Why don’t we ask our necromancer?’

She saw him then, coming through the trees. Robed in red, and with that eerie golden mask hiding his face. At a nod from the prince, he discarded it like a flying disc.

It landed at her feet.

But Sera’s eyes were riveted to that face. Shock stole her voice away, made her knees tremble as she pulled the gate closed, making a paltry barrier between them.

No.

No .

It wasn’t possible.

He was here again. The figure that had haunted her dreams for months now. The Dagger she had killed on top of the Aurore.

Lark Delano. Saints above . Here he stood in flesh and blood and bone. Only he looked different; his face was unnaturally gaunt, his gait was slow and dipped to one side, and his once pale skin had taken on an eerie grey pallor.

Around his wide green eyes, the sockets were shadowed and deep. When they met hers, they glinted like golden coins.

Saint .

‘Hello, Seraphine.’ He greeted her like an old friend.

Blood roared in Sera’s ears. ‘I don’t understand,’ she whispered, gripping the gate between them. ‘You’re dead. I killed you.’

His smile grew, his teeth too white against the grey of his skin. ‘You made me.’

‘Saint-maker,’ said Andreas, with all the reverence of a prayer. ‘The might of a sword can make a king, but a rose in full bloom can make a saint. Here is your proof.’

No.

No .

‘Your body disappeared,’ said Sera, a touch hysterically. ‘Someone dug you out of your grave.’

Lark said, ‘I dug myself out.’

‘That means… No.’ Stumbling backwards, she released the gate. Part of her wanted to run, to bolt for the Paramour. But another part of her… that ancient, secret part was burning like a bonfire in her soul. Begging her to stay. To look and see. To listen .

Her feet won out, backing her onto the narrow street, away from the graveyard and the carriage and the undead Dagger currently smirking at her. ‘How is it possible?’ she breathed. ‘How is any of this possible?’

Andreas didn’t follow her. That perfect smile gleaming, he simply called after her. ‘It’s a new age, Seraphine. Anything is possible!’

For the second time in two days, Sera turned on her heel and bolted from the graveyard.