Page 58 of The Rebel and the Rose (The City of Fantome #2)

‘Are you ever going to speak again?’ Anouk asked her brother as they rowed through the gathering mist, towards the shores of Ra’azule.

‘If you think I’m angry about Mother Madeline, I’m not.

She can rot on that island for all I care.

Let the lizards have her. If they can chew their way through all that gristle. ’

On the bench across from her, Caruso and Nadia exchanged a bemused glance. ‘You really are nothing like your brother,’ remarked Caruso.

‘You say that like it’s a compliment.’

‘It is,’ they chorused.

‘You’re way less broody,’ said Caruso. ‘Look at him. He’s even brooding right now.’

Ignoring the jibe, Ransom turned to his sister. She looked so small wedged onto the bench beside him, her frame so slight that a brisk wind might topple her overboard.

Anouk was seventeen now, but those wide hazel eyes still hinted at the wonder they’d held when she was a little girl of seven dying to be a ballerina that danced across the world, and although her adult teeth had come in – as straight and white as pearls – he could still see hints of that crooked mischievous grin he used to sketch on long nights down in the catacombs.

The dimple hidden in her right cheek. Her olive skin had turned wan from her secluded life in the priory, her life on the Isle of Alisa snatching the scattering of freckles from the bridge of her nose.

And the way she looked up at him now – with quiet admiration – that was the same, too.

As though the years that once separated them had concertinaed down to minutes, and the love that bonded them was as strong and sure as ever.

Tucking a matted strand of long dark hair behind her ear, Ransom said, ‘I’m not sorry about Mother Madeline either.’ Not when he looked at the manacle scars around his little sister’s wrists, the bruises on her arms, the faint outline of her ribs jutting through her fraying blue robe.

He wanted to say more. The truth was, he had a hundred questions, but the first of them – the one that sat like a weight on his tongue – was too heavy for this moment.

And he was afraid to ask it, afraid of the answer that sat like a dark shadow in that little boat with them, so he said instead, ‘We’ll talk more on the shore, just you and me. ’

Anouk nodded, then rested her head against his shoulder, the movement like second nature to her, even after all this time. Ransom’s thoughts drifted as he rowed, and the others fell quiet, welcoming the silence.

Back on the shores of Ra’azule, Ransom waited for Nadia and Caruso to walk on ahead, towards the lakeshore inn where a hot dinner beckoned. Gesturing for Anouk to sit beside him on a bench overlooking the grey lake, he summoned his courage and asked, ‘When did Mama die?’

Anouk sighed, casting off the bravado she’d worn back on the island. ‘Just over a year ago.’

Although he’d known it was coming, the news punched him square in the chest. Winded, he doubled over, curling his arms around his middle to hold himself together.

Mama was gone . She’d been in the ground for a year and he hadn’t even known it. How could he not have known? How could he not have felt her cleaving from the world, like a piece of his own heart falling away? He felt it now, like a blunt knife cutting through his chest.

She was dead. He would never again see the light of her smile or feel the warmth of her arms around him.

Tears pricked his eyes, falling like raindrops on the shore.

He had wasted all these years serving the darkness, kneeling at the feet of bitter, grasping men.

Killing and killing and killing , and all for what?

There would be no reunion now, no grand farewell.

‘How?’ he asked.

‘You didn’t hear?’

He snapped his chin up. ‘What do you mean?’

Her dark brows knotted. ‘It was a Dagger, Ransom.’

Utter stillness now. Over the dull roaring in his ears, he said, ‘ Who? ’

‘Gaspard Dufort.’

Of course. Of course it was Dufort.

He might have laughed if he wasn’t holding himself together, trying not to break from the cyclone of grief and rage inside him.

All those years Dufort had promised Ransom he would help him find his family, and when he managed to track them down, he had struck from the shadows, removing the only thing that could ever tempt Ransom from the Order.

Anouk’s voice was soft, her hand warm on his back.

‘We were down in Mauranus by then, living in a little cottage by the sea. After years on the run, we found a way to make a life there. A small one. But it was peaceful. Free of him .’ Their father and his cruel fists.

His dank, liquored breath. ‘I was weaving baskets at our neighbour’s house.

Dufort was there when I came home. I recognized him from the penny papers.

Mama used to pay a paperboy to go to Fantome every Sunday to fetch them.

She read every single one, hoping to hear news of you, where you had ended up after Everell. It drove her mad – the wondering.

‘At night in bed, instead of fairy tales, we told each other stories about you. We imagined where you were, eagerly sketching in the details of your new life.’ A smile brightened her voice.

‘We decided that you went to school to study art, and that one day, we’d see your paintings in the local gallery and know you had got out too.

We’d know you by the stroke of your brush and the colours you used, and we’d find your new name right there in the bottom corner, your landscape like a map waiting to lead us home to you. ’

Ransom looked at his hands, thinking of all the stoppers they had removed over the years, all the vials of Shade he had swallowed. A part of him was glad Mama hadn’t found him, that she had died with her dream of him intact, thinking he was an artist and not a murderer.

‘That day, when I came home, Mama screamed at me to run. I dropped my basket and fled.’

Silent tears striped her cheeks, smearing the dirt there.

‘I ran even as her scream cut out. I ran and I didn’t stop until I made my way here, to Ra’azule.

I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

I just knew I needed a place where the Daggers wouldn’t find me.

So I came, and I chose a new name and I got on my knees and I pledged myself to the Order of Alisans. ’

‘You became Marianne.’

‘I wasn’t very good at it,’ she admitted. ‘The priory was so… stifling .’

‘You never did like to be bored.’

She pulled a face. ‘Prayers always make me fall asleep.’

‘You were right to hide. Dufort was like a dog with a bone. He would have killed you too,’ said Ransom, with unerring certainty. There was no line of depravity he wouldn’t cross.

‘I thought it was Papa who sent him.’

‘No. Papa is dead.’ Ransom took a breath. ‘I killed him the day after you fled.’

Silence, then, the lake whispering in the moonlight.

Anouk’s hand on his back grew heavier. ‘Good,’ she said, more to herself than to him. ‘ Good .’

It was a bleak moment – an exchange of sorry news, but where Ransom was grief-stricken at the loss of his mother, Anouk was relieved to hear that Papa was gone.

‘We’re free now,’ she said eventually, and there was a kernel of hope in her voice. ‘And look what fate has done for us, Bastian. After all these years, it sent you here, to me. Saint Oriel has brought us back together again.’

‘And it has made you a saint.’ Ransom was still struggling to believe it, to see beyond the wraith his little sister had become, to the power swirling within. The kind that had threatened the king himself, that had nearly cost her her own life.

‘A happy accident,’ she said, only she was frowning now.

‘I’ve never given much thought to the saints.

Even when I prayed on my knees in that tower, my mind always strayed beyond the white walls, beyond that small cloistered life that never suited me.

Even the robes are drab.’ Pulling a face, she plucked at the threading on her sleeve.

‘But then the storm came, and the tower fell, and I couldn’t run fast enough.

I was inside it when it crumbled, buried in the heap of its rubble, and I would have died there if I hadn’t felt something spark to life inside me.

I lifted the stones, Bastian. I was half dead, and I found a way to move them.

’ She turned her hands over in the moonlight.

‘Before that, I could barely carry the well water back to the priory. We were so weak from lack of food. And the bucket was so heavy I’d have to stop every twenty paces to catch my breath.

Sister Honoria used to laugh at me.’ She tensed at the name, a shadow falling over her face.

‘At first, I was too ill to understand what had happened to me. As I began to come to, I would have these awful nightmares. Panic would strike in the dead of night and I’d wake in my bed, screaming and thrashing, my magic like a bonfire in my chest. Mother Madeline started to chain me to the bed, but it didn’t stop the panic.

It only made it worse. It made everything worse.

’ She looked away, guilt colouring her voice.

‘I tore down the walls. I shattered the windows. One night, half the ceiling caved in. Honoria tried to wake me, and she got struck. When I saw the blood on the floorboards, I turned cold. Utterly still. And I heard a voice inside me for the first time, so clear, it was like a bell ringing.’

She stood abruptly, frustration making her pace.

‘I knew I could mend her. I could have healed her. I’m not just meant to take things apart, but to put them back together.

To build. To make. To fix . I knew I could stop the blood and knit her wound back together, but Mother Madeline refused to unchain me.

She called me a Saint of Ruination, a curse on the priory, an unholy abomination , and struck me as I pleaded with her.

They took Honoria away. By the time I was dragged out of that room days later, she was already buried. ’