Page 60 of The Rebel and the Rose (The City of Fantome #2)
In the depths of slumber, where no thought or worry stirred, Oriel found her. The saint’s face was grave, worry pinching the smooth brown skin around her mouth.
‘ Hear my voice, Seraphine .’
Sera stared up at the saint, marvelling at her closeness.
She was almost real enough to touch, though she didn’t dare disturb the mirage by reaching for her.
How beautiful Oriel was, even in her anxiety.
How bright her dark eyes shone, the pearlescent beads at the ends of her long black hair swaying in an unseen breeze.
‘There is a wrongness in fate’s tapestry. A thread that does not belong.’ Oriel’s voice grew low and urgent. ‘You must pull it out.’
The saint drew closer, those doleful brown eyes filling up the world. In them, Sera watched three towers fall, over and over again. She saw a fair-haired man throw his arms wide, gathering up the storm. Claiming all that magic for himself.
Oriel brought her lips close to her ear. ‘You must pull him out.’
She drew back, looking so much older now. Frail, and small, and frightened, in a way that frightened Sera too. ‘Or it will all unravel, and the world as you know it will fall to ruin.’
The words spun round and round, echoing inside Sera’s head.
And the world as you know it will fall to ruin …
Fall to ruin …
Ruin …
Oriel clapped her hands, creating a thunderous crash.
The dream shattered.
Sera woke with a gasp.
Brightness engulfed her. She blinked, trying to clear her vision but the eerie glow remained.
It was rolling off her skin. Shining through her bloodstained shirt and glowing underneath the hem of her damp trousers.
A cold trickle of air caressed the back of her neck, the scent of brine sticking to the inside of her nose.
There was something dreadfully familiar about it.
‘What will unravel?’ Bibi’s voice sounded from somewhere beyond the light. ‘Sera, were you dreaming just now?’
‘Bibi? Is that you?’ Slowly, softly, the light faded, Sera’s magic settling back under her skin. It was dark then, the dimness feathered by distant wall lamps. Just enough of them to illuminate the thick black bars that separated her from Bibi.
Her friend was in the cell across from her, her pale fingers white around the bars, her face pressed against the metal like she was trying to wrench them apart.
‘It’s me.’ She summoned a shaky smile, but the hell of these past few weeks was written all over her face.
The natural rosy hue had been drained from her cheeks.
Her once bright eyes were sunken, and her beautiful red hair was lank and knotted.
‘You’ve been glowing in your sleep. Murmuring the strangest things about threads and tapestries. I’ve been waiting for you to wake up.’
‘How long was I out?’
‘A day or so. Almost twice as long as Val. She filled me in on everything before dropping off again.’ Shifting to the left, Bibi offered a glimpse of Val, who was sleeping on a bedroll behind her.
While they had been confined to the same cell, there were two sets of bars and a narrow passage separating them from Sera.
And her magic, she supposed. Unfortunately, someone had had the good sense to confine the resident Saint-maker to solitary confinement.
Not that she really knew the first thing about making a saint.
At least without scouring a hole in their chest.
Dropping her voice, Bibi said, ‘Whatever Andreas did to her mind has exhausted her. It’s like she’s been wrung out like a dishrag. She’s been trying but she’s not truly herself, Sera. I don’t know how to get her back.’
Sera didn’t have the heart to admit she didn’t know either.
And worse, she couldn’t tell what commands the prince had buried in Val’s thoughts, or how they might manifest. Though the reminder of Andreas’s eerie elastic smile jolted Sera back to her senses.
And the white-hot edge of her anger. The last thing she remembered was being at the archway to Marvale, caught in the grip of a failed getaway and kneeling beneath the prince’s fury.
Now she was trapped in his uncle’s dungeon. Again .
A cold slick of dread came over her.
‘Where is the king, Bibi?’
Bibi huffed a short laugh. ‘How on earth should I know? It’s not like he’s ever visited me.
Not that I’m complaining. Only the soldiers come down here, and they’re usually too brash or too busy to hold any kind of intelligent conversation with.
Although one did slip me a pack of playing cards when he heard me singing.
’ A small sad smile glimmered in the dimness.
‘If it wasn’t for that morsel of kindness, I think I’d have gone mad by now. ’
‘I’m so sorry, Bibi.’ Guilt nudged Sera closer to the bars. She wished she could wrench them apart too, crawl to her friends and throw her arms around her. ‘You don’t deserve this.’
‘None of us deserve it,’ said Bibi fiercely. ‘All we ever tried to do was help the kingdom. Why should we be punished for it?’
‘Because bad men are afraid of good magic.’ Saint Oriel’s face flickered in her mind, the echo of her dream still whispering faintly. There is a wrongness in fate’s tapestry. A thread that does not belong. You must pull it out .
‘We’re not giving up, Bibi.’
They couldn’t afford to cower now. Not after everything she’d witnessed at Marvale.
The king was one kind of poison, but Andreas Mondragon was a snake coming up from the long grass.
A lethal, powerful charmer who had to be stopped at all costs.
Left under his care, the entire kingdom would fall to ruin.
‘Do you have a plan?’ said Bibi. ‘Please tell me you have a plan.’
Sera did not have a plan.
But she had hope, and clarity of mind, and that was not nothing.
She might not have the prince’s favour, but she knew she had his attention.
His interest. He needed her to make his court, to empower his chosen minions.
All she had to do was turn that need to her own advantage.
Charm the silver-tongued saint, while sticking a knife in his back.
‘You’ve got that wild look in your eyes.’ Bibi’s voice was wary. ‘The kind that means you’re about to do something reckless.’
Damn right. ‘I’m going to kill the prince, Bibi.’
There was a strange spluttering sound. ‘ How? ’
‘I don’t know yet,’ she admitted. ‘First, I have to find him.’
‘He has to be here,’ said Bibi. ‘The soldiers changed the night you arrived. Not their faces, but their eyes. How they move. It’s like they’re all trapped in a fog.’
‘ All saints ,’ muttered Sera, trying not to shudder. If Andreas had already installed himself at the Summer Palace, then what had become of the king?
And more importantly, what would become of them?
Days passed with maddening slowness, the constant dark making it almost impossible to keep count of the hours.
They kept time by the meagre meals that came three times a day: cold porridge in the morning, a bread roll with cheese for lunch and a sliver of fatty meat and boiled potatoes for dinner.
The howling wind was worse at night, stealing under their blankets and filling their cells with the fetid tang of seaweed.
Val slept on and off, often waking in such a fog that at times she would have to sit in the darkest corner of her cell with her head in her hands, waiting for the pain to pass.
Andreas’s commands wormed through her thoughts, surfacing whenever they spoke of the prince.
It was then that she would retreat, unable to speak against the Silver-tongue or conceive of a plan that would lead her to harm him.
Though Sera missed the physical closeness of her friends, the ability to hold their hands, to hug them during the cold howling nights, she was glad that Bibi and Val could offer that comfort to each other.
That they weren’t alone in their fear and uncertainty.
That whatever came next, they would be able to face it together.
In the meantime, they waited, and they listened to the patter of footfall overhead. The palace was growing busier, a rising chorus of voices echoing through the damp stone walls as servants scurried about at all hours of the day and night.
Outside, whenever the ocean quietened to a gentle hush, Sera heard the palace gates groaning open to let carriages through. Wheels trundled across the grounds, punctuated by the excited chatter of voices and the tell-tale thrum of heels striking the polished floors.
‘Something’s happening,’ Val said to her one afternoon, when her eyes were clear, and she was sitting at the front of her cell. ‘I swear it sounds like a party up there.’
Bibi, who was shuffling their playing cards between games of rummy, went to the back wall to count the chalk markings there. ‘Oh,’ she said, in a strained voice. ‘I think it’s King’s Day.’
The king’s birthday.
An annual kingdom-wide celebration of Bertrand Rayere IV.
Ordinarily, there would be banners hung in every town and village of Valterre, the children wearing paper crowns, colourful ribbons in their hair, while lively music spilled out of the taverns onto the streets and revellers gathered to toast another year turning. Another year of their king.
Even back in the plains, Mama always made a butter cake for the occasion, letting Sera stay up well past her bedtime to sip wine and watch the stars, imagining themselves as queens for the night. Mama never cared much for the king or his ilk, but she never passed up a reason to eat cake.
Sera wondered what King’s Day would look like today in the rebelling heart of Fantome.
Whether Andreas’s followers were burning their pyres and tossing nightguards into the Verne.
Whether people were watching the royal flags go up in smoke from their windows, fearing what the following year might hold.
When four stern-faced soldiers arrived an hour later, she was expecting them. The first of them, a tall imposing woman with a crop of white hair, said, ‘You three are invited to tonight’s spectacle.’
Spectacle .
Not party.
Not good.
‘What’s this spectacle all about?’ asked Bibi, warily.
‘You’ll see soon enough.’ The soldier sniffed, then wrinkled her nose. ‘For now, you’ll come with me. The maids will have to scrub the terrible reek off you and dress you in something presentable.’