How many times had she seen her mother curled up in the window seat of their cottage, scribbling furiously? Wynna often looked peaceful as she gazed out into the forest, watching the birds flit through the plum trees and blackthorn brambles. But her face would darken as she turned back to the journal, ink spilling onto the page, sometimes tears spilling along with it.
Mia still remembered the time she mustered enough courage to ask her mother if it caused her pain, the things she wrote about. “Oh yes,” she’d said. “I write about the most painful thing of all.” When Mia asked what it was, she answered simply, “Myself.”
“Your mother wanted you to have it,” her father said. “When you were ready. I believe you are ready.”
Mia pressed the journal to her chest. Her mother’s history had always been enshrouded in mystery, a heavy veil drawn across some unspoken horror of the past. What secrets had she buried in these pages?
A half-formed memory flashed through Mia’s mind. “There was a key.”
“Yes.” Her father drew a carved red stone out of his pocket. It was small and winged, head cocked slightly and beak open as if in song. A ruby wren. Mia had studied the species with great interest: native to the snow kingdom, the ruby wren was the only bird known to hibernate in winter, when the females built domed, tightly woven nests in the branches of the snow plum trees. Mia’s mother had always loved them. She was destined to: in the old language, Wynna meant “wren.”
“The little ruby wren,” her father said, pressing the stone into Mia’s palm. She felt an instant flutter, as if the bird had melted through her skin and spread wings inside her chest, desperate to escape.
Again Mia heard her mother’s voice, calling her birdlings home to roost. Mia, my red raven. Angie, my little swan.
The memory was too tender, so she pushed it aside. Her fingers worried the red stone. More vitreous than carmine quartz, luster almost like glass; brittle tenacity with imperfect cleavage. She’d studied the physical properties of dozens of minerals, but her mother had never let her study this one.
“Do you know the stone?” her father asked, watching her closely.
“Is this a test?”
He nodded. “Perhaps the most important one you’ll ever take.”
She paused, thumbing through her mental catalog.
“Fojuen,” her father said.
“If you had just given me a second!” she snapped. The only thing she hated more than not knowing the answer was when her father answered for her.
She had read about the fojuen craters in the fire kingdom to the east. Fojo Kara??o was where her parents had met as students: an archipelago of islands forged from the molten magma of volqanoes, spewed out centuries ago and hardened into dazzling red rock. Thanks to her father’s language lessons, she knew fojuen meant “fire-forged.” Fojuen was also the official language of Fojo. How interesting to think of language as a kind of volqanic glass, a history told in the remnants of what once was.
Mia knew something else about fojuen: once cut and polished, it was deadly sharp. Her mother, who had studied medicine in Fojo, had told her how physicians in the fire kingdom carved the red stone into swords and arrowheads. Surgeons performed surgery with fojuen scalpel blades. The glass made clean, minuscule incisions, barely visible to the human eye.
“Don’t make me do this, Father.” She closed her fingers around the bird, its sharp beak digging into the soft flesh of her palm. She felt both dizzy and ferocious, closer to her mother than she’d felt in years. Braver, too. “Don’t make me marry Quin.”
He wouldn’t look at her. “I’m protecting you, little rose.”
“From what? I know your life has no value since Mother died. But my life does. I want to fight with the Circle. I want to find her killer. The father I knew would never hand me off like this, a pretty princess for a petty prince.”
“Perhaps your union with the prince will surprise you.”
“I don’t want to marry him! I don’t want to marry anyone. But if I someday choose marriage—of my own volition—I want what you and Mother had.” Her parents’ love had exploded like a shower of sparks in the sky, casting off cosmic dust that still glimmered. It had also led to misery and grief. Wynna’s death left a gaping crater no one could ever fill.
Her father stood stiffly. “I have promised a daughter to the royal family. Perhaps it should be Angelyne. The royal family will ensure she receives the very best of care.”
“No. Don’t put this on her.” Mia drew herself up. “It has to be me.”
“Very well then.” He clasped her gently by the shoulders. His hands were blocks of ice searing through the cloak. “The bridal feast awaits the bride.”
He disappeared into the tunnel, leaving her alone.
Mia refused to cry. She hadn’t cried since the day she held her mother’s lifeless body. Tears were mercurial and untrustworthy. Feelings of any kind made a person vulnerable, weak. Sometimes she wondered if her body even remembered how to cry. Did she have whole mines of unwept salt stored up inside her? Maybe someday, like a pillar, she would crumble to the earth.
What was the good of loving anyone if they’d only be taken from you? If loss were bound up in love, perhaps it was easier to seal her heart to both.
And yet Mia’s love for her sister welled up inside her, like salt water, like bile. The illogic of love infuriated her. What was love if not a rippling bunch of nerves and valves misfiring? An equation with no known variables? An incalculable contraction of the heart?
Saving Angelyne meant sacrificing herself. Was love a willing sacrifice?
Sometimes love is the stronger choice.
Mia had never missed her mother more. She was starved for comfort. Perhaps her mother’s words would soothe her soul.
She slid the ruby wren into the lock and turned the key. The book whiffled open.
She sucked in her breath.
The pages were blank.
Chapter 5
A Common Enemy
“LADY MIA. HOW KIND of you to join us.”
King Ronan had a way of injecting every word with simmering menace. One look at him lording over the feasting table and Mia’s headache came raging back. His skin had a grayish pallor, his gaunt form swathed in plush robes of lynx and ermine. Ronan’s plate was piled high with roast duck, boar fritters, cream of almond, green goose jelly, venison paste—and he hadn’t touched a morsel. His steely blue eyes bored into Mia so savagely that for a moment she worried she had forgotten her gloves. She dragged her fingers over her wrist, confirming the slinkskin was still in place.
“My apologies, Your Grace. After all these weeks, I still find myself dizzied by the intricate corridors. The Kaer is beautiful but bewitching.”
Immediately she regretted her choice of words. Bewitch was not a term to be used lightly. She watched the king’s face harden.
“We wondered what tragedy had befallen you.” Queen Rowena’s lips curled into a smile so cultured, Mia expected a string of pearls to pop out. The queen was beautiful but brittle, with silvery blond hair thinning at the temples, eggshell skin, and haunted violet eyes. There was no love lost between Rowena and Ronan—if passion had ever spiced the air between them, it had long since cooled.
The queen motioned toward the feasting table, gesturing to the chair at the prince’s side. “My son has been so anxious.”
Quin didn’t look anxious. He looked annoyed.
“Four gods! Let the girl be.” Princess Karri, Quin’s older sister, raised her pint of stonemalt and winked. “You’ve missed nothing but mindless prattle, Mia. Drink! Be merry! You’re just in time for the stoneberry flambé.”
Mia sank into her chair, grateful to the princess for intervening. She thought, not for the first time, that Karri would make an excellent queen. She was both proud and unassuming, and she seemed older than nineteen, a bold, spirited girl who could eat, drink, and fight with the best of them. Many Glasddirans considered her blunt and impolitic (including her own mother), but Mia was in awe of her. Karri’s fair skin was reliably sunburnt; she dyed her hair bright white and kept it clipped short, wore unadorned tunics and trousers, and could easily command a room.