Kosika woke with dirt in her hands.
She blinked for a moment, disoriented by the absence of a bed, the dappled sunlight where a ceiling should have been. She wasn’t in her chamber at all, but lying beneath a tree, its branches dotted by clusters of unripe fruit, and even though the ground beneath her back was hard, she could feel slivers of grass tickling her neck.
Kosika held up a hand, and saw dark soil sticking to her fingers, where she must have gripped the ground in sleep. Voices wafted toward her, and she sat up and saw Nasi and Lark sitting a few feet away, their heads bowed together over a book. He said something in her ear, the words too soft to reach, but she was close enough to see the way Nasi smiled, the twitch of her lips tugging on her scarred cheek, setting off the tracery of silver lines.
“It’s rude to whisper,” announced Kosika, brushing the dirt from her palms.
Nasi cocked her head. “Ruder than it is to wake a sleeping queen?”
The dream rose up, brushing against her mind, and Kosika wished they had woken her sooner. Besides, she didn’t like the idea of sleeping so exposed—but she hadn’t been able to help herself. She remembered drifting off, feeling full and tired and sun-warmed as a peach.
A picnic sat between them on a wool blanket, a bowl of cherries and a tray of sandwiches, a paring knife in a block of cheese, and three cups half-filled from a pitcher of tea.
It had been Lark’s idea, the picnic.
He’d shown up at her chamber door that morning, while Nasi was somehow beating her at kol-kot, a basket swinging from one hand, and announced it was too fine a day to be inside. Sure enough, sun was streaming in the open window. The weather was always nicer after a tithe. As for the picnic, he’d even dressed the part, trading his soldier’s armor for a fitted tunic and trousers and a pair of polished boots, a violet kerchief tied over the scar at his throat. She wondered if the clothes were his, and when he’d grown into them. He’d caught her looking, and smiled, and Kosika felt herself smiling back, caught herself halfway and rolled her eyes.
“Shouldn’t you be guarding something?” she’d asked, to which he said that, obviously, he would be guarding her.
“Is that why you’re dressed like a noble?”
“I’m in disguise,” he said with a wink.
And on the short trek from the tower to the castle grounds, he’d told Nasi about the picnics he and Kosika had had when they were kids whenever the sun was out, most of them on rooftops or city walls, the meals cobbled together from stale bread and bruised fruit. Kosika remembered, of course, but these days, those memories felt like they belonged to another girl, another life. One she was all too happy to leave behind.
The only part she’d wanted to keep, she had.
Lark lounged in the grass, his long legs crossed at the ankle as he listened to Nasi read from her book. His silver-blond hair was swept off his face, a neat little braid was woven behind his ear. It hadn’t been there when she fell asleep.
As Nasi read—it wasn’t her book of war, but a poem, and Kosika hated poems, they talked in circles instead of lines, and the cadence always distracted her from the words, and in fact, the poetry was probably what had lured her to sleep in the first place—as Nasi read, Kosika looked up, at the tree, and the sky beyond, the blue interrupted by crisp white clouds.
The tithe had cast a blush over the city, but how long would it last? She swore she could already feel it fading. It wasn’t enough, nothing she did seemed to last, and she was trying to decide what to do when something hit her on the side of the head.
It was small, and hard, and it bounced off and landed in the grass. It was, in fact, a cherry.
Kosika stared at it a moment, and then looked up at her friends, the bowl of fruit clearly in arm’s reach. Nasi, for her part, looked just as stunned by the attack, while Lark was looking pointedly away, as if something incredibly interesting was suddenly happening somewhere beyond the trees.
Kosika flicked her fingers, and the paring knife rose out of the block of cheese, and drifted almost lazily into her hand.
“Lark,” she said casually. “Did you just throw a cherry at me?”
He glanced back, as if noticing her for the first time.
“What? No. Of course not.” Her friend was many things—a good actor had never been one of them. He feigned shock, pointedly ignoring the weapon as he looked up at the branches overhead. “Must have fallen from one of the trees.”
Kosika followed his gaze up, confirming what she already knew. “There are no cherry trees in this orchard.”
“Huh.” He shifted his weight as he said it, inching away from the bowl.
“That really is an oversight,” said Nasi. “Can’t have a good orchard without a cherry tree.”
Kosika looked down at the blade in her hand. “You’re right,” she said, with a wicked smile that made her friends—rightfully—more nervous than the knife did. She turned the blade, and made a quick, clean slice across her thumb. Then she took up the offending cherry, its skin the color of a deep bruise, and popped it into her mouth, savoring the brief, bright sweetness before she spit the pit back into her palm, and pushed it down into the soil.
She knew the words she wanted now.
“As Athera.”
The world shivered, like a plucked string, and beneath the dirt, she felt the pit split open, felt the line of magic plunging down into the soil, becoming roots as the first green growth sprang up between her fingers. In seconds it was a sapling, the earth mottling under her palm as the tree spread, and the trunk rose and the branches twisted overhead, and blossomed, and bore fruit.
Her friends stared up at the tree, their faces lit with awe, and Kosika didn’t blame them.
It was one thing to light a hearth, or conjure a breeze. It was another to push a bloodstained pit into the ground and grow it into a tree in seconds, its limbs heavy with a hundred ripened cherries.
Nasi smiled in childish delight, and Lark opened his mouth to say something, but before he could speak, Kosika flicked her fingers, and every cherry on the tree came raining down onto their heads.
VIII
RED LONDON
It turned out that the quickest way to escape a warded cell was simply to be let out.
“Come,” the queen had said to the girl in the dungeon, “I want to show you something.”
Something turned out to be the grandest workshop Tes had ever seen.
Chambers connected by high stone archways, every room full of tables and counters and every surface covered in a dazzling array of magic. Spells laid bare like bodies, their skin peeled back, their inner workings open to the light. She would have been tempted to reach out, run her fingers over the magic, but her wrists were still bound.
The queen stood across from her, appraising, and Tes knew that she should do something to show her deference, but the truth was, in that moment, she wasn’t feeling very deferential. And she was hungry.
At the thought of food, her stomach growled again, and the queen turned to the two soldiers who’d escorted Tes.
“I was so lost in work,” she said, “I forgot to eat. Please go and fetch me something.”
Only one of the soldiers turned to go. She nodded at the other. “Go with him.”
“Mas res,” said the soldier, “surely I should stay and guard the prisoner.”
The queen looked at Tes, bedraggled, manacled, stained with blood though she was no longer bleeding.
“Somehow,” she said, “I think we’ll manage.”
Tes should have felt insulted. She would have, but the queen had not said I, but we, as if they were conspiring.
When the soldier still hesitated, the queen straightened, her eyes going sharp.
“Don’t mistake my tone,” she said. “It wasn’t a request.”
At that, the soldier bowed deeper, and withdrew.