Amy said, “What are you crumpling in your hands, Cassandra? If you were meaning to post those letters, you might want to flatten them out a bit.”
I loosened my fingers with a jerk, smoothing down the wrinkled pages. “These...are for you, actually.” I thrust them forward, bracing myself.
“For us?” Amy’s eyebrows drew into a frown. She didn’t move. “Why would you write letters to us?”
“Not only to us,” Jonathan told her, as he scooped them out of my hand. He held up the letter addressed to my young niece, his voice hardening. “Apparently, she’s planning to be gone for a while.”
“What on earth—?” Amy began.
“Just read them!” I snapped, and strode past them both to the window, sucking in a deep, panicked breath.
This was exactly the kind of conversation I hated most.
The snow swirled outside as discontentedly as my own frantic, whirling thoughts. My fingers tapped impatiently against the iron-bound windowsill.
It would have been so much easier to stride directly out into that terrible storm and face whatever was coming to me on my own, rather than having to endure this agonizing truth-telling session first...followed by the certain wrath of the Boudiccate afterward.
When they all realized exactly how I’d let myself be tricked through my own pride and arrogance into accepting that impossible, poisoned bargain from Lord Ihlmere...
Wait.
My mouth dropped open.
My fingers stilled.
Inside my head, the frantic storm whirled to a sudden, frozen halt.
“Cassandra,” Amy said behind me in a strangled voice. “You—”
“No!” A wide, disbelieving smile bloomed on my face as I spun around to face my family. It stretched and stretched until I was beaming like the sun at their horrified faces.
“Forget everything I said in those letters,” I told them. “I can solve this puzzle after all. But first: I’ll need as many people there to witness it as possible.”
14
It had been over a decade since the last time I’d attended an official Boudiccate ceremony. That last time, I’d stood prickling with resistance behind my mother with every inch of my body braced against the path she’d laid out for me.
That moment seemed a very long time ago, although I could see its memory reflected all around me in the faces of the older women who surrounded me now. They’d always commented on my resemblance to my mother.
She should have been here today leading all the rest, but that was an old—albeit aching—grief. My stomach might be roiling with sick tension now, but Amy and Wrexham walked on either side of me in the center of the crowd, while Jonathan walked so close behind that I could feel his steady warmth against my back. My easy-going older brother had bellowed at the top of his lungs this morning and nearly torn his hair out with his agitation—and Amy had made it very clear, in her softest and most ominous tones, that if I did somehow manage to survive this ceremony, she would have a very great deal indeed to say to me afterwards about keeping vital secrets from my own family members, who deserved far more respect and consideration and could perhaps have even helped me beforehand if I had only bothered to include them...
But she had cut herself off there with a visible effort in order to preserve all the rest of the time we had left for strategizing with the full force of her wily political brain. So it was because of my sister-in-law’s machinations that now, as we stepped en masse out of Cosgrave Manor, nearly the entire house party trailed after us through the knee-high snow, rather than the paltry nine-person committee that had originally been planned.
They would either be the audience that confirmed my victory to the world...or the witnesses as I was dragged away forever.
Lady Cosgrave looked physically pained as she shepherded our unwieldy group into place on a wide patch of nearly-cleared ground just past the knot garden. A bubble of magic protected all of us from the elements, but her voice grew more and more strained with every moment. “If everyone could please ensure that we stay in two clear semicircles, with every guest who isn’t an official member of today’s ritual remaining safely in the outer ring...no, not there, Mr. Sansom,” she added sharply as the scarlet-coated weather wizard tried to bluster his way into the center of the smaller, inner semicircle. “If you please...!”
Even through my own churning nerves, I felt a moment of pure sympathy break through. This couldn’t have been how she had ever imagined her exquisitely-planned ceremony proceeding.
Standing just in front of me and leaning on her walking stick, which she’d planted firmly in the snowy ground, Mrs. Seabury let out a sharp crack of laughter. “Be grateful for small mercies, girl,” she called over to Lady Cosgrave. “At least Sansom’s kept his clothes on for this one!”
“I beg your pardon, Madam.” Sansom glowered at her as he allowed himself to be shuffled back into the outer semicircle with the rest of us. “If you had any conception of the infinite mysteries of weather, which occasionally require—”
“Will everyone please be quiet!” Lady Cosgrave’s voice rose to a shriek. A stunned silence fell across the entire house party as our hostess, bereft of her customary poise, cast a desperate glare across our imperfect semicircles, her face pinched white with tension beneath her luxurious satin hood.
“Do you have any idea how much rides upon this ceremony?” she demanded of the company at large. “If they can seize upon a single excuse to claim insult—if a single person here coughs or speaks at the wrong moment—if Miss Harwood’s rash bargain hasn’t doomed all of us already—!”
I winced, but for once, I didn’t argue. Every muscle in my body was braced for the oncoming battle. From the moment that I had stepped outside into the cold, snow-swept air, all the intellectual excitement of my earlier breakthrough had been replaced by an overwhelming awareness of everything that could go wrong. That list mounted higher with every moment, clenching the muscles in my back tight with dread and sending nausea rocketing through my stomach.
It didn’t matter that I was certain I was right. I’d been certain I was right four months ago, too. And what had happened then, after all of my great plans...
A deafening roar of sound crashed through the air, and a towering tidal wave of snow erupted in the landscape before us.
“RAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGHHHH!”
I clapped my hands to my ears, but it wasn’t enough. Nothing could be enough to protect me from this. The roar echoed agonizingly on and on, growing impossibly louder and louder, pounding at my head and battering all my senses until I had to fight the urge to drop to my knees in pure submission and terror. A wall of unbroken white billowed before my eyes, piling higher and higher beyond our fragile bubble of spelled protection, while the roar...
No, wait.
It wasn’t a roar, after all. It was roars: a multitude of them, all sounding together and coming from all around us...