Page 133 of The Rebel and the Rose
‘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 therobesare 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 tothe 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. ‘IknewI 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. Tofix. 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, anunholy 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.’
Stopping, Anouk curled her fists. She closed her eyes, but not before Ransom caught the golden glint of her eyes and felt the bench tremble underneath him.
‘Breathe,’ he said, softly. ‘It’s not your fault, Anouk.’
She puffed her chest up, her breath whistling through her nose. Once, twice. The bench stopped trembling, and when she opened her eyes again, they were clear. In a quiet voice, she said, ‘I don’t understand why this has happened to me, Bastian. I didn’t want it. I still don’t want it.’
‘I think that might be why,’ he said, gently. ‘You have power preciselybecauseyou don’t covet it.’
‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ She looked so lost now, as young and uncertain as that day she had fled from Everell.
‘You’ll find out, Anouk,’ he said, and he was suddenly sure of it. ‘We’ll find out together.’
Ransom couldn’t guess at the inner workings of destiny – he had stopped trying months ago – but he no longer believed in coincidences. The threads of fate were growing stronger, moving faster, getting tighter, like gossamer threads shimmering in the air, binding him – binding all of them – to a future that was yet to unfold. He could see now that he could leave the Daggers but he could not outrun the change that was about to befall Valterre, not when the two women he loved most in the world were tied to the very fate of the kingdom.
In being chosen by Saint Oriel, Anouk and Seraphine were a part of something grand and vital and urgent, and if this kingdom truly was to be remade under the Second Coming of the Saints, he would have his own part to play in it.
For their sakes, and for his own.
There was no walking away now.
Fate had claimed his sister and his lover.
It could have him too.
