“It’s cold,” Sil says, as if that explained it. She takes a long drink.
“I was born,” she begins, “in the North Quarter of the Marsh, oh, about sixty years ago. I was diagnosed when I was eleven. My mother had died of fever when I was six. My father worked in the Smoke—he died when his factory caught on fire and burned to the ground. My grandmother raised me and my three older brothers, until I was shipped off to Northgate.” She scratches her chin. “We heard that some facilities let the surrogates see their families one last time. Is that true?”
“Yes,” I say. “It’s called Reckoning Day. The day before the Auction.”
“Reckoning Day,” she mutters. “In any case, that’s not how things worked at Northgate. I did not get to see my family again. I was sixteen when the head caretaker informed me it was time for me to be sold. There were only twenty-two lots in my Auction—I suppose the royalty were not interested in having children that year. I was Lot 22. My scores were nearly perfect—in the case of the third Augury, they were.” She levels me with a cold stare. “I was bought by the Duchess of the Lake.”
I suck in a breath. But it couldn’t be my Duchess—Sil is too old. She must have been bought by my Duchess’s mother. My fingers go numb. I feel like my head has been stuffed with cotton, the world muted, my senses dulled. Sil smiles a cruel smile.
“Yes,” she says. “I thought that would interest you. The House of the Lake can’t seem to hold on to its surrogates, can it?”
She takes another drink. I get the sense that she is enjoying herself. “The Duchess was a frail woman. Always sickly. The Duke . . .” Sil pauses, and her eyes darken from silver to slate. “He ruled that house with an iron fist. Cold and spiteful and full of ambition. Usually it’s the woman who deals with the surrogates, but not in the palace of the Lake. No, he had plans for me. He kept me much longer than is usual to keep a surrogate. All around me, girls were getting pregnant. Or dying. Or both. Then the future Electress died.”
I remember that from my old history classes. Originally, the Exetor’s sister was named to succeed the throne. But she died from a fall off a horse when she was eight. And the Exetor, only two at the time, became the new heir.
“That’s when the doctor started . . . well, I don’t need to explain any of that to you, do I?” Sil says grimly.
I press my lips together in a tight line.
“I got pregnant. It wasn’t until my second trimester that they discovered I was carrying twins. Don’t know how the doctor missed that. And the Duke, damned evil bastard, wanted to get rid of one. His wife wouldn’t let him. He told me I had to choose, to focus all of my Auguries on only one child, probably hoping the other would die as a result. And I did. I did exactly as I was told.”
I put my tea on the floor and hold my head in my hands. The room is spinning. If what Sil is telling me is true, then she was the surrogate for my Duchess.
“One week before I was due to deliver, they took me away. There’s a place where they kept us until we gave birth. All sterile, cold and white with bright lights. It was awful. There were three girls with me. One by one, they were taken away. And they never came back.”
Sil stares into the fire. The lines around her eyes and mouth seem deeper, aged with the telling of this story. She and I both know what happened to those other girls. But it still didn’t explain what happened to her.
“When it was my time, they took me to the delivery room. The doctor was there. He told me to push. A nurse held my hand. She was fat and her palms were sweaty. But mostly what I remember is the pain. Pain like nothing I’d ever known. Worse than learning the Auguries. And then the first baby was out.” Sil’s eyes sparkle like crystals, and she rubs her scarred hand against her jaw. “I remember thinking it strange how something could be so beautiful and so ugly at the same time. She was screaming at the top of her lungs. Her sister came out a minute later. She was smaller. Quiet. Then they took them away. They left me alone. Waiting for me to die.” She takes a drink and mutters, “Bastards.”
“But how?” I ask. This is the point, I feel, the purpose, where everything began. This is what Lucien brought me here to learn. “How did you survive?”
“Because I’m stronger than them!” Sil shouts, slamming her fist down on the arm of the rocking chair. “We have a power they can’t possibly understand. They’ve twisted it, manipulated it to suit their bidding, but they can’t pervert it completely. Oh, no. It is ours to comprehend.” She rocks back and forth for a moment, her chair creaking. “What do you think the Auguries are, exactly?”
“I don’t know. A genetic mutation, aren’t they?”
“Don’t recite that royal line of crap at me. Think. Think for yourself. What are they?”
I think about the images that sprang into my head when I connected with the old oak tree in the Duchess’s garden, during my doctor’s appointments. How I saw it in a field, its branches dancing in the wind, and then in winter, barren under the falling snow. The raw emotion that came from it.
“I—I don’t know how to explain it,” I say. “But sometimes it’s like . . . we’re the same. When I use Growth, sometimes it feels like I know the plants or the trees. Like I’m tapping into their life, their history. And they know me.”
“Everything in this world has a life inside it,” Sil says. “Everything is connected. Human beings, we think we’re so special because we can talk and think, as if having a mouth is the only way to speak, or having a brain is the only way to think.” She pauses. There’s no sound except the crackling of the fire. “Surrogates are the lucky few who can sense these lives. The power we possess isn’t meant for parlor tricks. Why do you think they teach us Color and Shape first? They are unnatural—they are the ones that cause the headaches and the bleeding. They’re not necessary. They are used to control and subdue. There is only one true Augury and it is not called Growth. It is called Life. And we do not own it or control it, but we have the ability to feel it, to acknowledge it. It calls to us as we call to it. They train us to conquer the Auguries, but this power will not and cannot be conquered. It can only be accepted as an equal.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“I was lying on that medical bed, bleeding to death. I could feel the blood and life pouring out of me. And I asked for help.” Sil rubs her hands together. “Something in that room answered me. It heard the call inside me and reacted. A brilliant heat flooded through my body, and the blood stopped seeping out of me, and my strength came back. And I . . .” She turns away and I get the feeling she’s censored herself. “My surroundings sharpened and I felt a strange sense of comfort. It was as if a chorus of voices were saying, ‘Hold on.’ And I did. I held on.”
“You heard voices?”
“No,” Sil says. “You’ll understand soon enough. If you can.” She sniffs. “Let’s hope you’re stronger than you look.”
“I’ve been through a lot,” I snap, tired of her condescension.
“Oh, you have?” Sil retorts. “Ever give birth to two children, then discover you’re not in a hospital but a morgue? Ever run until you can’t run anymore, lost and alone, and find yourself cornered in a room with only a fire-breathing monster for company? Lucien knew about that incinerator because of me. Can you fathom what it took for me to extinguish that fire by myself?” She pushes up her sleeve and I see the scars extend up her arm, glistening in the firelight. “I barely made it out. And I didn’t have anyone holding my hand. No one was looking out for me.”
“I still don’t see what you want me to do,” I say. “Why am I here? What is my role?”
“For too long, the royalty have abused our power. Balance needs to be restored. We need someone strong enough to call on all of nature, all the elements. This island has been cut up and stitched back together by the royalty. It wants to be whole again. The royalty have an army, they have money, they have weapons. But that is nothing in the face of the brutal force of nature. This force needs help. It needs you. Think about it
. Why have they built all those walls between each circle? To keep us separated and protect themselves from their own people. They are frightened, as all tyrants are, that one day their subjects will gather and rise up against them. Their walls are thick, impenetrable. But what if there was someone with the power to crack them, the power to open a space large enough to let a different army through?”
“You think I can break open pieces of the walls?” I’ve only ever seen the wall that surrounds the Marsh, and the Great Wall from a distance. They are made of thick black rock, cemented together. Like Sil said . . . impenetrable.
“Yes,” she says gravely. “I believe you will be able to.”
“Won’t the royalty plug the hole back up?”
“And how long do you think that will take?” she asks. “Not overnight, to be sure. If they can no longer isolate each circle of the city . . . well, that would make for a very interesting turn of affairs, wouldn’t it?”
“Why can’t you do it?” I ask. “You have a perfect growth score. What do you need me for?”
“I’m too old now. I thought Azalea could do it but her power was . . . limited. Let’s hope you prove my theory correct.”
Just then, the door opens, and Lucien, Garnet, and Ash come back in.
“Good,” Sil says, before they have a chance to speak. “We’re done for tonight. Food is on the stove. The bedrooms are upstairs. Tomorrow, we get to work.”
She gets up and takes a scarf and coat hanging off pegs on the wall and throws them on.
“I hope she’s everything you think she is,” Sil says as she walks past Lucien and out the door. “Otherwise, we’re all just a pack of idealistic morons, and we’ll live like cockroaches under a rock for the rest of our damned lives.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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Fifteen
ASH, LUCIEN, AND GARNET HELP THEMSELVES TO THE stew.
“What did she say to you?” Garnet asks through a mouthful of carrot.
My head is heavy with the weight of that conversation.
“I’m not sure I understand yet,” I say.
“You will,” Lucien says. “Azalea did.”
“I’m not Azalea,” I snap. “I wish you would stop comparing me to her.”
Lucien looks hurt for a second, then smooths out his expression. “I know you’re not. But I know you can do this.”
“I don’t know what you want from me,” I cry, throwing out my hands. “I’m not that powerful, Lucien. Growth isn’t that powerful.”
But then I remember the afternoon at the palace, right before I met Ash, when the Duchess called me into the drawing room and asked me to perform Growth in front of the Lady of the Flame. How I made a plant grow so quickly and so intensely that it destroyed shelves of china and ripped paintings off the wall. Is it possible I could do that on a larger scale?
“You don’t comprehend it yet,” Lucien says. “That’s all. If I could have taught you myself, I would have. But it takes a surrogate.” He puts his spoon down. “Don’t you want a chance to understand who you truly are? Don’t you want to know what it’s like not to be shackled to the very thing that took you from your family, that makes your nose bleed and your head ache?”
“Don’t make this about me,” I say. “You want your revolution and for some reason you think I’m the one to help.”
“I do,” Lucien says. “But don’t you want this revolution, too?”
I dig my knuckles into my eyes. “I’m tired,” I say. “I’m going to bed.”
I trudge up the stairs to the second floor of the house, which consists of one long hallway with a faded green rug. I peek through the doors until I find Raven in a bedroom with two twin beds. She’s fast asleep, moonlight piercing through the open curtains and illuminating her face. I sit beside her for a moment. Already she is doing so much better than when she woke up in the morgue. But still. I glance at her stomach.
The door creaks open and Ash enters the room. He holds out his hand and I take it, allowing him to lead me away from Raven and into another bedroom. He closes the door behind him and I fall into his chest, his arms snaking around my waist. For the first time in a long time, we are completely alone together.
“We made it,” he murmurs into my hair.
“We did,” I whisper back. He smells like packing hay and soot.
“Do you really think it’s safe here?”
“I do,” I say, pulling back to look at him.
“That forest . . . I don’t know how you found this place.”
I shrug. “Lucien was right. As usual.”
“Lucien isn’t some supreme being,” Ash says. “He’s human. He’s capable of making mistakes like the rest of us. Remember that.”
“Do you think he made a mistake, saving me?” I ask, bristling a little.
“No,” he says. “But he’s putting a lot of pressure on you. I don’t think that’s entirely fair.”
I stare at the wall, imagining Raven sleeping peacefully behind it in the next room.
“Raven’s going to die,” I say. “And I can’t do anything to stop that. How will overthrowing the royalty help her? That was the whole point of this, to help. Save me so I can save more. And even if I can, so what? Can I help all the companions who are being abused? Can I help all the Cinders who are dying of black lung, or the Annabelles killed by their mistresses?” Tears well up and spill down my cheeks. “Maybe Lucien shouldn’t have chosen me. What if I was the wrong choice?”
Ash tilts my chin up, his fingers brushing down my neck. “Listen to me,” he says. “Raven was going to die in that place, alone, in pain, giving birth to a baby that isn’t hers. Or not even making it to that point. You got her out. Maybe it’s not the perfect solution, but at least she gets to be with friends instead of locked up in the palace of the Stone. And you got me out, when it seemed like I was going to die in the Duchess’s dungeon. That’s two lives you’ve already saved from the Jewel, not including your own, which you seem to put last on your list. You can’t save everyone, Violet. It’s not possible. So don’t hold yourself up to some ridiculous standard. And don’t ever let me hear you say you were the wrong choice again.”
“I don’t want to lose Raven.”
“I know.” Ash rests his forehead against mine. “I miss Cinder already. I know she’s not gone yet but . . . she was my constant companion in that place. She kept me from falling apart.” A tear leaks out from under his eyelid and I brush it away with my thumb. His jaw is rough with stubble.
It’s been so long since I’ve felt anything good. I’ve existed in a haze of anxiety and fear and tension for days now. All of that melts away as I pull his mouth to mine.
Our kiss is gentle and slow. We don’t have to rush anymore. We don’t have to sneak around, to worry about Carnelian’s lessons or being caught by the Duchess. We are in a safe place, and my heart aches with how much I have missed being close to him in this way. I slip my hands up under his sweater, my fingers tracing patterns on his lower back. His mouth moves down to my neck. His lips are soft and each kiss sets a flame burning deep in that secret place inside me that only he knows.
In one swift move, I pull his sweater up over his head. I’d almost forgotten the smoothness of his chest, the dip of his collarbone, the hard curves of his shoulders. I run my hands over his stomach and Ash lets out an involuntary sigh. He grabs two fistfuls of my own sweater and I raise my arms to help him slip it off me.
I shiver with need as his skin meets my skin. Everywhere he touches me is electric. I sink my fingers into his hair as his lips come back to mine.
I don’t even realize I’m thinking it, but the mantra comes.
Once to see it as it is. Twice to see it in your mind. Thrice to bend it to your will.
I don’t need to open my eyes to know Ash’s hair is shifting back to its original color. I want him to be him, as he is, exactly
as he should be.
He pulls away and chuckles against my cheek. “Did you change my hair back to brown?” he murmurs. His voice sets my skin on fire.
“How did you know?” I ask.
“It feels warm, when you do it. And kind of . . . tingles.”
“It does?” I’m glad it feels nice to him. I barely notice the throbbing at the base of my skull.
“Mmm-hmm . . .” His fingers trace the line of my waist and I moan.
Suddenly there is a loud knocking on the door. “Violet?” Lucien’s voice sends my heart plummeting to my stomach. I scramble to put my sweater back on.
“Great,” Ash mumbles as he loops his own sweater over his head.
Once we’re both fully clothed, I open the door.
“Hi,” I say breathlessly. My face is burning, and I know I couldn’t look guiltier if I tried.
Lucien’s eyes flit from me to Ash. “If you even think about touching her that way, I will break you.”
“Really, Lucien?” I say, exasperated.
“I think we’ve already established which of us can break the other,” Ash retorts.
“Ash!” I say.
“I did not risk everything for her so you could satisfy your . . . urges,” Lucien says. “She is here for more important things.”
“You don’t think I know that?”
“No,” Lucien says, stepping forward into the room. “I think you have one goal on your mind.”
“Stop it, both of you,” I say.
“You’re a genius, Lucien, everyone knows that, but sometimes,” Ash says, shaking his head. “You can be breathtakingly stupid.”
“Excuse me?” Lucien takes another step toward him. I grab his elbow to hold him back.
“You hate the companions because we have something you don’t have,” Ash says. “But can’t you see something was taken from us, too?”
Lucien lets out a cold laugh that sends a chill down my spine. “You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”