When they reached the guard tower, Noruscan rode close, pulling up Red’s shackles so they caught the sun. “Thief from the outer villages,” he barked.
The lie made her lips twist, but Red stayed silent. Cooperation seemed her best option here, the surest way to get to Neve.
The guard waved a lazy hand, and the gates opened.
Noruscan’s horse cantered toward the palace. As soon as they crossed into the courtyard, he dismounted, helped her down cautiously. One of his hands brushed the bare skin of her arm, and he pulled back quickly, like her touch might burn.
They were terrified of her. Once, that might’ve hollowed her out, but now Red just wondered how she could use it. Hands still shackled, she shook out her cloak, clumsily fastening it around her neck.
The battalion marched her into the Temple, flanking either side, hands on their blades and eyes pointed away. They entered the hallway that led from the palace gardens, all marble and glass, but stopped at a simple wooden door instead of going all the way to the amphitheater. Noruscan waved a hand to dismiss the others, but he followed Red inside, closing the door behind them.
The far wall was a window, looking out on the gardens and letting in bright, airy light. A lone priestess sat at a desk beside it. She stood slowly, folding her hands into her sleeves. Dust motes like light shards twisted lazily around her red hair.
A new High Priestess, then. Red frowned. It shouldn’t have been a surprise— the other had been getting up in years. But a new High Priestess coupled with what she’d seen in the mirror made her hackles rise.
The Shrine. Whatever they were doing, it was in the Shrine. “Your Holiness.” Noruscan bowed. Red stayed upright. “She claims to be the Second Daughter.”
Calculating blue eyes flickered over Red. “Does she, now?”
“She came from the Wilderwood,” Noruscan said quickly. “But she hasn’t shown any signs of . . . of abnormality.”
Red straightened her shoulders, trying to make eye contact, but the bright light of the window left the High Priestess’s face in shadow. “How would you like me to prove it to you, Your Holiness?” Then, because subtlety was something she’d never been good at, “If you’ll take me to the Shrine, to pray and pay my respects, I’m sure I could answer any questions you have.”
“Don’t trouble yourself.” The priestess moved into the light, hands held loosely by her sides. A strange pendant lay against her breast, a piece of white wood touched with threads of darkness. Red’s eyes narrowed at it.
The priestess noticed. Long-fingered white hands picked up the bark shard, dangled it in the shaft of sunlight. “Familiar, I’m sure. Twisted up in you like rot in a corpse.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” But the splinter of magic in her, the shard of the Wilderwood, twined and bloomed around her bones.
The High Priestess— Kiri, Red remembered now, the name she’d heard Neve say in the mirror— flicked the corner of a cold smile, letting the pendant drop back against her chest. Slowly, she approached, close enough that Red had to fight the urge to step back. The priestess’s gaze was searching, like if she looked hard enough she could see into Red, into the hollow places between her organs.
“You arrival might derail us,” she said, nearly speaking to herself. “But perhaps you’ll be a useful pawn.”
Red’s brow furrowed, genuine confusion eclipsing the manufactured kind. “I don’t understand—”
But before she could finish, Kiri’s hands shot up, crooking into tortured shapes, and icy cold slammed into Red’s body.
Red’s own hands rose, like the invasion was something she could fight off, but all the power she’d learned to control was nowhere to be found. Whatever the High Priestess was doing, lacing ice through her veins, seemed to make her own power wither and hide, canceled out. It felt like being crushed, ground under some cold heel— the Wilderwood’s magic, taken and inverted, crawling through her as if searching for something.
It made a twisted sort of sense. Freeing Red would’ve been cause enough for Neve to weaken the forest, but not the Order. They had to have more of a reason, more of a reward.
This cold, awful magic must be it.
When the icy onslaught was done, Red was on her knees. She didn’t remember falling. Breath rattled in her lungs, and her throat felt thorned with frost. Blood dripped from her nose to pool on the marble.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Noruscan flinch.
The veins on the High Priestess’s wrist were ink-dark, wet with crystals of melting frost. One long finger dipped into the blood on the floor, brought it to the light.