“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.