Bloodleaf Read online

  It was the bracelet my father had given me. Trembling, I reached for it. I examined the golden links until I found the crushed clasp that had allowed it to slip from my wrist. It was definitely mine, the very one I’d lost that morning, I thought forever, in the press of the crowd.

  “Are you here?” I whispered.

  Then the lamp went out.

   6

  I whirled around.

  It was her. The woman who’d haunted me as long as I could remember, lurking on the periphery of every tragedy I’d ever known. I called her the Harbinger, because she appeared only when death was near.

  She wasn’t quite like any of the other spirits I sometimes saw, who were simply faded versions of their former selves. She was made of shadow and smoke, visible but intangible, bending light and color into her shape like a water droplet on a windowpane.

  Other ghosts clamored to get their hands on me the instant they knew I could see them—​but not the Harbinger. She’d only ever touched me once.

  I was ten years old at the time. Father was gone on a weeks-long expedition to tour our coastal lands with Toris and Camilla, while Lisette stayed with me and my mother, who was feeling poorly, at the castle. We’d spent several days holed up in my room with books of romance and adventure, though the romance was more Lisette’s fare than mine. I even let her read several of the stuffy, formal letters I received twice yearly from my betrothed, Valentin. It was my opinion that they were detestably boring and likely dictated by a tutor, if the rumors about Valentin’s lack of wits were true. But Lisette had become enraptured with them, reading one after another with eyes aglow.

  “Have you replied yet?” she asked when she was done, clutching the letters to her chest.

  “Not if I can help it,” I said, wrinkling my nose. I was always too busy helping Onal in her workroom and Father in the city to be bothered with such an unpleasant task.

  Lisette gave me her most reproachful look. “Oh, Aurelia, you can’t just leave him hanging! You must write back at once.”

  I said, “You can do it for me, if you like.” And she did so with great relish, even signing my name at the bottom and sending it off with a messenger before we went to bed that evening.

  That night I had a terrible dream of my mother trapped and dying in a room full of smoke and flame. I woke to find the Harbinger hanging over my bedside, icy hands on my cheeks, sharp fingertips digging into the soft flesh beneath my eyes.

  I bolted out of bed with a strangled scream. Lisette stirred. “Aurelia? What’s the matter? Aurelia!”

  I was already tearing down the hall, praying that what I’d seen was nothing more than an awful, vivid dream.

  It wasn’t. I arrived at Mother’s antechamber to find smoke billowing from beneath her parlor door, which was locked. I tugged furiously on the searing knob to no avail, just as Lisette tumbled into the room after me. “Aurelia?”

  “The letter opener!” I cried. “By her stationery! Quickly!” I could see the flicker of flames under the door. Lisette fumbled at the desk, coughing into her nightdress sleeve while I tried to break in by throwing my body against the barrier.

  “Found it!” she cried, and I yanked the opener from her blade-first, hardly noticing the way it bit into my skin or the red stain that then crept onto the lace of my nightgown sleeve. I shoved the implement into the keyhole the way all the heroes in my adventure books did it, but it was a losing battle. The blood made my hands slick—​too slick to allow me the leverage needed to make it work.

  I put my palms and forehead to the impenetrable wood, sobbing. My mother was going to die, and despite the Harbinger’s warning, I was helpless to change her fate. Emotion welled up inside me—​anger, frustration, fear, guilt, sorrow—​pressing against my heart until something inside me burst and all my rage and regret rushed free, like water from a broken dam. That’s when I knew. I knew what I needed to do. I could use blood. I could use magic.

  I began to mutter a haphazard sort of a spell. Most of my incantation was a mash of broken phrases and my own repeated exhortation to the fire itself. “Ignem ire, abeo, discedo, recedo . . .” Please don’t take my mother. Please don’t take my mother . . . “Ignem ire, concede, absisto, secedo . . .”

  “What are you doing?” Lisette asked in horror, backing away. “Aurelia, stop! Stop,” she begged.

  Something I said must have worked, because I felt the fire respond. I felt it in my hands. In my veins. In my heart. And when I knew I had it in my control, I gave it a hard push. I thought of water; I wanted the fire to drown.

  That’s when the guards came and found me staring dully at my hands in a smoke-filled room. They broke down the door, and my mother was found surrounded by blackened curtains, coughing from smoke but untouched by flame.

  Lisette was looking at me with wide, terrified eyes. “What did you do?” she whispered. “Where did it go?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her, dazed. “Away.”

  The next day we woke to the sound of a city in mourning. The king is dead! The king is dead! The story was horrific: King Regus and Lady Camilla had been standing on the dock of the port of de Lena when they were overtaken by a sudden, massive firestorm that devoured everything in its path. Ships, shops, people . . . everything. Toris was the lone survivor, and he emerged from the maelstrom with the ardent belief that the deaths of his wife and king could be attributed only to the work of witches.

  I tried to speak to Lisette at her mother’s funeral, but she wouldn’t respond, wouldn’t even meet my eyes. She and I both knew I was to blame for what happened to her mother and my father, even if we didn’t understand quite how. Toris joined the Tribunal shortly thereafter. I spent every waking minute for months listening for the sound of boots outside my door, convinced that it was only a matter of time before Lisette confessed and they came for me. But they never did.

  Lisette kept my secret. I resented it sometimes, knowing that with a single word she could bring the axe down on my neck. Perhaps she wanted just to forget it, or perhaps she wanted to use the knowledge of my wickedness for political gain in the future. I had no way of knowing, and the uncertainty was a torment.

  There was some light in the darkness, however. My brother was born. I grew older. I met Mabel Doyle and began trading for magical texts. I began experimenting, ever so cautiously, with the power I’d glimpsed inside myself that night outside my mother’s bedroom door.

  I saw the Harbinger dozens of times after my father’s death, her appearance always a portent of misfortune. Often I could sense when she was nearby before I glimpsed her. She observed me constantly, and though I always had the feeling that she wanted something more from me, she never touched me again.

  Now she stood immobile in the still air of Onal’s room. A circlet of silver rested on her brow. Beneath it, her eyes, black and bottomless, fixed on some point behind me.

  My fingers curled around my unlit lantern and the broken bracelet. “You were there in the square today, weren’t you? I felt you nearby.” I’d seen ghosts affect objects in the material world before, in fear or anger or desperation, but for her to bring me my bracelet was astounding.

  Her eyes clapped on me, and I felt shock roll through my bones from my crown to my toes. Steeling myself, I slid a foot closer. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  She waited.

  “You can see things before they happen, can’t you?” I swallowed. “Tell me, please . . . is it only death that you see?”

  She didn’t move.

  “I’ll be leaving here soon,” I said conversationally, though my voice was trembling. “Going to a country I don’t know. Marrying a man I won’t love. And that’s only if someone doesn’t kill me first.” I gathered my courage. “So I want to know . . . can you control what you see in the future? And if you can, will you tell me what you see in mine?”

  She took a dragging step forward. Then another. My lungs burned as I held my breath. Ice crystals were forming in the air around me. I forced m
yself to exhale, my breath a white cloud. When it cleared, she was standing only inches away. Her bony fingers were suddenly wrapped around my face, her thumbs digging into my eyes like cold daggers.

  My vision changed. Instead of the Harbinger’s face, I saw the lights of the banquet hall. My mother was on the dais, Simon Silvis beside her. This was his introduction to our court. But he wasn’t standing tall; he was doubled over, hands around the shaft of an arrow in his chest. Blood on his hands. Blood on the floor.

  I came out of the vision with a cry.

  There was a pounding on Onal’s door. “Aurelia!” Kellan called from behind it. “Aurelia, are you there? Aurelia, answer me!”

  The door swung open as the Harbinger released me, vanishing in the gust like the flame of a candle, leaving nary a wisp of smoke behind her.

  Kellan was frantic. “You weren’t in your room—​I was calling and calling. Then I heard you yell. Aurelia . . . ?” His eyes tracked down to the bracelet in my hands.

  “The Achlevan,” I said distantly. “Simon. He’s going to die.”

  In a flash, I was past Kellan and halfway down the hall in a full run.

  * * *

  I burst into the banquet hall with the force of a hurricane. “Simon!” I shouted. “You’re in danger! You have to watch out!”

  Fretting guests began to rise from their chairs, but I pushed through the clamor to the dais, where my mother was standing, a look of livid disbelief on her face. Simon was beside her exactly like I’d seen in the vision, and I swept toward him.

  “Listen. Listen! I know this sounds strange, but you have to believe me. Something’s going to happen to you, something soon. You have to—​”

  But his eyes shifted from my face and fixed on some point behind me. With one jolting movement, he pushed me away from him and I stumbled on the stairs, looking up just in time to see the arrow fly from the back of the hall and land square in his chest. The person wielding the bow was the same boy who’d caused me to spill the wine on my dress—​his features were contorted into a mask of rage and disgust.

  Lowering his bow, he cried, “Death to the witch! Death to all practitioners of the dark—​” But his war cry was cut short by the sleek shaft of metal that appeared in front of him, protruding from his belly.

  Kellan freed his sword from the boy’s body and strode toward me, while I turned back in horror to the bleeding man on the dais. Mother had grabbed Conrad and was turning him away from the grisly scene, covering his eyes with both hands.

  I crawled toward Simon, but Onal had beaten me there and was already bent over him, assessing the injury. “It didn’t get his heart, I don’t think.”

  “Wouldn’t matter if it did,” Kellan said, removing the arrow with a swift yank and pressing a cloth firmly against the wound. “Look at the shaft. The thing has been coated in bloodleaf poison.” He tossed it away. “He’s as good as dead.”

  “As good as dead is not the same thing as dead,” I said, clutching Kellan’s shoulder. Simon didn’t deserve to die this way . . . To Onal I pleaded, “Can’t you do something?”

  “I would if I could,” she said.

  “This is my fault.” The cold realization dawned on me. If I hadn’t seen the Harbinger’s vision, I wouldn’t have come back to the banquet. If I hadn’t come back to the banquet, the vision would never have been fulfilled. “This happened because of me.”

  If he died, there would be no one to teach me how to use whatever strange power I had inside me. The Tribunal would go on with its endless executions, Renaltans would go on masking their fear with hate, and I would have to add another name to the list of those whose lives were lost or plundered by another of my great mistakes.

  There was only one acceptable outcome: Simon could not be allowed to die.

  Setting my jaw, I pulled the knife from Kellan’s belt and drew it across my palm, a slim second cut paralleling the one from the unfinished ritual. When the blood began to well up, I let three drops fall onto Simon’s chest.

  “What are you doing?” Kellan said angrily. “Aurelia, stop!”

  “Ego præcipio tibi ut . . . uh . . . heal. Curaret!” I struggled to find the right word. “I command you to heal. Heal!”

  “I know what you’re doing,” Onal said, “and it will not work! Stop now, child, they are watching!”

  I looked up and found a hundred pairs of eyes on me and my upheld hand, dripping blood. But I didn’t have time to care; Simon’s eyes were going glassy and rolling into his skull. His rattling breaths were slowing.

  Onal was right; it wouldn’t work. I could feel it—​the magic was resisting. Blood magic wasn’t used for healing; that’s what Simon had said.

  I pulled out the glass capsule I’d hidden in the folds of my gown—​wine stains commingling now with blood—​and broke the seal.

  “Where did you get that?” Onal gasped. “Aurelia, no—​”

  But I had already poured the contents—​water, petal, and all—​down Simon’s throat.

  “What have you done?” she whispered.

   7

  “Will he live?”

  “Yes,” Onal said, pacing in front of the settee Simon had been transferred to in my mother’s study. “He’ll live.”

  “Please don’t be angry,” I said, though I knew I deserved every drop of her wrath.

  “Angry? Angry doesn’t begin to cover what I’m feeling at this moment, you stupid, stupid girl.”

  “I saved his life, did I not?”

  “You broke into my rooms! You stole something most precious—​”

  My mother had put Conrad to bed in the adjoining chamber and now sat anxiously by the fireplace. “That petal was meant for you, Aurelia,” she said. “We were going to send it with you. And now it’s just . . . gone.”

  I struggled to find words. “I’m sorry. Can’t we just buy another? I know they’re rare, but Onal got hold of them somehow . . .” I trailed off. The idea that we could waltz into the marketplace and purchase a bloodleaf petal was so absurd, it was laughable.

  I’d made a mistake. A terrible mistake.

  “Sorry?” Onal shrilled. “I acquired my bloodleaf petals when my sister was stolen away from our house during the night and we found her murdered the next day in the forest. I lost my sister but harvested bloodleaf flower. Who would you be willing to sacrifice to gain another?”

  I directed all my anger at myself toward Onal instead, to avoid having to fully accept my own idiocy. “But you wasted one yourself, did you not? You knew that bloodleaf petals don’t work on someone who’s already dead, and yet when my father—​”

  “You fool. How dare you compare us? I took care of your father from infancy. I loved him like he was my own child, my own heart. It was useless for me to even try to bring him back. He’d been dead for days when they brought him to us. But I did try. I had to. Because I loved him. And I will never get that petal back, but I don’t care. But you . . . you steal my last petal and immediately waste it! How long have you known this man? Less than a day!”

  “That arrow was meant for me! I couldn’t let him die. And if he, as an emissary from Achleva, were to die in our court, it could have been blamed on us. It could have meant war . . .”

  “War may have come—​it was a possibility. But what you have done has made the danger to you a certainty,” Mother said gravely. “We’re all in danger now.”

  Kellan entered, wiping sweat from his brow. “The halls are quiet for the moment, but the Tribunal magistrates have already begun to gather. I suggest we get Aurelia away, before word about the banquet spreads further.” He put his hand on the pommel of his sword. “Maybe my family can take her in, just for a little while?”

  “And what will your family do when the Tribunal arrives on their doorstep, bloodthirsty mob in tow?” Onal had always been imposing, but now she was like a prowling, angry cat. “As they will, undoubtedly, now that there is an entire hall full of witnesses to Aurelia’s witchcraft.” To me she said, �
�Mark my words: they will come for you, they will kill you, and they will kill anyone who tries to stand in their way.”

  “This isn’t how it was supposed to happen,” Mother said. “This isn’t how it was supposed to be.” Her eyes were glistening. “We never finished the ritual, and the bloodleaf petal is gone. I can’t just send you away with no protection, no assurance of your safety.”

  From the settee, Simon’s voice came in a bare whisper. “We can finish it.”

  “You’re awake,” I said, amazed. “It really worked.”

  He groaned as he pulled himself to a sitting position. Looking down at his bloodstained clothes, he said, “How was this accomplished? The last thing I remember—​”

  “You took an arrow to the chest. And when Aurelia’s blood spell didn’t work, she used a bloodleaf flower petal on you,” Onal said in a cool, clipped tone.

  “Stars above.” His bewilderment quickly changed to determination. “The ritual. We have to finish it now. Does the bowl still hold our blood? Bring it out. And the cloth and the knife. Put everything back the way it was.”

  “But you said I shouldn’t—​” I protested.

  “Forget what I said. I think we can agree that things have changed since this afternoon.”

  The stones were rearranged into the triangle, and Mother, Simon, and Kellan took their places at each point, though this time Simon’s arm was draped across Onal’s bony shoulder for support.

  “Right where you left off,” Simon prodded.

  “No,” I said strongly. “I’ve already told you: I don’t want this. I refuse. No one else is going to suffer in my place.”

  “Aurelia.” Kellan opened my fingers and closed them around the hilt of the knife. “Do it. You have to do it.” He held my gaze and I felt my breath catch.