Rosaliy

“The guards did what?” Rosaliy gaped, incredulous.

“Carted them right off,” the worker repeated.

“Both of them?”

Prior to this alarming conversation with three chatty workmen, Rosaliy determined her brother was not wiling away his evening by the horseshoe pit, nor had he talked the merchant manning the vat of bubbling oil out of any sugar dusted fried pastries. Therefore, Cade must not have finished his work for the day. When she arrived at the main gathering area—the brick square adorned with a newly-constructed stage—she found a tense buzz of idle chatter instead of any work taking place.

“I don’t know what that Baysellian did, but it must have been terrible. Did you see the guard slug him?”

His fellow workers chimed in their amazement at this odd behavior by a guard on patrol. Poor Drake. Rosaliy knew what her second question for the day was going to be, but she would have to find him to ask it.

With too much time to think on the ride to Kianne Castle, every hoofbeat pounded the resounding blows of failure on her heart. There was no way such a disturbance was above the notice of Daniella and her Kianne arsenal of spy equipment. To be painfully honest, Daniella must have known Rosaliy was in the city the second she crossed the gates. She had probably been the one to have Drake taken prisoner. All their sneaking was for naught and this was all hopeless.

In the midst of her dark thoughts, Rosaliy had to admit she was still free. Unless the former queen was taunting her, perhaps Rosaliy herself had escaped detection. Maybe the magic potion had been just enough.

An obnoxious squeaking interrupted her faint hope. She had been ignoring an intermittent squeaking she could not identify for more than half an hour, pretending the sound was in her head, but once she reined in her horse and dismounted, the actual noise was impossible to ignore. She pulled off billowing robes and scarves, draping them over the horse. A fortune teller sneaking around Kianne would draw much more unwanted attention than Rosaliy sneaking around Kianne.

The squeaking grew louder, less muffled. The sound seemed to be coming from her, but when she pawed through her bag, she found nothing but Drake’s knives, some magical odds and ends, and Athena’s potion. Nothing had leaked or mixed together during its time in her pockets. She stuck her hands in her pockets and drew out the little book. When had she put it there?

The squealing stopped as soon as she opened the cover.

Go to Taragon, said the book in shiny silver letters. Now.

“What is the purpose of you?” she complained at it. “No.”

She dumped the evil squirrel book in her bag. Message conveyed, it thankfully remained silent.

Rosaliy retrieved one of the filmy scarves to tie back her hair and pulled out the map Alexander had drawn for her of the layout of the palace—his childhood home. She could get into Kianne Castle and to Daniella’s rooms without having to announce her presence using the well-marked tunnels, but she had no map of the dungeon, assuming the guards had taken Drake and Cade there first. Rosaliy remembered that place with a shudder. The dungeon had been the place where Daniella had dragged Rosaliy and her family to be turned into puppets to fight her war. Awful woman.

She refocused. As soon as she found Daniella, or, even better, the children, she could have the Crystal Palace ally Hale release her brother and Drake. All in all, that plan seemed faster than trying to free them herself, although she did feel badly about temporarily abandoning them.

Rosaliy smoothed out the map with her fingers and compared it to the palace in front of her, plotting out a course. Crystal Palace was a lofty, imposing fortress. Luckily, Alexander’s passages took her in through the walls and necessitated only a short trip through the hallways before she had to deal with a magical entrance to a set of secret rooms.

She slung her bag over her shoulder. Outside Crystal Palace, a Sorceress’ main arsenal was enchanted objects and prepared powders and potions. Unfortunately, she would have to be careful about what she used, since there was a danger to using magical objects in Kianne or even carrying them. But surely Daniella could not have accounted for exactly which things Rosaliy would be carrying with her now. Except that book.

A shot of cold shock hit her. Daniella had planned for her to be carrying the book.

She tried to unearth the book from her bag and pitch it into the window of a nearby barn, but her fingers refused. Rosaliy huffed out a breath. At least she could abandon any further worry about using other enchanted objects. After all Rosaliy’s ridiculous secrecy, Daniella could see her coming from furlongs away.

Her eyes stared straight at the tall, imposing castle of dark stone. She thought of poor Queen Kat and Alexander the last time she had seen them, trapped in the glittering world of stars above her head.

“Is there any news?” Kat had asked the moment Rosaliy appeared in front of her. Unable to produce words, Rosaliy tried to adjust to the shock of lying in her bed one moment and standing suspended in the sky on an invisible platform the next. She stretched out her arms to steady herself, but there was nothing to grab, just a stretch of black broken by distant spots of glowing light.

“Everything will be set right,” Alexander soothed the frantic queen.

“Everything can’t be set right,” Kat disagreed, a tear streaking its way across her pale face in illustration. “They’re gone. Gone. What if I never—” Her voice broke.

“This is temporary,” he interrupted before she could finish. “This is nothing like what you went through.”

When she was a child, Kat had been kidnapped from her mother by a horrible woman who sought to use her power to do evil. Of course Kat would fear the same fate for her children. Rosaliy’s heart broke for her all over again. Katyrinna was the best person Rosaliy had ever met. She did not deserve an instant of pain or worry. She had helped Rosaliy and her family so many times. If there was the slightest chance of catching Daniella, Rosaliy had to try.

“Miss?” she heard behind her.

Rosaliy’s boots must physically have left the ground with the height of her jump. She nearly had one of Drake’s knives withdrawn from her bag when the mud-smudged boy with hay in his hair repeated, “Miss? Are you looking for somewhere to quarter your horse?”

“Yes,” she practically screeched, letting the knife drop from her fingers and digging out a few coins from her bag instead. She cleared her throat. “I’ll be back later today or tomorrow.” Or never.

“The festival must be packed if you’ve had to come all this way,” said the boy, snatching up the coins eagerly. “Unless you’re visiting the castle. Are you going to the castle?”

She was about to invent a story when she realized she was a terrible liar who should give up trying. Also, this stable boy was an opportunity.

“Yes, the castle,” she acknowledged. Telling the truth was so much easier. “Anything odd going on there?”

One rarely had to be subtle with questions directed to children.

A puzzled expression crossed his face. “Since you ask, something odd happened three days back, but maybe I shouldn’t repeat rumors…”

Her noble behavior ended at truthfulness because she pulled out another coin and twirled it in her fingers. “Now I must know,” she cajoled. “I could use a good story.”

She could practically see the shiny coin glittering in the boy’s eyes. “Yesterday, a woman bought three horse tails. Tails! I heard Mama asking Papa if she looked a little like the queen, and he said that was ridiculous. Kianne doesn’t even have a queen, so I probably heard wrong. Anyway, horse tails! Who wants those?”

Rosaliy did not know, but her inclination was to blame dark magic.

“That is very interesting,” she said, trying to sound only appropriately interested and not too desperate for idle gossip. “Shame you won’t have any stories about me.” She tossed him the coin.

“Are you queen of anything?” he asked hopefully.

“Not a single thing,” she laughed.

“Too bad,” he sighed. “I’ll take good care of the horse, anyway.”

Her well-paid friend waved cheerfully as he led the horse away.

Was this good news? Daniella was here? Or had been. What was she doing to the children?

Not for the first time, Rosaliy felt in over her head. Since there was nothing she could do about that fast-sinking quicksand feeling, she set off for the castle. The bustle of the festival worked to her advantage. Kianne Castle was short-staffed, and while droves of guests and servants and soldiers busily came and went, nobody paid her any attention. She shook off the oddness of being here on her own and unannounced, no children to chase or meetings to sit in on.

She veered off from the main entrance and found the door behind the ivy on the inner wall just where Alexander said it would be. She dug through her bag and withdrew a lumpy, white rock no bigger than the tip of her thumb—a firefly stone. After being flicked in the air, the little white rock glowed before her, faintly lighting her way. She set off down the narrow passageway between walls. Despite her vigilance and an incredibly detailed map, she almost missed the drop to the floor below. She caught herself before she tumbled into the dark opening under an oddly-angled section of wall.

Rosaliy sent the little glowing light into the darkness below, illuminating the rough, unfinished stone walls and floors coated with years of dust and rocks left behind from castle construction. She dropped her bag, kicking up a cloud of dust on the abandoned ground. Rosaliy lowered herself next, her soft landing still creating another billowing cloud of dust around her feet.

She tried to muffle her coughs with her arm, but angry chattering greeted her landing. Rosaliy’s heart raced, even though she was only being yelled at by a family of rats hiding in the fanciest nest ever built by a rat. The bed was mainly the arm of a fur coat decorated with peacock feathers and a hair comb studded with rubies.

“A poor servant was probably blamed for stealing that,” she accused the rat. It hissed at her, so she continued on her way. The rat was lucky Daniella was no longer queen here. That woman would not allow rats anywhere near her, even in her secret passageways.

Rosaliy reached a dead end and pushed out a hollowed stone from the corner of an abandoned library. She tossed the firefly stone back in her bag and managed to pull herself through the opening after a few tries. She took a moment to catch her breath, brush off some dust, and pull a few cobwebs out of her hair before she shoved the hollow stone back into place and brushed a few little rocks betraying its existence under a plush rug. So far, so good.

The door she needed to find was just down this hallway. She rifled through her bag for matches on the way, heart pounding as a servant hurried past. She forced herself to smile and nod and received an answering head bob in return. There was some advantage to being able to disappear into the background.

She reached the door she sought unchallenged. Standing in front of the wooden obstacle, she had a moment of panic. How was she to get in this door? She was supposed to have Drake and Cade with her to brainstorm dilemmas like locked doors. Maybe she could melt the lock? Had she brought liquis powder?

While her brain was half deciding to break into the dungeon and liberate Drake and her brother after all, her hand reached out and tried the handle. Her mind was confused as the door swung open, revealing the stone nook she was expecting to find. Was this unlocked entrance an oversight? Did Daniella make those? Ever?

Before Rosaliy could answer her questions in the negative, she reached forward to test the wall in the stone nook before her. Her hand slid through the stones. She fumbled around until her hand wrapped around a little candle holder. She drew it out and nestled it on a stone hollow. She struck a match, and it flared. She lit the shortest candle first, waited, lit the second candle, waited, and just as the match was about to burn her hand, she lit the last. The stone wall swung back, just like it was supposed to. The candles were extinguished by a rush of wind from the dark, narrow passage now in front of her, just where it was supposed to be.

Firefly stone bouncing before her in the dark once more, Rosaliy curved through the passage, vacillating between the joy of a plan coming together as intended and the terror of a plan coming together too easily. She rounded the final corner, fully expecting to be frozen in place or clapped in chains, but she found a dark room lined with shelves and workspaces. She pushed the firefly stone further into the room, revealing a dark seeing pool at the center surrounded by a padded bench. The inky water made her skin prickle. This was more than a Naxturaen seeing pool—dark magic was at play here.

Belatedly, because it gave her a small comfort, she pulled a tiny fragment of net from her bag. If Daniella had been here, Rosaliy would not have been alive to use it. Realizing this, she put it away and withdrew matches instead, lighting enough candles on mirrored plates to make a search of the room possible. If this room had been used for anything recently, it had been reorganized afterward. All the jars and books were back in place.

Actually, there was one book sitting next to a padded chair. With her recent book problems, Rosaliy drew out Drake’s short knife to use as a tool to flip the cover open. She was not touching that book. She scanned the yellowing pages. It was a volume of Curi folk tales. Lillya loved folk tales. Had she left it behind in haste?

“Back up, Rose,” she admonished herself in a murmur. She was making mental leaps.

On a counter, conspicuously out of place, was a hairbrush. A few strands of golden hair glistened in the brush. Rosaliy was trapped between two terrible decisions. She had hair and a seeing bowl in a room full of magical potions. She could easily find the whereabouts of the owner of that hair. But that brush had been set there on purpose, perhaps as much as this book had been. She would only find what she was intended to find.

While she decided whether or not she would fall for this trap, Rosaliy looked for the sap she needed to combine with the hair. She thought she spotted the yellow sap she wanted behind a nearly empty glass jar, just in reach if she stood on the tips of her toes. She pushed the nearly-empty jar blocking her way aside and strained, brushing the jar she wanted with her fingertips, coaxing it forward.

Just when she was about to wrap her fingers around the jar of sap, the jar in her way tumbled. Rosliy caught it before it shattered, but the lid shot off and liquid sloshed onto her hands. She did not dissolve or turn into a toad, so her clumsiness had probably wasted an ingredient and not a prepared death potion. In fact, the concoction had a pleasingly spicy, floral scent. Washing it off with anything in this room would be doubly stupid, so she decided to complete her objective and keep a close eye on her limbs lest she begin turning into a tree.

Grumbling under her breath, she dried her hands on her skirts and pulled the now-unobstructed sap off the shelf. She dipped the hair in the sap and dropped the sticky golden hair into the seeing pool. Nothing happened.

If this seeing pool was fueled by dark magic, it would require blood. This was where Rosaliy drew the line on her foolishness. Feeling the all-too-familiar twinge of failure yet again, she withdrew the mirror to contact Athena.