She sounded like someone trying to hold a door closed against an army.
“You have to hold on,” Sebastian said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Asha laughed. “Nothing… you can do. But I’ll hold… for her.”
She didn’t say anything else as Sebastian rode with her behind him, just kept a grip on his waist with one hand, and the glowing heart stone extended in her other. When her grip on his waist started to weaken, Sebastian caught hold of her arm, keeping her in place while their horses trudged across the moor.
After another hour, as they were working their way around a patch of peat that was too soft to hold their weight. Asha tumbled from the saddle.
Sebastian stopped and jumped down beside her, while Emeline and Cora dismounted ahead of them, rushing back to them with Violet. Sebastian knelt beside Asha, offering her a sip of water from his water bottle. She barely responded.
“Not… there… yet,” she murmured.
“You’ve done more than enough,” Sebastian said. “We’re safe thanks to you.”
“Violet… is…”
She tailed off, and Sebastian saw the moment when the heart stone of Stonehome went dull. He felt at her neck, but there was no pulse there, while around them, the fog started to thin as the power Asha had been putting in fell away.
“She’s dead,” Sebastian said, not quite able to summon sorrow for someone who had as much anger and hate in her as Asha, but able to feel gratitude and respect for all that she had done, at least.
“She can’t be,” Emeline said. “Asha wouldn’t put so much of herself into the stone that it killed her. She wouldn’t give up everything for us. For anyone.”
Sebastian looked over to his daughter and knew that wasn’t true. Asha had given everything to make sure that Violet would be safe. She’d burnt herself to an empty husk to maintain the magic needed to protect his daughter, and all for something she’d seen in a vision. Sebastian didn’t know if that was admirable or terrifying, right then.
“She hated everyone like us,” Cora said, “but she gave her life for us.”
“I just hope it will be enough,” Sebastian said as the fog continued to lift. They were far enough from Stonehome now that he couldn’t see any sign of the Master of Crows’ men, but he knew how little that could mean when every bird on the horizon could be reporting to him.
“I can make sure,” Emeline said, starting to reach out for the stone. “If Asha can do it, then I-”
Sebastian saw Cora’s hand close over her wrist. “Don’t you dare. Not if it will kill you.”
Sebastian could only agree. “If I’d known that Asha would really keep going until this killed her, I would have stopped her too. As it is, this is too dangerous.”
He didn’t risk picking the stone up with bare fingers. Instead, he took a pouch from his belt and scooped it inside, shutting it away from the world. It was far too powerful to leave for the Master of Crows.
“Do we bury her?” Cora asked, in a slightly shaken voice, holding Violet to her as if to protect the baby from the sight of the body.
“There’s no time,” Sebastian said, hating that he had to say it. He didn’t want to leave Asha for the crows. He looked over at the section of peat bog. “Emeline, give me a hand with her.”
He heard Emeline sigh. “It doesn’t seem like a respectful end.”
“It’s a better one than letting the Master of Crows feast on her power,” Sebastian said. “And I think right now she would want us to take the fastest way. Escaping is the best way to honor her.”
Emeline nodded at that. “I guess so.”
Between the two of them, they lifted Asha’s body, laying it in the soft peat, watching as her dead weight started to pull her down through it. Sebastian waited until she disappeared from sight, thinking of the times that she’d helped to save Ashton and how much he owed her for saving his daughter now.
“We need to go,” Emeline said at last. “I’m keeping us hidden from magic at least, but that won’t do anything about crows or soldiers. We need to hurry.”
Sebastian nodded. “To Monthys.”
“To Monthys,” Emeline agreed.
Sebastian wasn’t sure what they would find once they got there. He just hoped that it was something, anything that would let them survive the Master of Crows.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sophia didn’t know what to do, what to say. All this time, she’d been searching for her parents, and in the briefest of spaces, she had both found them and lost them forever. She could see Kate and Lucas just as frozen with the shock of their deaths, neither moving, neither giving any sign that they had more of an idea of what to do than Sophia did.
The grief came slowly, as if it took that long just for her to start to believe that any of this was happening.
“I can’t…” Kate said beside her. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I know,” Sophia said, and held onto her.
Lucas joined her, and for what had to be the first time since she’d met him, Sophia saw tears falling down his cheeks.
“If I had never set out to find them, none of this would have happened,” he said. “The poison wouldn’t have gotten in here.”
“But we would never have met them, or you,” Sophia said. She couldn’t imagine that. A world where she had never met her brother seemed completely inconceivable to her.
Even so, she could feel what her brother and sister were feeling. In their grief, whatever protections they might normally have put around themselves came down and all of their grief wrapped together, in a tangle that held Kate’s anger, Lucas’ sense of mystery, and her own wishes that she could have known her parents years before this. Above all, there was the deep well of sadness that seemed to fill the world for them while they stood there.
They were still standing there when figures in rainbow silks stepped into their parents’ home and moved to the spot where they still sat curled against one another.
“Who are you?” Sophia demanded. Kate was more direct, moving between them and her parents.
“We mean no harm,” a woman with them said. She was shorter than Sophia, with dark hair and mid-brown skin. “I am Aia. Lady Christina and Lord Alfred foresaw this moment, and they made arrangements. If you need more time here, we will wait, but we were told to say…” She paused. “I was told to say that they loved you very much, but that your tasks cannot wait, even for grief. They believe… believed in you, and-” She stopped as Kate’s sword leapt from its scabbard.
“Kate,” Sophia said gently. “I’m hurting too, but she’s just trying to say what our parents couldn’t.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Kate shot back. Sophia could feel just how much she was hurting right then, but she saw Kate pull back, straighten up, prepare herself. “All right. Let’s do this. The sooner we start, the sooner I can kill the scum responsible for so much of all this.”
She gets angry so she doesn’t have to feel, Lucas sent to Sophia.
Sophia wished it were that simple. She suspected that Kate got angry because in the House of the Unclaimed, any feelings had been a weakness to be exploited. Anger filled the spaces where there weren’t other things.