Bloodleaf (Bloodleaf 1)

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!”