Bloodleaf (Bloodleaf 1)

He plunged the knife into her chest.

I dove at him, brandishing my own tiny knife like a saber, inflicting a good-size slash on his forearm before he knocked my knife away. His face was a blank black mask, and I knew at once that he was costumed as the horseman of the Ebonwilde, a faceless executioner in Renaltan lore. I swiped at his expressionless mask with my fingers curled into claws, leaving red trails across his ear and neck. The mask wouldn’t budge. I snarled like a rabid dog until he struck a blow to my temple with the hilt of his knife: a glass knife, a mirror to mine. I saw swirling stars for a moment, but my mask took most of the blow, cracking across the right side.

Crack in the eye.

I lunged again, this time from below, aiming for his midsection. The force of my tackle knocked him off balance; he fell with me against the terrace stones, hitting his back against the edge of a stair with a heavy crack, emitting a gruff cry of pain from behind the mask. I wondered if he’d broken his spine until he threw me off him with a roar. I tripped on the girl’s body and found myself falling, entangled in her lifeless limbs, down the stairs. After rolling to a stop at the bottom, I climbed out from under the glassy-eyed corpse, sobbing.

Blood on my hands.

The man vanished into the shadows.

I’d made a mistake. I’d misidentified the maid, and this girl had died for it.

Zan and Nathaniel reached me at the same time, with Zan breathlessly pulling me to my feet and then into his arms. With my head tucked under his chin, he shouted to Nathaniel, “He went that way! He can’t be far. Find him.”

23

The girl was named Molly. She was a server from the kitchen. She’d snuck from her post at the party to rendezvous with a secret beau; indeed, she’d gotten the job in the castle in an effort to be closer to him. The other girls all said that she’d never told them his name, and now she never could.

The man’s trail was cold. He was a blood mage, after all, and probably used his wound to render himself invisible, as I had done so many times. If I’d obtained a sample of his blood, even just a drop, I might have been able to locate him, but the scene was a gruesome one. There was no way of knowing which blood, if any, was his.

News of the brutality of the girl’s death was overshadowed, however, by another peculiar happening: inside the city, everything green was turning slowly to brown. Roses rotted on the vine, the woods were carpeted with fallen needles of now-skeletal evergreens . . . and the terrace gardens, which had been a sight of wild magnificence at the masquerade, now lay wilted and ruined. The smell of decay hung low over the city, permeating everything; it was impossible to escape it. The only thing that still seemed to flourish was the carpet of bloodleaf around the tower.

The bruise on my temple was an unpleasant purple, but it could have been much worse if the mask hadn’t absorbed most of the blow. As Zan was eager to remind me, I was lucky.

It didn’t feel like luck.

The next morning I found Nathaniel, Kate, and Zan gathered around Kate’s table in silence, a melancholic mood pervading the air. “Nihil nunc salvet te,” I said.

Zan said, “You’re supposed to be resting.”

“I’ve rested long enough. I’m done resting.” I repeated, “Nihil nunc salvet te. Do you know what that means?”

“‘Nothing can save you now,’” Zan replied in a low voice. “Why—?”

“It’s part of the Tribunal execution script,” I said. “They say it before they hang people.” I gulped. While they all grimaced, I continued, “He said it to her, last night, before he killed her. For the Tribunal, the phrase is ceremonial. But this felt like a spell. A consecration, even.” I paused. “I knew, once he drew her blood and said it, that nothing could be done for her.”

Kate patted my hand. “What a terrible thing to witness.”

“I’ve never seen that phrase mentioned in Achlev’s writ

ings or in any of the spell books. Only in Renalt, and only from the Tribunal.”

Skeptically, Zan said, “You think this has something to do with the Tribunal? But they don’t use magic. They hate magic. They want to destroy magic. This person wants to unleash it in monstrous proportions.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. “It was just a thought. It’s just that we have so little to go on, and so little time . . .”

“Less time than we thought, even,” Nathaniel said.

“What do you mean?”

“You should be the one to tell her,” he said to Zan.

I frowned. “Tell me what?”

Zan’s lips were set in an unhappy line. “The king was very upset about how his party last night was so rudely interrupted. Never mind that a girl lost her life.” He shifted in his chair. “Combined with his disappointment that a prisoner escaped his gibbets, his spirits have been very low. So he’s decided to raise them the only way he knows how: by lavishing himself with leisure activities. This time he’s decided to take Prince Conrad and Princess Aurelia on a grand old hunt.”

My jaw dropped. “The plants are rotting. People are being murdered, and he’s going hunting?”