Greythorne (Bloodleaf 2)

The iron spokes from which now dangled rose vines were once hangers for Domhnall’s gibbet cages. There—something glinted from behind an ivy curtain. I pulled the plants aside, dusted off the object hidden beneath, and found my own face staring back at me, reflected in the glossy copper of Forest Gate’s bell.

I gave it a tap, and it gave a low, rolling vibration.

“How do we get in?” Kellan asked, pointing to the rubble where once had stood a grand doorway, watched over by three magnificent statues of a maid, a mother, and a crone.

“Looks like someone else has already figured it out,” I said, pointing to a hollow in the thatch that had been recently cut into the shape of a door.

Kellan drew his sword, looking around warily.

“I’ll go first,” he said. “Just in case the person who cut this pathway for us is still around somewhere.”

The opening behind the cut brambles was tight—just a narrow, triangular space created when two large chunks of the gate fell against each other. We had to go single file, flattening our bodies against the wall to slide through. In some places, I had to hold my breath to do it; I wondered a few times if broad-shouldered Kellan would be able to make it at all. When we finally came out the other side, I rewarded myself by taking a deep and generous breath, marveling at how good it felt to fully inflate my lungs again.

“Hey!” Kellan called from ahead. “I think we go this way.”

I caught up to him. “How do you know?”

“Because it’s the only direction that isn’t overgrown or covered with broken timbers and crumbled stone.”

“King’s Highway,” I said, recognizing its bones. It had once been the main thoroughfare from the gate to the castle steps, wide enough to admit three side-by-side carriages down it at once. It was now covered in dirt, with broken beams and buckled buildings rising up on each side. But down the center of the ruin was a narrow ravine, and at the bottom of it a single strip of uncovered cobble pavement.

We walked slowly—there were still places where Kellan had to hack aside thorny branches—while I tried to pick out places with which I was once familiar. There—there was an alleyway down that direction. If you turned at the end and turned again, you’d find yourself at Sahlma’s apothecary. And there—that towering wall of shrub was once a simple hedge. The same hedge I’d pulled Zan into with me when trying to hide from Lisette and Cael as they came down the highway.

And if I turned left at that juncture ahead and followed the lane toward the trees, I’d eventually come to the little cottage with bright yellow flowers in the front and a hut by the pond in the back. I could still picture Kate coming to the door of her house, welcoming me in with a bright smile. Nathaniel would be inside, quietly helping Kate make dinner. Zan too. He’d be lounging in the corner, an acerbic quip on his tongue and a glint in his eyes.

I was no longer literally haunted, but everywhere I looked, I saw memories of people I loved just as vividly as I once could see ghosts.

“Something wrong?” Kellan asked after I stopped to stare at the eastern trees for a little too long. Somewhere among them was the quiet makeshift memorial Zan called the Tomb of the Lost.

“No,” I said. “Just . . . remembering.”

“I would think you’d want to forget what happened here, traumatic as it was.”

“I wish it hurt a little less,” I admitted, “but I would never want to forget.”

We reached the foot of the castle just as a hawk began to screech high above.

“Someone’s here,” Kellan said warily. “Stay behind me.”

“Stay behind you?” I asked incredulously, drawing my knife. “I’m a blood mage. You stay behind me.”

“Yes, but if you die, I also die. So you need to stay behind me.”

Onal pushed past us both, rolling her eyes to the sky. “Such nonsense.”

Rosetta, who’d shifted into her fox form to beat us through the tunnel and search the road ahead of us, came bounding down the lane, shifting back into her human self in one leap.

“I think someone’s still here up ahead,” she said breathlessly. “Stay behind me.”

Kellan and I looked at each other, then glowered at her, but we did as she said.

Rosetta took the lead, followed closely by Onal and Kellan, and I brought up the rear. We were still a quarter mile away from the castle when I spied something peeking out from beneath a fall of vine to my left. It was an old public-decree board with several layers of the late king Domhnall’s proclamations still waving slightly in the wind. But there was something that had been drawn over the top of them. Something in black strokes . . .

Unable to help myself, I pulled the draping curtain of vines aside and found myself staring at another depiction of the horseman, this one taller than me.

Beside it was a doorway with a side path leading out the other direction. It had been purposely hidden: someone had arranged the vines to conceal it.

Four words were painted across the lintel: