Page 46 of When Roses Burn

I shuddered as a deep rending tore through my soul, robbed my breath, and seized my lungs.

Of course, I’d known what they did to him in that place, but hearing his confirmation and knowing my mother was the first to lead the degradation against him brought it sharply into focus. If she’d been standing in front of me and I had a knife, I’d cut the blackened heart from her chest.

I’d been stupid to hope that if I found him again, we could return to what we once were, flee the kingdoms, and never look back, but I’d make her pay for destroying us. Even if it killed me, she’d learn true suffering too.

“I’m sorry,” I breathed as I opened my eyes. A tear slid down my cheek and landed on the pommel. “I’m so sorry for what happened to you and all of them.”

He wouldn’t believe me, but I had to tell him that.

“How do we break the curse?” he demanded.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Briar

I closed my eyes again and willed the tears away. I could grieve for all we’d lost later, but I couldn’t fall apart in front of them. They’d enjoy my tears, and while they deserved retribution, I didn’t do this to them, and I certainly didn’t betray him.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It must have taken all the night casters working together to unleash this amount of magic on an entire kingdom.”

“It did,” Knox confirmed.

“Maybe, if you could somehow convince them to lift the spell, they would. You could use me as leverage against my mother, but in all honesty, she might try to rescue me to save face with the other kingdoms, but it’s more likely she’ll be happy to be rid of me. She wouldn’t care if you killed me.”

The horses’ hooves clopping against the bricks was the only sound following my words. I started noticing differences in the size of the rosebushes; some were much smaller than others, though they weren’t as common.

They’re children. My breath hissed in through my teeth with this realization, and I looked away from the tiny rose bush tucked beneath a larger one like a mother cradling her baby.

Oh, gods, what did she do? How can I be related to someone who could do something this appalling?

My fingers gripped the pommel as the ropes binding them kept me from digging into my flesh, ripping open my veins, and spilling my blood. I wanted to rid myself of all of it and any connection to that woman, but it was impossible. As much as it repulsed me, she’d been interwoven into the very fabric of my being.

When bile surged up my throat, I gagged but managed to swallow it back. The acidic, awful taste burned its way back down my throat.

“You know the night casters can’t get together to break the curse,” Knox stated.

I twisted in my saddle to look up at him. “Why not?”

His gaze raked scathingly over me. I had no idea what I’d done to warrant such a look, but I’d pissed him off somehow.

“After the night casters cursed Wildwood, the tribunal got together and punished them for it,” Dromon said. “They couldn’t allow such a thing to happen to one of their kingdoms, so they used the combined magic of their species to levy a sentence against the night casters. In doing so, they made it so they can’t unite to create a spell together. They retained their individual powers but can’t combine them.”

My head twisted toward the shifter with the dark, wavy blond hair falling past his shoulders. His brown eyes studied me as I absorbed his words.

“What?”

All of them stared at me like they were trying to peel back the layers to see into my skull. They were judging me, and they weren’t on my side.

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “Nobody told me.”

“How could they not tell you?” Lyra demanded. “How could you not know?”

“Seth—”

“Knox,” he growled from behind me.

I gulped before continuing. “Knox wasn’t the only one punished after my mother discovered us. She locked me in a tower for a year. The servants who brought my food were forbidden to talk to me, though I doubt they would have spoken to me anyway. I was a disgrace not only to my mother but to all of them.

“When my mother finally let me out of the tower, no one spoke to me. I was followed by guards, forbidden from books and other simple pleasures. She dressed me in white, a color we were forbidden to wear unless we were about to enter the harem for the first time. She also always put something red on me so no one, especially me, could forget I’d gone against our ways and wasn’t pure.”