Ruthless Vows (Letters of Enchantment, #2)
Rebecca Ross
For anyone who sought a different realm through a wardrobe door,
Who wrote a letter and is still waiting for a reply,
Or who dreams of stories and bleeds words
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
—John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
{ Prologue }
ENVA
There was never any doubt in her mind, even after all these dust-streaked mortal years, that Dacre would one day come for her. Enva knew her music would only hold him in his grave for so long. It didn’t matter how much she had sacrificed to sing it; the twisted spell she had sung over him would eventually fade in power.
She had strummed the lullaby for the entire turning of a year, from spring to summer, when gray storms turned the world green and soft. And then from summer to autumn, when the trees turned umber and gold, and rime cast a cloak over the dying grass. From autumn to winter, when mountains grew fangs of ice and the air was brittle, and then to spring once again.
It was enough to hold her former lover beneath the loam for centuries by mortal reckoning, and she had reassured the human king at the time. As for the other three divines … Alva, Mir, and Luz … Enva had never been worried about their waking.
But all good things eventually came to an end. And all songs had a final verse.
Dacre would wake, and she would be waiting for him.
Enva curled her long fingers into a fist at her side, feeling the ache in her swollen knuckles. She had known her spell would end, but what she hadn’t anticipated was the cost of swallowing so much power.
Momentarily lost to the past, Enva stood in a shadow on Broad Street, watching people hurry along their way, oblivious to her presence. But she was often overlooked, as was her preference. She could melt into a crowd of mortals like she had been born among them, with flesh doomed to bleed and decay, with a spirit that was like a candle flame, flickering and incandescent. Burning brilliant in the darkness.
She waited a few more moments for the sun to set. Only then did she step forward into the dusk and cross the street, her eyes on a particular café. She was almost certain she had been here before, long, long ago. Before this city had risen from a crosshatching of cobblestones. Before the buildings had been made of tall, steel skeletons.
She could almost remember this place if she let her memories fall back in time. If she dared to relive the era when she had dwelled with Dacre below. When she could have drowned in such lonely shadows, waking in his bed, longing for the sky.
He had put her in a gilded cage, but she had slipped away from his grasping hands.
Enva reached the café’s threshold. It was closed for the night, but locks had never stopped her before, and she stepped into the building and studied her surroundings. Yes, she had been here once, but this place had been vastly different then. She had the strange feeling that while everything around her had changed and evolved like the seasons, she had not. She was the same as she had been centuries ago, drawn from very old wind and cold constellations.
But she was not here to fall prey to what had been.
Enva narrowed her sight and stepped forward, searching for the door.
PART ONE
The Magic Still Gathers
{1}
A Grave Encounter
Spring had at last found the city of Oath, but even the flood of sunshine couldn’t melt the frost in Iris Winnow’s bones. She knew someone was following her as she walked through the bustle of Broad Street, over tram tracks and scuffed cobblestones. She resisted the temptation to glance behind, instead forcing her hands into the pockets of her trench coat as she stepped over a row of weeds blooming from the pavement cracks.
The coat was only three days old and still smelled like the store Iris had bought it from—a hint of rose perfume and complimentary black tea and polished leather brogues—and the days were becoming too warm to truly need it on her walks to and from work. But she found that she liked to have the coat belted at her waist, as if it were armor.
She shivered as she wove through a crowd gathered at a bakery door, hoping the person on her trail would lose sight of her in the tumult of people purchasing their morning buns. She wondered if it was Forest following her. The image instantly made her feel better, and then profoundly worse. He had done such a thing before, back in Avalon Bluff. In fact, he had been watching her for days, waiting for the right moment to appear, and it still made her feel ill to remember.
Iris couldn’t resist a moment longer. She cast a glance over her shoulder, the wind pulling a few tendrils of hair across her face.
There was no sight of her older brother, but then again he was no longer the swift-laughing, affectionate person he had been before he enlisted for Enva’s cause. No, the war had left its marks on him, had taught him how to maneuver in the trenches and fire a gun and sneak across dead man’s zone into enemy territory. The war had deeply wounded him. And if Forest was following her this morning, then it meant he still doubted her.
He continued to believe she would run, leaving him and Oath behind without a word of farewell.
I want you to trust me, Forest.
Iris swallowed and hurried on her way. She passed the building she had once worked in, where the Oath Gazette sat alight on the fifth floor, the place where she had first met Roman and thought him an arrogant upper-class snob. The place where her words had first found their place in the newspaper, where she had discovered the thrill of reporting.
Iris walked past those heavy glass doors, tracing the ring on her fourth finger. She turned onto a quieter side street, listening for the sound of footfalls behind her. There was too much din from the tram bells and the hawkers on street corners, though, and she dared to take a shortcut through an alley.
It was a strange, haphazard path that most vehicles couldn’t navigate without knocking a side mirror loose. A cobbled street where magic could still be felt when passing over certain thresholds or glancing at the shine of windows or stepping through a shadow that never faded, no matter how brilliant the sun burned overhead.
But Iris paused when she saw words painted in bold red paint on a white brick wall.
Gods belong in their graves.