Page 46 of When Ashes Fall

“They don’t ever go near the roses,” Ridge, Bertie’s husband, said. “They aren’t natural, and the bees sense this.”

“They probably have some residue from the curse they don’t like.” I sipped my soup and returned my spoon to the bowl. “I hope they return for the tree.”

“We could smell the tree all the way in the woods,” Bertie said. “They’ll smell it too. They’ll return from the other kingdoms. They must.”

I wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince herself of this or all of us, but I hoped she was right. The return of the bees would be one more piece of normalcy and one more step toward making Wildwood a better place for those who remained.

I couldn’t break the curse, but I could at least give the remaining residents that.

“Tea?” Bertie asked.

When I nodded, she lifted the pot in the center of the counter we sat around and poured me a cup of the sprites’ tea. The steam wafting from it carried the aromas of cinnamon, chamomile, and something sweet I couldn’t quite place. It was probably some berry from their garden.

Every day was a new adventure when it came to the sprites’ tea. They enjoyed making all kinds for breakfast and dinner, and I enjoyed sampling them.

When dinner ended, I helped dry the dishes while two other sprites washed, and the rest cleaned up. When we finished, Zephyr offered to walk me to my room, but I declined. I was ready for some time alone. I still had Gizzi on my shoulder, but he was sleeping.

I trudged up the stairs, taking my time in the hopes Knox and the others would return, but they didn’t. I wasn’t even sure if he was with them or not.

Finally, though it took me far more time than normal, I made it to my tower room. When I first came here, I opposed Knox placing me in this room, but now I liked it. It was my private little sanctuary in a place where I had nothing.

When I opened the door, Gizzi leapt off my shoulder, scampered to the bed, and curled up on his pillow. I changed into my nightgown, gathered my book on powers, and settled into my chair near the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the dying fields of the kingdom. It was too dark to see them now.

I missed seeing the blood and wolf moons, as well as Karastar, the nearby planet with its red and yellow rings, vast seas, and yellow moon. Instead, only a flat, black sky stretched endlessly across Wildwood.

Tearing my attention away from the windows, I focused on the thick book in my hands. This brown-bound edition was almost a thousand pages long, but like the other books I’d searched through, it hadn’t been of any help to me.

After finding nothing in the pretty yellow book, I’d returned it and stocked up on more tomes. I’d added fantasy and romance books to my pile so no one would spot me carrying only books on powers. I hadn’t touched the fictional books.

I’d also found a book on maps of the kingdoms. I was working to memorize a route from Wildwood to Terra.

The last two books on powers I’d gone through were pretty much a rehash of the first three, and so far, I hadn’t discovered anything to explain me. However, I had learned about hemomancy, a magic focused on manipulating blood inside and outside the body. I suspected that was the blood magic the strigoi possessed, and they were hemomancers.

The books had revealed many different abilities, some of which I knew and some I hadn’t. None of them mentioned the ability to speak to the dead.

Yawning, I flipped the page and lifted the piece of paper I used as a bookmark. I was about to slide it in when the title of the next page caught my attention.

The Forbidden Power

Curiosity piqued, I kept my bookmark in hand as I examined the cramped, wobbly words scrawled into the book. Everything else was nicely typed and in a pretty font.

This passage was handwritten and not glued into the book. Instead, someone had tucked it between the pages on shifting and increased strength.

I pulled the paper free and lifted it closer as I strained to make out the stilted writing. Whoever penned this pushed their quill so deeply into the paper they indented it; in some places, they’d poked holes. It was one paragraph, but it looked as if whoever wrote it had been terrified to do so.

I ran my fingers over the indents and examined the holes. The forbidden power?

Why would any power be forbidden? Who decided it was forbidden? And who enforced that? How did they enforce it?

And why is there only one damn nearly indecipherable paragraph on it?

Squinting, I focused more on the writing as I tried to understand it. Eventually, I started figuring out the different letters and uneven scrawl.

Necromancy

The ability to commune with the dead. The necromancer possesses the ability to speak with phantoms, learn what they’re thinking, and raise the dead. It’s a sinister, lethal, abomination of a power that cannot be allowed to exist.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE