Rosalind Emberheart's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

Rosalind's second came back to the tent before the fires were banked. She did not sit. She said one of the elder fairies had been walking tent to tent since the assembly was called, telling anyone who would listen that a queen who carried fire had already betrayed them. By dawn, she said, half the round might stand against her before Rosalind spoke a word. Rosalind knew the fairy by name. He had opposed her mother's marriage, and he had opposed her seat when she took it. She could burn him out of the round in a breath. She would also prove him right in front of the tribe she was trying to hold. She unbuckled her satchel and set it on the table. The burn ring on the strap caught the lamplight. From inside, she took the heart-shaped bottle her mother had left her, love fairy dust sealed under a brass cap. She had never used it on her own tribe. She uncapped it now and tipped a single grain onto her palm. It was enough to make a listener soft. It was not enough to make one agree. She corked the bottle and put it back. She told her second to wake the elder and bring him to the round alone, before the rest. No guards. No dust. She wanted him to say to her face what he had been saying at the tent flaps. He came. He stood under the heart-stitched canopies with his arms folded and told her he would not follow a fire-touched queen, and that he would say so when the tribe gathered. Rosalind did not reach for fire. She opened her hand and showed him the burn on her strap, and then she showed him the small scar on her wrist where her father's spark had marked her as a child. She said she had carried both for four hundred years while he slept safe. She asked him to name one time her fire had touched a fairy of this tribe. He could not. He did not soften. He said the tribe would decide, not him. But he agreed to stand at the back of the round and hold his tongue until she had spoken. It was less than loyalty and more than she had walked in with. She let him go. Outside, the sky was going gray. A blue-marked butterfly settled on the canopy rope and folded its wings. Her tribe was already moving toward the round. Rosalind buckled the satchel over the burn and stepped out to meet them. The hardliner would not raise the assembly against her at dawn. What the tribe did after she spoke was still theirs to choose, and she would learn the answer within the hour.