She turns then, eyes more somber than I’ve ever seen them. “I thought that I could help ease you through grief by connecting you to your mother and our community, but I made a mistake. I brought the craft into our sessions when perhaps I shouldn’t have, particularly as your mother never brought you into the fold herself.”

“So you’re just abandoning me?” I say, my voice cracking with sudden emotion.

She sighs heavily. “There comes a time when even passive support turns to endorsement, and I won’t endorse what you’re doing with the Order. I can’t.”

My hands ball into fists. “And you won’t help me figure out what I am?”

When she speaks again, her voice is thick with sorrow. “I want you to figure out who you are. We all deserve that answer, and the journey it takes to find it. But I fear for you, Bree, and the path you have assigned yourself. I know that the Order, for what they’re worth, has worked for centuries to rid our plane of the creatures who cross over and take material form. They may fight monsters, but they aren’t protectors.”

“Because they’re Bloodcrafters and they’ve stolen their root,” I say.

“We borrow root because keeping it in our living bodies creates an imbalance of energy. We call Bloodcraft a curse because power taken and not returned incurs a debt, and the universe and the dead will always come to collect, one way or another. The Order has tied power to their bloodlines for hundreds of years. Tell me, Bree, how large do you think their debt is? Do you know how they pay it? The only currency that Bloodcraft accepts is suffering and death.”

My stomach bottoms out in horror. “Fifteen centuries.” That’s what Sel said in the tunnels. All of the lives and Oaths and heavy prices paid. And the Abatement. Hundreds of life spans, taken. Cut short.

Patricia reaches for my hand and gives it a final, brief squeeze before she leaves me standing in the grass behind her.

34

PATRICIA’S WARNING HAUNTS me for the rest of the day.

But it dissolves as soon as I walk into the training room, where excitement ripples through the five Pages waiting for Gillian and Owen. Something’s happened, but I don’t know what.

Greer and Whitty pull me aside to fill me in:

Yesterday afternoon William barred Sel from performing the Warrior’s Oath to bond Sar and Tor until he calmed down—which only made Sel even angrier. After that, Nick, Sel, and Lord Davis were overheard on a tense phone call that lasted late into the night. There’d been shouting. Even a scuffle. It ended with Sel smashing a chair and storming out the front door. No one’s seen Nick since.