Kingdom of Sea and Stone (Crown of Coral and Pearl #2) - Mara Rutherford Page 0,50

to make sure my family is safe. It’s hard to even think about marriage.”

“Is that why you came? To ask the Galethians to help you?”

We had reached a clearing. In the center was a grove of the strangest trees I’d ever seen. Tall and skeletal, without a single leaf on their slender white branches, they looked more like dead coral than trees.

I turned to Adriel. I knew she was close to Roan, and I didn’t want her going to him before we’d had time to come up with a strategy. “Do you think the Galethians would help us if we asked?”

“That all depends on why you think the Galethians should help, I suppose. This is not their fight, Nor.”

From what I knew of Ceren, this would be the entire continent’s fight eventually, but my thoughts had snagged on something else. “What do you mean by their?”

She walked into the clearing, the light streaming down onto her dark hair. She was objectively beautiful by Varenian standards, but it was her lack of self-consciousness that set her apart from any woman I’d met before.

“My ancestors came from the Penery Islands, to the west. They arrived on these shores back when this land was still part of Ilara and began a small settlement. These trees are all that remain of them.”

I followed her into the clearing. “What do you mean?”

“Just like your blood coral, the bone trees grew from the bodies of my ancestors. When I die, I will be buried here, and my bones will nourish the roots of a new tree. The last tree, unless I choose to have a child someday.” She placed her hands on the nearest trunk and looked up at the bare branches. “They flowered, once upon a time. The fruit was poisonous, if eaten straight, but the seeds could be made into teas and elixirs with healing properties, just like your pearls.”

“Why did they stop blooming?” I asked. The wind picked up, and the branches rattling overhead sounded eerily like dried bones. A chill ran through my body, and I suddenly had the feeling we were in the presence of spirits.

“When the Galethians came, they drove my ancestors out of the region, back to the islands where they’d come from. A few stayed, but it wasn’t enough to sustain the grove.”

“You said Roan’s mother was a healer as well. Does that mean he shares your ancestry?”

“Only on his mother’s side.” She sat beneath the trees, finding a space for herself amid the roots, as if she already longed to be among them.

I stayed where I was, in the space between the forest and the grove. “If the Galethians were Varenians once, then what happens when they bury their dead? Do they grow some other kind of tree?”

She smiled sadly and looked up, past the branches into the sky. “The Galethians don’t bury their dead, Nor. They burn them.”

Her words sent another chill through me. “And the ashes?”

“Scattered on the wind.”

“Meaning they don’t return to the earth.”

Adriel’s eyes were shiny with tears. “And the cycle of magic—nature, whatever you want to call it—is broken.”

I could tell she considered this a genuine tragedy, and under other circumstances I would have agreed. But if the Ilarean royals really were linked to the bloodstones the way Varenians were linked to the pearls, then it might mean there was a way to break that cycle as well. Without the blood of a royal, the stones would lose their power.

And there was only one full-blooded Ilarean royal left: Ceren.

* * *

That night, I lay awake in my new bed in the little workshop, which Adriel had cleaned up for me, despite my protests. I liked the smell of the herbs, the books and crystals and even the cat, whose name I had learned was Fox (short for foxglove, a flower that Adriel said could either be medicinal or poisonous depending how it was used). Fox had come to sleep at the foot of my bed, curled up and making a strange rumbling sound that Adriel called purring. She assured me it meant he liked me, but I had my doubts.

I opened the book Adriel had given me, the one with the bone tree on the cover. It had come from her ancestors, she said, passed down through generations, and might help me to understand the connection between blood and nature. Though, she warned me, the language was deliberately confusing and arcane to prevent anyone who wasn’t a witch from using it, and