The Priory of the Orange Tree (The Roots of Chaos, #1)

by Samantha Shannon

‘In darkness, we are naked. Our truest selves. Night is when fear comes to us at its fullest, when we have no way to fight it,’ Ead continued. ‘It will do everything it can to seep inside you. Sometimes it may succeed – but never think that you are the night.’

Sabran had never seen the Bower of Eternity. If she was dreaming of it, something was afoot.

Mama bribed a guard to pass me a letter, telling me to remain strong.’ She touched the pendant at her throat, set with emeralds. ‘A week later, Father came to inform me of her death. He told the court that she took her own life, shamed by her attempt to abandon her king . . . but I know otherwise. She would never have left me alone with him.’

embroidered in gold thread.

There were the eyes Loth knew, their laughter gone.

He dreamed of Kit, entombed in bloodstained glass, trapped for ever between one world and the next.

Sabran might call Briar House her nest, but at present it was more of a cage. Rumours haunted its corridors and cloisters. The very walls seemed to hold their breath.

She thought of Sabran’s cool touch on her hand. When she slept, she dreamed of a blood-red rose against her lips.

Black hair was wrapped into a knot at the crown of her head. She wore pleated trousers, a tunic of deep blue silk, and a velvet surcoat. A fine sword hung at her side.

Her face was angular and brown, her lips chapped. Dancing pearls adorned her throat. But what seared itself into his memory, in the few moments their gazes held, was the scar. It whipped across her left cheekbone before curling towards the corner of her eye. Exactly like a fishhook.

He was a large man. Wide in the shoulders, broad in the chest, paunchy in the stomach. Eyes like clove, hooded with age, set in a sallow and blunt-edged face. Grey hair that held glints of copper. A mouth with a history of laughter etched around it. Round eyeglasses. Roos.

‘Take off your mask,’ she bit out, ‘or I swear to you, I will take off the face beneath it.’ Two gloved hands revealed a pale countenance. Truyde utt Zeedeur stared at the lifeless High Prince of Mentendon. ‘I never meant for him to die,’ she whispered. ‘I only wanted to help you, Your Majesty. I only wanted you to listen.’

wanted nothing but to sleep. Instead, he went to his knees beside the window, and he wept for Kitston Glade.

Thinking of Kit split his chest open. Grief was a swallet in him, draining all good thoughts.

There existed a realm between dreaming and waking, and Niclays was imprisoned in it.

Something was changing in her. A feeling, small as a rosebud, was opening its petals.

As the archers stood down, Ead looked back at the place that had been her prison and her home for eight years. The place where she had met Loth and Margret, two people she had not expected to befriend. The place where she had grown to care for the seed of the Deceiver. The guards came after her. They hunted a ghost, for Ead Duryan was no more.

The blood of the tree spreading over her tongue, soothing the blaze in her throat.

And the heat cracked her open, like the clay she was, and made her body cry out to the world. All around her, the world answered.

I know men, too, from their minds to their cocks.

‘I have crossed the South and the West to get back to you, Sabran Berethnet, and you reward me thus?’

‘am I a greater fool to want you still?’ Ead crossed the space between them. ‘No more a fool than I,’ she said, ‘to love you as I do.’

‘I am not your queen,’ Sabran whispered over her skin, ‘but I am yours.’

‘Perhaps then I can steal you away.’

‘My heart knows your song, as yours knows mine. And I will always come back to you.’

I will always come back to you.

Death had never held much power over him. He thought of it as he did an old friend that would one day knock again on his door.

Death, after all, would either end the pain of grief or reunite him with Jannart in whichever afterlife proved to be the right one. Each day, each step, each tick of the clock took him closer to that golden possibility. He was tired of having half a soul.

The realisation of his mortality. The reduction of his being to the wetness at his neck.

Ead tucked her head under Sabran’s chin and listened to her heartbeat. She prayed that sound would never cease.

And then, I pray you, Your Majesty, leave me to my shadows. I’m afraid they are all I have left.’

Ead retrieved Ascalon.

‘I have you, little sister.’ Nayimathun lifted Tané on to her back. ‘Hold on.’

‘Your bones lie behind me. Nothing lies ahead. You are dead, and I an old man,’ he murmured. ‘I resented you for such a long time, Jannart. I had been comfortable in the belief that I would die before you did. Perhaps I even tried to ensure it. I hated you – hated the memory of you – for leaving first. Leaving me.’

‘You loved me. Without condition. You saw the person I could be. And I will be that person, Jan. I will endure, my midnight sun.’

‘there is enough of a story there to fill a book.’

‘I would live alone for fifty years to have one day with you.’