Rose in Chains

Briony arms her twin with water, magic, and a lie

Six hours before the battle that would decide everything, Briony handed her twin brother Rory a vial of lake water to fuel his protection boundary around Claremore Castle.

Briony arms her twin with water, magic, and a lie

Six hours before the battle that would decide everything, Briony handed her twin brother Rory a vial of lake water to fuel his protection boundary around Claremore Castle. She rehearsed the plan: pour the water, place a drop on his tongue, and link the castle, the lake, and the school under one Rosewood shield. Rory asked if she truly believed the six-hundred-year-old prophecy—that during the eclipse, the Heir Twice Over would end the war. She told him yes without wavering, though her conviction outpaced her certainty. He rode out with Didion and the army. Hours later, from the castle balcony, Briony watched the eclipse end and dust billow from the battlefield. The boundary evaporated. She reached along the magical thread connecting her to her twin and found only silence. Rory was gone, and she had told him he was invincible.

He searches her bedroom while she hides inches away

Mallow's soldiers poured through the gates in a blue tide. Briony and her best friend Cordelia fled downstairs, but the castle crumbled as Rory's protection magic leached from the stones. Briony found her guard Anna dead on the stairs and raced to burn sensitive papers on her desk. She cast a blending spell and hid inside her armoire. Then Toven Hearst—tall, pale-haired, unmistakable—burst into her room. He searched the bathroom, ripped open her trunk, and flung the armoire doors wide. She stood invisible, his face inches from hers, close enough to feel his breath. He didn't see her. His friend Finn Raquin warned him that Mallow was coming, and Toven muttered there was still time before bolting. Briony emerged trembling, only to run into a Bomardi officer named Gains in the corridor. He knocked her unconscious.

Briony discovers impossible power but cannot save them all She woke days later in a dungeon cell packed with fifty collared women—Cordelia, her cousin Phoebe, her friend Katrina, and even Larissa Gains, daughter of a Bomardi elite, among them. The gold collars suppressed magic; the men running this operation intended to sell them as heartsprings—human batteries drained of their power. Briony organized an escape during medical exams. Velicity Punt and Eden, a sixteen-year-old volunteer, fought the guards. When the heartspring dealer Reighven began crushing Eden's heart with Heartstop, Briony felt something impossible surge through her chest—heart magic, despite the collar. She sliced Gains open and pinned Reighven to the ceiling. Yet Eden died in front of her.…