the last time she’d employed a lethal mushroom in her nasty doings.The scepter lay on the floor up ahead as if it were nothing, a useless stick someone had dropped in her hurry to leave. No doubt it had once been vibrant with color, a gleaming, crystalline staff with elaborate, gem-encrusted filigree awaiting the first touch of its intended’s hands. But now, the heart at its top was shriveled and gray. What gems still remained had turned black. The filigree was rusted and, in parts, had completely flaked off. But had it been otherwise, had she found a scepter as glorious and pulsating as Alyss Heart’s, she would have thought it a trick, a setup. The scepter at her feet, so elaborate in its decay-this was beauty. Yet here it lay, abandoned, discarded, just as she had been by her family.“And they had the impudence to blame me!” she yelled. Again, her words reverberated until they became noise.“It’s your own fault, Rose,” Theodora had said. “I cannot allow you to become queen. You refuse to listen to anyone’s counsel but your own, and you insist on being so undisciplined, disregarding the most basic principles of White Imagination.”“Perhaps I have discipline in other things!” she had
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