64. Chapter 64
Chapter 64
Kat
Anxious voices hover above me. I try to open my eyes, but they are sealed shut. Frustration burns inside my chest. It’s like my ears are fogged too, and I cannot understand what is being said.
I fall back into blackness.
The next time my awareness surfaces, all is quiet. I breathe through my nose and wriggle my tongue. A familiar scent I cannot name caresses over me. A dull throb pulses from my arm. I try to touch it, but something restrains me. I pry my eyes open, blinking against the candlelight, and inspect what holds me in place.
I’m not expecting to see my wrist tied to the bedpost.
I try to move, only to realize all of my limbs are tied down. I thrash against the bonds, trying to find a weak spot, trying to find some give in the rope. Nothing .
“Be still.” Rahk’s low voice comes from somewhere above me. “You’ll rip open your stitches.”
I follow the sound of his voice until I find him leaning against the wall beside the bed, his empty gaze fixed on the far wall, his arms crossed over his chest. No one else is in the room.
This is . . . Rahk’s estate. Not mine.
I remember running through the Wood. I remember turning myself over to Rahk. Beyond that, I don’t remember anything. He must have brought me here. But why? Why not take me back to the Nothril Court or kill me outright?
I would have had hope about that turn of events . . . if he hadn’t tied me to this bed in a way that I cannot hope to escape.
“It all makes sense now.”
Rahk’s cold, emotionless rumble fills the quiet space with dreadful resignation.
I don’t speak. Shame and sorrow fill me with equal measures, and I wish I could go back to the black oblivion I just came out of.
“All of it makes sense. The way you disguised yourself as a boy and came here—and why you never confided in me. Why you were always afraid of me killing you. Why I could never assuage your fears and make you fully trust me. How, even in our best moments, you always seemed to hold back from me. I attributed it to your mother’s death. But your mother’s death didn’t hold you back from Faerieland; it propelled you into it. You became the Ivy Mask to ensure what happened to your mother never happened again.”
I give a fruitless tug on my bonds. The walls of this room close in around me, suffocating me in my own lies and deceptions and the inevitable doom that has finally tracked me down.
“You knew I was sent to hunt you,” Rahk continues, his voice growing quieter. “You knew the entire time—or most of it. You must have figured it out when I pursued you on that first raid. All my efforts to win your trust and affection, no matter how much you might have longed to give them, were for naught. None of it could change that I would someday catch you and kill you.”
I give a few painful coughs to clear my throat. My words are scratchy and weak. “Now you know my temperamental nature is actually much more rational.”
“I never thought you were temperamental, ” Rahk growls back. “I knew you had reasons. Tell me: did you already know how to play Fool’s Circle?”
I wince and nod, then try to push up on one elbow—and end up jerking my wounded arm. I hiss in pain. “I did know how to play, but not well. Gah, these ropes are biting into my skin. If I promise not to—”
Rahk plants two hands on the bed, leaning over me. My throat goes even drier than before. “But I cannot believe anything you say, Kat. You’ve lied to me. Countless times. I cannot allow you to run away again. I’m not untying you.”
“I hated lying to you!” I cry, trying again to shoot up and only earning myself more pain. The burn inside my lungs turns to a roar. “Why do you think I panicked when we married? Why do you think I kept pushing you away? Why do you think I told you to go back to Faerieland? It was because I cared about you, and it was ripping me to pieces to have to keep this secret from you!”
“Then why didn’t you leave?” Rahk demands, his voice shaking. “Why did you stay? In my house? As my servant? As my wife? Why did you wait so long?”
“Because I didn’t have the power to leave!” I shoot back. “When I was your servant, I couldn’t leave and work elsewhere without a reference!”
“I would have given you one!”
“But I still wouldn’t have been hirable! I only worked for you for three weeks. I needed to have held a position for six months to be hirable elsewhere. When you found me out, I had no say in that marriage arrangement. What did you expect me to do? Run away again, with nowhere to go, abandoning my fortune, all while knowing that you would pursue me anyway? What would you have had me do, Rahk?”
He drops into a nearby chair, his shoulders dejected, his hand covering the back of his neck. “I would have had you tell me the truth.”
That lights a fire inside me that sends words hurling out of my mouth. “You would have had me abandon the people who needed me? You would have had me turn myself over to you and say, ‘Please chop off my head now, dear Rahk, I have nothing in this world I want or need save death at your hand’ ?”
“I wanted you to tell me,” Rahk seethes, piercing me with his black eyes, “so I could save you.”
I stop. Then I bare my teeth at him. “You are berating me for lying to you, when you kept your own secret from me. You knew how deeply it would hurt me to know you were hunting for the Ivy Mask, so you refused to tell me. You admitted this—that you had no plans to ever tell me even though you gave me gifts and kisses and made me fall in love with you!”
He rakes his hands through his hair. “I know. I did not want to hurt you, just as you did not want to hurt me. What have we done, Kat? I am furious with you; I feel deeply betrayed and I hate being lied to, even though I know you have every right to feel the same things about me. There are just so many things I am confused about. How could you have gone after your mother into the Wood? How could you even have survived?”
I blink hard. “I did not go after my mother into the Wood. She went after me.”
Rahk visibly flinches. “What?”
I draw in a fortifying breath, turning my face away. My hands fist in their bonds. “The Wood swallowed me when it expanded. We were having a picnic, as I said. My parents said to stay close, but I disregarded them. I went up to the Wood because it had always drawn me. I could hear it calling to me. Then, all of a sudden, it expanded. I was caught inside.”
He waits in silence for the rest of the story.
“A fae found me. A great, tall fae with horns curling out of its head.”
The blood drains from Rahk’s face. “You were a slave? In Faerieland?”
“In Nothril.”
He buries his head in his hands. When he lifts it again, his eyes are reddened. “You were a slave. In Nothril. As a child?” He looks away from me. Still, I catch the tear that slides down his cheek. It cuts me in half. The muscles in his throat flex. He seems to struggle pulling himself together before he croaks, “How long?”
“Not long,” I whisper. “A few days. It was the Valehaven Tailor who had pity on me, and when he discovered I could see the edges of the Paths, he told me how to leave. I went back home . . . only to find Mama was gone. She’d come after me. No one knew what happened to her.”
“So you went back,” he whispers.
I nod.
“You knew how to find Paths,” he continues, putting the pieces together. “So you tried different ones, searching for your mother. Was that how it began? You would go to different Courts and then you would show others how to get out?”
“It took me a while to be brave enough to go back. But once I started, I did not stop. I met the tailor again and we began coordinating rescues as I grew older.”
“What ever happened to your mother?”
“I still don’t know. My belief is that she wandered the Wood and against all chance, somehow found her way out. She was wearing the same clothes when she came out as she did going in. I did not find any evidence she had been a slave.” I pause, hesitating. Then, “Rahk . . . I did not suffer much as a slave. The hardest part was losing Mama.”
“But you felt like you should have suffered,” Rahk says. “Because you were the reason your mother was lost—and because so many others had to stay a slave while you got out.”
Emotion clogs my throat. I look away.
“It all makes sense,” he says softly. Then, with earnest gentleness, “Do you truly think this changes how dear you are to me?”
I stare at him with more shock than if he’d sprouted two new heads. “Why, yes, I did think it changed things. I thought me being a criminal to the fae changed things very, very much.”
“I never wanted to hurt you.” He buries his head in his hands. “I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know how to protect you. If I don’t take you back to Nothril, my sister will die.”
My voice is dull with resignation. “Then take me back.”
“If I take you back, they will make me enforce their judgment.”
My own face crumples. “I’m so sorry.”
He shoots to his feet, raking a hand through his hair as he paces across the floor. When he speaks, it sounds like there are tears in his voice again. They strike my heart like shards of glass. “I’ve known for some time it was you. I just so badly didn’t want to believe it that I refused to even consider it. But I knew. I knew when I saw the injury on your leg.”
I close my eyes, fighting the shuddering of my own lungs.
The slice of a knife through rope makes my eyes fly wide. Rahk cuts each of my bonds, until I am able to sit up and clutch the quilt to my chest.
“Whatever happens, there is something we must do.” Rahk takes my hand, pressing it flat against his.
I have never seen this ritual, yet somehow I recognize it. I try to yank my hand back. “You cannot—you cannot bond with me! I’m about to die, Rahk!”
“You won’t die if I have a say in things,” he growls, tightening his grip on my hand. “I told you before. I cannot take you into Faerieland as anything other than my true, bonded wife. So if I take you to Nothril, then it will be as my wife.”
I hardly breathe as he murmurs the words of a spell that feels so sacred, it should never be uttered on our magicless soil. Still, I do not protest when he tells me the words I must speak. He tells me his name, the name only he himself knows. I speak the words back, letting our names and souls twine together as one, fused by a drop of our blood. Our heartbeats pulse in tandem. A new, strange, and exhilarating sensation.
Then Rahk gets to his feet, his black eyes devouring me whole. “I don’t know what to do yet, but I will. I am not letting them hurt you.”
When he strides out, the air in the room feels thinner, stretched too tight. I clutch my palm to my chest, fingers pressing against the place where his presence lingers, where something irrevocable has settled into my bones. I don’t call him back. But my lips part, just for a second, as if I might.