Chapter 40
Chapter
Forty
Iwake up on the wooden floor, my cheek cold from where the breeze floats between the board beneath me.
I groan as I push myself to sit, and then I remember.
I remember Hazel and the look on Hawthorne's face when I screamed at him. I remember the ache in my chest that is still there, and the smell that lingered in the air the entire ride back here. I remember feeling as if I was exploding. I remember the gold shimmer that lingered in the air around me, and Rylan’s voice.
You have the power to use it.
Magic. He was talking about magic. My mind feels hazy, as if I am walking through a dream, but it’s all real. My mother wrote about a power, something I have to find deep within.
I find myself unable to ignore her instructions, grappling at the one thing that we might have really shared.
I force myself onto my weak legs, and when I open the door, I see Rylan sitting on my front steps. He doesn’t turn at the creaking of the wood, and it makes me wonder if he is even awake.
I look out into the clearing, and when I see the grass flattened in a circle, I realise no part of what happened yesterday was of my imagination.
I lower myself down, sitting next to Rylan. My body feels hollow, my mind a storm of grief on top of grief. He looks at me, his eyes tired as if he has been up all night.
“Tell me,” I say.
“It doesn’t have to be today,” he murmurs. “We can wait unt—”
“Tell me.”
He nods, biting the inside of his cheek as he looks out ahead of us to where Merlin walks over the flattened grass. He runs a hand through his hair as he takes a deep breath, and it only makes me nervous.
“I’ve known about my power for as long as I can remember,” he says as he leans forward, resting his elbows atop his knees.
“My mother taught me how to use it, how to hone it into a skill that I could never forget. I inherited it from her, but my father didn’t know.
He couldn’t know—no one could.” He doesn’t meet my eyes as he pauses.
He just twists the ring he’s always wearing around his finger.
It's then that I realise it has the same pattern as both the dagger and the key, the one I was supposed to show him.
“It was our little secret, the thing we would do when no one else was watching, and in a place like Ashewood, few people were watching.”
I frown as I imagine myself as a child. I never knew a hint of magic. I have never seen anything like what Rylan did yesterday. I couldn’t imagine growing up like that.
“She told me that where she was from, everyone had the power to use magic.” Arizaya.
So it’s true—all the things written in my mother’s fable are true.
“That it was used freely, and it was treasured. “But here, it was something sacred, something special that needed to be hidden, because no one would understand it,” he says. “So that’s what I’ve done.
Ever since she died, I’ve only ever practiced small amounts of magic, nothing like what we used to do together. ”
I think about all the times I’ve felt like there was a wind behind me on a still day, or the way the sun always finds its way through the clouds when Rylan is near. The way light appeared in the cave entrance when I told him I was nervous.
“I only found my mother’s journal along with the dagger when my father and I packed up in Ashewood to move here.
The only person she ever named was your mother, Esther.
So when I heard rumours about a woman named Esther who had died years ago, and her only living child still living here in Sylvan, I took the chance in hoping that maybe you were like me.
” He takes a breath, his head finally turning to look at me, but I can’t take my eyes off of that ring.
“But I was drawn to you long before I ever knew that you were Esther’s daughter.
From that very first day down at the lake, I felt a pull towards you, and once I learned who you were, I understood why—or I thought I did.
When I gave you the dagger, I thought you might recognise it, but when you didn’t, I realised you knew nothing about what runs in your veins.”
I shake my head. None of this makes any sense. “How can I have this?” I turn my palms over as if looking for some kind of proof. “Why would I have this?”
He sits up. “The ability is passed down through the maternal line. The only way you can inherit it is if your mother had it.”
“One day you will understand, my girl,” my mother wrote.
“Why I had to do it this way. Why I couldn’t tell you where you come from, or who you are.
But if you look deep inside, you might find the answers.
I have hope, just as the gods did, that one day everything can be restored. But only if you flourish.”
Rylan shakes his head. “All I know is that both of our mothers had the ability. I think maybe everyone from Arizaya did, but I didn’t lie to you, Everleigh. I don’t know anything about Arizaya. I don’t know where it is or why they left.”
“I do.” The words fall from my lips.
His gaze cuts to mine. “How?”
“A fable,” I say, running a hand through my tangled hair. “Well, more like another of my mother’s riddles, except this one was addressed to me.”
His brows pull together as he turns to face me. “What did it say?”
I can see it now, the desperation in his gaze that reminds me of the night we found the passage in my mother’s journal.
He is telling the truth. He is as desperate as I am to know exactly where his mother came from.
I cannot keep whatever knowledge that I do have from him, not even to protect myself.
“She spoke about Arizaya, and how it was once a place where the gods, the people and the land worked in harmony.”
“The gods?”
I nod, jaw clenched as I swallow my nerves. “It said that they walked the land, but that this harmony was broken when the people took too much from the land. That the gods fled, and so did people like your mother, and mine.”
“On the ship,” he mutters.
I nod. “She wrote that someone or some people crossed the line, that they drained the land, and that all that was left of Arizaya was rubble and ash.”
“They didn’t let it go,” he breathes.
“What?”
“The magic, they didn’t let it go.”
I shake my head. I don’t know what he means, but my mind is like a whirlpool, with so many things circling that I can barely make sense of any of it.
“So this is why you were always lurking, always following me, just to see if I’d do anything magical?”
He lets out a sigh before turning his pleading gaze on me.
“At first,” he nods. “But once I gave you the dagger, and you didn’t recognise it, I told myself I would stop, but I couldn’t.
” He hooks his thumb under my chin. “I couldn’t keep myself away from you.
It wasn’t the power that drew me to you—it was simply you. ”
I turn my head, pulling out of his grasp. I can’t face the longing in his eyes. All of those interactions between us, all the times he conveniently appeared, were because he was watching me.
“So, is this what they are looking for?” I nod to where the grass is still splayed out in a circle. “Are we what they are looking for?”
I was scared before. With my mother’s riddle-filled journals, and the vials of gods’ blood that still sit buried in the cushions of the lounge. But this is something to be terrified of.
“I’m not sure,” he breathes. “If it is, then that means that there are more of us out there. Enough to send King Wyndbrook on a continent-wide hunt to execute every last one of us.”
That makes my heart stop. Finnick was in our mother’s study. He read the fable about Arizaya and the fall of the gods. Did he know she had magic? Did he have it himself?
“Is that what happened to my brother?” I breathe. “If he knew…about all of this. If he knew he had magic, what if he used it and got caught?”
“Rosie,” Rylan tries to pull my attention back to him. “Hey, Everleigh.” My eyes finally meet his as he cups the side of my face. “You can’t think like that, okay?”
“I don’t know how else to think.” My chest seizes, each breath too rapid, too shallow.
Hazel just died, accused of being the very thing that I am. The thing I always have been, but didn’t know it. She was murdered for crimes she didn’t commit, while I sit here having a conversation that implicates me beyond a doubt.
I don’t want to be next.
I won’t be next.
I look up, catching Rylan’s gaze as I think. As I realise what I need to do. I don’t know where we stand now, after everything shared on these steps today, but if I have any chance of finding my brother, of figuring out what all of this means, then I need to understand it myself.
“Teach me.”