Chapter Forty-Eight
Forty-Eight
Elodie drops the stone and stumbles forward, reaching for me the same way I reached to save Rowenna.
I don’t know how she found her way up here, or where she found the courage to strike Rowenna, but I do know one thing: She did it for me. To save me. My most unlikely and truest friend.
Her fingers lock around my wrist, and she gasps as the added weight drags her forward. Her braids fall from their intricate knot, and her skirt tears as she’s dragged through the rocks, but she notices none of it.
“I’ve got you,” Elodie promises, but she’s wearing silky gloves adorned with pearls, and I already feel them slipping off her delicate fingers.
Her face contorts with effort. She struggles and strains forbidding me to fall, but every second the glove slips a little lower until it eventually rips free.
Elodie screams my name as I plummet. I can see the panic in her eyes, her mind frantically searching for another solution, but she’s already done far more than expected.
More than my own sister did. So instead of screaming with terror, I muster a small smile.
So she knows how grateful I am, how much her efforts mean, and how comforting it is to die, knowing I wasn’t alone.
I had a few true friends on this mountaintop.
“Help Alaric!” I scream into the wind, but I don’t know if she heard before her face is replaced by the gray blur of the cliff.
Then it’s just me and the sky. And Rowenna, too, I realize—falling with me. Leading the way, even in death.
It’s tragic but also, inexplicably, right that we should die together. She was there from the very beginning—my oldest friend, pulling me into her arms as I drew my first breath and, now, falling into oblivion with our last.
I wonder if she felt a twinge of remorse in her final moments.
If she regretted trying to shove me over the ledge.
I don’t regret saving her, but I do regret living so much of my life in her shadow.
I regret that she never got to know this stronger, braver version of me.
This girl who has always had so much more to offer our people and country beyond the planting beds.
But in my desperation to be exactly like Rowenna, I didn’t leave space for my own roots to grow.
I loved my sister so much, I forgot to love and nurture myself, and she never tried to correct me.
She was more than happy to soak up all of the sunshine for herself.
This should probably infuriate me, but even now I can’t bring myself to hate her.
Just as I don’t fault myself for loving her—for always seeing the best in her, even when it was no longer true.
There’s beauty in loving someone for their potential, for treating them as if there was never any doubt they’d grow into the most glorious version of themselves.
I can’t hate the bagrava for the same reason.
And I don’t regret sowing and tending it, despite knowing it could be stolen by the Marauders or taken by the Vanzadorians.
The plant isn’t to blame when wicked people misuse it.
Just as I’m not to blame for how Rowenna used me.
We can’t control how our love is received or what others choose to do with it.
We can only sow the best of ourselves into the soil of each relationship and hope our hearts are tended well.
And if not, there’s still hope. Just like plants can be propagated and replanted, there’s always an opportunity to start over and try again. A way for a piece of us to continue on, even if the original roots have rotted.
That’s all I can hope for now—that some piece of me will live on to see the future I attempted to cultivate with Alaric.
A world where Tashir and Vanzador will flourish together.
I want so badly to see it. To till the ground of the new world we sacrificed so much to create.
But even knowing the seed has been planted is enough.
It has to be.
The bottom must be close now. I wish it would come faster. I’m ready to escape this place between worlds and sprint into the Great Fields Beyond—wherever, and whatever, that may be.
I used to try to picture it when I was young, but I could never conjure anything other than light, even brighter than the sun.
Now that I’m so close to crossing that threshold, I feel strangely certain the Great Fields Beyond are different for each of us—like millions of individualized planting beds we can cultivate as we see fit, each of us pruning, planting, and tending our own eternity.
And in mine, there will always be a sea of purple bagrava.
Surprisingly, I see Alaric there, too, sprawled out on his back, hands clasped behind his head. His bare, pale chest a stark contrast to the deep violet petals.
Even in my fantasies, he refuses to wear a shirt.
My heart judders as I realize this might not be a fantasy. Alaric could be joining me there soon. He could be there already, dead from a wound I inflicted. I can only pray he’ll eventually forgive me. That he’ll be waiting for me with his smoldering smile and beautiful eyes.
Perhaps the afterlife has always been the only place a Tashiri girl and Vanzadorian boy can be together.
The thought brings the tiniest smile to my lips, but pain obliterates it a second later—bone-crushing, earth-shattering pain that starts in the soles of my feet and spirals up my ankles.
It cleaves through my calves, thighs, and hips, exactly how I expected slamming into the ground at the base of the mountain would feel, except I hoped not to feel it.
I assumed death would claim me on impact, but I’m in far too much pain to be dead.
My legs are pulsing, my back is hot and tingling, and when I manage to crack my eyes, I decide they must be damaged too, because what I see doesn’t make sense.
Rowenna and I are sprawled across a smooth slab of stone, rather than shattered across boulders and scrub oak.
And while the wind continues to blow, my hair streams down my back instead of up around my face.
The sheer cliff wall seems to be moving perplexingly downward.
Something that could only happen if I was surging upward.
My heart somersaults, and disbelieving laughter spills from my lips, because there’s only one way a slab of stone could be moving contrary to the laws of nature. Only one way rock could burst from the mountainside and catch me out of thin air.
“Alaric!” His name is a laugh, a cry, a prayer on my lips. I can’t stop saying it as the stone slab reaches the summit and dumps me back into the scree before returning to the earth, just as quickly as it appeared.
I tumble to a stop, and Rowenna’s lifeless body lands beside me.
I stare at her blank face and unseeing eyes, and my eyes finally flood with tears.
In part because she’s really, truly gone this time, but more so because she’s here.
Because Alaric caught her too. He knew it’s what I’d want, despite everything.
With a painful grunt, I push up to my knees and squint across the summit, praying I’ll find him alive and conscious, maybe even sitting up.
But he’s precisely where I left him, face down in the red-black puddle of blood.
The only change is that one arm is extended, fist clenched.
Proof he moved the earth to save me, though I still can’t fathom where he found the strength. He was already so close to death.
Elodie is kneeling beside him, flapping her hands and crying hysterically. “You have to wake up! I can’t carry you down the mountain, and I can’t just leave you to die. Too many people have died today already.”
My body screams with pain as I hobble closer, but it’s nothing compared to the other feelings exploding in my chest—feelings of love, joy, relief, and regret, but most of all profound gratitude for these two people who risked everything for me. Who sacrificed everything for me.
“Elodie!” The sound is a rasp in my throat, but somehow she hears it and turns.
Her mouth drops open, and now she’s crying even harder, tripping over herself as she runs toward me. “Indira! H-how is this possible? How did you survive?”
“Alaric moved the earth and caught me,” I say as I fall into her arms.
We sink awkwardly to the ground, both of us crying too hard to speak, holding on to each other like neither quite believes the other is real.
When I finally catch my breath, I pull back and grip Elodie by the shoulders, so I can look into her brave, beautiful face. “Thank you for saving my life.”
“Alaric is who really saved you. I was too late.”
“Your timing was perfect. You did what I couldn’t. You…” I steal a glance back at Rowenna, and an awful, strangled noise escapes my throat.
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” Elodie admits. “I just saw her driving you toward the edge, and instinct took over. I saw the stones, and it felt like they’d been placed there by fate—the one weapon I was equipped to use. I didn’t mean to hit her so hard.”
“Thank you.” I cut Elodie off with a hug. “I’ll never be able to thank you enough. I just don’t understand how you’re here. How did you know where to find me?”
Elodie wipes snot and tears across the back of her arm without a thought for her gloves or dress.
“I followed Delphine.” Elodie watches me as she says the name, gauging my reaction.
“She was acting so strange—all of you were—but when she excused herself from the queen’s gala preparations, I knew something was afoot.
She’d been having such a grand time barking orders and overseeing plans.
She wouldn’t have left—and she certainly wouldn’t have delegated authority to me—if it wasn’t something important.
So I excused myself and followed her. I’m a much slower climber, though, so I saw her running back down the mountain as I was coming up.
She didn’t see me, and I didn’t stop her to ask what happened, but she seemed to be in a hurry. ”