Chapter 6 Scarlette #3
By then, the storm was everywhere. The light was the color of drowning, the sky a ceiling of iron hammered close to the trees.
I could barely see my own hands, let alone the path.
I knew only that I had to move, to keep going, because if I stopped, the men would find me, or the cold would finish what they’d started.
It occurred to me, once or twice, that dying here might be preferable to being dragged back to Aldric or Tomas or whatever hell they’d built for girls like me, but the body is a stubborn thing, and mine was not ready to quit. Not yet.
Time lost its edges. Sometimes I found myself standing still, teeth chattering, not knowing how I’d come there.
Sometimes I hallucinated voices, sweet and cajoling, urging me to lie down, to rest, to let the storm wrap me in sleep.
Other times I saw faces in the trees, twisted and feral, and one of them looked like the girl I’d been before all this, the one who could still laugh, who still believed in love or in safety or in a future with windows and a warm bed.
I slipped and fell again, this time landing on my hands.
The skin split, and I left streaks of blood across the snow.
I tried to crawl, but the ankle sent up such a protest I nearly blacked out.
I bit down on the pain, literally, sinking my teeth into my own wrist, willing myself forward another inch, then another.
The bundle was gone, lost somewhere in the fall, but I barely noticed.
All that mattered was forward, toward some shape I’d glimpsed in the white—a line of trees, darker than the rest, standing shoulder to shoulder like a jury.
I knew the place before I reached it. The oaks.
The circle. I had not meant to come here, not truly, but the forest had guided me, or maybe the old magic had, or maybe it was just the way all lost things find their own level.
I belly-crawled to the edge and lay there, breath pluming weak and irregular, head pillowed on my arms.
The pain receded, replaced by a floating, woolen warmth that I recognized as the first step toward dying. I welcomed it, even as I cursed the body for betraying me so completely. I tried to remember the prayer Mother had taught me for dying, but the words scattered, outpaced by the snow.
Lightning split the sky, close enough to show the whole world in blue and black.
I saw the oaks, saw their roots writhe and twist through the earth like veins.
I saw, too, the place at the center of the ring, a small hollow in the snow where the ground seemed to pulse with light.
The wind whipped around me, and I felt myself lifted, not by strength but by the storm’s own arms.
I crawled. Or maybe I was dragged, but either way, I crossed the ring. Every breath burned, but the cold could not touch me now; I was past the reach of that pain. I collapsed at the center, rolling onto my back, eyes open to the sky.
Another flash, and this time I saw him.
He was there, standing over me, just as he’d been in the dream.
The man in black, his arms tattooed with snarling wolves, his eyes the impossible gold of firelight.
He knelt beside me, one hand outstretched, fingers tipped with claws or maybe just dirty from the road.
He smelled of leather and tobacco, of blood and rain.
“Come through,” he said, the words slurred by distance or by magic or by my own ebbing sense. “You’re almost there.”
I reached for him, but my hand was clumsy, useless. Still, he took it, and the warmth of his grip shocked me, made the heart stutter and then pound. The world tilted, the snow turning to water, the water to sky, and then everything collapsed into a pinprick of light.
He smiled, and it was not a kind smile, but it was real.
“Don’t let them catch you,” he whispered. “Not when you’re so close.”
I wanted to answer, wanted to ask who he was, or what he wanted from me, but the light swallowed the words.
In the darkness, I heard the trumpets again, but this time they sounded not like hunters but like angels, calling something home.
I closed my eyes and let the old magic take me.
***
I’d always thought the stories of magic were warnings.
Old Nan with her boiled tongue, her tales of girls who strayed from the path and were swallowed by the woods.
The lesson was to obey, to stay close to the hearth, to let the men do the dangerous work.
But here I was, belly-down in the snow, my whole body a map of pain, and the only thing that waited for me was the circle and the storm.
Thunder stalked the sky, moving in low, rolling growls that made the ground tremble.
Each time I tried to push myself up, the ankle screamed, but so did the rest of me, the hunger, the cold, the blood oozing from my knees and palms. I dragged myself by inches to the very center, where the snow was gone, and only black earth showed, ringed by the roots of the oaks.
The air was strange here. The wind, which howled everywhere else, died at the edge of the circle.
The silence inside was so thick it pressed on my eardrums, turned my breath to thunder.
But there was something else, too: a heat, like the way it gets before a summer storm, where the air trembles and every hair on your body stands up to listen.
It made no sense, but I welcomed it, even as it burned in my lungs.
I tried to look up, but my head would not obey.
Instead, I lay there, face to the dirt, and let the storm rage over me.
The lightning came again, closer now, turning the oaks into giants, their limbs snaking overhead.
The thunder that followed cracked so loud I thought it would split my skull.
The air sizzled. It was not just light and sound, but force, a wall that shoved at my back and threatened to drive me through the earth.
I felt the ground buck beneath me, a ripple that passed from tree to tree.
The circle was alive. I knew then that what the men feared was not the old stories or the girls who ran, but this—the truth that the world could change, that the rules could break, that a girl with nothing left might draw down the sky and remake the night.
My vision was mostly gone, black at the edges and white in the middle, but I forced my eyes open one last time.
The trees leaned in, their branches almost touching, as if eager to see what would happen next.
The air inside the ring began to shimmer, a distortion like the heat above a cookfire, bending the trunks into impossible shapes.
My hands, pressed into the mud, tingled with a current I’d never felt before, something older than pain.
The storm spoke to me in a language I understood only because it was made of need and of endings. I pressed my bleeding palm to the dirt and whispered, “If you want me, take me. But let it be somewhere better than this.”
I thought of Mother, of Agnes, of the widow with her brave, battered hands.
I thought of the man with the wolf on his arm, the one who said “come through” as if it was a blessing and a dare.
I thought of the men behind me, their boots and torches, their certainty that the world belonged to them.
Let them have it, I thought, and spat the last of my blood into the ground.
The light came then, not gold or white but a blue so sharp it burned.
It filled the circle, swallowed the trees, boiled the snow into steam.
It touched me, and for a second, I was everywhere at once: in the circle, in the manor, in the hunting lodge, and the old stone church.
I saw my own body, small and broken, watched as the lightning threaded up my arms and across my chest. There was pain, but it was clean and bright, nothing like the slow rot of cold or the hunger that had gnawed me for days.
I screamed, but the wind took the sound and turned it into something else.
The blue light thickened, wrapped around my limbs, and lifted me from the ground.
I hung there, weightless, above the dirt, and watched the world dissolve at the edges.
My thoughts were shards, scattered and sharp.
I felt myself slipping, body tearing away from the mind, and I wondered if this was what dying was like.
But then there was a second pull, a drag sideways, and the world flipped. For a moment, everything stopped—the thunder, the pain, the cold. I was nowhere. I was nothing.
And then, in the silence, I heard a voice.
“Scarlette.”
The sound was gentle, but it hurt worse than the lightning. I tried to reach for it, but my arms were gone. I tried to answer, but my mouth would not form the words.
The blue light went white, then black.
I fell.
***
I woke with the taste of smoke and iron on my tongue, and the memory of a man’s hand wrapped around mine.
But when I opened my eyes, the world was new.