Chapter Eighty-Five. Daye
Daye
It was dawn on the spring side. Daye stood, barefoot, amid the wash of poppies, bloodred, wound bright.
Their petals fluttered against her calves.
Between her toes, the ground was damp and cool with runoff.
Just a step away, the snow pillowed upward, soft and white.
Above it, dawn was still hours away, the world still and calm and dark.
Two wings dangled from her shoulder blades, red and brown and blue and white. A warm, heavy weight against her back.
Daye took a deep breath. Behind her, the owl hooted softly. The blue jay was ahead of her, perched on a low, snowy branch. She closed her eyes.
Lifted her foot.
Took one last breath of the sweet spring air. And—
“Daye! Daye, what are you doing? Stop! Come back.”
No, Daye thought. It couldn’t be.
But it could. She opened her eyes, and all she could see was Rory running toward her, his clothes snow-stained and incongruous in the kingdom of spring surrounding him.
How could he be here, now, when it was still night in the world outside? When she was almost out, so, so close?
Daye froze, her foot suspended only inches from the snow. Close enough that she could feel the chill of it, a phantom caress against her skin.
Rory stopped a few feet away, as if afraid to spook her into crossing.
“Daye, please,” he said, breathing hard. “Just step away from the border.”
There was terror in his eyes. Though Daye couldn’t tell if it was terror of her wings, sudden and heavy against her back, or of what might happen once she stepped beyond the border. To her. To them. Did he know what her feathers meant?
Did it matter?
“Please. Come here,” Rory coaxed, reaching out a hand. Even hoarse with fear, his voice was steady.
The words were like fishing rods, lines arching to pull her down, down, down.
Daye sucked in a breath. She braced for the filaments to form around her, for the moment his words would coalesce into strings.
But his voice slid over her like water, finding no purchase in her feather-lined skin.
It felt a little bit like heartbreak, all over again. To know that she still wanted to go to him, when he called. Even when she didn’t have to.
To know that she wouldn’t. Not ever again.
“Daye?” Rory called, a fine fissure running through her name as his voice cracked.
A second passed between them. Slowly, Daye lowered her foot into the snow. The powder slid against the arch of her foot, cool and soft. She saw Rory’s eyes track the movement, saw his terror change, becoming a stark, sharp thing.
“Daye.” Rory swallowed. “Come here.”
“No.” It was whisper-thin, barely an exhale, her throat long unused for this sort of sound. And then again, louder, “No.”
Rory flinched.
He was breathing hard now, his chest rising and falling too fast. Blood was seeping from his curls, tracking down his forehead. “Please,” he begged. “Please don’t leave.”
Daye closed her eyes. Inhaled. It hurt, still. Rory’s pain. She suspected it always would.
“No,” Daye said a third time, snow-soft.
When she’d pictured it, stepping over the border and walking away, she never looked back, never turned around.
She always crossed the line and kept on walking.
But she looked back now. Of course she looked.
Through the trees, she could just see the stumps of her candles, glinting in the morning light, the pile of discarded vines and feathers beside them.
The poppies waved in the wind. A blackthorn flower landed between them, astoundingly white.
And Rory. Winter-pale and salt-crusted, tears and blood tracking down his cheeks. Her Rory.
For a long moment, Daye took it all in.
“Goodbye, Rory,” she whispered, one last time.
And took flight.