WALES 2022
PALE-SILVER MOONLIGHT WASHED THE valley clean. The craggy hills, pocked with gorse and sheep. The dark, shadowed river, bracketed by blossoming trees, water gushing like low static on a distant radio.
The stars, indifferent.
My love, beside me.
Our deaths, imminent.
We sat on the cliff edge, legs dangling over, shoulders pressed together, having walked up the steep hill by torchlight. My eyes stung with tiredness and grief, and I sucked in deep lungfuls of the ripe country air, relishing the chill of it in my chest.
Neither of us spoke. Once we did, there was no going back.
Even though I’d chased these answers for ten hundred years, I was suddenly afraid to hear them. I knew nothing would be the same hereafter, and the thought was both a blessing and a curse. I was at the very outer edge of my limits – Gracie a hard boundary I would do anything not to cross – but I was so immortally afraid of losing Arden in the process of chasing the truth.
Arden had always promised this would hurt, and I was so tired of pain.
Yet what other choice did I have?
This moment was a crux, a seam, an axis.
I chose to postpone it for a little while longer. To just be here with Arden, our hearts beating, alive, if not for much longer. To lift the veil as slowly as I could.
‘When did you first fall in love with me?’ There was a tremble beneath my words – from the cold, and from something more visceral still.
He stared up at the waxed moon. ‘Sometimes I think it was seeded from the start. Decided by the very hand that wrote the universe. But as for when the thought first truly struck me … it was Northern Song. You laid down your body for me, for my father, even though I was then a stranger. I had lived a couple of lives by then, and never before seen such selflessness. Such goodness .’
There was an old-fashioned cadence to his words, as though he was connecting himself to eras that had ended long ago.
I rested my head on his shoulder; a thoughtless intimacy. ‘In your less charitable moments, you call it martyrdom.’
‘It’s hard, remembering things you don’t.’ He wrapped an arm around me, then the length of his scarf, until we were cocooned. ‘The very foundations of us – the moments in which our love was forged – just don’t exist to you.’
Something I’d been grappling with lately. How profoundly sad it must be to carry our origins alone. ‘I get glimpses in really sharp focus, but they often vanish as soon as they arrive.’
‘How far back can you get?’ he asked, and I got the sense he’d been wanting to ask me this for a long time but didn’t feel he had the right – not when he’d neglected to answer so many of my own questions. ‘In those glimpses?’
‘Northern Song, I suppose, but not all of it. Slivers. The hot welts from the bamboo.’ I shuddered. ‘And other stuff comes to me seemingly at random. Like the other morning, when I mentioned the coffee in the Ottoman Empire and you clammed up. Straight away I felt why you were embarrassed –’
‘I wasn’t embarrassed, Evelyn. I was inappropriately turned on.’
We both laughed, enjoying the small moment of normal teenagedom.
‘The clearest memories, where I can remember full scenes, not just snippets …’ I searched the darkest recesses of my mind. ‘The asylum. That one stuck. Sometimes I think the memory lapses are a trauma response to all those hideous experiments. Other times I think it’s just human, to forget huge swathes of your life. How many people can honestly say they remember their first few years of existence?’
‘Do you have any sense of when you started to love me back?’
His voice sounded so young, so insecure, like a door had suddenly opened in the sky-high walls around his heart. This too felt like another question he had never dared to pose, but one that had needled him for centuries. He had asked why , back in the trenches. But not when . Not how .
I thought for a moment, unsure how to put such a complex thing into words. So I pressed my eyes shut once more, and searched for the right image. It came.
‘Whenever I try to pull at that thread, it leads me back to the desert. There were camels and tents, gold and salt, lakes and sand and date palms, and I felt something for you very deeply. Something that destroyed me, in the end.’
Arden swallowed hard, resting his head against mine. ‘We were best friends. The closest we had ever been spawned together, and we were raised almost as siblings, so tightly knitted were our families. That was one of the worst.’ He winced at the memory. ‘To gradually remember, as the years unpeeled, that I would have to kill the person I cared about most in the world. I can’t explain how … I was just a little girl. We were just kids. We played board games and pranked our elders. Our fate never felt so cruel to me as it did then.’
Something else I had never considered from his perspective. How it must feel to gradually realize what you have to do – and just how early that happened. How young he sometimes was when he began the search for me. How it stole his childhood again and again and again.
He ran a hand through his tangled hair. ‘Are you sure you want to know the truth?’
‘I’m sure,’ I said quickly, though now I was right up against the thing, the fear was almost enough to make me turn away. To make me hurl myself from the great height before I had to confront anything more terrible than I had already faced.
Several silent beats, our hearts pounding violently as one. He laced his fingers through mine, cold against my perpetually warm palm, and squeezed so hard I almost winced.
Finally, he spoke. Calm and measured and afraid. ‘Every time I’ve considered telling you, I’ve agonized over how to do it. Which words to choose. Which phrasing would take the most sting out of it. And I still don’t know.’
‘I think I’ve imagined every possible explanation,’ I admitted. ‘I’m not sure you can surprise me. Hurt me, yes. But surprise me? No.’
He ran a thumb over the veins on the back of my hand. ‘What have you imagined?’
‘Well, there are the more human options, such as revenge. I did something awful to you, and the only way you can live with it is by punishing me again and again.’
He shook his head, but there was a certain tension to it that made me think I wasn’t entirely off base.
‘Or there’s the fact that you might just have kind of a thing for killing,’ I said. ‘Like, it gets you off.’
He snorted. ‘Couldn’t be further from the truth.’
An owl hooted above us, wistful and melancholy.
‘Then there’s the more supernatural stuff,’ I went on. ‘All of it sounds absurd, but what happens to us is absurd, so I haven’t ruled anything out. Ancient curses. Small gods. Malevolent witches.’ White hair, black nails. ‘What else? Oh, blood magic. You need my blood for something. But my most compelling theory is that we made a deal with the devil.’
At this last suggestion, Arden stilled, and my bones knew something before my mind did.
My heart hitched in my throat, my whole existence on the brink of free fall.
‘We didn’t make a deal with the devil, Evelyn. You are the devil.’