17. Rowan
17
ROWAN
D isorientation was the new normal for Rowan as she moved about the shadowy halls of Wolf’s Keep. Since the day she’d been attacked in the woods, Conor had made a point to stay as far from her as possible—that was, until the day prior, when he kissed her in the library before once again making himself scarce. She sensed he was eternally right on the edge of losing control. The thought of causing that kind of frenzy in him made her feel strangely powerful.
Maybe it was normal for him to act so changeable, and she was simply too inexperienced to know otherwise. It wasn’t as if Rowan had someone she could ask, and since she’d yet to find the Red Maiden journals, she was left in the dark.
She was still afraid to tell him about her issues with the elders for fear of how he’d react. Her whole life, she’d been blamed for anything that had gone wrong around her, and she wasn’t sure that Conor had the temperament to handle the situation with tact. While he didn’t seem as fond of punishment as the elders, she still didn’t want to test things in case he blamed her for Elder Garrett’s interest. They seemed to have settled into a precarious rhythm that she didn’t want to disrupt.
Conor appeared at the library door. He looked both frustrated and nervous. Apprehension flashed in his blue eyes and he tugged on the sleeve of his dark green tunic, and rubbed a hand over the hair curling around the back of his neck. He still needed a haircut. The thought almost made her laugh, but Conor looked so serious she refrained.
“Good afternoon,” she said, closing the distance between them.
She waited to see if he would kiss her or shake his head and walk away like he often did. His gaze dropped to her lips, and she leaned in slightly. Instead of kissing her, he took a step back.
“Come with me,” Conor barked, grabbing her wrist and tugging her out of the room. She trailed behind him as he led her outside into brilliant sunlight.
“Have you given any more thought to changing the bargain?” she asked as she stumbled to keep up.
Conor stopped short so abruptly she nearly ran into him. “Rowan, please let that go. I heard your request, and I’m considering it. Do not push me on this.”
The words held no menace, but she still felt chastised. She was asking more in the hope of selling him on her plan so he wouldn’t suspect her deal with the Mother than of actually negotiating. Still, his easy rejection made rage curl in her stomach. She clenched her fists and reminded herself who she was speaking to as he led her around the corner and through the garden gates.
“The Dark Garden.” Rowan smiled. She spun in a circle, taking it in. It had changed since her last visit. The late afternoon sun cast orange light on several new blooms on the rosebushes. Most of it still remained in dry neglect, but she could see the potential.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked.
Conor shifted on his feet and looked anywhere but at her as he dragged his boot through the dirt. “It’s yours,” he said so quietly she was sure she’d imagined it. “It belongs entirely to you.”
“What?”
“The Dark Garden is yours—to do whatever you want with. If you need help or supplies, just tell Charlie, and he’ll make sure you get what you need. I don’t know what that might be, but I imagine seeds or bulbs or dirt.” Conor ran a hand through his hair and gestured at the barren plots.
Rowan stared at him, her mouth clogged with words that felt too heavy to speak. Humiliating tears rose in her eyes without her permission. Her body seemed poised to absolutely lose it around Conor at all times. It was extremely inconvenient.
Conor took a step back and threw his hands up. “Mother slay me! Now what did I do?”
Rowan swallowed hard. “Nothing, I?—”
It was embarrassing to even speak the words. Her clothing was all handed down, and she had no worldly possessions that were really hers. The lack reminded her of how ephemeral she truly was at all times.
She turned and looked around the garden in an attempt to compose herself. He probably meant to keep her busy and out of his hair, but with this one gift, he was also saying that he expected her to have time to grow something. Relief coursed through her as she turned back to Conor. He looked expectant, or maybe even afraid he’d done something wrong.
“I’ve never really owned anything before, at least not anything like this,” she whispered. It was thoughtful not just because she loved to garden, but because it gave her a space in which she belonged.
Conor’s face lit with recognition, and he gave her a sharp nod. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but instead, he turned and marched toward the gate.
“Conor,” she called after him, and he paused. “Thank you.”
He said nothing else as he disappeared through the gates.
Rowan looked around the garden. She saw its boundless potential. It just needed some love—something it had likely been sorely missing in Conor’s broody presence. She laughed to herself as she began to yank at weeds, the dry barbs threatening to cut into her hands.
Can’t make that mistake again , she thought, then said aloud, “Gloves first.”
Instead of getting to work, she lay on the dry grass and looked up at the beautiful blue sky, dreaming up a garden of her own.
She stayed there for a long time. In the back of her mind, she knew that Conor’s kind gift might have just been a clever way to keep her out of his business. The garden was just about as far as she could get from his sitting room while still remaining in Wolf’s Keep. She didn’t let it steal her joy, though, because—even if there was more than one reason to give her such a gift—she finally had something of her own.
Rowan padded through the western wing of Wolf’s Keep. She’d explored most of the rooms downstairs, but now she moved from guest room to guest room, wondering why the god of death required so many bedrooms.
Several rooms were occupied by the ghostly servants who worked for the Wolf, but most were empty—ghosts themselves —and covered in a heavy film of dust with furniture sheltered under white sheets.
Finally, Rowan reached the last room at the end of the hall. She cracked the door open and froze. The room was unlike most of the others in that it had been lived in recently. A familiar shawl was slung over the back of the plush chair by the empty fireplace. She stumbled back to the doorway.
“It was Orla’s room.”
Rowan startled, her heart jumping into her throat at Charlie’s voice.
“Were you following me?” she accused, turning to face him.
Charlie shrugged. “Conor’s out, and he asked me to keep an eye on you and figure out what you’re up to.”
“Snooping,” she said with her most charming smile.
Charlie laughed. “Grand! Will you continue now that you’ve been found out?”
Rowan looked back at the room. He was offering her free rein of the space, but she felt suddenly guilty now that she knew whose space it was—or had been. For some reason, this room felt more sacred than Orla’s at Maiden’s Tower.
Charlie waved her into the room. “You can go in, lass. I doubt she’d mind. She was a very guarded person, but it was clear she cared about you and the little one. She didn’t have many belongings anyway.”
Rowan took in the red velvet curtains on the windows and the dark purple bedspread. Her eyes caught on a canvas in the corner where the sun poured in through the window. She took a tentative step into the room even though she felt like an invader.
“What’s that?” she asked.
Charlie grinned. “Orla liked to paint.”
Rowan blinked, stupefied. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. She painted every week. She spent most of the night here working on her paintings. If I’m not mistaken, she had some works at home, too.”
Rowan stared at the reaper, trying to digest the fact that she hadn’t known her friend as well as she thought. Suddenly Orla’s long naps before ceremony nights made more sense. She was preparing to stay up all night and work. Rowan couldn’t believe her friend had kept such a beautiful secret for so long.
Charlie spoke up. “I can leave if you want.”
“No, don’t.”
Her grief was like lightning that struck with no warning or regard for the devastation it wrought. One moment, Rowan was fine, and the next, she felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her.
She’d grown up watching the people of Ballybrine mourn and wail publicly. But Rowan’s grief was quiet, private—jammed beneath her lungs and felt every time she tried to take a deep breath. Her heart was haunted, the sorrow appearing out of nowhere then dissipating into nothing. There, and gone, and everywhere all at once. She wanted to hoard it to herself, but couldn’t bear to sit alone with it.
“I don’t want to be alone, and it’s nice to know there were other people who treated her like a person and not just someone they could get something from,” Rowan said. “She was always so stoic in the face of everything and so hard to read. I admired it so much. I walk around with everything written on my face. I just couldn’t imagine what it was like to be so good at hiding it.”
“You really do have a way about you,” Charlie laughed. “It’s entertaining to watch.”
Rowan crossed the room to look at the half-finished painting. It was a landscape of the view outside the window: the walls of the keep, the dark forest in its fall colors.
“I don’t know much about art, but I think it’s quite good,” Rowan rasped.
Seeing its unfinished parts filled her with such a potent sadness that she felt like she needed to sit down. Orla didn’t get a chance to really be someone of her own making. Who would Orla have been if she’d gotten free of her life as acting Red Maiden? It was strange to mourn both a person and their potential.
“It’s not bad. Although, landscapes weren’t Orla’s thing. She liked portraits. She did one for me and one for Conor too. You’ve probably seen his in the sitting room.”
Rowan barked out a startled laugh. “She painted that? It’s amazing.” She had been shocked by the painting the first time she saw it because the artist had captured the eternal storminess in Conor’s eyes. She couldn’t imagine the talent it took to paint something so dynamic.
“She’s had a long time to perfect her work. There are a few paintings over there she wouldn’t let us look at,” Charlie said, waving his hand to a bunch of canvases in the corner.
Rowan crossed the room and took them out one by one. There was a painting of Mrs. Teverin, one of Elder Falon, and several of people Rowan didn’t recognize but knew must have been family members judging by their resemblance to Orla. She gasped as she pulled out a stunning portrait of Aeoife outfitted in a pink dress. Her smile was bright and lifelike, her strawberry-blonde hair painted into twin braids. Aeoife would have loved it.
Rowan stared. Orla had hidden tremendous talent. If Rowan had even a hint of such skill, she wouldn’t have been able to keep it to herself. Unless, of course, it was her talent for bringing plants back to life.
There was one more canvas, and Rowan’s hands shook as she pulled it out. She held it up to the light and immediately started to cry. It was a portrait of Rowan.
“That explains why she was so particular about her green paint order. She wanted to get your eyes right,” Charlie said. “Had to travel beyond the mountains for that one. All the way to Solemnity.”
Orla protected Rowan and Aeoife from prying eyes, even in Wolf’s Keep.
Rowan stared at her own face in the painting. Her hair was unbound, and she was clothed in a dark green dress that she would have never been allowed to wear in Ballybrine. It meant so much to her that Orla had painted her as something other than a Red Maiden. In the painting, her arms were crossed over a book held to her chest. Orla was always teasing Rowan about her love of romances, reminding her they had no place in her life, no matter how handsome Finn was.
When she was young, Rowan hated that Orla burst her bubble, but as she grew up and worried about Aeoife in the same way, she started to understand it was an act of love. It grounded her in the reality that romance would spell disaster, regardless of whether it was with a man or the Wolf.
Rowan’s face was somewhat serious in the portrait, her lips only half smiling, her eyes full of a barely contained fire.
“She does you quite a justice,” Charlie said. “Don’t tell Conor it’s here, or he’ll snatch it up so he can stare at those green eyes all day without you knowing.”
Rowan’s cheeks heated. “I don’t think we need to worry about me telling him anything. You, on the other hand, can’t ever seem to keep your mouth shut.”
She went to set the painting down on the floor, and only then did she notice it weighed considerably more than the others. She flipped it over and there, tucked in the wood over which the canvas stretched, was a journal.
“Goddess above! Orla, you evil genius!” Rowan squealed.
She snatched the journal and pulled it open. A folded paper fluttered out, landing at her feet. She was shocked when she bent and saw her name on it.
Rowan swallowed hard as she looked at Charlie.
“Found what you were looking for, then, lass?” Charlie asked.
“I didn’t know what I was looking for,” she admitted.
Rowan was simultaneously eager to read the words and desperate to postpone their finality. They might be the last words that Orla ever shared with her, and the knowledge of that was too weighty to hold. She took a few steps and collapsed into the plush chair by the fireplace.
As she took a steadying breath, she unfolded the letter and started to read.
Rowan,
If you’re reading this, it means I’m gone. Goddess above! That feels dramatic to write, but also maybe not dramatic enough considering the lives we lead.
A few weeks ago, I started feeling this strange sense of foreboding. I figured I could count on your nosiness, so congratulations on being at least a little bit predictable. I used to think the only predictable thing about you was your rage, which you don’t hide as well as you think.
Rowan laughed out loud, brushing tears from her eyes. An ache formed in her chest like a fist clenching her heart.
Perhaps it’s my imagination playing tricks on me with my tenure as acting Red Maiden coming to an end, but I can’t help feeling that if there was ever a time to leave some final words, it’s now.
Sometimes I regret hiding so much of myself away. I’m well aware that you tried your best to get to know me. I appreciate it, even when I seem like I don’t. The truth is, I don’t know how you bear loving people so much.
You’re not as broken as you think you are. I believe you are actually better suited to this life because you’ve held on to your sense of rebellion.
I never had a sister, but if I did, I would want her to be like you—unflinching in the face of scary things. You stand up for what’s right.
You’ve never asked me about him, but I saw the questions on your face hundreds of times. I’ll tell you this—Conor can be maddening and cruel, but he does his best. He’s so handsome it’s easy to forget what he is. He doesn’t care the way humans do. His care is possessive. It’s ownership. Still, I think he wants to be good at his core. He’s never been anything but honest and kind to me, but he is undoubtedly more than a little rough around the edges in all his isolation.
He likes to pretend he’s so unaffected by everything, but I expect he will be quite taken with you. You have the kind of fire that matches his, and I think you could be good for him, as long as you don’t forget that he’s the god of death. He cannot care like you do, Rowan, but he can connect in his own way.
You and Aeoife are the two bright spots in my life, and I am so grateful for both of you, even if I never said so. Please take care of Aeoife. She’s so much softer than you and I. I worry about what the future holds for her if she doesn’t learn to protect herself as we have. The rest of the world will not treat her with such delicacy.
I don’t have any regrets other than the fact that I haven’t been able to fully unravel a mystery that I’ve been working on for quite some time. There must be a way to undo this bargain that puts us at the mercy of the gods. I’ve been researching for years now and haven’t made as much progress as I’d hoped. I’d planned to request access to the former Maiden’s journals once I finished my tenure and was made a lady.
Perhaps the answers are in the other Red Maiden diaries, wherever they may be. I know you’ll be able to put it together.
Please help yourself to what little I have. I wish I had more to offer than a few paintings and this journal, but I also know what you need most and what you’ve been lacking your whole life is information. I’ve done my best to get everything I know into this journal. The one that the elders have is fake.
All my love to you and Aeoife,
Orla
“Goddess above! I miss her,” Rowan choked out.
The grief swallowed her whole. She could barely breathe around the ache of it. Charlie put a steadying hand on her shoulder, and she covered it with her own.
She felt compelled to start reading the journal right away but also unable to start. Instead, they stayed there for a long time: Rowan crying, Charlie a silent witness to her grief. Still, it felt better than grieving alone. Especially as the weight of all of it settled onto Rowan in one devastating revelation.
Orla had only allowed Rowan to truly know her once she was gone.