Chapter 37
KORYN
Rylynn did not come any closer. She folded her hands in front of her, as proper and graceful in death as she had been in life.
This was a version of her I did not remember.
I’d never seen her with gray in her hair.
So, this could not be a memory. But she could be a creation of my imagination, a hallucination induced by Pava.
Or this could be Rylynn. Whatever was left of her after three hundred and some years.
Did it matter?
I curled my hand around the base of one of Isanara’s horns, trying to draw on her strength. My feet did not move.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
My voice shook. Showing weakness to a deity was a mistake. I remembered how Xyta had taken the shape of my mother and Maura at the Sacrifice Gate. But I could not help it. No control, no amount of practice with Tomin or the Dark God, would ever be enough.
Rylynn lifted her slender arm in invitation. “Walk with me.”
This could not be real. This was a trick to… disturb my peace? Was that what the Peace Gate was really about?
“I…” No more words came out. I just could not form them.
Rylynn’s mouth curved into a smile it did not recognize. It was softer than any I’d ever seen in our shared years together. “You’ve come so far. You can do it. It is just a few more steps.”
Isanara nudged my hand.
Come with me?
Always, she promised.
So you think. But I kept that thought to myself. I did not want to hurt her anymore. I did not want to hurt anyone.
My feet moved. The leather boots were mine. Garrick hadn’t told me how he’d gotten them back. The hole in the sole was mended. But the tread was familiar. The leather hugged my ankles, shaped over the years to the unique dip and curve of my bones.
Every other part of my body felt foreign. One step, another. Until I stood before my eldest sister in the pale blue-green light.
She didn’t speak or try to touch me. If she’d tried to hug me… but we’d never been a family given to physical affection. I almost thanked the gods out of habit, but I stopped myself. The Goddess of Peace was already here, no doubt. Watching. Judging. I was not feeling very peaceful.
“Why are you here?” I asked. Here in the Peace Gate. Here in this cave tunnel. Here in the back of my mind, no matter what I do or where I go.
Rylynn glanced around. “This is the Peace Gate, is it not?”
I followed her gaze. There was nothing about our current whereabouts that should have given her a clue. “How do you know that?”
She gave a small shrug, her eyes landing back on me. “I just do.”
“What else do you just know?” My suspicions grew.
This was not the real Rylynn. It couldn’t be. The sister I’d known in life was sharp, clever, and proud. This was Pava’s creation. And I still could not figure out how being tortured with my dead sister was related to peace.
“I think we should walk,” Rylynn suggested for the second time. She turned back in the direction she’d been walking before I called her by name.
I did not want to walk or talk or do anything with her.
If she were Pava’s creation, she could turn on me at any time.
Grow fangs and tear me to shreds. Maybe this was about luring me into a false sense of security, letting me know that peace was always just an illusion.
It sounded twisted enough for one of Velora’s deities.
But I was not going to get out of the Peace Gate by standing still.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Rylynn did not move until I was by her side.
Isanara huffed in annoyance, but she could not walk by my side anyway. The tunnel had not gotten any wider. She blew a puff of breath against the back of my neck, sending my hair forward into my face.
I will not forget you are there, I promised.
We walked in stilted silence. At least, it felt that way to me. I kept stealing glances at the being that purported to be my sister, but she showed no signs of agitation. She seemed perfectly content to walk in silence, now that she had me walking.
If this was the whole of the Peace Gate… but of course, it was not that simple. We reached another split in the path. This time, one sloped up, the other down.
I stopped. “Which way do we go?”
“That is for you to decide.”
I should have slowed my pace and waited to see which way maybe-real Rylynn would go.
Ideas? I asked my familiar.
Whichever way leads out.
Helpful.
I chose down. Down toward the Dark God’s realm. Down because my thighs were still angry from sprinting and trying to catch up to Rylynn.
The decision felt inconsequential a few minutes later. We’d only sloped downward for a few yards, then the path flattened out again. I was beginning to suspect that the path did not matter as much as the person beside me did.
“Do you have anything to say?” Navigating around stalactites gave me an excuse to avoid looking at her.
Rylynn found her way around them easily, as graceful in death as she had been in life. “This is not about me,” she said calmly.
Not just calm. Gentle.
It was not just the gray hair that made this version of Rylynn different than the one I had known. This was not the sister I’d known in life. This was Rylynn as a mother. Maybe even a grandmother.
“You are here because of me,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a question. She did not answer. A new thought occurred to me. I stumbled. Isanara was there.
This was the worst of me—Garrick had already heard it at the Justice Gate, but this was different. I was splayed open before Isanara, my singular familiar who had chosen me alone…she was going to change her mind. She was going to realize I was not worthy of her choice, her love.
Just like Rylynn had after Janessa died. Instead of grieving with me, my elder sister had shut herself away. She’d isolated herself and left me alone, with a father who barely remembered my name and our middle sister’s gruesome death imprinted on my young brain.
It wasn’t an excuse for what I’d done to her. The fact that she’d hurt me did not entitle me to hurt her, but… we were both traumatized. By our mother’s death, our father’s abandonment. By Velora’s curse.
The difference was that Rylynn had not seen what she was doing to me. She’d hurt me, but only because she could not look beyond herself. My grief had not stayed in. It had lashed outward. The damage I did may not have been intentional, but it was malicious.
Did she still suffer for it in the afterlife?
“Am I the reason you are trapped here? Do you have no peace in death… because of me?”
Rylynn paused. We were both adults now, in this strange in-between space of life and death.
The Peace Gate. She no longer looked down at me.
We were the same height. I recognized the intensity in her eyes, a mirror of my own.
But hers were earnest with an emotion I did not understand and struggled to name.
“Which path will you take?”
I blinked. She had not stopped to answer me, but because we’d reached another split in the path.
I can’t do this, I said to Isanara, even as my feet chose one of the paths at random. I walked faster. Rylynn kept pace.
“Don’t you remember?” I demanded of Rylynn. I barely watched where I was going. A stalactite scraped against my cheek. I did not care. “I am the reason your husband was hurt. He did not walk again because of me.”
“It was a hard life,” she acknowledged. Her brow remained smooth. She might have been talking about the weather instead of the tragedy I’d created in her life. “He was never happy again after that, not truly. Only when the children were born did I see him fully smile. Then as time went on—”
I grabbed her arm. “Did you not hear me? It is my fault, Rylynn. My power did that. I am a witch.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“You should be angry!”
“I was,” she said. It wasn’t an admission; it was just a statement of fact. “But the centuries have a way of erasing the pain.”
I could not say that I understood. They’d only amplified mine.
She stopped walking. We’d reached another fucking juncture. Another decision point. But what decision was I supposed to make? What did it matter whether we went up or down or left or right? We were trapped. I was trapped. I would always be trapped by what I had done.
Rylynn looked down at where I gripped her arm. I waited for her to shake me away. For even a crease to show in her brow. But she was serene. I could touch her, but I could not touch her.
It did not matter to me anymore whether the person whose arm I held was real or not. Those soulful eyes belonged to my sister. The way she inflected the last word in every sentence. The way she dragged out her vowels. The pain in my chest was real, even if she wasn’t.
“Please, Rylynn, I am so sorry. I didn’t mean it. Or maybe I did, but I did not know what I was doing. I… I wanted you to hurt like I had been hurt.”
The corners of her mouth lifted in a small, sad smile. This was it. The moment that she told me that I would never be forgiven. That smile would turn sharp; she would turn me away. This was the woman who’d warned her granddaughter against wishes, who’d hated me for what I’d done to her family.
Rylynn cupped my cheek. “I know, little one,” she said softly.
“I am so sorry,” I said again. I covered her hand with mine, holding on tight, suddenly afraid that she would slip away. “Forgive me.”
“I love you, Koryn.”
If I did not have a heart, why did my chest feel like it was being cleaved in two? My knees buckled. Isanara was behind me, I thought, but the tears were coming so fast and thick I could not see clearly.
“Please, forgive me,” I begged.
My sister leaned forward and pressed a kiss to my forehead with a sweetness we’d never shared in life. “Forgiveness is not mine to give. Forgiveness is for the living.”
Another piece of my cold, dead heart sheared off. “But I am a witch,” I sobbed. “I am dead.”
“Your heart may not beat. But you can choose to live.” Rylynn lifted her hand to the path—split. Two choices. “Choose life and love, Koryn. We will be waiting when your time comes.”
We. Rylynn and every descendant of her line. My mother. Janessa. Gods, my sister Janessa.
“But my time will never come,” I realized. The only afterlife that awaited me was in the dark recesses of the Dark God’s realm. Forever. My family was not there. I could not believe my family would be there. I squeezed her hand harder against my cheek, but my fingers found only my own skin.
“Rylynn, don’t go, please, don’t leave me again.” Even as I said it, she faded away. She disappeared the same way that she had appeared in the tunnel. There one moment, gone the next. A figment of my imagination or a creation of Pava, I did not care. I wanted her back.
I sank to my knees.
“My time will never come,” I whispered.
I hated the Dark God for his claim to my eternity.
I hated myself for the bargains I’d made.
I rocked forward until my forehead pressed into the ground.
Then my cheek. I melted down onto my side.
The tunnel glowed blue and green behind my tears.
Isanara curled up around me, protecting me from the hard walls of the cave.
She breathed in and out. Her heart still beat.
She was still there. She still chose me.
I understood what Rylynn meant, but I hated it. It was harder than saving Garrick at the Mercy Gate or offering up my own life for Isanara’s at the Devotion Gate.
I did not need her forgiveness.
I needed to forgive myself. I had to accept that I had done a bad thing, but that one mistake would not define me forever.
I did not know whether I could do it.
Hours passed. The floor was cold. But I was a frost witch. The cold could not kill me. Neither could sorrow. If it could have, I would have found out then. But eventually, I got my knees under me. For Isanara. For Garrick. For young Tomin, who should not have to watch me die. For myself.
I did not even recall which path I chose. Only that a few minutes later, the cave widened abruptly again and light spilled through the iron gate.
Isanara nudged her snout beneath the fleshy part of my upper arm, nestling her head against my heaving chest. I’d only been walking for a few minutes, but I could barely breathe through the sobs.
Garrick was right there, ready. Not to enter the Peace Gate, but to hold me as I emerged from it. I let him. I buried my head in his neck, breathing in cinnamon and wine and home. He murmured words that I did not understand. My mind was too thick. But I had to warn him.
“You must make peace with your crime,” I choked out. “From the Justice Gate.”
Garrick jerked back. He searched my face. Whatever it saw, it scared him. That was fear in his beautiful, beloved turquoise eyes. He was right to be afraid.
I might be right back where I had started. But I was not the same.