Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
We passed through brush into a dense, tall forest. His stride was twice mine, though he always stayed just close enough for me to follow. If he was going to kill me, he’d had twenty opportunities to do it by now. All he had to do was run me through with his sword in that first attack on the wall.
But he hadn’t. Which meant he was keeping me alive for something. You’ll get your chance to run, he’d said, and the memory of those words was an iron weight on my chest.
I didn’t have the first idea where we were headed, but I did know we weren’t in the Kingdom of Storms. The air was clean, the rain only water, the pine sharp in my nose. Under my boots, the grass tamped rather than crunched. Hell, there was grass.
For twenty minutes we walked in silence, and I evaluated how much of my body was broken. I could walk, which meant my legs were capable and my spine was mostly intact. My back screamed with each step, most of all from when I’d been thrown into the barracks’ yard well.
I still couldn’t breathe through my nose because of the cotton plugs.
A pang struck me when I realized they were still there—a last remnant of Isa.
All the same, I needed to breathe. I tugged them free one at a time, but I couldn’t bear to throw them away.
I held the bloodied wads between my fingers like a talisman.
Eventually I felt brave enough to touch my temple. Pain flared, their touch a brand, and I winced away from my own fingers. I sensed I had a large welt, but that was all I could tell. Maybe I had a skull fracture, but I’d never learned more than basic field triage.
Last of all I set my hand to my breast. My captor hadn’t stripped me, which meant…
My fingers slid under the edge of my guard’s jerkin, and there it was. My mother’s journal, untouched. Somehow it was completely intact, the pages so dry I could have wept.
Everything I knew about myself had been reduced to what I wore on my body.
Somehow I’d been left my knife, and the Eurydice Waters I’d known all my life would have long ago unfolded it and carried it in hand, blade ready.
But not me, not now. Holding a weapon—even a sunlit one—had never felt so futile.
Not after what I’d seen those creatures do.
But why was this one alone? Why just him and me in the wagon? And why had we left the horse and wagon behind?
My mind revolved on those questions. I didn’t come to a good answer.
After twenty more minutes of walking, the pain in my back radiated down my left leg. I had to limp at the same pace as before, because he didn’t slow.
I was about to open my mouth when he stopped. One of his hands went up in a staying motion. I stopped hard, watching him.
His face lifted as though he were searching the trees.
With a whistle, something pierced the air.
I barely had time to register it before he was at my side, jerking me a foot toward him with his hand at my back.
Thunk. The bark of the tree nearest me splintered.
There, not a foot away, an arrow as long as my arm stuck out of its trunk.
White, almost iridescent feathering glinted in the moonlight.
That arrow had been meant for me.
His arm stayed around me as he let out a warbling three-note call like a bird I’d never heard.
A beat, and then the same call answered from somewhere in the trees.
He spoke words, loud and guttural and foreign. The tall trees rustled in a faint breeze, and he said to me, low, “Death seems to want your head.”
Said the monster who’d domed me.
I was breathing too hard and fast, my vision swimming, my heart too erratic to snap back. Like a rabbit, I didn’t move until he did. I hated myself for that, but there was something to it. Rabbits were survivalists.
He stepped away, turning from me.
“Will any more arrows come for me?” I breathed after him.
“Not tonight,” he said. “Come.”
He stepped toward a thick section of brush where the path seemed blocked. His hand went up in an arc, sweeping through the air. At the bottom of the arc, his fingers came to rest on an iron gate.
That gate hadn’t been there a moment ago.
Or maybe it had, but I hadn’t noticed it.
And now that I had, I realized it wasn’t alone: it was connected to a ten-foot-high wrought-iron fence overgrown with vines and brush that extended left and right for as far as I could see—which was about twelve feet in either direction.
The gate sagged with rust and when he pushed it open, it protested with a squeal. Almost a shriek. The noise was familiar, like a faint echo of what I’d heard inside the city. The memory came over me like a shroud, sudden, in flashes—
The wall. Isa. Arms separating from shoulders, legs sliced off above the knee…
He glanced back at me, hand on the iron. With his other hand he gestured me through.
My gaze sharpened on him. I didn’t move. “What’s on the other side?”
“My home.”
If that was true, it was poorly guarded. “I could climb over your fence.”
He let out a one-note laugh. “I thought you’d realized by now the height of a wall doesn’t make much difference.”
My fingers twitched. I itched again to take out my knife.
His eyes flicked down. He’d seen it. He didn’t move. “You could stay out here, but once this gate shuts, you can’t change your mind.”
He knew he had me—wounded, confused prey.
He was taunting me, had been for some time.
I hated it, and him. That feeling broiled inside me as I limped forward, each step sending a spear up my back.
He held the way open for me as I limped under his arm and through the iron gate, into the shadow of his home.
I came through the gate and stepped into wildness.
My kingdom was one of bare plains and parched flora. Everything that grew was in spite of the acid rains, including the people. And because I had never seen or been told of anything else, I couldn’t imagine anything else existed.
The clouds had moved to allow the moonlight to shine.
Around me, the trees grew huge and ancient and gnarled.
Not like ours—these were as wide around as a single turret on our walls.
The bark was dark and adorned with markings like the patterns I’d seen on my captor’s cloak.
In the moonlight, they were limned in silver.
Thick vines and ivy—I only knew what those were because of fairy tales and picture books—coiled around the bark.
Mist clung to the forest floor, swirling and shifting past my feet. The air was humid and heavy with the scent of damp earth and something sweet and fragrant. When the wind rustled the canopy, a faint sound like I’d never heard before drifted through the branches, almost like children’s laughter.
But the most striking thing of all couldn’t be seen, smelled, or heard. It could only be felt.
As soon as I stepped through that gate, the air changed. It pulsed against my skin like needles. My hands went out, and as the moon’s light played over my palms, the air seemed to spark away from my skin.
This was not my kingdom. It was not even my realm.
The gate squealed as it shut and clanged behind us. The sound felt permanent, irrevocable. Icily familiar.
He stepped up beside me. Metal glinted at his hand; a sword. “Stay closer to me. This place is nothing of what you expect.”
I couldn’t imagine limping through the night. As much as I didn’t want to speak to him, I said, “How much further?”
I felt his attention shift to me, though I didn’t see his face move. “Take a step forward.”
“Why?”
“Do it.”
I took one step, braced for pain. But my body moved with buttery ease, and not a part of me complained.
Impossible.
I turned to him—and froze.
He looked different. Not entirely, not worlds apart, but enough that the sight was shocking. He had the shape of a man and the same cut-glass cheeks and jaw, the same knot in his nose and turn to his lips, but his eyes…
The irises were hazel and the pupils were black, but the innermost circle of the iris was pure, carmine red. His skin was dusky with yellow-green undertones. His hair, black before, now had a blue-black hue and seemed somehow wilder.
Like the air, something about him resisted description. He was a foot taller than me, not slender and not hulking, not a terror and not innocuous. His presence seemed to hover in the liminal space a wild animal possessed. Poised, still, but always ready, always prepared for violence.
“You see,” he said, starting forward. “Nothing of what you expect.”
Now I did slip out my knife. At the wood-on-cloth sound of it sliding from my belt, he let out a low chuckle but didn’t stop walking. Didn’t look back.
If it meant I got to hold my knife, I didn’t mind his mockery.
I followed at a distance, the folded knife my thread to home, to normalcy, to sanity.
My body didn’t cry out. It didn’t ache. My eyes darted, but even so, I could hardly stop my free hand from wandering to my nose and temple. Both were in perfect condition, as if I had never sustained a wound.
That was impossible. I must have died that night in the southern district. This had to be purgatory: a cruelly lush world where I was bound to trail at my killer’s heels for eternity.
The path continued, winding through the dense forest. Rustling sounded around us, but every time my gaze shifted in that direction I only caught the barest after-effect of movement. Whatever moved was as fast and ephemeral as a shadow.
Even without my wounds, I felt too slow, too dull for this place, as though it moved at double-time and I at half. The longer we walked the more frustrating it became. And the forest pressed in without relent, as though we walked around the inside of a well.
Finally, when we had walked an hour, I said to him, “Tell me one thing.”
He didn’t answer.
So I said it anyway. “Am I dead?”
His step faltered, but he kept walking. When he spoke, his voice held disdain and patronizing mirth. “If you’ve died, I’ve died.”
“That’s the idea.”
“And this is your concept of an afterlife?”
“I don’t believe in an afterlife.”
“Then why ask the question?”
My jaw hardened. I felt small, even without his gaze on me.
We walked on in silence until finally he said, “No.” His voice had lost its mirth and its disdain. “Neither of us are dead. Though you may wish it soon enough.”
I already do wish it, I thought, but not in the way he meant it. I clenched the knife’s grip tighter, imagining how fast I would have to run to plunge it into his back. Now that I had my strength back, my speed, I could—
“You couldn’t,” he said, his pace unaltered. “I’m twice as fast as you and more than three times as strong. And if you trust nothing else I say, trust this: You’re better off without me dead.”
I nearly dropped the dagger. As it was, I stumbled on a root I’d never have otherwise missed and nearly lost my balance altogether.
Again and again, he seemed to predict me. To read my mind. It was like magic, but magic didn’t exist in my world.
As I thought it, I saw a flash of those green spears piercing the night sky. Terrible. Incredible. And I finally began to understand that twenty years inside the walls had taught me absolutely nothing, nothing about what lay beyond them.
Ahead of us, the trees relented. The path widened.
And the two of us came upon a copse with a tree taller than any I’d seen, its base as wide as an entire block in the southern district.
Purple-blooming vines grew up and around its sides, and around it was arranged a wide, silver-sparkling moat with a curving stone bridge across it.
“We’re here,” he said, and I thought I sensed regret in those words. “Sylvanwild.”