Chapter Fifty-Five
“ L et’s start from the beginning,” a sinister voice hisses in my ear.
Why ? I want to ask. I already know how the story goes.
It starts with me in chains.
It ends with her being burned alive at the stake.
“Lyra, come here,” my mother calls to me.
I move, but a buzzing child with long, frosted lilac hair runs past me.
“Coming mother!” she sings. The child with eyes like amethyst wraps her tiny arms around her mother’s waist and squeezes.
My mother embraces her with such warmth. “Where have you been, my sweet flower?”
The girl beams, boasting missing teeth. “Gray and I were playing hide-and-seek. I hid in a cabinet inside an abandoned chamber. He had to give up because he couldn’t find me.”
My mother chuckles and strokes the girl’s hair. “You must be careful where you venture.”
“Yes, mother.”
The scene blurs and shifts.
Tears pool in my eyes.
“Gray, we’re getting too old for these games,” a version of me whose body is maturing says through laughter.
“Come on,” he urges, his voice sounding squeaky yet deep all at the same time. “It’s raining outside, and I’m bored.”
“Then attend to your studies.”
He arches a brow. “Have you completed Sterling’s assignment?”
He got me. “Hide-and-seek it is.”
Another shift in the scene, and I see myself running through a corridor, glancing over my shoulder, giggling. I veer left, then right. I run until I reach a dimly lit corridor with a large, beautiful wooden door sitting at the foot of it.
I reach my fingertips toward my younger self. “No,” I whisper. “Don’t go in there. Please .”
But she can’t hear me, and I can’t change this scene.
There is a large male body grunting in a bed, sweat dripping down his back. I can’t see his face, and his hair is tied back in a bland way. Beneath the body, I catch a glimpse of silvery-violet hair and unseeing mauve eyes.
My mother’s face looks distant, lifeless. On the floor is a spilled tonic, her Gardner supplies scattered across the ground. I note the rip in the hem of her dress, see the split in her bloodied lip.
A frenzied rage overtakes my child self.
I watch in terror as the young version of me reaches for the first thing she sees—an ornately forged silver candlestick. It’s sturdy—heavy. Enough to knock someone unconscious.
Before I realize, I am reaching for that girl—trying to hold her back. Prevent her from what she’s about to do. “Don’t do it,” I plead. “You’re going to be filled with so many regrets because of this mistake.”
But my hands grasp nothing but mist and smoke, and regardless of my pleas, I’m forced to watch the girl raise the candlestick high above her head and smash it down onto the head of the unidentified man.
He collapses with a dull thud .
My mother blinks, as if just now coming back into her body. Her watery eyes take in the scene. “Oh, Lyra,” my mother breathes. “What have you done?”
The scene crumples away, and I sink down to my knees, shaking—convulsing. Everything around me merges and blurs in a collage of shadow, mist, and smoke. A blinding light flashes, a scream pierces my ears—everything stills.
My eyes flutter, adjusting to the new scene. I am back in the throne room, but this time I am not looking at a past version of me—I myself am bound in chains, kneeling at the throne of the king.
“Foolish, insolent girl,” he hisses.
I blink at his face, finding it to be strangely warped—half-rotted, almost. A dark aura pours from his skin.
My mother kneels unbound beside me. “Please, My King. Please forgive my daughter. She did not know it was you in that room. She was just a scared girl fearing for her mother. She is young, and does not yet understand the nature of such relationships.”
King Alastair scoffs, disgusted. “Please,” he spits. “There are courtesans already training at her age.” He tilts his head, and his face is so, so cold as he addresses me. “Did you know if a healer had not been nearby, I would have died from the trauma to my head?”
My eyes bulge with terror.
“Sterling?” The king calls out to his advisor.
“Yes, Your Highness?”
“What is the usual punishment for an attempted murder of a king?”
Sterling’s throat bobs, the only reaction he’ll allow. “Death, Your Majesty.”
“And what sort of death?” he coos, ice punctuating each word.
Sterling’s features are strained, so filled with grief. “Whichever death His Majesty finds most fitting.”
King Alastair clicks his tongue. “Ah, yes.” His dark eyes slide to me. “And do you know why that is, child?”
I want to kill him right here and now. Yet I can’t move—can’t speak. All I can do is mirror the past.
My head glides back and forth.
“It is because I am the king . I am of the highest birth. My word is the word of the heavens themselves. And you—with your worthless, dirty blood—bludgeoned me.” He releases a sigh and slumps down in his throne, resting his cheek upon his closed fist. “She is to be executed at dawn tomorrow. I choose…death by flogging.”
Terror stains my cheeks while my stomach hollows out, horror flashing in and out my eyes. Regret, pain—so much pain and anger—flood through me. Not at his order. Not at the decree. No—there are days I wish for that to be what happened.
It is the knowingness of what happens next that mutilates me.
I hang my head and begin to cry. Tears stream down my face, and my body shakes. “Please,” I murmur. “Please. Stop this now. Don’t make me watch it again.”
“ What will you give us ?”
“Anything,” I breathe. “Anything. But don’t—please don’t make me relive this.”
“Stay,” the slithering voice of one yet many replies. “ Stay with us. Become us. Then we’ll stop. Then we’ll make it all go away .”
I open my mouth to accept their terms—
But a voice that could rattle the stars stops me.
“NO .” It comes from the essence of darkness itself.
I blink.
No.
That’s right.
I have to face this. There is more for me to live for now—people that need me.
Thestis’s sweet face appears in my mind, and I can almost feel him squeezing me, nestling into the crook of my neck.
My ‘Ma said if you make it—if you actually get accepted into Bathara—that maybe there will be hope for me after all. She’s going to allow me to train with a real tutor if you’re admitted.
Said that it’ll be the start of a new future.
Make them see us.
I glare at the king, reawakened defiance burning in my gaze. His face morphs under my stare—his eyes going wholly black, his face sinking in and hollowing out in the cheeks. I look over to my mother, who still stands next to me; she shines with a bright luminescence.
Her eyes are practically glowing as she lifts her chin and calmly says, “I invoke Samsara. ”
King Alastair’s warped face twists. “Don’t be ridiculous. I will not lose the brightest, most accomplished Gardner seen in centuries to such nonsense.”
My mother does not balk, her eyes a combatting light in the darkness. “You don’t have a choice.”
The king whips his head to Sterling, whose face is already beginning to fade away. “She’s right,” Sterling murmurs. “Samsara is as old and unbreakable as Tani Law. If you do not honor it, the gods will curse our lands and take revenge by claiming the life of your future children and your own.”
King Alastair swivels his attention back to my mother, gaping. “You would invoke Samsara for some worthless, groveling child?”
She raises her chin. “My daughter’s life is worth more than you could ever imagine.”
Everything shatters and breaks inside of me. Burning, freezing, crumpling—like trampled petals trapped in burning ice.
My fault. My fault. My fault.
It should have been me.
This world of mist and smoke and darkness pulses and blurs as the scene shifts again for the final time. The last moments where my heart remained alive and unbroken—my canvas still fresh and unblemished, ready to become a work of art instead of a thing of nightmares.
The king watches as two guards finish binding my mother’s wrists above her head and drench her in oil, departing back down the hill once finished. “Let’s get this over with.”
Sterling clears his throat and unrolls a scroll.
He reads from the parchment. “Samsara exists so that a parent may pay a life debt in the place of their child. A soul for a soul, sanctioned by the gods. But only fire can wash away the stain of what the child has done. So, as Samsara is invoked, a parent must burn by their child’s flame.
And as the smoke reaches the heavens, may the debt wash away, and the charred blood serve as penitence.
” He refolds the scroll and looks at me with impossibly sad eyes.
A burning wick appears in my hand. I glance down at it, then up at my mother.
I have spent every day since this moment trying to forget—forcing the scream out of my head and pushing the smell from my memory.
Running and running and running and running from it.
I can run no longer—only resign to the brutal, debilitating pain of it.
With slow, rigid movements, I approach the post binding my mother. Her face still looks how I remember. Calm, peaceful—incomprehensibly serene. She watches me closely. As if she wants to memorize every pore on my face to take with her to the Hanging Gardens.
Tears slide uncontrollably down my cheeks. “It should be me,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry, mother. This is all my fault.”
She catches my eyes with a gentle dip of her chin. “No, it isn’t,” she whispers back. “It never was.”
I blink at her unblemished face.
It’s strange, seeing her so clearly. I’d forgotten the way one brow sat slightly higher than the other. That she had a small cowlick near the back of her head, making her braid rest funny.
I’d forgotten so many small details.