Chapter 18
I slept, but only in fits. Once the rain stopped and morning touched the sky, I called to Freyda. The flap of her wings woke Gareth, who gathered his supplies in silence. I didn’t look at him; I didn’t want to see the hurt on his face or his judgment. Remembering it was awful enough.
I won’t let you hurt yourself again, he’d said.
As if he could stop me. As if he had any idea what it was to live my life.
Freyda pricked my arm with one of her talons, and I smeared two fingers through the blood before reaching into my shredded clothes and pressing them to the rose tattoo on my thigh.
A physical manifestation of the bond that tied me to the Warden, to my fellow Roses, to the Order, I’d long thought of it as a brand: here stands a Rose, and her body is not her own.
As soon as my blood touched the tattoo, the binding magic bloomed to life and tugged me forward. It was like one end of a hooked chain had been buried deep inside me and the other end of it lived in the Warden’s fist. Come home, it said. Come home to me.
It wasn’t a pleasant sensation; the magic was urgent and impatient, and I already felt sick to my stomach. But at least it was a distraction, something to focus on besides the memory of Gareth’s kisses and the question of whether my anger was justified or simply embarrassing.
“Follow me,” I told him, still refusing to look at him. I held out my hand. “Traveling along the binding magic is faster than taking a greenway, but it’s also more violent. You’ll have to hold on to me or you won’t be able to keep up. The magic will sense a foreign body and reject you.”
I hated the cold tone of my voice, hated it even more when Gareth took my hand.
I gripped his fingers hard; the last thing I wanted was to lose him somewhere in transit.
The thought of never having to look at him again was both horrible and tantalizing.
With him gone, the memory of kissing him would fade, and the next time I decided to die, he wouldn’t come after me.
Shameful thoughts. I immediately wished I could unthink them.
Hand in hand, we stepped out into the mountains and said nothing else.
***
The passage back to Rosewarren was a sharp shot through the darkness. One minute we were hiking up a dusty mountainside in Ghorlock, following the binding magic’s pull. The next we were stumbling out of a tight nothingness and onto the snowy grounds of Rosewarren.
Gareth lost his footing and caught himself against a tree, gasping for air, but he didn’t vomit.
Impressive. We rarely allowed anyone outside the Order to travel with us along the binding magic, but when we did, they always got sick immediately afterward.
The pressure on your lungs, on your whole body, felt like being squeezed in a giant fist. Traveling through even the harshest greenway couldn’t compare.
I watched Gareth long enough to ensure that he wouldn’t lose consciousness.
When he looked over at me, sweaty but clear-eyed, I turned and trudged through the snow toward the priory’s turreted silhouette.
Freyda stayed with him, which made me feel a little better about the fact that I couldn’t bear to be around him for another second.
But only a little.
My throat ached with regret, but if I lingered, he would speak, and I couldn’t bear that. Not now, not when every word trapped inside me was choked with barbs he didn’t deserve.
Maybe, I thought, this would be the end of it—a few aborted kisses that I wouldn’t have allowed had I been in my right mind, and nothing more.
I walked with clenched fists and forced myself to think of Crellin’s broken body.
Ordinarily, when I recalled my long-ago lover, I preferred to think of her alive and whole.
But maybe if I meditated fiercely enough on the memory of her shattered skull, and how the other Roses had to forcibly drag me away from her corpse—maybe if I imagined Gareth’s body in place of hers—that would renew my resolve.
That is what happens when a Rose decides to love. I must have said it to myself a hundred times. Walk away before it’s too late.
The quiet told me it was the middle of the night.
Rosewarren’s carpeted corridors were quiet; the polished wood-paneled walls gleamed softly in the dim lamplight.
Everyone except the night patrol was asleep, and no one bothered me until I reached the barracks, where Danesh sat on a root of the enormous Heart Tree that grew in our common area and supported the roof with its branches.
She was reading a book and chewing on the end of her braid.
I hadn’t seen her do that in years, not since we were children.
I strode past her, hoping my stony silence would deter her, but I should have known better. She jumped up and hurried after me, letting her book fall to the floor.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“Out.”
“Fenwood?”
Why not? “Yes.”
“An interesting choice, to take someone to bed right after…” She trailed off.
Posey. Right after you killed Posey.
“Everyone grieves in their own way,” I said flatly.
“It must have been a rough one. You look like shit. Did you have sex in a pigsty or something?”
I stopped short and kept my gaze straight ahead. Maybe if I didn’t look at her, she would go away. “What do you want, Danesh?”
“I just…” She hesitated, then blew out a sharp breath and came around to face me. “Mara, I’m so sorry.”
I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard Danesh sound genuinely sad about anything. I was surprised enough that I finally looked right at her. “Sorry for what?”
“I was the one who gave the report to the Warden. I didn’t know how to stall her.
She was adamant. She wanted every detail.
I think she nearly lost her mind when she saw you in Gothyn.
You looked half dead. She might have thought you actually were dead.
And once she heard my report, that was all the justification she needed to target Posey.
” Danesh looked away, her mouth twisting.
“I know we’re not the best of friends, but we were inducted together, we endured the trials together, and that means something to me.
I didn’t like Posey, but for your sake, I never wanted anything to happen to her. ”
The word trials sat between my shoulders like a stone. Petra’s auburn hair flickered in the corner of my vision.
“But for her own sake,” I said dryly, “you didn’t mind so much if it did?”
“Look, I may not trust fae, but that doesn’t mean I want them to suffer like that. I don’t want anyone to suffer like that.” She crossed her arms over her chest, no longer looking at me. “I’m sorry she died. I’m sorry she died like that. And I’m sorry that you had to be the one to do it.”
I didn’t know what to say. Anger was pointless; when the Warden was set on doing something, there was no deflecting her. And like Gareth, Danesh didn’t deserve my anger.
I was starting to think the only person who did was me.
“All right.” I touched Danesh’s shoulder. “Thank you, Danesh.”
When I went to my room, she didn’t follow. My exhaustion was so complete that I crawled into bed in my muddy clothes, boots and all, and didn’t even stop to light a lamp. The darkness was far preferable anyway; in the darkness, I couldn’t see my painted Ivyhill.
But I felt it. I knew every vine winding across my walls, every leaf, the mansion’s every meticulously drawn window.
My mind whirled with so many thoughts, so many memories—each containing a different hurt—that the weight of them pinned me to the bed.
Could a person die of sadness? Could they fall asleep wrapped in grief and longing and never wake up?
I missed my sisters. That was the last thing I remembered thinking before I fell asleep. I missed them so badly that it felt like the distance between us was tearing me in half.
I clutched a pillow to my stomach and willed myself to sleep.
***
The breach bells woke me a few hours later.
I’d barely opened my eyes when I began transforming, my body snapping and stretching, feathers sprouting down my arms. As my fingers grew talons, my bandage tore open, and I glanced down at my hand with numb curiosity. It was the first time I’d dared to look at it since returning from Gothyn.
Beneath the soft sheen of down, which thickened as my feathers came in, my skin was mottled with blisters.
The welts had diminished in size, but there were dozens of them, and they’d blackened, which I distantly registered as an ominous sign.
Maybe, I mused numbly, I would lose my hand.
And how funny, and fitting, that Gemma’s left hand also bore scars, but hers were a net of delicate lines that glittered prettily as an embroidered glove while mine looked like the patchwork hide of a chimaera.
Monster of Rosewarren indeed.
I followed my squadron mates out onto the grounds in a daze.
I shouted the commands I was supposed to shout, strapped my weapons to my body as I usually did, and launched into the air alongside my fellow Roses, but it was like my body was doing these things of its own accord.
I knew Freyda was flying beside me, but she was a blur.
Sounds were muffled, and my mind was a void.
Even when we reached the breach site—Section Twenty; a pack of lycans; a convoy of human refugees headed south—I felt removed from myself, like I was nothing more than a puppet at the mercy of my training instincts.
Earthquakes below us; howling winter winds all around us; the snarls and howls of the lycans as we tore through them; and the Mist, a sea of silver loosed from its bindings, flooding it all—I noticed these things as if from a great distance.
Unmoved. Unafraid. If my hand hurt from fighting, I didn’t feel it.