Chapter 19 #2
“What you did,” I said firmly, “was violence against you just as surely as it was violence against those you were forced to hurt.”
He slumped and sat back on his heels, staring at his hands. The only sound in the room was the soft patter of snowflakes against the window.
Finally he whispered, “How have you gone on living all this time with such memories in your head?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But it’s been easier with you here.”
My answer surprised me. With a racing heart, I watched him look up at me. He was calmer, his breathing softer. Gently he touched my cheek.
“Now is perhaps not the time,” he said slowly, “to point out that you’ve tried to kill yourself twice since I’ve been here.”
He was right. One attempt, quite abbreviated, interrupted by his page; the other, nearly successful, interrupted by him.
Realizing this made me laugh. I couldn’t help it; the sound burst out of me.
None of this was funny, and yet the next thing I knew, we were both slumped back against his bed, laughing deliriously through our tears.
“All right, maybe it hasn’t been easier,” I said after a moment, wiping my face. “But I do like that you’re here. I like it very much.”
Gently, he took my hurt hand and rubbed soft, slow circles across my wrist. “I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“It was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“You finally succumbing to my charms, you mean?”
My heart twisted. If only I could, Gareth. “I’ll allow you to say that only this once.”
“Duly noted.”
We sat in a strange, easy silence for a few moments, my hand in his and my bare legs prickling with cold. Then I said quietly, “Thank you for sharing all of that with me. You didn’t have to.”
He leaned his head back against the mattress and closed his eyes. “Maybe I shouldn’t have. You have enough violence in your memory without me piling on my own. Gods.” He rubbed his forehead, frowning. “I really shouldn’t have put all of this on you. What an ass I am.”
The idea came to me quietly and brought with it the cold echoes of my first few weeks at Rosewarren: Petra’s hair, Petra’s laugh. The black lake under the full moon, and my ten-year-old hand holding a blood-soaked dagger.
“Would it help if I told you about my trials?” I asked slowly. “An exchange: memories for memories, violence for violence. It would make us even.”
Gareth opened his eyes to stare, as if I’d proposed something extraordinary. “Are you sure?”
I nodded, though beneath my outer calm, I was a buzzing hive of nerves. “It seems only fair.” I stood and held out my hand. “Do you mind taking a short trip?”
“I’ll go anywhere if you’re with me.” He took my hand and stood. “But shouldn’t we help downstairs?”
I tried to ignore how the simple sweetness of his words made my heart race. “You shouldn’t be seen for a while,” I said, “not until things have calmed. You’re safer with me. And they can do without me for an hour. And—”
“And you don’t want to see it just yet,” Gareth finished quietly.
It. The wrecked priory, the possibility of yet more death.
“Not particularly,” I said.
“I don’t either.” He gave me a strained smile. “Do you think the Warden will send me away after this?”
I wish she would.
I pray she won’t.
“She can try.” I tugged lightly on his hand. “Come on. We’ll take the back stairs.”
***
The network of greenways that led us to the lake was well traveled and smooth, and the lake itself shone black and still at the heart of a secluded forest.
“The moon is always full here,” I told Gareth.
We stood on the shore as he took a moment to recover from the journey.
“No matter where you go, as long as the lake is in sight, you can look up and see a huge white moon. But the second you lose sight of the lake, the moon snaps back into its proper phase.”
“Fascinating,” Gareth said quietly. “That reminds me of Wardwell. It’s almost as if they exist in their own worlds—like pockets, separate from their surroundings, with their own seasons and their own configuration of time.”
I understood the urge to whisper even though we were alone. It was a somber place, and despite the wind whispering through the nearby pines, the lake remained smooth as glass.
“The Warden guards this place well,” I agreed. “Not once has an Olden set foot here without permission.”
Gareth turned around slowly, his tired green eyes cataloging everything. “It looks exactly like the images we’ve constructed from our studies of the crown and the egg. I’m baffled that your searches here haven’t turned up any signs of an anchor.”
“Your team should conduct a search, confirm it for yourselves. I suppose it’s possible we’ve missed something during the twenty times we’ve scoured this place from treetop to lake bed.”
“But unlikely.”
“Unlikely,” I agreed.
“Does it have a name? The lake?”
“Voroth. But we never call it that. It’s only ever ‘the lake.’”
“And your trials were here, in this very spot?”
“Twelve years ago.”
“Ten-year-old Mara.” He smiled sadly. “I wish I’d known you when we were children. By the time I met Farrin, you were gone.”
Over the years, I’d gotten very good at ignoring the twinge in my heart that came with remembering my childhood. But here on the shores of this lake, everything hurt more than it should have. I breathed long and slow, smoothing over the sharp ache.
“Older Roses woke us in the middle of the night and brought us here,” I began, walking slowly along the shore. “We were still in our nightgowns. The Warden was waiting, and there was a bonfire, and many other Roses, all of them in masks. The games began immediately.”
Gareth walked quietly beside me. “Were you afraid?”
“I felt fear, but I wasn’t afraid.” My chest tightened at the old memory.
I’d thought of it so many times over the years that returning to it felt like settling under a familiar blanket.
“Father taught me that long ago, that it was possible to feel fear and not let it make you afraid. Fear keeps you sharp, but being afraid can paralyze you.”
“That sounds like Gideon Ashbourne, all right. What happened then?”
Hearing the fondness in his voice was like pressing hard on a bruise.
How many days had he spent at Ivyhill over the years, attending Father’s balls, pulling pranks with Gemma, swapping secrets with Farrin late into the night?
Things I wished I could have enjoyed along with them.
Things I would never do again—not without this sadness, this awareness of lost years looming over me.
“I had one friend among the new recruits, and I killed her,” I said bluntly, my fingers trembling at my sides.
Thinking of my past was always dangerous; this time it had ripped away my composure altogether.
“Her name was Petra. She was unfailingly kind to me in the days before our trials. Life would have been unbearable without her. But in the end, that didn’t matter.
The Warden told me to kill her, and I did. ”
I came to a stop at the water’s edge, my eyes burning as I stared across the lake at the old wooden pier. I nodded sharply at it.
“Petra didn’t have magic,” I said. “I told her and the others like her to wait on that pier while the rest of us distracted the hostiles—a water titan the Warden had roped into the festivities, a dozen Roses in masks. Though at first we didn’t know they were Roses.”
“My brave Mara,” Gareth said softly.
“No. Not brave.” Suddenly I didn’t have the will to tell the story nicely; was it even possible for such a tale to be nice?
“Petra rowed away from the pier, abandoning the others. She was terrified, I’m sure, and she made a break for it.
I don’t know what she thought she would do—get to the opposite shore and run?
Run where? A tiny human girl alone in the Old Country? ”
My voice was fraying at the edges. I blinked hard, set my jaw.
“The Warden took me up into a tree and bade me to watch. I was her favorite even then. She told me that allowing Petra to join our ranks would corrupt the Order. That she was a coward, and cowards were dangerous. She told me that I should be the one to get rid of her, that the binding magic would honor my sacrifice, strengthen the bonds between me and my fellow recruits. So during the hunting games, I did. I stabbed her in the heart and watched her die.”
I laughed bitterly into the night. “I didn’t want to kill her. Gods, I didn’t want to. But after I did it, the Warden was so pleased. She told me she was proud of me, and that made everything feel a bit better. What sort of monstrous person does such a thing?”
“You weren’t monstrous, Mara,” Gareth said. “You were a frightened, manipulated child.”
Then he touched my arm so gently that it made me unreasonably furious. Now that I’d said it aloud, my story seemed pale beside Gareth’s confession, and the realization left me feeling broken with shame.
I jerked away from him and took a step back. “I’m sorry. This was a terrible idea. I don’t know why I thought you needed to hear this.”
“But Mara—”
“It’s insulting to compare this to what you’ve gone through.
Memories for memories, violence for violence?
” I let out a harsh laugh. “I killed a girl when I didn’t have to—I could have saved her and chose not to—and you had your autonomy stripped from you entirely. This is far from a fair exchange.”
I started walking away, but he caught me by the arm before I could get very far.
“You know how I told you I’d be happy with you storming around being angry at me for the rest of our lives?” he said ruefully. “This is not one of those times. You can’t walk away from me like this right now, not after what we’ve just shared.”
“It’s insulting to you,” I muttered, staring at my dirty bare feet.
“This may seem like a radical concept, but in fact I get to decide what I do and do not consider an insult.”
“I’m so sorry for what they did to you.”
“Mara—”
“You didn’t deserve it. No one does, but especially not you.”
Gareth took my face gently in his hands. He was always taking my face gently in his hands, as if I were a treasure to be revered; part of me hoped he would never stop.
“You say that as if I’m some paragon of goodness,” he said gently.
I looked up at him through a veil of tears. “In fact, you’re a menace.”
He smiled, smoothing his thumb across my jawline. “That’s more like it.”
Then he kissed me—so soft and sweet that it left me breathless—and for that brief, precious time in his arms, on that moonlit black beach, I let it happen. I wouldn’t ever again, I told myself. But I could allow it this one last time. I could almost trick myself into some kind of happiness.
The feeling lingered all the way back to Rosewarren.
A quiet heat thrummed between us, his eyes blazed every time he looked at me, and my body felt so primed to devour him that the longing was like physical pain.
I knew there was work to be done; I hadn’t completely lost hold of my senses.
Returning to Rosewarren would mean fresh grief, which I would push aside to tend to everyone else’s.
But right then, all I could think about was him—how much I wanted him, how good it would feel to be with him, and how I would have to somehow find it in me to turn him away forever.
Then we came within sight of the priory, and my whole body went cold with dread.
The Warden stood at the top of the snowy slope, watching our approach. And even from so far away, with her face hidden in shadow, I could feel the sting of her fury.