Chapter 24 #3
I turned away from her. There had to be another record. Another road.
Something else that nobody had thought to look for because everyone had spent generations making sure these worlds never touched again.
“Give me until morning.”
Behind me, Maren's staff shifted softly against the floor.
“I will give you every minute we have.”
I turned.
Every minute we have.
“And how many is that?”
She shook her head. “I don't know.”
I hated that answer most of all because I believed her.
My gaze dropped to the old record. “What happens to the Weaver?”
Maren’s silence tightened something in my stomach.
“The record ends before the sealing is complete. It says her Wild became part of the boundary as the roads were unmade.”
I stared at her.
“You don’t know if she survived.”
“No.”
The room tilted beneath me.
I caught the edge of the table and held on until the shelves stopped shifting at the edges of my vision.
My vines warmed beneath my sleeves.
I froze as Stonewater came back with sickening clarity. Bramble’s body pressed against my neck while the place he had occupied inside me vanished. My Wild still alive beneath my skin, close enough to feel and suddenly impossible to reach.
I had known what I wanted to do, but my own body had refused me.
“The oath.”
Maren’s attention dropped to my wrists.
“It happened again at Stonewater.”
Her grip tightened around her staff. “I suspected it had.”
I closed my hand around the vines at my wrist.
“I chose these vows.” My voice sounded rough in the quiet of the library. “I stood in front of the Circle and gave you my word because it was mine to give.”
Maren said nothing.
“You never told me that somewhere inside that promise, someone had already decided my choice only counted for as long as I kept choosing what they had decided was right.”
I stepped toward her.
“I could still think at Stonewater. I knew what I wanted. Bramble was against my skin, and I couldn’t feel him. My Wild was still inside me, and I couldn’t use it.”
My fingers tightened around the vines at my wrist.
“A promise only meant something if I was still capable of breaking it.”
Maren’s eyes closed.
Anger burned behind mine.
“I could change my mind tomorrow. I could learn something that changes everything I believe. I could decide the Circle is wrong and the entire Deepwood is wrong, and none of it would matter, would it?”
My nails pressed deeper into my skin.
“My own power would stop being mine.”
Her eyes opened again. “Verena?—”
“No.” I shook my head.
“You let me believe my loyalty meant something because I chose the Deepwood every day. Every patrol. Every fight. Every person I put myself between and whatever was trying to kill them.” My throat tightened. “Now I don’t even know which choices were mine.”
“They were yours, child.”
“Until I make one the oath won’t allow.”
Maren had no answer for that.
I opened my hand, staring at the crescents my nails had left behind.
“So tell me where it ends.”
She looked at me.
“Tell me what part of me it cannot take.”
Maren held my gaze, her expression carefully neutral as she said, “It cannot make you sever Xandros.”
I should have felt relieved, but I knew it wouldn’t be that easy.
Her next words came more quietly. “It can stop you from knowingly using the Wild to destroy the Deepwood. But it cannot choose the permanent Veil. It cannot choose him.”
“Then I choose him.” My pulse thundered in my ears, each beat drumming harder than the last.
Maren shook her head, her expression warring somewhere between grief and disappointment.
But I didn’t care anymore.
I wanted him.
I wanted the porch and summer rain against the roof. I wanted Bramble terrorizing Asterran birds and Rhian laughing when he inevitably encouraged him. I wanted Torren to find something to laugh about again.
I wanted stars over Asterra.
I wanted the little girl behind me to wake tomorrow with her mother's hand still wrapped around hers.
I wanted everything. Every last bit of it.
By the time I reached my rooms, I could barely feel my feet.
My hand rested on the latch.
For one terrible moment, I couldn't make myself open the door.
My fingers trembled around the handle, tears burning my eyes as I stood there like a fool, afraid to face everything that waited on the other side.
Then I did.
The room was quiet.
Bramble had curled into a tight ball at the foot of the bed, his nose buried beneath his tail.
Xandros had barely moved.
He lay on his side in the space I had left him, pale hair spread across my pillow. One arm still rested over the blanket where I had been.
Something inside my chest folded in on itself.
I closed the door.
There were a hundred ways to kill a Moon Fae.
And Xandros Umbriel had trusted me with the one that mattered.
I crossed the room and sat beside him on the bed.
His eyes never opened, his long dark lashes still kissing his cheeks as he slept.
My hand hovered over his chest.
I knew where the living gold gathered now.
I knew how it would feel beneath my palm.
I knew what Maren's old record said I could do with it.
My fingers curled before I touched him.
No.
I climbed beneath the blanket instead.
Xandros moved toward me almost immediately, still asleep. His arm found my waist and drew me against the heat of his body as though I had never left.
I pressed my face into his chest.
His heart beat steadily beneath my cheek.
“I won't,” I whispered, and his fingers tightened once against my back.
I lay there listening to his heartbeat long after his breathing settled again, surrounded by Xandros' warmth and the weight of his arm around me.
I had given Maren my answer.
I would not take it from him.