Chapter 10
ten
Sometimes, I wonder if men are made of reaching hands.
Searching hands. Always hungry, never satisfied.
But when Ransom presses closer, the smell of him cancels out the wet soil of the gardens.
He is all I can think about. The bell is gone, and Bram is far away.
Even the thoughts of Mother become nothing more than a buoy eddying at the back of my mind.
But there is something inside me, something that smells of lemons, peeled and festering in the sun, and it makes my fingers tighten around the brass. I pull away, standing to my feet. Ransom sits at the fountain’s edge in front of me, gunpowder eyes ablaze.
“Don’t fight it, Ade—”
“Why would I help you?”
His lips tense, tight against teeth. And then he stands, shoulders slack. When he looks back up, the fire is gone, and the bleeding man is back, dripping mildew and rot, just like the old house surrounding him.
“I thought we might help each other, Thorn. Get back what we both have lost.”
His words play over and over in my ears, like an untuned piano.
Our mothers.
One, a fool. Two, a thief. Three—my heart whispers unholy hymns against my breastbone.
“I do not understand how you know about the bell.”
His eyes widen at this, misty at the edges, like an autumn field thawing in morning sun. “So, it is true.”
Betrayal washes over me in thick waves. “You said you knew! You lied to me?”
That mischievous grin spreads like butter on his lips. “I never lied; I only twisted the truth, and isn’t it a delicious thing?”
I watch the curve of his mouth, then say flatly, “I don’t trust liars, Ransom.”
His smile wanes, and he steps closer. “Forgive me, Adelaide. I—” He takes my hand.
The air is brushed with sweetness, and I fight the simultaneous urge to both strike him and kiss him, neither being an unpleasant thought.
“You know how it is, don’t you? Watching a loved one melt away into nothing.
When my mother died, Father went into his study and never came out.
” His finger strokes my knuckles. “He was different after that, with his spells and seances and whispering. The house began to fall apart, the mold crept higher and higher, and then he died and left me to take it on.”
I pull away. There are tears gathering at the corners of his eyes.
The ghost of his fingers still kisses my skin, making my stomach swim.
I can’t remember the last time I was touched and didn’t suddenly balk and gnash my teeth.
It takes every inch of self-control not to reach up and wipe my tears away.
Between us, the dark air tightens, grows so hot I feel as though I’m breathing fire. I do know this pain, know it like I know the souls swirling at the edge of the forest. Like I know the way my heart beats uneven in my chest.
After pulling the bell from my pocket, I press it to Ransom’s hand. “Tell me how to use it.”
His expression changes, something akin to curiosity. His fingers curl at the edges of the bell. There is so much hunger, so much desire in his eyes. I will burn if he looks at me.
“You offer it to me freely?”
Our gazes catch, and my throat shuts tight. His hands against mine are like hellfire, brimstone, molten ash. A dull ache throbs through every inch of my body, the agony swelling in my chest. Ransom Black has turned into a dragon.
I withdraw the bell and slip it back into my pocket. My nose fills with basalt and brine. The smell of the river licking up through the soil at our feet. And something else too. A sucked-penny scent.
“Ransom—”
He steps forward, face twisted with shadow. “Let me show you how to use it, Thorn. We could rescue our mothers, together.”
Together. The word is a boon to my lonely heart.
To the woman trapped in her room, her only friends the illness thick in her veins, the scripture on the walls.
There is a string connecting Ransom’s heart to mine.
Two wandering souls without the guide of a mother’s loving hand, only the willow bark switch of a father’s anger or grief taken out on the next best thing.
But the hunger in his eyes is molten gold, the heat of it already creeping up my bones, sinking teeth into the vein pulsing too fast just below my skin.
I press my lips into a bloodless line. “And if I do not?”
It is a gamble to play this game with a man who holds much more power than I do. But isn’t that the way of things?
A man holds the world, and a woman scrambles toward it, only for it to bowl her over. Crush her time and time again. Perhaps the moment has arrived to change the game. The entire bloody narrative. To take the world into my fist and crush it until it runs green and blue between my fingers.
Ransom steps away from me, elegant fingers folding in front of him. A smile smears across his lips, this time like honey. Dripping saccharine sweetness.
“Oh, Thorn.” He speaks my name with all the solemnity of a prayer. “I had rather wished it would not come to this.”
Fear blossoms at the base of my skull, purple monkshood. A sting so cold it freezes the bones. My stomach ties itself into knots, but I shake my head, clearing the cobwebs.
“Are you threatening me?” Anger settles into the space between my ribcage, red-hot as cinnamon.
Men will never speak plain words. They like to twist them, shape them to form their own wills behind forked tongues.
I stalk closer to Ransom, the air between us souring with the scent of the gardens. The mold creeping along these old stone bones. His smile quirks, sparking something in my guts. Something so deep and primal it tastes of rich earth and blood.
“If you do not help me use the bell and find my mother, I will be forced to rescind my patronage of your father’s good work, the vicar will fall to ruin, the money you rely on will turn to ash, and all you love will be devoured by Erybrus.
You know how Ithrandril punishes those who cannot walk in His ways. ”
Above us, the clouds shift, moonlight throwing a darkening halo against Ransom, spreading darkness like wings.
A bitter laugh breaks on my lips. “Did you know my father ties me to a chair? Your threats are empty, Lord Black.”
Ransom’s face turns to sharp angles. Like if I struck him now, I would only hurt myself.
“Oh, but I know what it is you want, Thorn. You want to piece your family back together, soul by soul. Isn’t that what every lonely child wants?
A warm hearth, fireside reading, laughter?
” He brushes a curl from my cheek, the touch once more lighting fire to my skin.
“But there are other things I can do. I’m a lord now. There isn’t much outside my grasp.”
Anger curdles in my stomach. Not just at Ransom, but at this world of reaching men. “Your meaning?”
He picks at dirt beneath a fingernail. “Clara Weston and Liza Thatcher are planning to run away, are they not?”
“How do you—”
He presses a finger to my lips. “What matters is, they matter to you, and I could make life very difficult for all your…loved ones.”
“Are you now threatening my friends?”
Moonlight drips down either side of his face. “I don’t have to be, Thorn. If you help me, I could offer you means of fortune. I would not let you fall to ruin.”
Ruin. My father’s exact word. I clench my jaw.
“I do not need your salvation, Lord Black.”
“Ah, but that isn’t the full truth, is it?” His words slip around me like oil. “I have heard talk of a house of healing in Idlewild for young women of your condition. Tell me, you are not much younger than me, are you not? One and twenty? Two and twenty?”
The hairs rise on the back of my neck. “One and twenty. But I do not see how—”
“Then you are old enough to tell your father no, to leave if you truly wished to.” He paces around me. A cat stalking a mouse. “But you see, I believe I have stumbled upon the truth.”
“And what truth is that?” I snarl. If he wants to cage me, to back me into a corner, then he will know the sharpness of my teeth.
A cold finger traces the line of my jaw, and my skin tenses with the touch.
“Adelaide Thorn, cursed by Erybrus and desperately clawing for Ithrandril. Your father promised Idlewild would make you better, didn’t he?
Told you the healers there could cure you.
” His breath is moist and hot on my ear, drawing a tiny, not wholly unpleasant shiver from me.
“My father told my mother the same thing, you know. And when she came back, she was more broken than ever. Took to roaming the moors on horseback until the day she was thrown.”
My heartbeat screams in my ears, chest heaving with ill-gained breath.
Lady Miriam Black. Thrown from her horse only a week after not being seen for over a year.
Whispers of her mind, how it had been broken a long time before her spine shattered on the rocks.
Murmurs that she had sold her soul to Erybrus.
“I am not your mother.”
“No, but you are going along with your father’s plan for the same reason my mother did my father’s. It’s what keeps you tethered to Rixton when you have every ability to leave of your own accord.”
Indignation causes me to tighten my fists, raise my chin. “And what reason is that?”
“You desire love from a man no longer capable of such a thing.”
My stomach twists at this, blood pooling at the hollow of my throat.
I want to hate him because he is right. While I have all the agency at my fingertips to run away from Rixton, to join Clara and Liza and flee to the Queen’s city of Lysdin, where no one will ever find me, what I want, above all else, is a father’s love.
“What do you propose I do, then?”
Ransom circles before me once more, blocking out the moonlight. His eyes glisten, and I do not hate the way it makes me feel. Like someone is spooning warm syrup into my veins.
“There is one more thing to sweeten the bargain. You help me, and in return, I offer you a way out of Idlewild while still maintaining the favor of your father.” He closes the gap between us, reaching for my hand. “Take my name.”
His words hit me like a blow to the gut.
“You’re speaking of marriage?” The thought alone is enough to make me feel like a mad thing. Like this is all some elaborate dream my addled mind has conjured to make the pain of Idlewild all the more sour.
Ransom smiles wickedly in the starlight. “Would it be so bad? To be mistress of Blackbourne Castle?”
His boots shiver across the soil, and he wraps a hand around my waist, draws me in so tightly the buttons of his jacket press through my bodice. My breathing slips to something like ocean waves, crashing against my own lungs, my ribs. A ribbon of sweat licks down my back.
“If this is a marriage proposal, Lord Black, it is the worst in centuries.”
He pulls back, silver light dancing in the green of his eyes. “That is not a no.”
“It is also not a yes.” The words are hot on my lips. “You cannot utter a threat to me and those I love and a means of rescue all in one breath. It is a devil’s deal.”
One more to add to the list ever-growing.
His teeth are alabaster in the low light. “Call it what you like. I’m not letting you leave without an answer.”
So, this is it. This is why Ransom Black brought me from my house under the guise of damnation to my father.
No belongings taken, only to be sent home.
So that one night, when the moon is low and the souls in the wood are hidden behind their veil, he can meet me by the banks of the River Thine and watch me use the bell. But even that, I do not know how to do.
The need for Ransom’s knowledge cracks across my chest like rippling thunder.
“You said you know how to use it.”
His smile splits wider, hand tightening on my waist. “Is that a yes, Ms. Thorn?”
I spread my pink lips like oleander. To seize the bones. Even the ones trapped beneath the earth. “It is not a no.”
His throat rumbles, nose inches from mine. My eyes drift to his mouth, blood-bitten and full, and back to his own. Still just as hungry. Maybe more so.
“The trees,” he says.
“What?”
He takes a step back and drops his hand from my side.
“That is how you get to whatever lies beyond—a copse of trees. In the Rending, Erybrus was cast away from Ithrandril. The power of that breaking created a place in between life and death, or do you not remember your father’s teachings?
” He grin is a pointed tease. “Trees are both living and dead, Adelaide. Alive and yet unmoving. They act as a passageway to this in-between.” He moves back toward the fountain, boots slipping.
“Father discovered the truth just before he died. During one of his seances.”
The trees.
I roll the words around on my tongue until they taste of something familiar. Until they are worn down to something palatable. And when I swallow them, they light a fire in my belly.
The simplicity of it all. And yet, the truest things often are.
“The rowan wood.”
“Doesn’t matter which trees we pass through, as long as I know you will use the bell and help me bring my mother home.
I can’t—” He slumps to the fountain, the broken man again.
“I cannot keep this castle by myself. You see it for what it is. Nothing more than a festering shell. And hell, I need her, Thorn.” He looks at me again, the ghosts of pain in his eyes. “Please.”
The brass in my pocket is heavier than it was moments ago. I pull it out. Oh, but it does matter. For the souls only come from the forest, tethered to the silver trunks like leashed dogs. The bell catches the moonlight, throwing gold stains on the twisted stems around us. I roll it on my palm.
One, a fool. Two, a thief. What would three make me? Death itself? A Reaper with my shadowed blood? I swallow, throat as sharp as needles.
“We meet tomorrow night by the banks of the river. Where the graveyard wall meets the trees,” I say. “Tomorrow or no deal.”
When I look up, Ransom’s eyes are as red as the rowan leaves. My heart stutters, and I stumble, skirt catching on my heel. The bell leaps from my hand when I tumble back, rolling near the fountain. The world seems to slow while I watch Ransom’s boots approach the tiny thing glistening in the light.
One, two, three, his steps strike hard and cold as steel. He bends, fingers brushing the brass. My breath hitches, snags in my throat like cotton thread on a nail.
“Ransom, please.” The words escape me in puffs of air.
Spirits of hunger pinch the sallow of his cheeks. He holds the bell up to the light, watching in mummified awe while it casts liquid gold about the darkening garden.
“Ransom.”
It takes him all of two steps to drop the bell back to my palm and lift me to my feet. His chest is solid against my hand, and the smell of him wafts toward me, like smoke from a candle.
“I will meet you tomorrow evening,” he whispers. “And when we get back, you will become Lady Black, and all thoughts of Idlewild will be wiped from memory. This is your salvation, Adelaide.”
And then he leaves me there, standing in the rot and dust, breathless against the night.