CHAPTER TWENTY
Anya had smelled the way out before she had seen it.
She smelled it chasing after the phoenix and smelled it again now. Flowers; hundreds of them, easily. Disconcertingly, the smell was almost as enticing to her tongue as to her nose.
From the edge of her vision, she watched Sy’s more human senses register the floral bouquet, his brow wrinkling in the torchlight.
She supposed the cavern must open up to a meadow.
But as the darkness waned and the tunnel opened up into a chamber, she saw the smell was not coming from outside – it was coming from within.
The sunlit chamber was bursting with colorful life.
Light from the world above poured from an opening in the dirt ceiling like a picture window, angled just so it flooded half of the chamber with daylight.
In the center of the cavern was a serene green pool.
All around it grew an impossible, kaleidoscopic patch of flowers.
In the Lichtenwald, such a sight usually meant some obscure horror lurked nearby. But the obscure horror was dead by her hand – and his. Now, it was just beautiful.
Or it should be. But to her, the flowers held a tint of menace. A reminder of the curse creeping up her spine, twining around her throat.
Sy was breathless as he took it all in. Anya watched him, tried to see the underground garden through his eyes – violet and lilac spiderwort, spiny pink astilbes, creamy white turtlehead, bleeding hearts a riot of scarlet and magenta with dripping ivory teardrops.
Orange and yellow lilies lined the cavern walls, and below them, spread across the mossy stone floor, was a soft bed of blooming forget-me-not.
“Anya. This is incredible,” Sy breathed, dropping his rucksack.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s almost midsummer.
Half of these shouldn’t be in bloom.” She watched him touch the dangling teardrop of a bleeding heart, his demeanor as relaxed as she’d ever seen it. More than relaxed. Enchanted.
He turned to her. “More magic?”
She shrugged. “Magic, natural. Things aren’t so distinct as that. Not in the forest. Likely not in the city either, though they certainly try to force it.”
At that, he straightened, surreptitiously examining the mark on his left hand, as she had seen him do more than once.
She turned toward the sunlight streaming from above. The rock wall below it made several footholds; they could climb out easily. The phoenix had gone out that way; now that it knew it was being hunted, it would be that much harder to find. She must go after it without pause or remorse.
But she could not go back into the sun.
After being spared by the buzzard beetles, she had made her wincing way back into the far more bearable shade of the trees. As she did, she recalled how, looking for Sabina, she had seemed to see clearly in the pitch black. She now understood why.
Fine for the night. But the phoenix was not nocturnal. How could she ever hope to find it if she could not even go into the sun?
Is that why the moth flew into the flame? Did she crave the sunlight, too?
Why must her last days be spent in the dark?
Her last days. For all the horror she’d seen and felt, it was the first she had truly confronted the concept. Last days. So final, so unforgiving, so jarring in its paradox.
Despairing – and, she knew now, drawn by the smell – she had found a cluster of purple foxglove on the edge of the trees, and sat in its shade.
It had taken her longer than it should have to remember.
Foxglove was poisonous to humans. To the heart. Prepared properly, a bit of it could cure. But if one ate enough of it, it would slow the heart until it stopped.
She had grazed the tip of one violet flower with her gloved fingers. Poisonous to humans. Not to insects.
Did she even still have a heart? She felt a pulse.
Was her blood still hot and red? It wasn’t as if she had ever been very familiar with the workings of her body; but now that it was unfamiliar, now that she couldn’t even begin to know herself, she felt that loss acutely.
But here – here was a way to know. A sweet-smelling, violet, beautiful way. And so much of it.
But then, a shout in the trees. Sy. She knew it was him by the vulgar curse, by how strange it sounded coming from his mouth. She found him, caught in a wire snare but unhurt. He’d looked so relieved that it was her and not some fearsome monster.
Relief. She had thought it was that, at the time. Basic, animal.
Then, in the entrance of the cavern, she told him her secret, something no one else knew.
That she’d named her trophy. She’d never even told Johanna; she knew Johanna would have taken the bird away.
Would think it was frivolous, the folly of a much younger child, the kind of nonsense that meant she was unserious, the kind that got a person killed.
A ridiculous secret. Not a beautiful one like his, but no less dear. And he laughed.
The nerve of him. The viciousness. She’d been ready to lash out, to cut back. But she’d been stunned into silence by his reaction to her anger. Not annoyed disinterest, or hateful contempt.
He looked hurt. Like she’d misunderstood him and it wounded him that she had. Like she had the ability to wound him.
It occurred to her then that his perfectly tuned voice had been wavering incessantly since they’d come back across one another’s paths. His carefully molded mask cracked like clay on a summer’s day.
Perhaps she had misunderstood him. Perhaps she had misunderstood him completely. Or – more dangerous still – perhaps she hadn’t.
And before she could process what that might mean, he was looking at her like she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Like he wanted to close the distance between them in every possible way.
She turned away from him, to the dark, because in that moment, she knew. She did not want to hunt the phoenix; she did not want to do Mira’s bidding. She did not want to lie to Sy anymore.
She wanted him to look at her like that again. Again and again.
Bad luck, she thought now, watching him marvel at the florid grotto. What putrid, rotten fucking luck.
Suddenly exhausted, she dropped her pack. The mimic’s cut on her arm throbbed. He watched her gingerly set down her bow and quiver. “I’m staying here until nightfall. You do what you like.”
His brow furrowed. “I won’t pretend to know your craft, but won’t it escape? And won’t chasing it be safer during the day? Easier?”
“I’m tired,” she said flatly. It wasn’t a lie. The past day had left her completely drained.
“Your eyes,” he realized, looking her over. “You can’t go into the sun.”
Defeated, she closed them. Ever observant, wasn’t he?
“Anya, please. Tell me what hurts you. There must be something I can do.”
“How I wish you would stop asking me that. I’m fine,” she snapped, then stopped, because as the words left her mouth, she felt tiny thorns piercing through every pore of her skin, and then her skull exploded.
This time, the pain did not linger, because she blacked out.
It was a deep sleep, like before. Dreamless, but not peaceful.
Something called to her, like the crouching silence of the night, the things breathing, waiting, outside the arms of the rowan tree.
It would be so easy to cry out, to let her fear take her, to let the silence take her in her fear.
To taste the violet beauty, the green, all-encompassing sleep.
But she still had so much to do. She didn’t know what, but something important. She would rest here, a while. Just a short while, in the dark, in the green.
When she awoke, she did not feel well rested, but she was no longer in pain. She felt along her face, her chest. Nothing more seemed to have changed; not externally, anyway.
Except one thing – the gash on her arm was healed.
She realized she had been moved into the bed of moss. Clusters of forget-me-nots cradled her limbs. Her head had been propped up on her pack, her braid laid carefully over her shoulder.
The sun had set. Fireflies danced lazily above and around the pool, now indigo.
Sy was still there. He’d managed to make a fire. He must have climbed outside for the wood, then back down, his arms full. It would have taken several trips.
He sat beside it, examining Mira’s arrow in the low light. She closed her eyes. So, he had seen its strange markings. That was why he stopped her from shooting the bird. He had known she was hiding something, and now he knew the arrow was part of it.
He had pulled parchment and a pencil from his kit. He turned from the arrow to his paper, scribbling something busily.
She sat up. At the movement, he looked up, and his pencil stilled on the page. Slowly, he set it aside.
“It’s something the forest has done to you. It’s killing you. Isn’t it?”
For a long time, she didn’t answer, watching the lazy, winking glow of the fireflies. She told herself, over and over, that she wasn’t going to. That she shouldn’t. That he would only use it against her.
Then she said, “Not the forest. The witch.”
His forehead wrinkled. “The witch?”
“Mira of the Mire. Her magic is forest magic, ancient. The forest isn’t evil. She is. She does awful things without even the slightest provocation. She’s a monster.”
“I take it you have…provoked her.”
“I killed her pet,” she said. “Her familiar. I didn’t mean to. It looked like any other fox. Just a very pretty one.”
She wiped her eyes. They weren’t wet, but felt as if they should be. A stone settled in her gut as she pictured the fox pelt in her empty kitchen.
“I almost feel bad for her,” she added in a small voice. “She must be very lonely, all alone in her house in the woods.”
He retrieved his pencil, but even after several minutes, she never heard it scratching against the paper. When she looked up, he was watching the fireflies.
“Why can’t you go back?” she asked. “I need to hear it. From you.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to.”