CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO #3
“We had a misunderstanding.” He paused his scrawling, almost imperceptibly. “One I would do anything to take back.”
She shook her head in disgust, then turned back to the rain.
“Wait,” David said. Despite her fury, something in his tone made her hesitate. “Only until – until I’m sure he’s going to be alright. Please?”
There’s my bleeding conscience again, she thought, dropping her pack with a sigh and sitting on it. She really ought to do something about that. Impatient, she watched David, the careful way he wrote – different from Sy, slower, more deliberate.
A misunderstanding, David said. Sy’s word for it, too.
“You and Sy. You…” She licked her lips, pressed them together, choosing her words carefully. David was handsome, polished, educated. She was sure his rooms were spacious, his walls tastefully decorated, his windows large and spotless. His roof unpatched with mud.
A misunderstanding could be easily amended, especially with a history to buffer it.
Especially with a future to offer in return.
She wasn’t so provincial as to assume everyone treated a night of passion with the same gravity she did, however it had felt in the moment.
In fact, she was struck by how naive she had been.
How easily manipulated she was when a pair of pretty eyes and strong fingers gave her a moment’s attention. She was an idiot. A mark.
“You two have a history,” she settled on lamely.
“History,” David said, emphasizing the word, to her surprise. He kept his eyes on his spell. “And to anyone who desires a future with Sylas Cassirer, I wish all the luck in the seventh sky.”
“Why?” she returned, both prickled and encouraged.
“Because he won’t allow it.” He met her eyes briefly, and meaningfully. Then his eyes wandered over the fur visible on her neck. “I knew you were hiding something. Does he know?”
“He knows enough.”
“And still, he won’t help you. Will he?”
Anya balked. “Because he can’t.”
“He never can,” he said without anger, but perhaps a tinge of remorse. “Not unless it benefits him.”
“He isn’t like that,” she said defensively, though she had only moments ago thought the very same. “It isn’t that simple,” she said to David, to herself.
He peered at her. “Then perhaps the forest has changed him even more than I thought.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was…different.” He paused, staring off into space.
“The magic, here. I feel it. Seeping into me. I don’t like it.
It’s…willful. At times I feel feral, ferocious.
Others I feel insignificant as an aphid on an oak leaf.
” He looked at her, frowning. “Surely you must feel it, too. But no, you wouldn’t. You’ve been in it your whole life.”
Magic. The forest’s magic, the magic in the phoenix, the magic Mira commanded. In her.
The thought had never crossed her mind. Johanna had never mentioned such a thing as a possibility. She peered at her fingers, as if she would see some evidence of it there.
The curse upon her required no glyphs, no blood.
“It’s changing all of us. Even those two,” he sneered, looking over his shoulder. When he turned back to her, his eyes lingered on hers, then flicked quickly away. “Claude – he was never a paragon of virtue, but this…this is beyond my comprehension.”
She remembered his gaze upon Bertrand’s wounded figure, empty and cruel. It might be beyond hers as well.
David finished the spell and set it in a dish. “I noticed it when we first crossed the tree line. It’s only getting stronger. I’d rather get out before it changes me too irrevocably.”
“It may change you for the better,” she countered, as defensive of the forest as she had been of Sy. But she left it there. She was still human enough to concede the vast space between may and will. The space between who she had been days ago, and what she was now, what she was becoming.
He blew into the dish, then dusted the spell over Bertrand’s exit wound. The unconscious man stirred, mumbling incoherently, then settled as the spell took effect and the wound stopped bleeding.
He would live. But it would take many more spells to make him well enough to travel. And Anya had already wasted enough time.
As she rose to leave, David had the needle once more in his arm. “Your shotgun. And your map.”
Something halted her anxious feet. To make it home, the two of them would need both, more than she would.
“Keep them, in return for your promise that you will leave with all haste.”
David nodded. “If you ever find yourself again in ?bender, find me. I’ll return them to you – and whatever aid I can offer you, I will.”
“Agreed.” But there was only one reason she would ever set foot in that city again, and he was currently being hunted like an animal himself.
She had not gone far from David and Bertrand before a sharp pain in her skull stopped her short.
It came on violently, nothing like tightening thorns – like a clap of thunder hammering into her head.
She clutched the trunk of nearby birch, fighting with everything in her to stay upright, to stay awake. Blindly, she felt for her knife.
But it was futile. As before, she blacked out.