CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
As if his thoughts hadn’t become difficult enough to manage, the liar’s pigeon sent them swirling like the spores he’d inhaled.
He felt them working, listing from the turbid depths of his mind to the pit of his gut, dredging up his most hidden feelings, sending stumbling signals to his tongue.
Though he fought it with everything he had, he’d almost said something he couldn’t take back.
Something one opponent would never say to another.
Something he wasn’t sure he could entirely blame on the fungus.
Something he had to tell her.
It was a good thing she’d stopped him. He’d almost shown the self he kept so closely guarded. The boy who pinned his hope on flowers – the man who let himself be peeled open in the dark – the self now uncovered, exposed, claws retracted. No; removed.
And then the spore exposed her most secret self.
“I’m going,” she said. “Don’t follow me.”
Then, with a heartrending cry of pain, Anya fell to her knees, digging her fingernails into the mud.
He was by her side in an instant. She threw her weapons and bag to the ground as if they burned her. When she saw him, her face collapsed and she pulled the brim of her hat over her eyes. “Go away,” she begged.
Impulsively, he reached for her. With a pained gasp, she flinched from his touch. “Anya, please, for once, let me help you,” he said desperately.
Another spasm. Her back arched. Another dreadful cry ripped out of her as she pressed her head into the dirt, a profane prayer.
He resisted the urge to reach out to her again, but held his ground. “There is no world in which I would ever leave you like this. There must be something I can do. Tell me.”
“Fuck.” She pressed her muddy fingers to her closed eyes, then threw her hat into the mud. “Fuck. It’s my back,” she managed. “Something’s–” She broke off in another cry of pain.
That settled it. “We’ll need you out of these clothes,” he said, using a tone that brooked no argument.
With shaking fingers, she undid the laces of her jerkin, and he carefully helped ease her out of it. Beneath her clothes, her back was bulging. He reached around her waist and took her knife from her belt. Gently but swiftly, like the delicate stroke of a pen, he cut away the back of her shirt.
Most of her body was covered in the short, downy fur he’d seen on her neck; but on either side of her spine, below her shoulders, her skin was discolored, shining, swollen. Something mottled and furred moved beneath it. It was a film. A thin, wet membrane, stretched across her spine.
Astonished, he gingerly touched it, then jerked back when she sucked in a hissing breath.
He knew what he must do.
Lightly and precisely as scrawling a spell, so as not to cut what lie under, he ran the pointed tip of her knife along the length of her spine. At the sensation, she shot up, straightened, panting.
Split open, the film slowly stretched apart, pushed by the rippling and growing of the furry, wet bulge in her back.
Where the film stuck, he helped it, pulling back the dripping, sticky sheaves of dead skin.
As the last of it peeled away, something cracked open, emerged.
He fell back, scooting through the dirt to avoid the dripping mass.
Green, sea-foam green, violet around the edges. Enormous. Magnificent.
Wings.
As he watched, they creased and stretched, dripping with fluid at the curling, tailed ends.
Gradually, they spread, undulating and wavering like silk sheets in a summer breeze, making the sound of soft cloth whipping against a strong wind.
Nearly translucent, they were soft, lightly glistening, coated in a short fur.
They extended fully, stretching a bit wider than the length of her arms, and their full, colorful majesty was revealed.
The edges were limned in dusky lilac; the curls of the tails faded to a rosy pink.
Each wing had a painted eye in its center, eyes ringed by yellow crescent moons, staring into the dark beyond, daring it.
All against a soft canvas of seafoam green, the same gorgeous green her eyes once were.
She gasped as she felt them, worked them with new muscles.
Her entire anatomy was rearranging, he realized; not only what he could see.
Every muscle, every blood vessel, every organ.
Since he’d known her, she’d been being silently altered, silently scraped clean of who and what she once was; what he could see was only the barest hint of it.
This alteration wasn’t something happening; it was something being done.
A brutal exchange: for one transgression, a lifetime of pain, of unknowable terror, compressed into days.
His heart broke for her; it raged that anyone could do this to her, her, who deserved the world. It raged at himself, that he had not seen the depth of her suffering, not even in the dark, when she showed him everything.
But what he could see now was incredible; almost entrancing. No longer in pain, she released a shaking breath, relaxed her shoulders. Her wings folded inward, draped off her back like an elegant, tailored coat.
“I wondered,” she said, barely a whisper. An empty laugh sent them fluttering. “But I can’t even use them. They’re useless.”
“Anya,” he said, released from his stupor. “They’re beautiful.”
“Beautiful,” she repeated. Her voice was a husk. “Do you find me beautiful, Sylas?”
“Yes.” He heard the breathless, unhindered longing in his voice. He didn’t care. “I always have.”
What sounded like a gasp became a wretched laugh. “And what price must I pay? What fucking price?”
“Anya,” he said again, trying to capture all he felt flitting around his addled brain. He couldn’t begin to imagine what she was going through. What he was putting her through.
He felt the feather in his pocket. He felt his heart, heavy, in his chest.
She wouldn’t like it. But he must try. “Perhaps – I met your friend, Perrine. She mentioned – what I mean to say is, I am not unskilled in negotiating with tyrants. Perhaps, if I found the woman who cursed you, I–”
“No,” she snapped, swift and harsh as a snake bite. “You helped me. I’m grateful. Now go.”
“I don’t know–” He managed to stop himself, but he heard what he hadn’t said, plain as day, in his voice. I don’t know if I can leave you again.
Abruptly, she spun around, uncovered; let him see all the frightening, alien beauty of her new body. But he hardly noticed. She had said something, something odd.
“What?”
“I lied to you, I said.”
He struggled to make sense of her words. “You…lied.”
“From the start.” She clamped a hand over her mouth, as if her words pained her.
Of course. The liar’s pigeon. It compelled her to confess. To speak only truth. And she was fighting it, fighting against revealing her secret self to him.
He was suddenly very sure he didn’t want to see it.
But neither of them could stop it. “I was always going to betray you. I’m taking the phoenix straight to the king to make my name, then reclaim my inheritance, my rightful place as a baroness of Gescany.”
He had supposed as much, once, though he was sure he’d been mistaken. No matter; it changed nothing, now. “Be that as it may–”
“From the moment I saw you,” she went on, “I knew you were a soft-hearted, frivolous fool. Easy to use.” Her voice caught. “And you were. Like a well oiled gun.”
He felt each word as a stab. Each freely given desire, each shared fear, turned and aimed against him, an arrow to the chest. He deserved it; he had done the same to her, days before.
There was only one difference. He hadn’t meant it.
Though he’d expected her betrayal all along, now it felt unreal, like a dream. But even through the haze, something wasn’t adding up. “Your curse–”
“Can be cured with phoenix blood.” Her voice had taken on a startling urgency. “A single drop.”
He shook his head, adamant. “No. You’re not making any sense.” The arrow, the glyphs. The fair beneath the foul. The shouldn’t, but must.
Something else, something humiliating, bubbled to the surface, and he couldn’t stop it. “In the cavern–”
“You are good at deluding yourself, aren’t you?” She laughed, sharp and cold, no longer fighting against her own tongue. “Everything you imagined between us was a fantasy. But fear not – if you really want to see me again, perhaps some day I’ll hire you. If the king can spare you, of course.”
The haze cleared.
A fantasy. A shadow, dissipated with the setting of the sun.
And this was the truth, glaring. He’d had it backwards. Anya Degen’s rough exterior protected nothing petal-soft. She donned that softness like camouflage to mask a vicious cutthroat, cunning and ruthless. He could delude himself further, or, for once in his life, accept the bitter truth.
“Well,” he managed. His throat didn’t want to work; but, like her, the spore pressed him on. “I had not realized how clouded I had let my judgment become. It seems I must thank you for clearing it up for me.”
“Shut up,” she said, her voice empty once more. “Don’t say anything else. I can’t take it.”
“I–” He exhaled, willed his tongue to still. He chose his next words with great effort. He couldn’t hope to best her; it felt as good as begging. His only chance was to follow her – to wait and hope for the solstice to complete the curse before she shot the bird.
But he wouldn’t. He would pay this debt, at least. He must.
“There may still be a way to help us both,” he managed. “I owe you that much.”
“Oh. I see.” Her tone changed; her posture straightened. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she sounded genuinely surprised. Perhaps, hurt. “You owe me.”
“For saving my life,” he clarified. “It’s only fair.”
“Of course. You owe me.” The bitter emptiness returned. “Fair payment for services rendered. And what luck, for a base provincial such as I to have earned such a reward. And from a man of such quality.” She spit on the ground. “There. Now we’re even.”
He stood, stunned, hollowed out. “That’s it, then.”