Chapter 29 #2
He caught one tear with his finger, bowed low to kiss another away.
I said, voice distant, “It was the dawn of winter and I was seventeen. Six summers had gone since my mother’s death; six summers of blood and terror.
Deep in the forest, on a cracked cliff, stood a strange hut and in that hut lived a hag.
She had lived there for three-hundred years.
Some said she brewed in her cauldron an elixir of youth.
Others claimed she was more wraith than flesh.
They whispered of her as they had of my mother, and that was perhaps why I listened so closely.
I heard in the night, as a group of villagemen passed the hill, that the hag had been the lordling’s lover, long ago, that she knew his true name.
I went to her the next morning, feeling for the first time in six summers a sliver of hope. ”
“Down by the river lived the miller with his wife and daughter, and it was that daughter’s youth that the hag asked me to steal in exchange for the lordling’s name.
I like to pretend that I hesitated. That I thought first of a thousand other ways and came horribly to the decision that there were none.
In truth, I did not hesitate at all. I went that night to the river while the miller’s daughter bathed, and I pierced her heart with the hag’s knife.
The guilt came much later, long after I’d left that village behind me. ”
“She told me the lordling’s name, the hag, and I ran that same night to his castle in the swamp.
The name still echoed in my bones as I pretended to have come to see him.
He became imprudent as vile men tend to be when they fancy themselves the object of desire of a much younger woman.
He did not notice, as we were in his bed, that I clawed his shoulder not from passion but to draw blood, and that I licked his skin not for pleasure but for a taste of freedom.
I leaped from his window that night, and I ran. ”
I breathed into the stiff, dead silence, staring blurredly from the window. I felt raw—stripped naked and whipped to the bone, the truth I hid in flesh and darkness torn from me and laid bare.
Adrik’s hand was like a vice around mine, trembling and white-knuckled.
He drew breath a few times as if to speak, but from his chest came only a snarl.
It was enough. It was enough that his gaze never faltered.
That he looked at me, undeterred. That he understood.
He did not look differently at me—only more clearly.
As if all he had felt for me before had not lessened, but sharpened.
At last he said with a growl, “Tell me someone has paid at least for the horrors you have endured.”
I blinked, struck by how quickly his rage melted the sorrow from my bones and replaced it with a thirst for vengeance.
“Oh,” I said, sweetly. “I ran for the river after I fled the castle, but I did not run there at once. I returned to the cabin first, where my father had passed out over the kitchen table. I left with blood on my hands.”
“Good,” Adrik snarled, a wild glint in his gaze.
“You wear that look of murder well, Ana. You wore it well in the forest, too. I watched you tear that faerie apart. I watched as you became the wild. I cannot help it. What I feel for you—” He drew a shuddering breath.
“What I feel for you burns even through magic meant to numb the soul.” I tensed, afraid he’d say something to shatter whatever tenuous illusion lingered between us.
He chuckled quietly. “No need to look so frightened, Ana. I shall not say another word.”
A whisper of the wind plucked my answer off my tongue, eyes wandering past Adrik to the window. My gaze slipped to the edge of the forest and through the thin gap between the elms.
The wind spurred me on, ruthless and thick with the scent of a coming storm. I walked stiffly along the riverbank, thinking wistfully of sprightlier times.
I knew these forests like the back of my wrinkled hand; I had grown in their shade and when the spirits took me, I would come to rest beneath them, as it should be.
I knew that the thickest strangleroots grew in a grove just past the second river-bend, that the thistles in the far meadow bloomed late in the spring but sprawled far and wide, and that the lichen taken from the sunlit birch beneath the cliff was more potent than any other I had found.
I knew, even if I could not see it, that a pond nestled between reeds and three thin-stemmed birches, and that the forest beyond brimmed with a strangeness that had deterred me until now from finding out what lay there.
A rustle came from afar. It belonged to the little fox I’d seen only in my mind. I followed the wind, knowing it would lead me to that fox.
I huddled deeper into my coat, clasping its seam with aching fingers…
I knew those hands… I knew those fingers… The tips scarred from handling burners and boiling brews, the deep lines carved into sun-flecked skin.
I returned to the castle chamber with a gasp and a scream.
“Lorell.”
I was shivering so violently that bile stung the back of my throat. Adrik’s hands were hot and urgent against my cheeks, cradling my face as if to make certain I did not slip into madness again.
“Are you certain?” he asked.
“The pond. The pond, Adrik. He’s going there.”
A flicker of panic lit his eyes. He observed me, face grave and torn. “I do not want to leave you—”
“Then do not,” I said, clutching his hands.
I did not care that it was pathetic and selfish.
I did not want him out in the cold, in the darkening winter.
I did not want to be alone. The lordling was still out there.
A storm was coming. Already the wind howled like an injured beast and the roots of my magic shivered with terror.
I’d drained my magic, out there in the swamp.
The mists were churning once more, creeping closer.
Adrik hesitated a moment, but I knew that duty would lure him away in the end; and that the guilt would weigh worse the longer he lingered. Even after these long years of service, he still firmly believed that he deserved good things only in return for his self-sacrifice.
I released him. “Be back before nightfall. Take the stag and the brothers.” I looked from the window, dread knotting my insides. “Something stirs in the forest.”
He kissed my forehead, quickly and fiercely, and he turned back once more before he left the bath. To look tenderly at me. To draw breath as if to speak. He vanished wordlessly with a sharp shake of his head.
I climbed with sore limbs out of the pool, draped myself in a silken robe, and sat by the ceiling-high window, a cheek pressed to the frosted pane.
The sheet ice melted under the heat of my nervous breaths, revealing a view of the twilit edge of the forest—and of the lone rider, chasing his stag down the road until the trees swallowed him.
He had gone alone.
He had gone alone, that vain, irritating, thick-headed—
I welcomed the rage, for it scorched the fear from my veins.
I could not wait to unleash these flames upon Adrik.
To scold him for his carelessness and obstinance.
To see on his face the flicker of irritation that told me he knew I was right but would rather fight me than admit it.
How I longed for the burn of a quarrel. He would argue back, then make that low, irritated snarl—
A knock snapped me rudely from visions of frantic breath and wandering hands.
“The wind whispers,” said Almira as she came in. “Listen, girl.”
I shivered as she tore the window open. The cold had returned with a vengeance, breathing frost into the room. The howls had turned to a screech, echoing between the hills and from the mountain’s bold rock-face.
Let me see you. Let me taste you.
The flares had died. Behind the trees gathered thick, white mist. It was there that I felt it; an anguish I could not quite place. A scream came from that mist, and the stalling beat of hooves.