Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
Valenna
Once safe inside her room, Valenna shut the curtains and slumped into a pool of silk and organza on the floor.
Stupid bloody Evander. Why couldn’t she just hate him like a woman with a little blasted pride?
She watched helplessly as purple aconite bled across the floor, followed by blue foxglove and lacy white hemlock. Poison ivy climbed the walls; mushrooms sprouted from the corners, their caps luminous, red as blood.
“Stop it, Valenna, you idiot,” she hissed at herself, panic pressing against her ribs. “Pull yourself together!”
She cursed, her anger building as the plants grew to her waist, climbed the wallpaper. Thunder rumbled in the armoire (what on earth was it doing in there?).
She was so frantic, she didn’t hear the knock at the door or the voice calling her name. She tore brambles from her arms, leaving long scratches. Her dress shredded, her palms stung, her arms bled, and as she let out a sobbing scream, someone slammed against the door, and it burst open.
Valenna whirled around. In the doorway stood Evander, clutching the latch in his fist like he might fall over if he let it go. Valenna froze—bleeding, disheveled, tangled in her own vines.
“What are you doing in here?” Valenna shouted, her shame blooming into fury. “This is my room! Get out!”
Evander raked his eyes over her body, then the foliage choking the room, and his expression changed as though he’d solved a puzzling math equation. “Is this magic … yours?” he asked.
“Go away!”
He shut the door and strode toward her. She shrank from him, tugging against the clawing thorns.
“Valenna, stop, you’re hurting yourself."
“Go away!”
“You’re bleeding!”
“GO AWAY, VANDER!”
He paused, his eyes tracking the blood dripping off her fingers. She wrestled with the thorns again, trying in vain to wrench her arms free.
“Stop it, Val,” Evander cried, crossing the space between them and grabbing her elbows. “Stop!”
“Leave me alone!”
“Please!”
His voice was ragged with horror, and she stiffened, trying to gauge his reaction.
Was he going to shout at her? Tell her she was disgusting and he hated her, and he couldn’t believe she’d ever tricked him into loving her? Would he descend the stairs and disappear? Would he collapse from the shock?
But he didn’t do any of those things. Instead, he took a pen knife from his pocket and calmly cut the vines binding her. She’d seen him like this before—gathering his emotions like laundry and then folding them away, each in its designated drawer.
“There,” he said once her arms were free. “Now I can think.” He led her to the vanity, then indicated the chair. She sat, her heart in her throat as he took off his glasses and let out a long, slow breath.
“Is your head …” she began, but he cut her off.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?” she asked stupidly.
He thrust out his open hand, indicating the poisonous garden spreading across the floor and up the walls.
“Probably for the same reason you never told me that you know who Raska is.”
Evander’s expression froze. “How do you know about that?”
“How do you know about Raska?”
Evander took a rag from the washbasin and wetted it, then he knelt before her and lifted her bloodied arm.
“You don’t have to do that,” Valenna objected.
“Yes, I do,” he said gently. “You always took care of me.” He didn’t sound angry. Worse, his voice was heavy with compassion. With surprising gentleness, Evander wiped her scratches. “Are you going to explain, or do you want me to make assumptions?”
“I grew up in Sennaliath,” Valenna admitted. “Cadmus … is my father.”
Evander’s mouth dropped open.
“Oh, Vander, I’m so sorry,” Valenna stammered. “I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid …”
He sat back on his heels and gazed at her, his face impossibly pale. “Oh, Roz …” he breathed. “You’re Valeria.”
Miserable, she nodded.
“And Tahlia was your mother? Not his first wife, or …”
“Tahlia was my mother. She was the botania, the bringer of spring to Talwaith.”
Evander shut his mouth, his jaw tightening as he dipped the cloth in the basin again and squeezed out the excess water. “And what about you, Val? Are you faithful to Cadmus?”
Valenna rested her head on her fist. “My father is an angry man. He loved my mother. He wants vengeance. I …” She paused and ran her fingers through her hair. “I do not. Not for my mother, anyway. I want it for myself.”
“On Marwenna?”
“No. On my father. He was cruel to me.”
Evander looked thoughtful. “Has your magic always been like this?”
“It is strongest and darkest when I’m angry, and I’ve been very angry since …” She paused. Since he left. Since her world nearly cracked apart when he fell from his dragon and then, six months later, abandoned her.
“Ah,” he said, reaching for her other arm. “I see.”
She pulled away. He didn’t see. For a month after he disappeared, she’d hidden in corners and locked her door as the magic shredded all her dresses, ruined her bed covers, and sprouted carnivorous plants the size of grown men in the washroom.
They were the worst months of her life. Worse than Olivette’s exile, even.
“If you’d told me the truth …” he began, but she was in no mood to hear his excuses.
“What? You wouldn’t have run off and abandoned me?
You wouldn’t have left me that stupid, asinine note and forgotten to tell me where you went?
How could you do that to me? After everything we said to one another and everything I did for you?
How?” Crimson bitterweed blossoms tumbled over Valenna’s lap like she was a kettle boiling over.
Valenna tried to stifle the magic. “Why didn’t you send me a message?
Tell me where you were? You weren’t well, and I was so worried about you. ”
He sighed. “If I had, would you have followed me?”
“Yes!”
“Then that’s your answer.”
With a pang of angry grief, Valenna wondered what would have happened if he had written. They had been so close to a cataclysm. She was ready to give up searching for Olivette and … she didn’t know what. Marry him? Had that even been an option?
Valenna snatched the cloth from him and crossed to the window. “You don’t get to make that choice for me. You took my agency, tried to control what I did with my future, and that makes me furious. Because it was cruel.”
His eyebrows pinched together, and he tilted his head. “I wasn’t trying to control you, I just wanted to spare you …”
“THAT IS MY CHOICE, NOT YOURS!” An entire gnarled tree, its trunk black and glistening, peeled up the floorboards and unfurled behind her. It reached thorny branches toward Evander, and he jumped away from it, thumping into the wall.
“My father was so cruel to me,” Valenna said, viciously scrubbing her arm with the cloth she took from him.
“If I cried, he shut me in my room until the tears dried. If I laughed, he did the same. He made me wear dark clothes and wax my hair and put …” She shuddered.
“… put charcoal around my eyes. He controlled me. He made choices for me. So, yes, what you did made me angry, because I thought you were different! I thought you loved me!”
“I do … did …” Evander edged along the wall, away from the tree, and climbed onto the vanity to avoid the nettles sprouting from the rug. “You’re right,” he said.
Valenna hugged her ribs, and the tree wrapped its branches around its trunk, imitating her. “What?” she asked, dumbfounded.
“No, you’re right. I didn’t mean to control you, I meant to protect you, but it was wrong of me to leave the way I did. I’m a fool, and I’m ashamed, and I’m sorry.”
Valenna stared at him in shock. She didn’t know a man could apologize.
Evander continued quickly, the words coming out in a rush, “I don’t think I knew how much it would hurt you … and this is my fault, mind, because I’ve never really had anyone love me before except … anyway, I think somewhere inside, I thought you’d be relieved when I left. I felt like a burden …”
“When did I ever imply that you were a burden?”
“Never!” he cried. “Not once. And it was ridiculous of me to think that of you. But my headaches have gotten worse, like you guessed, and I didn’t want you to give up everything for me.
You’re so clever and talented. And I was already dragging you down.
Your work was slipping; your heart wasn’t in it.
The master dracologist was unimpressed, and I feared you’d lose your position. ”
“You. Don’t. Get. To. Choose. That. For. Me.”
“I know. I know, and I’m sorry.” He was pleading, earnest. “I am so, so sorry, Val, and if I could go back and fix it, I would. I regret leaving. I regret everything.”
The tree sank into the floor and disintegrated into a pile of wood shavings.
“Thank you,” she said, her throat raw. “I appreciate that.”
Was she supposed to forgive him for a full year of pain?
Right here and now? She tried to hate him, and found she couldn’t.
She was a turtle crossing the road—never heeding the crushing wagon wheels, stubbornly heading to the other side, no matter how many times she tried to turn away. Evander always drew her back.
But Evander didn’t ask for forgiveness. Instead, he said, “Tell me more about your father.”
Valenna sighed. “I was a disappointment to him. I could never live up to his expectations. He wanted me to be angry at Marwenna and Ashkendor, and I tried. For years, I tried, but I could only be angry at him and myself because ... well, because ...”
Again, she couldn’t find the words, and she didn’t imagine a woodcutter’s son with no magic and no vendettas against enemy kingdoms would understand anyway.
“Because you’re tired,” Evander said, climbing off the vanity. “And you feel weary and dried-up inside like sludge in the bottom of a bucket.”
Surprised, Valenna replied, “Yes. Yes, exactly.”
He nodded and sat in the chair, opening the drawers, searching for something.