Can’t Help Falling
Can’t Help Falling
Nathaniel snatched his hand away as something stung him—a pin in Violet’s cloak, perhaps, or an insect that had hidden away on her shoulder.
For a moment, as she whipped her face up to look at him, he imagined malice on her features, fury and intent like he’d never seen before, that lush mouth curled into a snarl and those eyes blazing with something that scared him, but then he blinked and she was Violet again, albeit much more distraught than the woman he’d come to know.
“What’s wrong?” he asked sharply. Grouchy though he could be, Nathaniel was not a violent man—but he found himself just then seized by the mad desire to find whoever had hurt her and make them pay.
A cold gust of wind whipped her hair in front of her face, and again he saw that glimpse of a startled predator, a fey creature with glowing green eyes, all snarling teeth and jagged edges. He blinked.
Violet made a barking sound that might have been a laugh or a sob or a choke of relief.
“You,” she said, breathless, running her hands over her arms like she was soothing a bird with ruffled feathers.
“It’s you.” Her voice cracked and his frown deepened, creasing his face into crisp lines like folded laundry.
“Violet.” He forced his tone to soften so she didn’t think he was upset with her. “What happened?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re on the ground, looking like you’ve seen a ghost. Of course it matters.
” He searched her face for answers, but she only tilted her chin, searching him right back.
Nathaniel knew with some inner certainty that he was undergoing some kind of test, and so despite his discomfort, he held her gaze as he helped her to her feet.
Some of the tension in her eyes seemed to soften as his fingertips brushed her wrist, the flash of green he had imagined replaced once more by the warm golden brown he sometimes saw when he closed his eyes.
“Thank you,” she said, brushing the dirt and damp from her clothing, her eyes breaking from his. “There was a man—I thought I recognized him from somewhere, that’s all. Sometimes I—”
“You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want.”
Again, Nathaniel forced himself to still as she studied him. “There’s more blight,” she said finally. “Bigger than any we’ve seen.”
“Show me?”
When she led him around the corner, his heart sank.
Nathaniel produced a vial from one of his pockets and, as he’d grown accustomed to doing, took a sample to test in the greenhouse.
He cast his eyes around, looking for similarities, patterns, anything to help him determine why this was happening to his town.
“The man I met,” Violet said quietly, “suggested that Shadowfade had been keeping it at bay.” She gestured to the blight. “And that with him gone, the town needs protection.”
She studied the rot, refusing to meet his eyes. “That monster was not a protector,” said Nathaniel firmly, but his response didn’t carry the comfort he intended. “We can hold our own here just fine.”
Nathaniel couldn’t shake the feeling that she was taking more from his words than he intended, and he didn’t know how to break the flow of whatever was happening inside her head to cast such heavy sadness into her expression.
This Violet looked so far from the smiling, bright, hopeful woman who lived and worked next door, the one who, despite his stubborn intentions, made his days brighter too.
He wanted to touch her, to tuck the wayward hair behind her ear, pull her cloak back up over her shoulders so she’d stop shivering.
He had no idea how she’d react if he did.
Moons, he wished he was better at this.
“I’m worried he could be involved,” she said.
“With the blight?”
She hesitated, then seemed to come to a decision. “He’s an alchemist, and the timing of his arrival in Dragon’s Rest is…”
Recognition prickled like a bee crawling up his sleeve. “He wouldn’t happen to be named Sedgwick, would he?”
She startled. “You know of him?”
Nathaniel barked a humorless chuckle. “Do I know of the man who appeared from nowhere to open a rival business that is doing its best to sink Marsh Apothecary? Yes.”
“He’s hungry,” Violet said. “Ambitious.”
Nathaniel thought of the list of ingredients Sedgwick had asked him for. “He’s dangerous.”
“I think the blight could be his way of positioning himself as someone powerful in Dragon’s Rest. If he ‘saves’ everyone from a problem he created, he’d be respected and listened to.”
He thought on this for a moment. “I suppose the blight could be alchemical in nature. A skilled alchemist could create a balance that only they’d be able to reverse.”
“And if he lets Dragon’s Rest fall to panic and is then the one to produce that reversal…?”
“He would be considered a savior.”
“Sedgwick could do anything he wanted in this town.” Horror filled Violet’s expression. “He could routinely allow the blight to continue cropping up, just to remind everyone that if his goodwill was lost, he could let Dragon’s Rest fall to rot and ruin.”
Nathaniel was quick to believe the bleak picture she painted. His experiences with Sedgwick had shown a man who fit quite cleanly into the role of a villain, but Nathaniel knew his view was biased. Still, the theory merited further study. He was a scientist, was he not?
“I’ll have to run some tests,” he said. “If I approach my experiments from the hypothesis that the rot is alchemical in origin, I might be able to find out how he’s doing it. And I want to know more about Sedgwick. Where he came from. Who he is. What brought him here.”
Suddenly, a sharp crack filled the air, seeming to come from everywhere all at once.
Violet finally looked at him, though her eyes were filled with, of all things, horror.
In a flash, she threw herself at him, knocking them both to the ground.
His head knocked painfully against the wet cobblestones, and he was dimly aware of movement, a heavy whoosh and a shuddering crash that shook the air around him.
His arms flew around Violet’s waist, clutching her to him and rolling them both to the side as something big and heavy snatched at his sleeves.
Dust enveloped them in a cloud, and Nathaniel clenched his eyes shut, raising a hand to cradle Violet’s head to his shoulder as they trembled. The air grew eerily still and, his heart thudding in his chest, he cracked open an eyelid.
A cherry tree had fallen, landing exactly where he and Violet had been standing.
Blossoms rained down around them like snow, blanketing their bodies in pink-and-white petals as they lay, shocked, in the filth of the empty road.
Wet branches tangled with their legs and clung to Violet’s hair, and a wall of thorny bramble had appeared from nowhere, holding back a heavier branch that should have crushed them.
Violet’s doing, Nathaniel surmised. She was panting, her eyes wide and glowing eerily green just as they had that first night in the greenhouse and again today when he found her.
Her arm was flung wide from summoning the bramble, her scar stretched tight over a tense mouth.
Something vibrated against his chest, and he realized she was shaking.
Nathaniel recognized it with the distant sort of awareness he sometimes got when he spotted one of his own expressions on his twin’s face—Violet was experiencing the same sort of attack that sometimes stole his breath and drove his heart to fighting the bars of his ribs for escape.
He pushed himself to a sitting position that left her in his lap.
“Breathe,” he instructed, ducking his head to catch her eye.
Her teeth chattered and her body shuddered, and it was as easy as blinking to pull her into his arms. He stroked her hair, pulling twigs and petals from her curls and inhaling the scent of petrichor and fresh-turned earth that clung to her skin like perfume.
“Deep breaths. Look at me, sweetheart. Focus on my face. The sound of my voice.”
She dragged her attention from the tree that had nearly crushed them and scanned his features with those wide, darting eyes, which slowly faded back to their usual color.
“We’re alright,” he murmured, holding her tightly. “Violet, we’re alright.”
And then she flung her arms around his neck and burst into tears.
Nathaniel froze like a statue, his brain catching up to his body all at once with the reminder that while he was somewhat experienced in managing anxiety (however poorly), he was not very good at offering physical comfort.
He felt entirely certain that there was a protocol here, that there were Certain Things One Should Do to comfort a crying woman in one’s arms, but for the life of him, he could not remember what they were, if he’d ever learned them at all.
(Pru would, he surmised, roll her eyes at him.)
What he did know, however, was that they’d just narrowly escaped death or serious injury, and that he was incredibly relieved to know Violet was safe.
Slowly, intentionally, Nathaniel relaxed his body and allowed himself to hold her as she cried great, heaving sobs into his shoulder.
He was peculiarly aware, in that moment, of her humanity, full and robust and a three-dimensional thing.
The woman in his arms was not just the wild force of reckless optimism she’d come to represent to him but a person with fears and fragile pieces, just like the ones that rattled painfully within the cage of his own soul.
He stroked her back, his other hand tangling in her hair, and thought to himself how curious that the knowledge made him want her even more.
“I don’t want to go,” she said wetly at one point, her tears soaking his shirt. “I want to stay.”
“Then stay,” he said into her hair. He was not entirely sure what she was talking about, but he knew he didn’t want her to be anywhere else, to seek comfort from anyone but him. “Stay here with me.”