ChapterThirty-Four
Mirren
I spend the next two days entrenched in magic. I wake up with its sweet taste in my mouth and its tangy scent in my nose. I think only of its rushing power and its delicate precision. I cultivate and nourish it with my emotions, feeding it my fear and my love and my loneliness. In return, it spirals through me, invigorating and restorative. For the first time in my life, I don’t feel like I am grasping for pieces to make myself whole. I am strong and I’m enough.
I move on from the well bucket to forest streams, calling and shaping the water. It runs over my skin and tangles in my hair, and I wonder how I ever lived without it. My body has never felt stronger, but opening myself to everything I’ve kept shoved down for so long leaves me exhausted and at the end of each day, I collapse gratefully into sleep.
Aggie is delighted at my progress and her eyes always shine with tears whenever she watches the water move, as if seeing nature’s power return home is something she never thought she’d witness. It’s her that suggests I try to manipulate the very humidity in the morning mist. “It’s water, after all.”
I close my eyes, feeling each miniscule droplet, each individual prick of power. I call them to me, and they dance happily over my fingertips and up my arms until I direct them toward Cal, who stands ready, having taken to accompanying me dressed in a cloak and armed with a large umbrella.
I skirt the droplets around the umbrella, and they dive under his collar. He jumps up and down, yelping and cursing, to the great amusement of Max.
The only part of myotherthat remains stubbornly out of reach is the water’s healing properties it first showed in the cave. Aggie tells me not to rush, that in time, I will discover the right emotion that opens it to me, but I ignore her warnings. My dreams are filled with Easton gasping for his last breath, Easton crying out for me, forgotten and alone. He doesn’t have time to give up to my failings.
Each night, I slice my dagger through my palm and each night, I end up sopping up my blood with a rag, unable to magically staunch the bleeding. As the last evening before we depart for Yen Girene falls, I’m forced to admit that I may not be able to heal Easton on my own. My only way forward is trusting in Anrai and in my own power, and saving my father in time.
Anrai has been noticeably absent from both meal and training times. Max, whose unabashed honesty I’ve actually come to appreciate, informs me that he’s taken to eating in Denver’s office, pouring over every snippet of information he can about the Dead Prophecy and how the Achijj might seek to use it. On the rare occasion we run into each other in the candlelit hallways, he never meets my eyes, deliberately skirting around me as if my touch would be unbearable.
Only my pride has kept me from bursting into the study and demanding that he look at me. That he offer some explanation as to why, only days ago, he touched me with reverence, and now the mere sight of me offends him. He is more schooled in the emotional entrapments of the Dark World, but I know enough to know I will never debase myself by begging for his attention. He hasn’t argued against my coming to Yen Girene since I splashed him in the face and that’s enough for me.
If only my body agreed. There are nights I wake in the dark, my skin feverish and pleading for his touch. I can’t decide whether to hate myself for it.
It’s during the last meal before we leave—a supper of pasta with peppered sauce and freshly baked bread—that Max asks, “have you talked to Shaw yet?”
His name sends a bolt of electricity through my stomach. I pointedly take another bite of pasta and chew slowly before answering, “no.”
“We leave tomorrow,” she points out. Rhonwen bustles in and Max looks to her with an appreciative smile. “Thanks for dinner, Rhonwen. It was delicious.”
Rhonwen smiles but shoos away Max’s thanks as if they are insects in the air. “You’ll all need something to stick to your bones while you’re on the road,” she looks at me with a cheeky grin. “I made that chocolate cake you like for dessert.”
I blush, flattered that in the middle of her vigorous workload, she took the time to notice my favorite things. As if I’m the same as any of the others here, cared for and important. “Thank you so much, Rhonwen,” my throat tightens. “I…I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”
She tsks impatiently. “Now, now, none of that. I’ll see you in three days’ time and there will be plenty more where that came from.” Her skirts swirl around her ankles as she hurries back toward the kitchen.
I watch her with a sad smile. Even if everything goes to plan in Yen Girene—if we somehow manage to break into the impenetrable fortress, make a deal with the Achijj, and escape unharmed with my father—there will be no more chocolate cakes for me. I will be on my way back to Similis, Denver at my side. When I originally imagined coming home with the very thing that can save Easton’s life, it was a bolstering thought that kept me moving forward, but now it is edged with dread. I will see my brother safe, but it will come at a steep cost. For how am I to fold myself back into the small box I lived in? Am I to take myself apart bit by bit and sort through the pieces, discarding ones the Community has deemed unimportant? Dangerous?
And what of myother?Will it thrash around inside me, demanding to be fed? Or will it abandon me when it discovers I am only a shadow of what I once was, capable of only fractions of emotions?
And then there’s Anrai.
The man who first colored my gray world, tore me apart and put me back together as something more genuine—something more me.You cannot touch the Darkness and remain unchanged.Aggie’s words to me, truer than she could possibly know.
I look to Max, who’s friendship was hard won and well worth the effort. I’ve never had a true friend before—or really, a friend at all—but if I were to imagine one for myself, it would be her. Brave and loyal, whose truth streams from her like the power it is. “I know we leave tomorrow,” I tell her sadly. As much as I wished for the day to come, for time to move faster, I now want to run from it. I want to stay in this manor forever, listening to Anrai read or Cal and Max argue. Leaving will feel like being torn from a picture I’ve been painted into, one whose colors and tones align seamlessly with my own and thrust into a new painting—one whose colors clash against mine and whose lines delineate.
“We’ll be back in three days,” Calloway says from his seat next to Max. Cal, with his boisterous laugh and his mischievous eyes; able to turn even the angriest person into the truest friend.
Max nods, but her eyes are grave. As if she knows it isn’t only three days; that after Yen Girene, everything will change. “Do you remember what I said to you before the lunar celebration?”
“That if I don’t moisturize my curls, they’re going to look like electrocuted straw?”
She laughs, shaking her head. “About Shaw. About how he acts.”
He acts how he thinks he should.And how is that?Broken,she’d replied.
I nod slowly.
She flicks her eyes back to her plate. “Good.”
