Anger is roiling off Bram like steam, ruddy dust spilling between the fingers clutching his stomach. He makes a move for Ransom, but I hold him back, hand soft.
“Bram, he isn’t worth your time.”
Something in the air shifts. A kind of warmth spreading out from between my fingers. It shakes me to my very core, and when I open my mouth to scream, all that comes out of me is a twisting vine. It grows from my lips, my viscera its soil.
Clara’s eyes widen, and a sound like a sawn-off limb presses past her lips. The vine grows, the taste of it like honey in my mouth. It does not hurt. If anything, it feels like heaven. So warm, so welcoming.
So much like how home should feel.
The plant grows toward Bram, wrapping him up in golden light. I reach forward into his chest, feeling for the dry and sunken heart, then cradle itin my palm, dead and still. White flowers bloom along his skin, their centers yellow as bumblebees. And the lightest flutter in my hand—his heart restarting.
Ransom makes a sound like a gutted lamb, his lips curling. Bram is lifted off his feet, and I let go.
Between the shafts of light and green leaves, his skin knits back together, turns to something pink and healthy. Bones slip back into place, lungs inflating to fullness, and the flesh is pieced together and made whole. And then, he’s gone. Every inch of him devoured by the golden mist.
The last of the vines leave my body. I surge forward, but the light is blinding. The air smells of autumn leaves, freshly cut fields, apples crisping on the branch. The room goes dark again.
I fumble for the bell, hurrying it to my pocket, while Ransom’s voice echoes in the darkness.
“What have you bloody done?”
Tears sneak from my lashes and fall down my cheeks. The shadows are all-consuming.
“Bram?” My voice is light. I am half afraid to speak his name and not hear a reply. Never again.
Something scuffles, hands against stone. Clara moves in the dark beside me. Rascal’s ears are piqued to the sound.
“She’s become something stronger than you’ll ever be, Lord Black.”
My chest contracts. I push forward, swimming through the darkness. Bram.Bram. And then I feel him, solid, there, and…warm. So warm it is like he has been lying in the sun.
“Are you—gods below and above, Bram. Are youalive?”
An arm comes to circle my waist, a hand to my cheek. “As close to it as a dead person can get. What was that?”
I open my mouth to tell him, but it is Ransom’s rasping voice that fills the space.
“You could have had it all, you know? Your mother promised me a spot at your side, magic beyond our wildest dreams. The power of Erybrus and Ithrandril combined. And you have traded that in for what? The petty ability to growflowers?”
The bell glows once more in my pocket, feeding off the angry beatingof my heart. Ransom Black is fast against the wall, vines like ropes at his wrists. The poisoned shadows seep from him, every inch stinking like rot. I fist my hands, leaving Bram’s side, until I am so close to Ransom the stench rolling off him sends my stomach roiling.
“Death can only take you so far. I am more than happy to let you stay here, molting in your own greed, but give me one answer, Ransom.One.”
He tips his chin at me, lips peeled back in a sneer.
“Why did you do it?”
Something in his eyes flickers, something akin to what little humanity he has left. He struggles against the vines, veins bulging blue in his neck.
“You’ll never understand. Don’t cry to me about being tied to a chair. At least your father wasyours. At least for the brief years your mother held you, she did so with love. You want to know why the castle is rotting, Thorn? Want to know why my inheritance became nothing more than sludge and rubble? Because my father was all hate, down to his very bones. He knew from the day I was born I wasn’t his. My mother had found love somewhere else. She couldn’t take my father’s purpling fists. But what were they to do?”
The revelation is a lightning strike to my guts. “So, you chose death?”
“Iwasdeath!” He rips against his bounds, skin shredding white between the vines. “I killed my father the day I came out of my mother. Not in blood and bones, but in knowledge. I was no Lord Black; I was not his trueborn son. I was the son of a stable hand! An embarrassment, a stain on Blackbourne’s history. So, what choice did I have?” He glances at the shadows bleeding from his pale hands. “Those women, the power they gave me, it was all I had.”
For a moment, I feel nothing but pity for Ransom Black. The lordling who never knew love. Only understood pain, loss, the slip of rot on his cheek. But anger replaces it.
The light from the bell pulsates. “You’ve been killing for so long.”
