For a moment, she felt triumphant. Then a thickly muscled vine encircled Arthur’s waist.
“No!” Eva shouted. “Let him go!” She snarled a long tress of grass growing on the bank in her fingers and used it to keep them from flowing any farther downriver.
A figure standing on the opposite bank caught Eva’s attention. She blinked, confused. It was a woman, but something about her was wrong. Her body was made not of flesh but of tree branches woven and bent as though to imitate the shape of a person.
My son.
The voice rang through the clearing, finding Eva in peril. The roots binding her tightened, and Arthur woke with a hard exhale, expelling water from his mouth. When he clawed at the vine around his stomach, the woman on the bank screamed. The shape of her was unmade in an instant as the branches snapped back into their places, rigid and… anddead,Eva realized. The roots burning Eva’s skin slackened and fell away as the figure disappeared, the trees that had made her now as stiff and dead as the grove of aspens Arthur had killed.
Had she been the one to attack them? First at the pit, now here?
Eva hauled Arthur onto the bank, her ankle screaming as they both crawled up the muddy slope and fell onto the grass. Every inhale was a knife.
The wildflowers her gift had yanked into bloom lay beneath Arthur in a colorful carpet. Where his skin touched, they faded, only to bloom again under the heavy rush of relief Eva felt. He made things die, but she brought them back. Life and death. Always a tug-of-war between them.
“Breathe,” Eva commanded, flattening her palm to Arthur’s chest. It rose and fell in a stutter, but he was breathing still, his face pale but with color slowly returning. Something slinked up and over his wrist, filling her nose with the scent of fresh, damp peat. The root was small and tentative, barely brushing over his pulse point, as though it, too, was searching for signs of vitality.
But that was absurd.
“GET AWAY FROM HIM!” Eva snatched the root up and twisted it hard, snapping it from the soil. It was already dying, doomed by his skin. Eva felt the echo of its last thread of life wisp away as Arthur drew its light into himself. He had corrupted it. Poisoned it. For a moment, with his hot breath fanning against her cheek as she leaned over him, Eva was certain he was poisoning her too. What else could make her feel such a burn?
She laid frantic touches to Arthur’s torso and arms, afraid that he was hurt because of another choice she’d made. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Arthur gathered her weakly against his chest. Her ankle was throbbing, but when he brought her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to her palm, Eva forgot the pain, and shivered at the scrape of his teeth.
She liked his teeth.
“S’okay,” he croaked.
But it wasn’t.
They were both still dripping, shivering from the cold of theriver. Or maybe it was the pressure of so many feelings kept inside that made Eva shake.
“I never should’ve left you,” Arthur whispered. “I know you said you don’t want my apology, but… fuck, Ev, I wish I’d stayed.”
The words should have been a balm. Instead, they were gravestones. If Eva really were made of glass, this confession would shatter her.
She drew back. Water dripped off Arthur’s brow, running pink from his reopened wound. The stitches weren’t holding, and the dribble marked a path down his cheek. He opened his eyes and met her gaze. “I wish I could go back and make a different choice,” Arthur said softly. “For you. For us.”
And something did shatter then, but it wasn’t the splinter of heartbreak she feared. Instead, Eva’s anger fractured. There were two griefs bisecting her heart now: The fury she’d held on to all these years, bitter and spent. And the newer, sharper ache of grieving what might have been, if only they’d been a little braver.
“At the very least,” he said, “I wish we’d had a better goodbye.”
She thumbed a bead of scarlet blood off his cheek. Arthur found the small of her back with a gentle hand, and for the first time since his arrival back in Audrey, Eva realized he was in pain too, a kind that reached far beyond the physical aches they’d incurred on this mountain.
“Let’s find that honey,” she whispered.
Arthur nodded and sat up, twisting as he searched the bank full of vivid blue Lotties. Despite the peril of the river, they’d somehow both ended up on the opposite bank. Their meadow had to be close by.
Bug yowled in displeasure from the other side of the river.
“We’ll come back!” Eva called out.
The reassurance did nothing for the panicked little kitten, who tentatively pawed the ground beside the very log the two of them had fallen off. Eva’s heart jumped into her throat when Bug leapt onto the log. Arthur stiffened too.
But the kitten’s journey across the river was not nearly so eventful as theirs had been. She bounded across, then shot toward the two of them. Eva scooped her up with a laugh of relief. Bug’s paws were wet, her usual gray fluff slightly damp. “That was brave,” she murmured. In response, Bug nuzzled her neck, digging her claws in deep enough to make Eva yelp.
The bright flare of emotion clogging her throat drew even more of the delicate blue-violet flowers to the soil’s surface. Eva plucked one, bringing it to her nose to smell. It was home, it was Dad, it was tea and comfort and summer.
