Emmett looks at her with shock, at this evidence she might actually care for Rhion in return.
“Follow, quickly!” Rhion’s voice is a few shades quieter, as if it’s coming from the rustling green leaves in the trees surrounding us.
“I’ll go.” Faith plants a quick kiss on Marion’s lips and steps onto the bridge. Like Rhion, she vanishes a few paces in, but this time, I listen close enough to hear a splash as her button hits the water.
Marion follows closely after, then Lydia, leaving Emmett and I alone.
The sun shifts and bends like candlelight, and the air clings thick and hot to my skin like a velvet cloak. The dappled light of the trees dances over his dark hair as he looks at me.
“You go,” he says, his voice low and gravelly. “I’m not leaving you here alone.”
“You think I want to leaveyouhere alone?” Despite everything, or perhaps because of it, it’s awful, unnatural, to be separated.
He reaches down and squeezes my hand. “Go on,” he urges, “I’ll see you on the other side.”
The quicker I go, the sooner it will be over with, so I gather my courage and step onto the bridge.
The hollow wood makes a dullthunkas my feet hit it, and then the whole world shifts.
An icy wind whips my cloak around me as the lights go dim, like the sun was snuffed out by a rolling thundercloud. Drifts of snow flutter around my feet like phantoms, and the forest seems to spin around me like a top.
“What have you come to offer me?” The voice is young and old. Soft and screaming. It could belong to one person or one hundred, and it’s coming from inside my own head.
I reach into my cloak and am relieved to find the comforting, smooth surface of the button. I tore it off a white coat I found in my wardrobe late this evening before the revel. Marion and Faith have the other two.
“This.” My voice trembles.
I extend my hand, revealing the button resting in the center of my palm. Tiny shards of ice carried by the wind sting as they pierce the delicate skin of my wrist.
“Mmmm.” The voice purrs, pleased. “And the memory?”
The memory, the memory...My brain scrambles, trying to find something. Rhion said a memory associated with the button, right? I cast my mind back to my room, how I giggled with Marion and Faith as we ripped off the buttons and snipped small locks of our hair.
The voice in my head snarls like a cornered animal. Its claws scrape against some fundamental part of me and I shiver. “Not that, that’snothing.”
Nothing, nothing, nothing.The wordclangs like a bell. I want to clap my hands over my ears, but I know that won’t make it stop.
“What about this?” I offer, fully panicking now. Through the drum kick of my heartbeat, I picture Emmett walking through the forest beside me, the broad line of his shoulders, his perfect face lit up by beams of silver moonlight, how I ache for him, even when he’s close enough to reach out and touch.
“This means nothing to you.” The voice in my head is disgusted. “You have insulted me.”
“No, no—” I protest, but the forest stops, then whirls counterclockwise around me. I blink and find myself suddenly somewhere else.
I land hard enough to knock the wind from my chest, splayed out on cold, hard dirt.
I wheeze in and out for a few shaky breaths, and though my lungs eventually fill, it does little to calm my racing pulse.
“Emmett?” I call, but I hear nothing save for the far-off snapping of twigs and soft whisper of leaves in the dark. The air is cool, layered with the sweet smell of autumn once more.
I push myself to my feet, and through the thick wall of brush in front of me, I see the glowing, faintly purple lights of the castle.
I realize I’m right on the edge of the garden, where we began our journey. It seems my punishment from the bridge spirit was being spat out of the forest entirely.
My heartbeat slows and I sigh in relief. There are far worse punishments than being sent back to my warm bed for the night. The knife’s edge of anxiety still cuts me, but I have confidence Marion, Faith, Rhion, Lydia, and Emmett are more than capable of finishing the journey on their own. Surely it doesn’t take more than five people to find one knife.
The gardens are quieter than they usually are on revel nights. Perhaps without Bram or Emmett here to encourage merrymaking, the court isn’t in their finest form tonight.
The doors to the castle swing open silently, and I’m surprised to find the great hall has changed colors. The walls were sage green when I left this evening, but someone has magicked them to a pale purple. It’s a strange choice. It doesn’t particularly match tonight’s Camelot theme and I can’t imagine Bram will be pleased to find his castle altered when he returns from England.
