Nearly every day for two weeks, it had been the same ritual: breakfast in the library, followed by a brief lesson with Simeon, while Oberon attended to his duties. When he returned, we would walk with Sir Toby to the rowan grove, which I learned had been a wedding gift from Titania. But besides the faerie king and his ancient owl-librarian, the only people I’d seen were Ceres, and occasionally Prim, or Antenor, who stopped by the tower to deliver messages, but did not stay there. Devil had made himself scarce indeed, ostensibly searching for the antidote to Helena’s lovesickness, but I’d become increasingly certain that Oberon had threatened him to stay away from me.
It was not only Devil that I caught myself missing, though. I desperately wanted to return to the Hollow to see Aliena, especially after Prim brought a secret message directly to my room one night. Apparently, Jon had found Willwandering around the edges of the Arden several times, desperate for the love spell’s antidote. While Jon promised to ensure Will’s safety, the entire situation had only compounded my aggravation and restlessness.
As much as I tried to embrace it, Oberon’s ‘unveiling’ of my power–as he called it–had also become rather disheartening. After two weeks, I could still only use my shadows to manipulate small air currents and plant life. I could not solidify them, nor travel through the Arden in the blink of an eye, nor had we come any closer to finding my wings. Having lived for so long with only my healing gift, which was often more burden than blessing, I was far too eager to be in control of something real—something thatfeltdangerous, the way I imagined a sword or a bow did. Oberon insisted that magyk, and especially my Shadowspinning, was not intended as a weapon, and refused to teach me any kind of offensive skills until I had mastered the basics.
But a weapon was exactly what I wanted. Every day, on our walk to the rowan grove, we passed by the Rot. Every day, I watched as it consumed another piece of bark, another leaf, another blade of grass. And every day, flashes of anger and fear, bright as fireworks, burst inside me at the sight of the destruction. At night, I dreamed of burning the curse away with my magyk, of watching it retreat so the forest could come back to life. But that seemed as much a faerie story as everything else at this point.
Having now twisted the rosebush into the shape of half a dozen different animals, I allowed my shadows to dissipate in small bursts of blackness. They pulled back into my body as I turned to face Oberon and folded my arms.
“This is stupid,” I said coldly.
“Perhaps,” he answered, “but it is necessary.”
“I can do more!”
“Not yet. Not until you learn to be mindful of yourself.” He circled around me, hands clasped behind his back. “You think mastering the power is about physicality, about the precision of your movements, but it is not. Your emotional control matters more. If you do not have control, you will either explode and hurt someone, or deplete yourself doing even the simplest of things.”
“Easier said than done when the emotions are still flooding me every chance they get,” I grumbled.
“And what exactly are you doing to keep them in check?” asked Oberon, patient as ever.
“I-I don’t know…” I stuttered, taken aback. “Just…trying not to feel them? Not allowing them to overwhelm me or…control my decisions, like you said.”
Oberon frowned. “I told you not to let them shape your decisions, yes, but I said nothing of pushing them down. You must let them come, but do not let them control.”
“You do well enough pushingyoursdown,” I snapped.
“Excuse me?” He stopped in his tracks and pinned me with a hard expression, but I just sat down hard at the base of a rowan tree.
“You heard. All this talk of emotional control, of letting myself feel, and you have not spoken to your own wife once since I arrived here, have you?”
“What makes you think I have not spoken to her?”
I paused, unsure if I had made a mistake, but then pressed on. “I think I would be able to tell if you had. The only time I’ve ever seen you rattled was after she confronted you at the revelry.” Oberon’s shoulders sagged a little, and he called up a chair from the roots of the tree beside mine. He sat, folded his hands, and sighed—something I had noticed he did quite often when he was feeling melancholic or frustrated.
“You are right,” he said softly. “I have not found the courage to seek her out, and she certainly has not come to me.” I pried a piece of bark away from the tree trunk beside my elbow and snapped it in half, attempting to channel some of my anger into it.
“Perhaps…I should speak to her.” I knew it was a foolish thing, but ever since that first day in the library, Simeon’s words about Titania had been hanging in the back of my mind like an overripe fruit, ready to fall and burst open on the ground.
“I do not think that would be wise.”
“Because she might hurt me?”
“Not only that, but…seeing you could hurther…” Oberon murmured, “and I cannot be responsible for causing my wife any more pain.”
He hid it beautifully, but his sadness was palpable. It weighed down the air around him, and the leaves on the rowan trees drooped when his head did. I shifted to kneel in front of him and took his hands.
“Her pain comes from her own guilt, not from anything you did,” I tried to reassure.
Oberon raised an eyebrow. “And how would you know this?”
“I have seen it before. Parents losing their child…”
“At your Abbey?”
I nodded slowly. “When I worked in the infirmary. It was a terrible thing, but I also learned from it. Please, let me speak to Titania. Maybe if I can get her to come around, the two of you together can push back the Rot.”
“We have tried,” Oberon said. “We tried many times when it first emerged, and many times after that. Sometimes, we were able to keep it from spreading further, or prevent attacks from the Unseelie creatures it makes. But nothing worked to erase it completely, which is why I began to believe that we need you to banish it completely.” I fell silent, thinking hard, but he spoke again before I could come up with any words of comfort. “I will…call for Hippolyta. If you truly wish to speak with Titania, it would be best to do it through her commander.” He stood up just as a large shadow passed over the grove and a winged figure landed amongst the rowan trees. My heart jumped for a moment, thinking it might be Devil, but the wings were featherless.
