And I... it was impossible for me to do the same. The truth of that burned in my chest, hollowing me out from the inside. No matter how talented I was, no matter how well I performed or how much I charmed—I could never stand where Woferl would.
From a higher balcony, I spied Hyacinth with a hand of cards. He turned to watch us, his blue eyes glowing. I looked up by instinct and met his gaze. At long last, he was here. He staredat me for a moment, reading the weight in my eyes, tapping the cards thoughtfully against his cheek. Then, finally, he smiled.
Woferl waited for me to respond to his declaration about putting on an opera, but I pretended that I could not hear him through the applause.
THEARROW
When Hyacinth visited our bedchamber that night, I was already awake and waiting for him. Somehow, I’d known at the opera that he would come for me tonight. He looked once at my brother, but this time he did not bother to address him. Instead, he let him sleep.
“You’ve grown taller,” Hyacinth said to me.
So had he, I realized, his lithe, boyish shape now transformed into something leaner and stronger, and the forest hue of his skin paled even further, white seeping into his hands and arms like frost curls over dew.
“Why have you come back only now?” I asked him in a hushed voice.
“I needed to know exactly how to help you,” he replied, flashing me a quick smile. “I was waiting for a sign from you. I finally got it at the opera.”
He had been waiting for my anger to rise? “How will that help me?” I asked. “Or you?”
“It is time for you to complete your third task.” He looked over his shoulder, jewels clinking in his hair, toward the moon hanging over the city’s rooftops. He beckoned to me. “But we must hurry tonight, Fräulein. You have only a short time to retrieve what I need.”
I could feel the threads of his urgency tugging against my heart. My legs swung over the side of my bed, my bare feet crept across the cold floorboards. I followed him out of our inn and into the street, where drunken revelers were still staggering home. None of them seemed to notice me, although one man squinted in confusion as Hyacinth passed him, as if he had seen some kind of shadow rippling against the wall.
As we went, moss began to cover the street’s cobblestones in a silver blanket. Ivy trailed out from the cracks between the rocks. In the sky, the twin moons shone bright and round as coins, separated now by only a couple of arm’s lengths. Crooked trees arched in between buildings. When I turned to look at them, I noticed that their branches were bare, as if they were roots reaching up to the sky.
They grew thicker and thicker, until soon they crowded out the buildings altogether, leaving us hurrying along a mossy path that wound through a now-familiar forest. Faeries dotted the night air, illuminating our path with their light.
Hyacinth broke into a run. I struggled to keep up with him as he darted along the path, barely visible in the darkness ahead of me.
Finally, we arrived in a meadow blanketed with bright silver flowers, their petals dancing in the breeze. Among them lingered the faeries, and when Hyacinth arrived, it was as if all of themcame alive at once, their light surrounding us in excitement and their tiny teeth nipping at my ankles. The blue grass beneath our feet waved and sighed.
“There,” Hyacinth told me, pointing at a yawning arc of stone that connected two cliffs. Rock pillars formed a large circle underneath the bridge, a valley heavily overgrown with trees and brush. “Long ago, this was all a cavern. When the oceans lowered, it collapsed, until all that remains is this arc of stone.” I followed the line of his finger to the underbrush. “Down there, when the moon is shining directly above the land bridge, you will find a golden crossbow fitted with a single arrow.”
I peered at the stone arc, then the thick growth underneath it. Nothing seemed dangerous here. “Why do you not go in yourself?” I asked.
The faeries around me quivered, and a hush spread across the meadow. Hyacinth’s playful face looked grave now, even afraid. His eyes lingered on the billowing blue plants that grew within the circle. “It is poisonous ground for me,” he replied. “I cannot enter.”
I looked at the valley. Then I stepped past the rock pillars and into the circle they formed.
The faeries did not follow me into the circle. It was as if they were fearful of the vegetation here too, as if it were toxic to them as well. I was entirely on my own. The grasses sighed at my approach and whispered at me to turn back. A strange sense of foreboding clung to the ground inside the pillars, and as I went, it dragged against my legs, so that I felt like I was slogging through deep water.
When I looked over my shoulder, Hyacinth was nowhere to be seen.
The grass at the bottom of the valley grew tall enough to come up to my waist, and the blades were rough, chafing against my nightgown. I waded through it, searching for a glint of gold in the shadows. Overhead, the moons shifted slowly closer, half exposed and half hidden behind the arching rock.
I searched in a circle until the waving grasses and rock pillars made me dizzy, then turned my face up to the sky. The twin moons gradually moved into position. As they did, the light in the valley dimmed, and a glowing outline formed as the moons beamed from either side of the land bridge. It formed two arcs of light against the grass, as bright as if the blades were glowing silver, shifting wider and wider until the rock pillars surrounding me were entirely illuminated.
The ground beneath me suddenly shifted. I stumbled, looked down, and there, glowing from within a new crack in the earth, was a golden crossbow with a single arrow notched on it, its tip frighteningly sharp.
I let out a cry of triumph and bent down to pick it up. My hand closed tightly around the crossbow’s cool handle. A numbing tingle rushed through my arm. I sucked in my breath at the sensation, but still pulled the crossbow close to me and wrapped both my arms around it.
“I have it, Hyacinth!” I called out, turning to head out of the circle of rock.
As I walked, my arms felt more and more locked around the crossbow, and the weight of the weapon seemed to pull me backward with each forward step I took. A great wind blew through the valley, sending the grass billowing like an open sea. The world swam around me. I shook my head to toss hair out of my eyes. Beyond the pillars, I could see the silhouette of Hyacinth waitingfor me, calling my name... but the faster I tried to run, the farther away the pillars seemed to get, lost in the waving landscape.
The numbness in my arms began to spread. With it came the whisper of a thousand voices brushing past my ear.
Faeries come, but they cannot leave. They fear the poison of these grasses.
