Then a new flood came, one of her own doing. She thought she couldn’t cry anymore, but her broken heart was an endless pool, and Briar was going to drown in it.
“I cried out for you when I found El. I called your name. I prayed and begged to a god, any god, that somewhere, out there, you would wake up and make things better. But you never came.”
The memories came rushing back. Elly’s body cradled to her chest. Her throat turning raw from screaming. The name of asleeping princess echoing through the tunnels. The deafening silence that told her nobody was going to help them.
For so long, she had told Elly not to get her hopes up with magic and fairy tales. She had dismissed the stories as desperate imagination for fools who had nothing else to live for. Yet even after discovering Elly’s body starved to death with the other lost souls, Corin had continued wandering through the tunnels in search for the castle ruins. She had done it because, more than anything, it was Corin who wanted to believe the fairy tale was real.
In the end, she had been the fool who dreamed.
Briar recognized this truth as well, because her face crumpled under the weight of it. She let go a shuddering breath as if she were in pain, even though Corin no longer pinned her to the ground. Something heavier pressed against Briar’s chest, forcing tears to spring to her eyes, a broken sob to crawl out of her throat.
“I’m sorry,” Briar said. “But there would be no difference in the world if I was in it. In fact, the world would be better off without me.”
“Why?” The question sounded more like a beg. Corin saw the image of the perfect princess crumbling before her, an ethereal vision cracked into glass shards. Briar’s flowers washed away in the river, her skin turning pale like the sleeping princess Corin had seen in Gyldan. Blond, limp hair slicked her real face.
“Because I am a coward,” Amelia answered, “and cowards do not change lives.”
Corin stared at her, remembering every clue of Amelia’s life she had witnessed, every wound the princess tried to hide. Broken crowns, dented chain mail, rows of pearls with specks of blood. An act of defiance ending with a dead king’s blood crusted beneath her nails. They came in flashes, the memories diluted from suppression,like watching something submerged underwater. Corin had only seen pieces in Autumnland, yet she felt the weight of Amelia’s pain, the way it suffocated her. It was the same sinking feeling Corin possessed when she held Elly’s body to her sobbing chest, knowing that even when her sister was alive, Corin couldn’t have given her a better life anyway.
She had been suspicious of Briar Rose, not because of her unfamiliarity, but her uncomfortable likeness. Beneath Briar’s facade, Corin had seen the very thing she hated within herself.
The realization washed over her like the last wave of an ocean. The sun broke through the sky in fractured light, shining through the waterfall that streamed over the cliffside again. What once were walls surrounding them shrank back to rocks. Malicine and Talon stood from the other side, watching in stunned silence.
Corin could not stand up or apologize. Instead, she broke down in Briar’s arms.
The stream trickled past their skin and tried to wash away their pain, but the sounds Corin made were too loud and horrid, disrupting what should have been serene. She cried like someone who felt the whole truth: that sometimes people died and the world was cruel and there was nothing left to do but feel every loss.
Briar held her for what felt like an eternity. She didn’t let go, even as Corin gripped her arms and wailed. They curled inside the pool, floating between each other’s limbs. This was different from drowning herself in the darkest depths of the ocean or burying herself in soil like a grave. Corin could no longer sink into oblivion and self-hatred, because this time, Briar Rose carried her.
CHAPTER 32
NEARLY 100 YEARS AGO
LILITH DID NOT remember dreams, but she remembered this one like a memory bubbling to her subconscious. The swell of the ocean, the burning light of sun. How the earth carried to shore a dying boy. At twelve years old, she’d already had lungs powerful enough to scream for help. She had already lost her mother. The thought of losing another person, even if it was a stranger, was earth-shattering.
Her arms had hooked underneath his armpits as she’d dragged him away from water and dropped him into sand. He was skinny and pale, and appeared almost the same age as her, perhaps younger. She’d brushed wet, blond locks of hair from his face and crushed her lips against his. He’d tasted like the salt of the ocean and her tears.
She’d switched between pressing her palms hard against his chest and blowing air into his mouth. In those frantic minutes, she’d pleaded for him to open his eyes, waited for air to expel from his lips. A single breath to let her know he was alive.
Please, please, please.
Breathe.
Lilith woke up with his cold breath against her ear.
Moonlight slanted into her bedroom, casting rippling shadows on patterned wallpaper. Satin drapes were left open to reveal a full moon hanging bare in the sky. Parts of Lilith’s room brought her back to reality: red upholstered furniture, malachite candelabras, the cabinet that doubled as a mirror, reflecting her body entwined with another in bed.
She turned to look at the boy from the ocean, grown into a man a decade later. His jaw had become more defined, sharp as the slice of light that fell through the windows. His hair’s white-blond locks were tousled like the blankets. Long lashes swept over pale cheeks, and the gentle breath of his lips fluttered over her face.
He looked so innocent whenever he slept. Soft and ethereal, the light of the moon gently caressing his cheek. For a moment, his expression was the exact replica of the time she’d pulled him from the ocean in Zilar. A moment of peaceful unconsciousness before she’d breathed air back into his lungs.
Lilith untangled herself from his arms and sat up from the bed. The movement made him stir awake. When she was certain he was fully conscious, she said, “I told you not to come here anymore.”
She thought she had locked the door. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe some part of her pretended to forget. When Amelia accepted Ezran’s marriage proposal, Lilith had been horrified by the news. He’d intruded upon their lives and fooled the kingdom into letting him stay by proposing to the princess. All so that he could be in Lilith’s life again.
Ezran crawled toward her on the mattress and wrapped his arm around her waist, burying his face into her back like a lost child.She fought the urge to take his embrace, but didn’t push him away, either.
“I can’t keep acting like you’re a stranger, Lilith. It doesn’t come as easily to me as it does to you.” His voice was husky and low, muffled by the fabric of her nightgown.
