Each desire another arrow. Each an obstacle in his path.
And that wouldn’t do at all.
He should leave her now, before those feelings overwhelmed him; before he was as full of arrows as the monster between them.
He could. He could manage on his own. He had to; that had not changed.
But then she said, softly, “The passage is this way. Come with me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Anya had smelled the way out before she had seen it.
She smelled it chasing after the phoenix and smelled it again now. Flowers; hundreds of them, easily. Disconcertingly, the smell was almost as enticing to her tongue as to her nose.
From the edge of her vision, she watched Sy’s more human senses register the floral bouquet, his brow wrinkling in the torchlight.
She supposed the cavern must open up to a meadow. But as the darkness waned and the tunnel opened up into a chamber, she saw the smell was not coming from outside – it was coming from within. The sunlit chamber was bursting with colorful life. Light from the world above poured from an opening in the dirt ceiling like a picture window, angled just so it flooded half of the chamber with daylight. In the center of the cavern was a serene green pool. All around it grew an impossible, kaleidoscopic patch of flowers.
In the Lichtenwald, such a sight usually meant some obscure horror lurked nearby. But the obscure horror was dead by her hand – and his. Now, it was just beautiful.
Or it should be. But to her, the flowers held a tint of menace. A reminder of the curse creeping up her spine, twining around her throat.
Sy was breathless as he took it all in. Anya watched him, tried to see the underground garden through his eyes – violet and lilac spiderwort, spiny pink astilbes, creamy white turtlehead, bleeding hearts a riot of scarlet and magenta with dripping ivory teardrops. Orange and yellow lilies lined thecavern walls, and below them, spread across the mossy stone floor, was a soft bed of blooming forget-me-not.
“Anya. This is incredible,” Sy breathed, dropping his rucksack. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s almost midsummer. Half of these shouldn’t be in bloom.” She watched him touch the dangling teardrop of a bleeding heart, his demeanor as relaxed as she’d ever seen it. More than relaxed. Enchanted.
He turned to her. “More magic?”
She shrugged. “Magic, natural. Things aren’t so distinct as that. Not in the forest. Likely not in the city either, though they certainly try to force it.”
At that, he straightened, surreptitiously examining the mark on his left hand, as she had seen him do more than once.
She turned toward the sunlight streaming from above. The rock wall below it made several footholds; they could climb out easily. The phoenix had gone out that way; now that it knew it was being hunted, it would be that much harder to find. She must go after it without pause or remorse.
But she could not go back into the sun.
After being spared by the buzzard beetles, she had made her wincing way back into the far more bearable shade of the trees. As she did, she recalled how, looking for Sabina, she had seemed to see clearly in the pitch black. She now understood why.
Fine for the night. But the phoenix was not nocturnal. How could she ever hope to find it if she could not even go into the sun?
Is that why the moth flew into the flame? Did she crave the sunlight, too?
Why must her last days be spent in the dark?
Her last days. For all the horror she’d seen and felt, it was the first she had truly confronted the concept.Last days. So final, so unforgiving, so jarring in its paradox.
Despairing – and, she knew now, drawn by the smell – she had found a cluster of purple foxglove on the edge of the trees, and sat in its shade.
It had taken her longer than it should have to remember.
Foxglove was poisonous to humans. To the heart. Prepared properly, a bit of it could cure. But if one ate enough of it, it would slow the heart until it stopped.
She had grazed the tip of one violet flower with her gloved fingers. Poisonous to humans. Not to insects.
Did she even still have a heart? She felt a pulse. Was her blood still hot and red? It wasn’t as if she had ever been very familiar with the workings of her body; but now that it was unfamiliar, now that she couldn’t even begin to know herself, she felt that loss acutely. But here – here was a way to know. A sweet-smelling, violet, beautiful way. And so much of it.
But then, a shout in the trees. Sy. She knew it was him by the vulgar curse, by how strange it sounded coming from his mouth. She found him, caught in a wire snare but unhurt. He’d looked so relieved that it was her and not some fearsome monster.
