She hesitated, weighing her options. “Yes,” she lied. The rope broke. He stayed where he was. She heard him rubbing his arms, sore where the rope had held him. She pressed her cheek against the trunk, laid a hand on the bark.
“I want to ask you many things,” he said, “and it is taking more restraint than I would like to stop myself.”
“I should go,” she said, chest tightening as she rose to leave.
“Anya, I – when we–”
“Don’t,” she said, sharp and short. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to hear. She couldn’tstandto hear. “Don’t say anything.”
“What I mean to say – what I mean, is–”
“I’m going.” Her fingers dug into the bark, seeking splinters. She could say whatever she wanted, and he would believe it was the truth.
She could rip her heart out, and hand it to him, and he would know.
She said only, “Don’t follow me.”
Then, with a pain like a sharp hook tapping into her spine, she collapsed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
As if his thoughts hadn’t become difficult enough to manage, the liar’s pigeon sent them swirling like the spores he’d inhaled.
He felt them working, listing from the turbid depths of his mind to the pit of his gut, dredging up his most hidden feelings, sending stumbling signals to his tongue. Though he fought it with everything he had, he’d almost said something he couldn’t take back. Something one opponent would never say to another. Something he wasn’t sure he could entirely blame on the fungus.
Something he had to tell her.
It was a good thing she’d stopped him. He’d almost shown the self he kept so closely guarded. The boy who pinned his hope on flowers – the man who let himself be peeled open in the dark – the self now uncovered, exposed, claws retracted. No; removed.
And then the spore exposed her most secret self.
“I’m going,” she said. “Don’t follow me.”
Then, with a heartrending cry of pain, Anya fell to her knees, digging her fingernails into the mud.
He was by her side in an instant. She threw her weapons and bag to the ground as if they burned her. When she saw him, her face collapsed and she pulled the brim of her hat over her eyes. “Goaway,” she begged.
Impulsively, he reached for her. With a pained gasp, she flinched from his touch. “Anya,please, foronce, let me help you,” he said desperately.
Another spasm. Her back arched. Another dreadful cry ripped out of her as she pressed her head into the dirt, a profane prayer.
He resisted the urge to reach out to her again, but held his ground. “There is no world in which I would ever leave you like this. There must be something I can do. Tell me.”
“Fuck.” She pressed her muddy fingers to her closed eyes, then threw her hat into the mud. “Fuck. It’s my back,” she managed. “Something’s–” She broke off in another cry of pain.
That settled it. “We’ll need you out of these clothes,” he said, using a tone that brooked no argument.
With shaking fingers, she undid the laces of her jerkin, and he carefully helped ease her out of it. Beneath her clothes, her back was bulging. He reached around her waist and took her knife from her belt. Gently but swiftly, like the delicate stroke of a pen, he cut away the back of her shirt.
Most of her body was covered in the short, downy fur he’d seen on her neck; but on either side of her spine, below her shoulders, her skin was discolored, shining, swollen. Something mottled and furred moved beneath it. It was a film. A thin, wet membrane, stretched across her spine.
Astonished, he gingerly touched it, then jerked back when she sucked in a hissing breath.
He knew what he must do.
Lightly and precisely as scrawling a spell, so as not to cut what lie under, he ran the pointed tip of her knife along the length of her spine. At the sensation, she shot up, straightened, panting.
Split open, the film slowly stretched apart, pushed by the rippling and growing of the furry, wet bulge in her back. Where the film stuck, he helped it, pulling back the dripping, sticky sheaves of dead skin. As the last of it peeled away, something cracked open, emerged. He fell back, scooting through the dirt to avoid the dripping mass. Green, sea-foam green, violet around the edges. Enormous. Magnificent.
