by Sara Holland
I don’t care. I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. My body is making its own decisions, as if it thinks that moving fast enough will allow me to outrun what I’ve just done. Killed a man. Murderer. Does it matter that Joeb would have killed me too?
I can’t help but recall what Caro said to me at the palace. That I stole her heart just because I could, because I wanted her power. No—I will not succumb to her tricks and lies. I will not believe the worst about myself.
And yet . . . something in my heart tugs. What am I really capable of? Why can’t I remember what happened? Why are my memories of past lives so difficult to find?
The town whips by, a dark house and a stray dog and a lighted window passing almost too fast to see, as if my power over time encompasses the whole of me, sending me racing across land while the entire earth is slowed down. Somehow, though it seems only seconds have passed, I’m in Montmere, asking for directions to the inn Liam mentioned, nothing on my mind but escape. Tears streaking my face, I charge through the Green Hour’s dark entryway, down the hall to our room.
Then, I’m slamming the door behind me, pulling at my clothes, desperate to get every trace of Joeb off me, every reminder of what I’m done.
When I’m down to my shift and bare feet, I realize that Liam is sitting against the far wall—waiting for me—awake. His shirt is unbuttoned and his hair loose, curtaining his face in soft waves.
My pulse hasn’t quieted one bit since I ran from Althea’s cottage. It seems to get even louder now, blotting out the sound of my footsteps on the floorboards. Something—guilt and relief, panic and fear, all braiding into the tugging feeling I still refuse to name—carries me across the room, makes me drop to my knees across from him, a sob tearing my throat open.
I reach for him, aching to be touched, to have the memory of death burned away.
Liam’s eyes are impossibly dark and soft with sleep. The room is nearly black, but with adrenaline still coursing through me I can see him perfectly: every shadow of his eyelashes on his cheekbones, the way his neck flutters with his pulse, his lips parting with the sound of my name. His fingers, reaching forward to intertwine themselves into my hair.
And I lean forward to meet him. His arms go up around me, and in the space of a breath our lips meet.
Warmth cascades over me. He’s warm, almost feverishly so, and my hands are in his hair and his lips are moving against mine. Murmuring my name. He pulls me into the bed, on top of him, holding me tightly against him, quieting my trembling and filling me with an entirely different kind of ache. He tastes like salt and sandalwood, and his hands are soft on my back, moving to grip my waist. He holds me like something precious; the gentle touch of his tongue to my lips draws a sigh out of me—a slow sound, melting in the air that’s no longer between us—and it’s unlike anything I’ve heard before.
My heart slows to match his, the strong, steady, just-out-of-sleep beat of his blood, whispering to me from all the places our bodies are pressed together. My frenetic, dancing blood finds an anchor in the steady pulse of his, slowing and swirling and loud and quiet all at once.
I could make this moment never end. Liam wouldn’t be afraid, I can tell from the tender way one hand rises to trail over my cheek, the wonder in his gasp as he breaks away for an instant to breathe, then finds my mouth again. He’d stay here with me forever, he will, if I don’t pull away.
But I can’t. I can’t stop the whole world. Not forever.
So though it’s among the hardest things I’ve ever done, I let go. Pull away. Still sitting on his bed, on his lap, really, I drink in the look in Liam’s eyes, sleep-fogged and hungry and tender all at once. Allow myself to wonder at how lovely he is. And then lift his hands from my waist and hold them between us, a connection and a barrier all at once, as the awareness floods into his eyes that none of this was a dream.
22
Liam and I sit there, frozen, for what seems like a long moment. Regret tears at me. I wait for him to speak, or even for his face to change from the sleepy wonder it is now.
“Jules. What happened?” I’m not sure if he’s talking about the kiss or what happened before—what sent me running from Bellwood, what brought me here, drove me into his arms, the cause of my racing pulse. His limbs are frozen in place, his fingers still curled around the back of my hands. His skin radiating heat. Gently, he traces my wristbone, turning my hands over until my palms face up to reveal the cut Joeb made on my palm.
“You’re bleeding.” His touch is so gentle that my eyes begin to burn with newly formed tears. “Talk to me. Elias and I—we couldn’t find Stef, we’ve been taking turns searching for you.”
I consider lying—but I can’t bear the weight of what happened alone. I killed someone.
Adrenaline is still rushing through me from the kiss; it takes only a heartbeat of silence for the delirious thrill of it to turn over into fear. There’s something more frightening about this—breaking the silence between us, not holding back the ugly truth of what happened—than anything I’ve done. But there’s no way around the truth but to lie. What’s more, what’s terrifying, is that I don’t want to lie to Liam.
I tell him everything.
When I’ve finished relating what happened, Liam steps out to speak with Elias. After catching him up on Joeb and his attack and death—all that darkness—our kiss remains unacknowledged, and I keep it that way, pretending to fuss over the bedspread and avoiding his eyes as Liam leaves the room. It’s only when the door closes behind him that I notice a slip of parchment crumpled on the nightstand. Without thinking, still shaky from adrenaline, I take the note and flatten it to read.
Son,
Return home at once. The Queen’s retinue has arrived, and I can no longer answer for your absence. You well know that she has been taking measures to punish those who are disloyal. I will not have another tragedy fall upon my house.
Lord Nicholas
Dread curdles my stomach at the words. Have I signed his death warrant?
The sound of footsteps outside makes me jump. I let the note fall from my numb fingers just as Liam enters again. “I’ve asked Elias to give us a few minutes. I didn’t know if you wanted company, or—should I leave you, to rest?”
He trails off, a note of hope in his voice that tells me he wants me to stay. Color stays high in his cheeks; his hair is still tousled where I ran my fingers through it.
“Liam.” The word escapes me in a rush of breath, like I’ve been struck in the chest, and I’ve no idea what to say.
But I don’t have to figure it out. He kneels in front of me, reaches out and intertwines his fingers into mine, squeezing my hand as if I’m his only anchor to the world. I press back, caging the sob gathering in my chest.
Caro’s taunts echo in my head. I see her teeth bared in mockery, hear her promises to hollow me out and break my heart. I remember the diabolic hunger in her eyes when she put her knife to Roan’s throat, thinking his death would break me.
Oh, how she would laugh if she knew what I’d just done.
Liam is still staring at me, his eyes soft, pleading. Waiting for me to say something. He’s been protecting me since we were both children, even as I hated and feared him. And all along, I was right to be afraid, even if I didn’t know why. All along he would be the one who could break my heart.
Finger by finger, I pull my hand away from his. Tears spill down my cheeks, hot and furious at what I know I must do to save him. The same thing that Papa did, that Liam did, throughout my entire childhood.
I have to lie.
Maybe that’s what love is made of. Maybe it’s what allowed me to hold on to the Sorceress’s heart for centuries.
I get to my feet and move around the room, picking up his clothes where they’re folded next to his sleeping mat, tucking them into his leather traveling bag.
Liam’s head snaps up at the snick of the clasp. “What are you doing?” he whispers.
My voice comes out thick, my throat lined with more unshe
d tears. “You have to go back to Everless. I”—my words catch in my throat, as if refusing to deceive Liam—“I will go with Elias to Connemor.”
Liam stares at me blankly. He stiffens. “You will?”
Through the grief, my heart screams at me to take it back. But I can’t. Kissing him was as good as drawing a target on his chest, and if he doesn’t go back to Everless now, his father will find him. And then—Caro.
“You were right, I should have fled all along.” I abandon the clothes and return to sit next to him. My body feels simultaneously heavy and fidgety, my own helplessness pushing at the inside of my skin. Nothing I can do, nothing, except convince him to go back to Everless, where he can be safer than he is with me. “I’m sure Elias will agree to take me.”
“Of course,” Liam, says, confused. “Of course he’ll take us. . . .”
He trails off as I manage a watery smile. Pity and regret tug at my chest, as I remember Elias’s promise to me in the Thief’s Fort. That he would kill the Alchemist to guarantee that Liam didn’t come to harm. “Liam.” I lower my voice, forcing myself to keep breathing so my voice doesn’t break. “You have to return to Everless. Pretend none of this ever happened.”
Liam looks blankly at me, saying nothing. No matter how much his cleverness usually grates on my nerves—his quick mind constantly fastening on the next answer, before I can even process the puzzle—I miss it fiercely now. The silence is too much to bear. My voice is in danger of cracking, so I don’t say any more. I cross my arms over my chest, trying to ease the icy pain that digs into my lungs with each breath.
“You’ll go alone?” he asks.
“Yes—” Now my voice does break. I swallow and try again, rearranging my words before I can no longer resist telling him the truth. “It’s time to part.”
“This is what you want?” he presses.
“It is.”
Liam doesn’t speak for a long time after that. He only stares at me, eyes working in the pursuit of an answer to a puzzle. Finally, he nods, sharply as the fall of a guillotine, then finishes gathering his things from around the room. I sit there watching him blankly, a ghost of myself.
For a moment he seems frozen, then he reaches out tentatively toward me and takes my hand, squeezes it once before nodding back.
His other hand rises to my face, and he traces my cheek with his fingertips, so quick and light I almost can’t tell if I’ve imagined it.
I stare into his eyes. “Promise me that you’ll be safe.”
“I’d promise you anything,” he says.
Liam withdraws his own small journal from his pile of things, then presses it into my hand, curling my fingers around it with his. He touches his lips to my forehead in one swift motion before quietly slipping out the door, leaving me no chance to even whisper good-bye.
23
At some point I fall asleep, curled against the headboard with my arms around my knees, mattress damp with tears underneath me. A few hours after Liam disappears, when I wake up to watery sunlight, Elias is there at the table, looking somber. But he simply says, “What’s the plan, Alchemist?” The hint of a sad, teasing smile plays on his lips.
I let one more tear slip down my cheek. I wipe it away, and for a second, marvel at how different Liam and Elias are. Amma and I were opposites on the surface, too. A flash of her laughter echoes through my mind.
I steel myself and recount my interaction with Joeb to Elias, the twisted child’s rhyme he’d offered when I showed him the strange sentence in my journal. The river of red, red with blood. I tell Elias how he’d suggested that it was referring to the Alchemist’s blood. The Alchemist’s death. Though Joeb attacked me—though I couldn’t trust him—he didn’t lie to me. He had no reason, or mind to.
“Seek the river of red. You think that somehow refers to your death?” Elias frowns. “You’ve died more than once.”
“But we know of at least one death that occurred in a river. At least according to the stories.”
Elias leans back. “Caro forcing you to eat her heart in your first life.”
I nod. “According to the stories, I offered her heart back by turning it into twelve stones. She fed them to me—she thought I tricked her just like I tricked the lord—then in anger, drowned me in the river.”
“And you want to go there?”
I nod. “Even if the stories aren’t true they contain truths. What if I was trying to point myself to that story, that moment—because something important happened then? Some key to defeating Caro? Maybe it was a trick all along, and I intended to destroy her then and there.”
I reach into my bag and withdraw Liam’s notes. My chest aches to hold them, but I bring them over to Elias and spread them on the table. “The place is never named in the stories, but he found an obscure scholar who speculated the actual site was the Valley of Blythe.”
“Then—we go to the Valley of Blythe.”
Outside, the morning has dawned foggy and cold, a mirror of the gray landscape in my chest. The Valley of Blythe is several miles outside of Montmere, near a town called Pryceton, and we have to pass through the city first.
Because Ayleston is flooded with soldiers and civilians looking to profit off my arrest, Elias and I try a new disguise: we tear our robes and smear dirt over the fabric as if we spend our days in the woods, until we look passably like bleeders. When we emerge into the streets again to find a public cart, I notice how groups of people gather in the street, wretched looks on their faces. My heart begins to pound, assuming they’ve caught sight of me—but then, I overhear snatches of their conversation.
“More than a thousand years—”
“May the Sorceress curse the murderess for bringing this upon us, and steal her hours while she sleeps—”
“The soldiers will start bleeding us next week—”
I turn to Elias, but he’s already speaking with someone in the crowd. When he returns, he tells me that the Queen has circulated an announcement. Her soldiers are moving through Sempera’s towns and will begin bleeding its citizens of their years at random, if Jules Ember is not found by the beginning of the week. It will continue until she is turned in.
My stomach churns with anger. “That can’t be Ina. It must be Caro. All the more reason to hurry.”
Thankfully, Elias gives Joeb’s cottage a wide berth as we leave the town behind and make our way to the spot on the main road where a public hay cart will take us in the direction of the Valley of Blythe.
As we travel, surrounded by silence, the reality of what happened last night sinks into my heart. I killed someone.
You had no choice, a voice whispers in my ear.
I let my head sink into my hands. It’s true that Joeb was in Caro’s service. But looking back, those circumstances don’t seem important. He was alive, and now he’s dead. Because of me. Because of the Alchemist.
With thoughts like these, the day passes in an agonizing crush—we transfer from cart to cart as the trees grow thicker, keeping our heads down when we pass clusters of guards. The moment of my parting with Liam still manages to sneak up on me everywhere.
Finally, in the late afternoon, Elias and I go as far as we possibly can in the public carts. After we disembark, Elias points out through the trees the shadowy mouth of a gorge, then to a map in his possession. Liam’s, I realize with a pang. The Valley of Blythe is at its bottom. Something in me gutters like a candle swiftly blown out, and I go cold. All this hiding. All this desperate journeying, and now I will have to finally face my own death—my first death.
But will I find the weapon that will bring about Caro’s death?
I take in the view, catching my breath and trying to slow the rapid beating of my heart. Once a shallow plain with a river running through, over the past thousand years, wind and water have carved out a ravine, splitting the earth a hundred feet down.
I see a road running alongside the canyon—empty now, but I spot the marks where wagon wheels have recently churned up the mud. We c
an’t linger here long.
At the bottom, the river is a flat green ribbon. The water is wide and slow-moving here. It’s not as far down as I thought at first, but the sides of the canyon are steep and craggy, scraggly bushes and stunted trees sticking out at odd angles. There’s none of the hazy magic in the air that I felt in the glen. But still, something draws me to it—makes me scan the walls of the ravine, looking for a way down.
“Are you sure about this, Jules?” Elias asks, peering over cautiously. “If anyone comes by, it will be hard to run.”
“Yes,” I say, though doubt rears up in me as soon as I stare down into the gorge. But I have no choice—I need to know what lies below, in my past.
“It looks like there’s a footpath down the way slightly farther. I’ll go down, make sure there’s no one there.”
I’ve already crouched by the rim, grasping the branch of one overhanging tree and starting to lower myself down. I can’t see below me, but something in me knows that if I stretch out my right foot, there will be a foothold. And there is. That now-familiar trickle of recognition, cold and thrilling at the same time, runs down my spine. I have been here before.
I have died here.
A dizzying nausea moves through me and I nearly keel over and throw up.
“Jules,” I hear from above, a hint of worry tinging Elias’s voice. But I’m already too far down the side of the ravine to pull myself back up, even if I wanted to. I tilt my head up to see him kneeling by the edge—but the path down seems less obvious from below, or maybe it’s memory guiding me. Elias’s brow creases.
“I’m going to go down to make sure there’s no one coming,” he says. “It’s a quarter mile this way.” He lifts a hand, pointing in the direction of the river’s flow. His tone is light, but he can’t fully hide the undercurrent of worry in his words. “Meet me at the bottom there?”
I wait, clutching the wall like a spider, until the sounds of Elias’s footsteps have faded into the soft burble of the water below. I reach the bottom of the ravine and turn around. The water glitters before me, beckoning me toward it.
