by Sara Holland
I died here, I remember again with a shiver.
I want to shout for Elias, and my eyes fix on the small figure of him in the distance. But even as they do, my vision blurs and changes dizzyingly. I vaguely feel my hand reaching into my cloak pocket to retrieve the compass as the sky’s color plunges from the washed-out paleness of a spring afternoon to the gilded blue of an autumn evening.
The simple beauty of the river arrests me, even as I stumble up to the bank, legs aching and lungs screaming from running. It fills my eyes, forcing me to squint as I scan the water’s edge, searching for any sign of life. But not for Elias, I realize as I see how the trees are no longer budding but barren with the coming winter.
I’m no longer waiting for Elias. I’m waiting for Caro.
24
My waking mind collides with the memory, an explosion of thought and feeling that burns until only one certainty is left in the ashes.
I have to give Caro’s heart back.
I kneel at the edge of the river, half hidden beside a flat reclining rock in case anyone should wander by. I can tell by the tint of color in the leaves around me—they’re tinged red, like they’re bleeding—that we’re in the death of summer. The Sorceress has already become a shadow at the edge of my vision, a rumor whispered in dark village streets. She sleeps with the wolves in the eastern forests. She travels from town to town, disguised, letting the poor drink what’s left of her blood. I run my hand along a rock next to me, over the crudely drawn image etched into its surface: a snake and fox.
With trembling hands, I withdraw the small leather bag from my skirt pocket and hold it in my palms, so the mouth is slightly open. The bag is surprisingly light, considering what it contains: the Sorceress’s heart. Pure power, pure life, cut to pieces.
Inside, the pale gray stones glow, illuminating the night darkening around me. They warm my hands, even through the fabric of the bag. They shimmer in the sunset, flecks of gold catching and refracting between my fingers. Pale threads of solid golden light seem to hover over each stone—a wisp of the Sorceress’s heart, vying to be free.
A shadow moves in the distance.
As if in response, heat erupts in the bag. I clutch it to my chest, even though the stones feel like live coals, almost too hot to hold.
A dark, slender shape makes itself known across the river. I look up, call softly, “Caro?”
She stares across the water at me. Her anger apparent in her drawn-up posture, the severe tilt of her chin—and there’s a wild hurt in her eyes, visible even across this distance. She comes up to the river until the waves nearly lap at her feet and stops.
She raises her hands, and my skin prickles as her power stirs the air. An instinct rises in me to run and hide, but I force myself to remain where I am. I stagger to my feet as ice lances across the water, a thin, slick path, and she steps delicately across, her skirts trailing in the water. When she steps onto the sand, the ice melts into nothing behind her. For a long moment, the only sounds are river and wind.
I hold out the life-stones between us.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” I say at length.
“Why here, of all places?” Her voice is cool, controlled. Her eyes flick dismissively to the stones in my hands. “What is this?”
I swallow. Tilt the stones up so they catch the light. “Your heart.”
Caro’s eyes widen. Something flickers in their depths. She steps closer, until she’s only an arm’s length away. Until she could reach out and take the stones if she wanted. But she doesn’t.
Her mouth turns downward in what could be grief or suspicion. Silhouetted against the light like this, with the setting sun blazing behind her, her edges seem hazy, like she’s something out of a dream. Or maybe that’s me, weak with fear.
Caro asks, “What do I have to do?”
I swallow down a painful lump in my throat. “Just—eat them.”
Caro regards me, her gaze as steady and unforgiving as the sun behind her. Her eyes look dark, her features exaggerated, shadows hollowing her cheeks and bruising beneath her eyes. I reach toward her with my cupped hands, until my fingers almost brush her chest.
Caro’s flat green gaze flicks to the stones in my hands, then back up to my face. She delicately plucks just one of the stones from my hands. Brings it to her lips. And stops. “You took everything from me. Everything.”
My hands clench. “I only did what was necessary to save you. Please, trust me.”
“You liar,” she hisses.
Wildfire fury bursts into her eyes. Her other hand shoots out, and she grabs my wrists together, her grip crushing in a way that has nothing to do with magic. I cry out in pain as my fingers splay out, letting the remaining stones fall to the ground with dull thuds. Unsuccessfully, I try to wrench myself out of her grip as she brandishes the stone in her hand—and forces it past my lips, pressing down on my mouth until I have to swallow.
The pain of the stone dissolving on my tongue is blinding. “Caro,” I sputter, “Please.” But all I can do is thrash weakly as the Sorceress drags me into the river, forcing stone after stone down my throat. My vision goes from red to white, and my tears bleed into the water.
“This was always the plan, wasn’t it?” Caro snarls. “You thought to kill me for good and carry my heart with you forever. Tell me it’s not true, Antonia, take it back.”
Her words blur together in my hearing, the meaning—but not the anger—drowned in the slapping of the waves, the roaring of my own blood in my ears. I try to scream, to fight, but a wave catches me in the face and silty river water fills my throat. My fingers rip at cloth.
I think I can see something glittering red through the smear of river water covering my mouth and nose. A ruby blade set ablaze by the dying sun just above the surface of the river. I reach for it, my vision burning black, but my fingertips brush against nothing, nowhere and everywhere at once, and—
I die.
25
I break, gasping, from the water, hands outstretched to fend off the person drowning me, and the bright pale stretch of the afternoon sky nearly blinds me.
That small pain is too much, on top of the fire in my throat and the ache of oxygen-starved panic shooting knives through my body. I fling my arm up to block out the sky—and it’s only when my arm actually obeys, landing over my eyes, that I realize something has changed. My limbs ache, but there’s strength in them. And there’s something solid beneath me—sand—though my head is still half underwater. My stomach turns. My body must have thought it was being strangled and drowned, though it wasn’t.
I fling myself forward with a cry of relief and hit the sand hard before rolling onto my back.
I stay that way for a long moment, until the pain in my throat and lungs fades slightly, the sensation sliding from me like the river water from my cheeks and arms. The ravine slides into focus, the water gone to an ordinary green-gray, and there’s no sign of Caro.
For a few minutes, it’s all I can do to sit slowly up and breathe, try to suppress the panic, my hands fisting around the sand at my sides. Traces of the memory cling to me. I remember the heat of Caro’s heart-stones. The fingers that felt like claws around my throat.
A new thought cuts through the disquiet: I tried to give Caro’s heart back. The stories are true.
But what does that matter?
As the full memory slips away, the panic polluting my veins starts to get worse, not better, my breath quickening again and tears welling in my eyes. I remember the reason Elias and I came here in the first place—and what I saw just before Caro killed me, glittering above the surface of the water.
The weapon, the fang, the claw. The rubied dagger, the one weaving in and out of my mind like a thread. The one thing that could help me kill Caro, end all of this. But the tighter I try to cling to the memory, to pull meaning from it, the more I doubt myself. I reached for the dagger while I was drowning in the river, in a swath of black. Could it have just been a vision, an image my desp
erate mind created? Is it lost to time, or somewhere else? Or nowhere at all?
Any remaining hope in me quickly dies when I remember that Liam is at Everless. Caro too. Does she know? Could the weapon be there, despite what Liam said? Is that why she went there, to rid the world of the only thing capable of killing her? I close my eyes, lean against the flattened rock by the shore, dizzy with the questions I have no answer to . . .
And start. Because under my palms, carved into the rock, is something familiar. The crude shapes of a snake and fox. Lightly, I trace the shapes with the tip of my finger.
The world shifts again, swiftly and with a violent tug at my mind. The woods shrink back. Younger. My finger, still tracing the shapes in the rock by eroding the stone—but now, I’m making the rock melt for the first time. I turn it to dust with nothing more than a light touch.
From somewhere behind me, a voice calls, “Hello.”
I snap my head around. Shaking, my knees curl into my chest. But it’s only a young girl with dark straight hair and eyes as green as the grass, standing a few steps away from me.
“What are you drawing?” she asks.
Slowly, I unfold my knees. She closes the distance between us and bends over the rock. “A snake?”
“That’s what they called me. In my village. That, or a witch.”
The girl kneels down next to me, glancing at my dress, which is covered in dirt and marred with holes. “Is that why you ran away?”
I nod. “And I’m never going back. You can’t make me.”
She smiles. “My father calls me a fox, because I’m clever. One day, I’ll know as many tricks as the fox. Will you make one for me?”
Warmth fills me, traveling down to my hand as I work it over the stone surface. The girl’s eyes glitter as she watches me carve a fox next to the curving lines of the snake.
“My father said you can come home with us.” She closes her hand around mine, and our palms spark when they meet.
“I don’t have any money. . . .”
I pull my hand away, but she takes it back. “You don’t need to worry about that. My father has plenty.” She turns and points to a figure standing at a distance, then faces me again, pulling out a small coin purse from her pocket to reveal a shimmer of silver coins inside. The purse is stamped with a flowering tree.
I reach up and pull something from my hair. A blue satin ribbon. “I have to give you something if I’m coming to live with you.”
Grinning, she takes the ribbon and helps me to my feet. “You don’t have to be scared anymore. I’m special, like you. My father is too. We’re not like other people.”
The world shifts again in front of my eyes. Back in the Valley of Blythe, every inch of me Jules Ember.
I let out a strangled, wordless cry of frustration, not caring how it echoes up the ravine walls—because I don’t want to be pulled into my past any longer, the fractured, broken mirror of it, swimming with shards of me that don’t align. When I have no more strength left for weeping, I stumble wearily to my feet and look around, trying to decide what to do next.
Though my mind is reeling, it occurs to me that Elias should be here by now. He should have met me by the riverbank. Elias can help. Elias can make sense of this.
Then—panic. I look to where he said he’d descend. Nothing there but the river, sparkling innocuously in the afternoon sun, nothing there to indicate that these waters had once wrapped around me and poured down my throat, filled my lungs with death.
I plunge in the direction that Elias said held a way down—where he said he’d keep a lookout.
Each step is an effort, my heavy feet sinking into the sand. But still it doesn’t take me long to reach a bend in the river, accompanied by a set of narrow stairs carved into the ravine, twisting with tree roots. Where Elias should be. There’s no one here. Not a single footstep in the sand.
But I can hear something up above, past the rim of the little canyon. A jumble of voices, men and women shouting and the urgent whinny of horses. They’re too far away for me to make out individual words, but I think I hear Elias’s voice among them—calm, haughty.
At first, relief—then, shouts in the name of the Queen. A chill rips through me, and I freeze.
As I stand there, rooted to the ground with fear, I realize that the commotion seems to be moving away, in the direction of the tiny farm village we skirted on the way here. A different fear grips me suddenly—what if Elias is captured, what if he’s punished, dragged away, because of me? The thought is enough to send me scrambling for the stairs, climbing until I can peer cautiously over the top.
And my heart contracts with panic. Halfway across a field, I see a knot of Shorehaven soldiers circling Elias with swords out. In the center of them, Elias stands with his hands up, head tilted toward a towering figure. The Huntsman.
The Huntsman’s knife is pressed to his throat.
I move without thinking, pulling myself over the edge and running, running toward them, the earth rolling under my feet. When I’m close enough that they turn to look at me, I throw my hands out. I call on all my powers of time, make the world leap to my command, no matter what the consequences.
And it does. Time coalesces around me, around them. The soldiers slow, gloved fingers reaching to their swords, expressions of wonder and fear splattered across their faces. I freeze them all where they stand, all except for Elias, who sprints toward me—
But something’s wrong, because when I meet the Huntsman’s eyes through the holes in his mask, I falter—and he stirs, like the flash of a fish under the river’s surface, once, twice, then breaks free of my hold on time. He gives a silent order to his soldiers—his hand flashing a signal I don’t understand—and his words seem to pierce through the seal I’ve created. The soldiers fall sideways, out of the path of my time. My hold on them dissolves into nothing.
I’m already moving to gather another attack, but then the Huntsman sprints toward me, seeming almost to fly over the earth. Terror, the likes of which I’ve not felt since Caro killed Roan, stabs through me.
Almost absurdly, my first thought is to be thankful that Liam isn’t here. That I did the right thing, sending him back to Everless. He’s safe, as long as he’s not found out. I must make sure he remains safe. If I’m captured, if Caro suspects that I love him—
I silently resolve not to be taken alive.
“Jules!” comes Elias’s voice. The urgency in it tears my eyes away from the Huntsman to meet his. I realize two things at once—he’s drawn his dagger, and his face is full of sorrow. I remember our promise: that he would kill me before he let Caro capture me. I see that he remembers it too.
I stop breathing as he raises his arm and lets the blade fly. Straight and true. It arcs through the air and I see, rather than feel, the metal bury itself in my chest.
The pain hits everywhere at once. I stumble back. A few feet shy of me, the Huntsman stops abruptly. Faintly, I register that his horse’s hooves send a spray of dirt toward me. My vision peels away into black, black, black. Warmth leaves me, along with pain, even when I crash down to one knee.
I think of Liam, walking through Everless’s gates. Safe, safe without me.
And something takes over. The time I’d been spinning around my hands to trap the soldiers crawls up my arms through my veins, fills my chest and my head. Time, pure and dizzying, pulls itself over me, a shiver that races up and down my spine. I hear my own heart beating, the buzz of blood in my veins.
The pain hits again, a tidal wave of it, and the world blurs back into color around me.
I stand up.
Though I don’t control it, I feel the time unspooling from me, like a snake shedding a layer of skin. The pain in my chest is suddenly lessened, then gone. Blood retreats into my wound. The tears in my eyes, which I hadn’t even noticed had spilled down my cheeks, dry up, clearing my vision in time for me to see a streak of silver in the air, shooting back toward Elias.
Time itself shudders. I’m on my fee
t unharmed, the Huntsman is racing for me, and the knife is in Elias’s hand. He looks at it, dazed, the expression on his face like someone trying to remember.
“He’s armed!” one of the soldiers cries.
I’m too stunned, too slow, to stop what happens next, even as I realize how it will unfold. The soldiers step forward as one. Swords flash. And Elias falls, his own dagger thumping uselessly into the clover.
No.
Time explodes outward from me again. I scarcely have control of it anymore, unhurt and alive with fear and rage. Even as it races outward I’m running too, past the frozen form of the Huntsman, past the soldiers in their poses of violence, to where Elias kneels in the dirt, clutching a deep gash in his side.
If I can hold them a little longer, I can save him.
I fall to my knees in front of him and touch his shoulder to bring him out of the freeze. He comes awake, blinking, his face twisting immediately with pain. A wash of gratitude that he kept his promise goes through me, followed closely by a deep, stabbing regret. Another person dead because of me—though it’s clear from the confusion with which he regards me that he doesn’t remember throwing his dagger.
“I’m going to turn back time to heal you,” I say, putting a hand on his ribs, over the wound. Elias winces and nods, and I close my eyes and call on time for a third time, hoping to speed it up around Elias’s wound and heal it before he bleeds too much. But my thoughts are too scattered, my heart beating too fast. Images of Amma’s body flash in front of my eyes. My bitter inner voice screams at me that I’m a failure, a poor excuse for the Alchemist—that I’ve done everything wrong since the day I left Papa for Everless. Tears stream down my face. I bite my lip and try to concentrate on Elias’s wound, but my hands are shaking with grief and rage and doubt. I’m burned up inside, hollow and useless.
“Jules. Just Jules.” Elias’s voice is rough with pain, but a trace of his old humor is still there beneath it, somehow.
