by Sara Holland
I look up at him, tears in my eyes. I can feel that his wound is healing, but not quickly enough. Not enough. Blood is trickling down his side and soaking into the soil, staining the crushed wheat red beneath him.
“Only a scratch. I’ll be fine,” he says, his hand closing weakly over my wrist. I follow his gaze; above us, the soldiers and the Huntsman are paused in midair, descending on us with the speed of gathering storm clouds. “Truly. You need to get away.”
“I can’t leave you here!” I cry, not caring how desperate it sounds.
“You can and you will.” He takes my hand from his side. “I doubt Caro will kill me. At least not right away.”
“Small comfort,” I growl at him. I feel sweat pop up on my brow as I bend all my concentration toward healing his wound. But it’s not enough. I’m not enough.
“Go, Jules. Finish what we started.” He smiles a thin half smile.
Leaving him is the last thing I want to do, but I can feel my hold on time thinning. Soon the soldiers and the Huntsman will wake. And things will only be worse for Elias—for both of us—if I’m here with him.
Wherever I go next, I need to go alone.
Elias nods, the humor slipping from his face. “Now go, Jules.” His words the last bit of light in the gathering dark.
26
Flight. I’d forgotten how it felt.
The Huntsman’s horse gallops underneath me. The pounding of her hooves, the pain in my legs as I struggle to stay seated help me forget what I’ve just done—we ride for hours before I recall the sight of Elias’s wound. I allow myself to cry, blame it on the whipping wind and not myself for leaving Liam’s best friend in the arms of the enemy.
Or at least in the arms of the soldiers—because the Huntsman follows on my heels. The only thing that saves me is that I’ve stolen his horse, which is clearly superior to the other solders’ steeds, though I am a poor rider. For hours, he drives me along the small road that runs through the forest, falling back then plunging forward, always keeping pace but never catching up.
The forest rapidly dwindles around us now—and the sound of the Huntsman behind me fades with it. I slow to a halt, wary of the sound of the wind in the dark, carrying the scent of cook fires in the distance. Though the Huntsman has fallen behind, I’ve left a trail of hoofprints behind me, serpentining through the woods . . .
I need a place to hide.
The moonlight through the trees illuminates familiar land; I am back in Gerling territory, not far from Laista, and with every stride, coming closer to Everless. In the distance, I see shelter: a small walled area on top of a hill, like a tiny fortress, with green and gold banners billowing at its wrought-iron gate. A shiver runs down my spine at the sight of the Gerling colors.
I’ve never been here, but I know what it is immediately—the Gerlings’ graveyard, walled and only five miles from Everless itself, wreathed now in a chilly fog. The recognition is born not of Alchemist memories, but of the tales Papa used to tell me when I was small, and the whisperings of the other servants at Everless.
It’s said that if consumed, any time still remaining in the blood of the dead can kill you . . . and yet, there are always those desperate enough in this country to try and dig up the dead and see. It doesn’t matter in places like Crofton—none of the dead have any time to steal—but the graves of nobles are always far from civilization, distant and high and heavily walled. Inaccessible as mountain peaks.
I dismount, legs aching from gripping the horse, and tie its reins to a tree, far enough back from the graveyard that no one will see.
The rest of the way toward the Gerling graveyard, I run. The fog spills over the wall, curling like a finger to beckon me inside.
On either side of the entrance are two nooks, where Everless guards normally flank the gates. They should be there now, ensuring that the Gerlings remain undisturbed by the likes of the living, but I reason that they’ve most likely been commissioned to scour Sempera for me. I send a word of thanks to the Sorceress for that—if Caro hadn’t been hunting me down, I might not be able to enter unbothered. I climb the gate and drop into the graveyard.
Inside, the high walls block out much of the sky, and the morning quiet turns strange and unnatural. Grand tombstones of marble or polished granite stick out of the fog, dark sharp-edged shapes looming from nowhere. Another chill sweeps over my skin as I stand among them. The normal sounds of spring—birdsong, the whisper of wind—are absent; if it weren’t for the slow drifting of the fog around me, I would wonder whether time had stopped. For the dead, I suppose it has.
I feel nothing but a creeping sense of unease, like I’m being watched.
A spot of color catches my eye, bright crimson against all the green and gray. I move closer to it. One tombstone—a taller-than-me obelisk of pure white marble—stands over fresh-turned earth, and about it are strewn flowers of red and white and green, delicate strings of pearls and semiprecious stones, little Sorceress sculptures of copper and gold, and several brass cups of half-drunk wine. The scent of cut flowers and perfume floats above the scent of rain and earth as I draw closer to read the words carved on the tombstone.
My eyes find the word Roan Gerling in the mist. It draws me inexorably. So suited to the boy I knew, who was always ready with a smile, a laugh.
My grief for Roan occupies a strange unexamined corner of my chest, a small room I’ve scarcely entered since I ran from Everless what seems like a lifetime ago—though it’s been only two weeks. And yet, when I allow myself to stand still and look, really look at Roan’s grave and remember that he is dead, he’s gone, the grief slams into me like it’s happening all over again. His last confused, whispered plea, cut off by Caro’s knife. The dimming of his eyes as he fell, and how heavy and complete and eternal the silence seemed afterward. Dead. Gone. Because of Caro.
Without meaning to, I sink to my knees, all my strength going out of me. I suddenly feel the presence of the dead—feel like they’re surrounding me, a crowd of invisible eyes, a silent wind of not-breath. The weight of expectation and a reminder of my failure. That I, who have come back again and again when they have not, can somehow save them, redeem them. Papa, Roan, Amma. And those I didn’t know well—Rinn, the woman who taught me my mother’s name, caught in her endless time loop in Briarsmoor; Althea the hedge witch, and even Joeb, her son.
Elias, who may already be dead.
Who knows how many more, stretching back through the Alchemist’s history.
And yet she hasn’t broken me. For centuries I’ve fought blindly on, neither winning nor letting her break me entirely, and for centuries Semperans have been dying for it.
The memory of my death washes over me again, and I feel a sudden rush of foolishness—of shame.
Liar. You’ve taken everything from me.
“You’ve taken everything from me, too.” I say the words out loud, though they sit oddly in my mouth. I sit with them, turning them over in my mind. Now that I’m still, the odd moment I slipped into at the side of the river, the one rooted in the drawing of the snake and the fox, resurfaces in my mind. Because the little girl was Caro, of course. And the man in the distance, her father—
Who invited me to live with them.
My stomach drops, and I stand up.
Superstition would not have me stand so close to the graves, would say that Roan’s poisoned, dead time can rise out of the ground like a living thing to curdle my blood. But I don’t—I can’t—move away. Because as the fog burns off in the morning sun, a line of tombstones comes into view behind Roan’s. Rows and rows of them. Curious, I follow the rows down until I come across a familiar name:
Lord Ulrich Ever
His gravestone is plain, nearly bare except for a familiar flowering tree, the same shape stamped on the bag of coins that Caro showed me when she found me.
The world blurs. Through the green and gray, I see another face. Papa’s. I hear Caro’s voice. My father.
Lord Ever.
&nbs
p; Caro’s father.
How could Liam—how could I—not have guessed? Yet I feel the truth of it, down to my bones.
A whisper of motion or sound, so subtle I’m not sure if I’ve imagined it, is what stirs me from my thoughts.
At first, I think I’ve fallen into another memory, but the sky remains an identical gray wash. I look one way, another, seeking out a sign of another living thing in the graveyard. There is none, but my senses prickle, aware of the dozens of massive tombstones, the remaining fog that could easily hide an intruder. Perhaps it’s just another heartbroken friend or lover, who fled at the sight of me.
Then something touches my back, something cold and small and sharp that makes me go rigid.
“Turn around,” comes the low whisper, and I do.
To see the Huntsman standing before me.
A scream wells up in my lungs, but I’m determined not to let it out. He stands there, masked and hooded, an arm’s length from me—and the tip of his knife a centimeter away from my chest. He’s deathly still; I don’t even see the movement of breath. As if he’s a ghost, a weapon of the dead come to bring the Alchemist to justice.
The Huntsman lunges, flesh and muscle and bone, and it’s all too real. I barely dodge in time. I feel the weight and heat of a person under the black silk, hear the knife sing against air, then the soft, sickening thud as it pierces the earth. He lunges for me again.
I stumble back, still stiff and slow from curling on the cold earth. My back catches a tombstone, and I half fall behind it, ducking down so that the Huntsman’s next slash with the knife narrowly misses my face. I find my feet and walk backward, not wanting to turn away from him, raising my hands as I go. The Huntsman’s shadowed face sucks my eyes in. I can’t look away. With a shiver, I remember the figure who tried to drown me. Somehow that span of darkness where eyes should be is more frightening than any face.
He comes at me again with the knife, and this time I knock the blade from his gloved hand. The Huntsman doesn’t miss a beat; he lunges at me with nothing but his leather-clad hands, going for my throat.
We crash to the ground together, him on top of me. Through the black silk of the Huntsman’s cloak, I can feel the hardness of armor, leather or metal wrapped around his torso and arms—worsening the pain coming with each blow as we grapple, the Huntsman’s metal-tipped boots finding my shins, elbows landing in my ribs, gloved hands reaching for my throat, stronger than my own hands wrapped around their wrists. Ragged breathing escapes from beneath the mask, and I can scarcely hear it, layered as it is beneath my own gasps and the pounding of my heart in my ears.
The Huntsman goes still over me, his hands pushing back at my own in their mission toward my windpipe, small, gloved, ferociously strong. His chest heaves against mine, and for the first time my head clears enough to recognize that his body is smaller and lighter than I had thought.
The Huntsman scrambles off me then, pouncing on the knife where it fell in the grass a few feet away, and straightens up to face me—and then, without letting go of the weapon, lifts one hand to nudge back the hood.
My breath catches in my chest. I recognize that short, curly hair—she undoes the mask, lets the silk fall to the ground.
Ina.
27
I sit up without meaning to, and the knife whips back around to point in my direction. Ina Gold, my sister, the queen of Sempera, stands before me, her face simultaneously calm and lit up with fury. She’s breathing hard through parted lips, and color is high in her cheeks. But her hand as she levels the blade at me is absolutely steady.
“Ina.” My breath comes out hoarse. Relief and joy and fear twist into a knot in my chest. “Ina, how . . . ?”
“Don’t speak,” she hisses, a furious whisper. “How dare you? How dare you come here where Roan is buried?”
I close my mouth and open it again, trying to breathe, trying to think. Ina. My friend, my sister. Where can I begin, when she’s looking at me with such hatred in her eyes? Regrets roll through me: I thought lying to her would protect her. I did it out of love—but I never should have let her think I was the murderer. Because now the air between us feels thick and impenetrable, the anger and hate in her eyes more painful than all the blows we just exchanged.
“I didn’t kill him” is what finally comes out in the end. Out loud, the words sound pathetic, even though I know the truth of them.
Ina’s hand twitches, but her gaze stays steady and burning on me. “Of course not,” she says, her voice dripping acid. “I suppose he and my mother just decided to murder themselves.”
“Ina, you could have killed me. Just now, and back at the river,” I croak. My body aches all over, but I push myself off the grass to my feet—slowly, slowly, without taking my eyes off hers. “But you didn’t.”
“No. You’ll have a trial.” Ina’s eyes travel briefly past me, yards away to Roan’s gravestone, and back to me. Again, for a moment, I think I feel the presence of the dead around me, Roan’s eyes and Lord Ever’s and all the others, the dead here and not here, in this lifetime and the last and the last, stretching five hundred years. Ina only wants the same thing as I do. The truth.
“Roan was my friend,” I tell Ina, emotion clotting my voice, but I force myself to swallow it down and be strong for her. She’s lost everything too, and I owe it to her not to fall apart. Like Liam first did for me when he told me of the Alchemist, I give her the truth a little at a time. “He was killed to get to me. Because someone thought it would hurt me.”
“Who?” she demands scornfully, though tears tremble in her eyes, threatening to spill over. She takes a step toward me; I force myself not to step back, even as the knife comes closer. “I’ve spoken to the other servants. They told me how you hated the Gerlings. And how so many thought that you loved Roan since you were a child.”
I force my voice to remain steady. “It’s true. I didn’t hate Roan. I never have. The one who killed him . . .” How can I tell her this? How could she believe me? But Ina’s eyes stay on me, steady and seeking, so I hold her gaze and say:
“Caro killed him, Ina. She killed him, and she killed your mother too.”
The color flees from Ina’s cheeks, though she doesn’t lower the blade. I watch her face closely, afraid to hope, as she processes my words. Thought is passing over her face like clouds scudding through the sky.
“Why?” Ina whispers at last. Her voice is quiet, but it cuts easily through the heavy, tense silence between us, surrounding us in the graveyard. “Why would she do such a thing?”
I grab on to the fact that she hasn’t told me I’m mad, seizing that shred of hope and holding it with all my might. Possible things to say rattle around my skull, each sounding more absurd than the next. But now that I’ve given Ina the beginning of the truth, I can’t stop. It would be wrong to deny her more. I take a deep breath and turn my palms out toward my sister.
“She wanted to hurt me,” I say slowly. “It’s difficult to explain why, but Caro and I have known each other for a long time. Since before you came to Everless. I can’t say I understand it, but I’ve been trying to.” I take a deep breath. “But think back. Can you tell me the first day you met Caro?”
Ina’s eyes narrow. She doesn’t understand. But as the silence stretches, her face starts to furrow, her eyes widen. I can guess what she’s doing, searching through her memories for the first day the pretty, soft-spoken, green-eyed maidservant stepped into her life. And she can’t find an answer, because . . .
“She was always there,” I say, tentative, letting the end of my sentence drift upward like a question. “She was always there, wasn’t she?”
Ina doesn’t reply, but I can see my words hit her, see the truth in them in how they make her flinch slightly.
I press on. “Because she’s always been there. She’s been by your mother’s side before either of us were born. Never changing. Keeping track of everything. Watching. Waiting.”
Ina’s silent for a moment more, her hands tig
htening around the burnished handle of her knife, and I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her, growing up alone in a palace, both her mother and her friend disappearing at strange intervals. I remember the manner that the dead queen and Caro had together, the strange, quiet interdependence, orbiting each other while scarcely ever exchanging a word. I imagine Ina got used to the dynamic after seeing it every day, but I can see her questions form now as she turns over my words.
Then, though, she seems to put them aside. She lifts her chin at me. “Waiting for what?”
“Me,” I say. It’s true, in a way. “Caro and I . . . we’re enemies. I didn’t recognize her when she first came to Everless, or she me, but eventually she realized who I was.” I take a deep breath that hurts my chest, trying to hold back the tears gathering behind my eyes. “She killed Roan to hurt me, because she thought I loved him. And your mother, the late queen, knew it, so she had her killed too, making sure that I would take the blame.”
A tear slips silently down Ina’s cheek, and I think I see her hands flag a little. “Who are you then?” she whispers.
“Ina,” I begin, trying to find a way into it, a way that won’t send my sister running from me, or make her reconsider using those knives. “What would you say if I told you that the Alchemist and the Sorceress still live?”
She blinks. “My mother raised me to believe in the old tales, but . . .”
“My father did too,” I say, my voice falling into a whisper without my meaning it to. “And do you believe that the two of them walk the earth still? That they might still be among us?”
Ina shifts on her feet, uncomfortable. “What are you saying?”
“This is going to sound mad,” I say. “I still feel mad, but please believe me, Ina.” I swallow. “I am the Alchemist. And Caro . . . Caro is the Sorceress.”
Ina stares at me blankly. What seems like a full minute passes in buzzing silence.
Finally: “What I felt in the valley? When we attacked you and your friend? That was . . . old magic?”
