Rowan

by Josephine Angelini

  “No, she hates them. They make her too hot,” I say. We all go back to staring at her.

  “Are you sure that’s Lillian?” Caleb asks.

  I give him a look.

  “I don’t know,” Tristan muses.

  “What don’t you know?” I say.

  Tristan sighs. “It doesn’t feel like her,” he says, gearing up for a fight.

  I open my mouth to argue, but I can’t. I know that the girl in the cage is Lillian, but Tristan’s right. It doesn’t feel like her.

  “We should bring her to the sachem,” Caleb says. “Let him decide.”

  I’m just realizing now that from the moment I laid eyes on her outside the café I’ve reeled from one snap decision to the next. I haven’t once stopped to think things through. What if getting to the sachem is what she wanted?

  “I don’t trust her,” I reply.

  Caleb asks me questions about her, trying to get to the bottom of this, and I keep telling him that the girl in the cage is Lillian, but I also keep saying that there’s something off about her. I know I’m not making any sense, and that I’m starting to rant, but I can’t shake this feeling that something terribly wrong has happened.

  I’m combing through every tiny detail, but I’m still not getting it. My da used to say that it’s easier to find things when they’re small. All you have to do is be careful and you’ll spot it eventually. But when what you’re looking for is big, you have to be able to stand back to see it all. Sometimes, you just can’t get far enough. I have a sinking feeling that something huge has happened to me to today, but I can’t remove myself enough from the situation to see it.

  Then I hear her move. She starts to yell. And she calls out for Tristan. She asks for Tristan to help her. Not me.

  She’s coughing and hacking, complaining about the mold. I light a sage bundle to purify the air and she stops. Why is she acting like this is bothering her? Mold hasn’t bothered her since she was eight, and I say as much. The sound of her voice is irritating—if only because I want to hear it so badly.

  “I’m not Lillian,” she says. Again, her eyes search for Tristan. “Please, you have to believe me. I’m a version of Lillian.”

  It takes a moment for the three of us to get what she’s saying. She’s talking about parallel worlds. Alternate selves. Multiple universes. I can’t believe she expects me to swallow this. It’s insulting that she thinks I’d be so gullible. And something else keeps gnawing at me. It’s the way she keeps turning to Tristan. Did something happen between them that Tristan didn’t tell me about? That’s ridiculous. But still …

  Then Lillian brings up the shaman, shocking me out of my mounting bitterness. I didn’t think she’d ever admit to that.

  Caleb turns to me. “Is it true?” he asks. “Did a shaman go to the Citadel?”

  I tell them about how I asked the shaman from our tribe to come to the Citadel to help Lillian’s mother—not that there’s a cure for what she had. I thought it might help make Samantha feel better to talk to someone who didn’t think she was crazy. But all of that spirit-walking stuff the shaman used to spout is just a fairy tale. Caleb knows that.

  Lillian isn’t swaying from her story. Now she’s talking about science, of all things, and even going so far as to admit that what she’s saying is impossible. She’s really selling this. Even Tristan is starting to fall for it.

  She keeps looking at him like she knows him, like she expects him to suddenly come to his senses and let her go. She looks at Tristan like he’s the one she’s always loved and trusted.

  “How am I supposed to prove to you I’m not the evil witch I look exactly like?” she asks, her teary eyes working Tristan over mercilessly. She must be doing it on purpose to get to me. She wants to turn me against him. I can’t take another second of this.

  “You know how, Lillian,” I reply. “Let me in your head.”

  “Ro. Be serious,” Tristan says. He’s so nervous his voice cracks a little.

  He and Caleb argue against it, which I’m sure Lillian knew they would. She planned this perfectly. The only way for us to know the truth is for me to ask her who she is in mindspeak, where no one can lie. I don’t have to let her claim me, but I do have to let her touch my willstone in order for us to share a moment of rapport. In that moment she could do just about anything to me, and I may not be strong enough to resist her. A part of me is begging for it to happen. To finally be rid of the weightless ache.

  Caleb won’t let me. He pulls rank and says it’s for the sachem to decide. Relief battles with disappointment.

  We leave Tristan to guard her while Caleb and I go to see Alaric. My eyes keep straying back to her, even as I walk away.

  “You have to calm down,” Caleb tells me.

  “Calm down?” I say. I can hear the hysterical edge in my voice now that Caleb has pointed it out. “If Elias killed your father—”

  Caleb stops and puts a hand on my shoulder, turning me to him. “I’m trying to help you, brother. You’re making stupid choices.”

  “I know I am,” I admit. “How am I supposed to be calm about this?”

  “No idea,” Caleb says. “But find a way.”

  As I follow my stone kin through the trees, I try to pull myself together. I’m fighting the urge to go back and force her to admit that she is Lillian—that she recognizes me as she does Tristan. How can she manage to look at me like I’m a stranger to her? And the way she spoke to Tristan—so intimate, like he knew all of her secrets.

  Caleb brings me through the main camp. Tents are already pitched and the few armored carts that travel with this light and fast faction of our tribe make a barrier wall toward the westerly side. Alaric is outside of the strangest cart I’ve ever seen. It’s completely windowless, so I doubt anyone would live in it, and judging by how deeply the extra thick wheels are sinking into the ground, it’s the heaviest cart I’ve ever seen. I can’t help but wonder what he’s hauling in it. It must be full of metal or an ore of some kind.

  The council fire is lit in front of Alaric. He’s hearing a petitioner who is speaking passionately. The conversation stops as soon as I arrive, and the petitioner leaves without finishing his suit. As he passes me I see he isn’t an Outlander. I catch a whiff of hay and the fleecy smell of sheep about him and figure he’s a ranch hand, although I’ve never seen a ranch hand petition a sachem before. There are red patches on his face and hands. Burns. I scan them quickly and find no hint of ash or trace of chemicals in the raw skin. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

  “Rowan,” Alaric says, standing up on his stiff leg. “Is she still unconscious?”

  “No,” I reply. I’m distracted by the man’s injuries. “How did he get those burns?”

  “A cooking fire,” Alaric says. I narrow my eyes at him and he laughs. “Okay. Not a cooking fire. But I can’t tell you the real cause, so let’s leave it.”

  “Is that where all my salve is going?” I think of how much salve I’ve been making, calculating how many more are burned like that man. Dozens. Hundreds?

  “Yes.” Alaric’s eyes say he’s being honest with me because he thinks I have a right to the truth, but they also say he’s not going to tell me anything more. “But onto bigger matters,” he says, smiling wolfishly. “How did you capture Lillian?”

  I explain what happened—the café, the chase, and how Tristan and I got her out of the city. Then I tell him about Lillian’s ludicrous claim that she wasn’t our Lillian but a different version of Lillian from another universe. As I say this, Alaric’s face freezes. I stop talking.

  “She says her name is Lily,” Caleb finishes for me.

  “Interesting,” Alaric says. I notice he doesn’t say “bullshit.” “It almost sounds like she’s been listening to one of our shamans. How could Lillian know about other worlds and spirit walking?”

  “I brought the shaman to the Citadel a few years ago and introduced him to Lillian,” I say. I start to think of all those nights I woke up and Lill
ian wasn’t next to me. She’d told me she’d been working. She never said on what. “It’s possible she met with him more than once, in secret.”

  Alaric’s eyes dance around, but he’s not seeing the campfire or the benighted forest. He’s seeing scenarios and possibilities. Caleb tosses me a look.

  Why isn’t he laughing at how ridiculous this is? he asks in mindspeak.

  He doesn’t think it’s ridiculous. In fact, I think he thinks it’s true, I answer.

  “So this Lillian,” Alaric says, thinking out loud, “does she look the same in every way?”

  “Yes,” I reply. “Sachem—she’s Lillian. And I’m convinced she’s setting us up. Maybe it’s to get to you—”

  “Are any of her mechanics here with her?”

  “No,” I say. “Not that I know of.”

  “Without mechanics she’s helpless, correct?”

  “Not completely, but the tricks she has left I can counter.” At least I think I can. I’ve never really known what she was capable of.

  “Good. I want to meet her.”

  Alaric’s guards fan out behind him like wraiths. They melt into the shadows, seeking an ambush. One thing I learned from Caleb after he took the oath was that if you see Alaric followed by one of the warpainted guards, you can be sure that there are three nearby you don’t see. We hear two yips and a yowl from one of the guards signaling outside the perimeter of armored carts, and all of our heads snap around toward it. Woven. A moment later we hear an inhuman howl. We reach for knives and form a circle around our sachem while the air blossoms with screams.

  A flock of part avian, part insect Woven burst from the underbrush. They’re over ten feet tall with huge, land-strider legs. They trap the unfortunate under three-toed feet as their long beaks stab the killing blows. Crinoline-thin wings flutter uselessly over their heads. One fixes its black eyes on me and strides forward, its insect wings buzzing. I stutter step and dodge between its big legs, slicing the backs of its ankles as I tuck and roll. The Woven squeals and tumbles to the ground behind me.

  When I pop up onto my feet again, I see a second wave of Woven behind the large insect-avian. They’re smaller, hodgepodge Woven—some are like lizard-dogs with scaly skin while other have tufts of fur puffing between the joints of their exoskeletons. I start hacking my way through them, using my knife like a scythe to mow them down. After I cut a decent-sized swath, I feel a hand on my shoulder whirling me around.

  “Get back to Lillian,” Alaric yells in my face. “I want her alive!”

  I see Caleb as he takes off into the trees, following the retreating Woven to their nest.

  I’ll find you and follow you to the rendezvous point, I tell him in mindspeak.

  I run the other way through the darkness, back toward where I left Tristan guarding Lillian. I leap over low bushes and feel branches whip my cheeks. My heart is rattling around in my chest. I’m afraid, but not for myself.

  I barrel into the clearing where we caged Lillian, and see her. She’s safe. A wave of relief nearly washes the bones out of my legs, but she sees me and cringes. She’s terrified of me.

  Tristan asks after Caleb, and I answer. Then I say, “We have to move her.”

  “Where are you taking me?” Lillian asks. She’s clutching at herself, like she thinks I’m going to attack her.

  I unlock her cage and pull her out of it harder than I probably need to, and Tristan calls me on it. I feel like a fool—an angry fool. Gallant Tristan saves the princess from the dirty, violent Outlander.

  “Then you take her,” I say, shoving Lillian at him. “But if she bolts for the woods, her death is on you.”

  “Fine. It’s on me,” he says out loud, and then adds in mindspeak: What the hell is wrong with you?

  Lillian doesn’t give me a chance to answer. She tilts her freckled nose up at me and puts on her haughty face, saying that she’s responsible for herself. I see anger staining her cheeks pink and brightening her eyes. Her mouth is just inches from mine and I’m aching to kiss her. I’m sick with it, and sick because of it. She rambles on about monsters (she knows they’re called Woven) and then says, “I’m not a frigging moron. And I don’t appreciate being ignored, Rowan whatever-your-last-name-is. Where are you taking me?”

  “Like I’d tell you that.” I’ve never heard the world “frigging” before, but I get the gist of its meaning. Pretending not to know my last name was an inspired touch—even I almost believe that she doesn’t know me. And I bury this, but it hurts. “She’s all yours,” I tell Tristan. Let him deal with her. It’s what he’s always wanted, anyway. Maybe something did happen between them—that would explain why he’s always dogged after her. I’m choking on the thought as I turn my back on them.

  I slip into the forest, heading in Caleb’s direction, not really caring anymore if they follow. Lillian crashes along after me, tripping over everything as if on purpose. She’s having a horrible time of it, and that’s only making me angrier. Her skin is reacting to every irritant possible, and she doesn’t do anything to counteract it. She even twists her ankle and pretends not to know how to mend it.

  I glance at the ankle and see that it’s broken. She’s in a lot of pain. Crying, even. A sinking doubt starts to creep in on my anger. This can’t be an act anymore, can it? Tristan picks her up and carries her. Just seeing her in his arms, and the way she settles into him like she’s done it a million times before, eats away at me. I go ahead of them and give Tristan the direction of the rendezvous point in mindspeak.

  When they arrive at camp after me, Caleb goes to them. Tristan tells him that the girl isn’t Lillian—he believes her story now. Caleb and I go to get the sachem. We bring the sachem to her, and he bends down close to look her in the eye. He asks her a few questions and makes up his mind.

  “This isn’t Lillian, Rowan,” he says.

  I fight it—of course I fight it. What Alaric doesn’t understand is that I can look into her cells and see the life helix. I know this is Lillian.

  “Look in her eyes, Rowan,” he tells me. “There’s no death there.”

  He has a point. I look down at the girl sitting next to the fire, and see again what I saw when I first laid eyes on her outside the café this morning. Innocence. Alaric asks me if this girl is as powerful as Lillian.

  “There’s none stronger,” I say. And it’s true. She’s so heavy with power she seems to punch a hole in the night. But her power doesn’t flow through her as it should. It’s dammed up inside of her … because she’s never used it. More doubt weakens my resolve.

  “Can she do everything that Lillian can?” Alaric asks.

  “Maybe. With training,” I answer. I see something light up in Alaric’s eyes.

  He speaks some more with her, but I barely hear them. Is she really from another world? I can’t accept it. Alaric has accepted it so easily. Too easily.

  He orders me to fix her ankle, and I’m glad because it gives me something to do. I can’t look at her. I touch her ankle with my fingertips and focus on her injury. This is Lillian’s skin. I know it so well. The dusting of gold hair that rises when I skim my fingers over it. The taste. I’m losing focus again. I pull my thoughts back to where they belong and try to reduce the swelling.

  My willstone flares and I look up at her. She gasps and swears and tries to pull away from me. “Your eyes are on fire!” she shouts. And just like that I don’t recognize her. This girl is a stranger to me.

  It’s like ice down my back. “You’re not Lillian,” is all I can say.

  “No. I’m really not,” she whispers.

  Tristan comes back with the supplies. He’s worried about “Lily,” as she likes to be called. He thinks I might have hurt her. I guess I deserve that. I’ve been a brute all night, and as I replay my behavior, I’m embarrassed by the way I’ve been acting toward her. Lily. The stranger in Lillian’s body.

  It occurs to me that I might not be able to heal her. She’s blocking me because she doesn’t trust me. I tell Tristan
that she has to heal herself, using my stone. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that before, but for some reason, I know it will work.

  Lily watches me as I prepare the brew. Knowing that her eyes are on my hands makes me aware of them, and it takes me longer than it should. She has no idea what to do when I give her the boiling pot. She’s like a virtuoso who’s never heard music, and I get to be the one who teaches her to sing her first song.

  As she swallows the brew I realize I have to get closer to her so she can access my willstone. I lay her back and hover over her, but I don’t let my stone touch her. Forks of energy jump between us, and I feel all the hairs on my body prick with static. This is an inefficient way to transmute, but she’s so powerful it works anyway. I guide her, watching from the inside, as she uses her gift for the first time.

  An “Oh” of surprise hangs in her chest. The wonder and the blinding brightness of understanding she feels are too much, and a lump forms in my throat. Her hands are braced against my chest and I feel them curl as she clutches at my shirt. She wants me nearer. She softens under me and I have to look away. I back off, helping her sit up.

  “Magic,” she says. The word stumbles out of her mouth awkwardly, and I wish my mouth was there to catch it.

  Something snaps in her. I watch as she struggles not to cry. She presses at her breastbone with her hand, like she’s trying to keep her heart inside her chest. Tristan and I tell her that she doesn’t need to be locked up and she can sleep in the tent behind her. She clambers into it, blind with fatigue and shock. I can hear her panting with panic on the other side of the thin sheet of fabric.

  I stand there, listening to her smothered cries, wishing I could make them stop. I’m too scared to think it, but three words fly recklessly through my head anyway.

  … A second chance.

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  CHAPTER 1

  Lily Proctor ducked into the girls’ room, already yanking back her rebellious hair. Aiming for the toilet through a blur of tears, she vomited until her knees shook.