“Marigold?” But the girl really is gone, and Aurora’s voice, disembodied, echoes through the woods.
The sun has set; darkness has risen. The night surrounds Aurora now, throbs with that same anticipation it always has, making her yearn for Isabelle. For home. For Heath. For everything to be different than it is. For something to begin. For something that she has already, inexplicably, lost.
A hand clamps down on her shoulder. “A beauty like you shouldn’t be wandering the night alone.”
Aurora turns around and makes out the figure emerging from the darkness. “Heath?” She sighs in relief. He’s just as breathless as she is. “How did you find me?”
“My notes were missing. It wasn’t hard to guess where you’d gone. I heard the waterfall. I feared . . .” He clears his throat. “I followed the river downstream and then I saw the trail. And that’s when I really got worried.”
“The trail?”
“Of scattered flowers. You met Marigold, didn’t you?”
She nods, swallowing hard. “She disappeared.”
“She only exists in daylight,” he explains, as if it were the most natural thing. “Lucky for you,” he adds, his expression clouding over. “What were you doing out here anyway? I told you not to come back to the Borderlands. You could have died. I’m surprised she didn’t try to drown you.”
Aurora shakes her head. “She was helpless. She’s just a little girl!”
“I have more than once come upon one of these lying on the ground near the cliffs’ edge,” he says, holding up the flower wreath, “only to discover the bloodied mess of some poor fellow smashed into the rocks below.”
A shiver runs up Aurora’s neck. But she will not be scolded, not for the bravest thing she has ever done: saving someone’s life. “Well, she didn’t hurt me. In fact, she may have helped me.” Her confidence begins to return. The cottage . . . the words in the wood . . . the clues. “Heath, I think I’ve learned something new about the queen—”
A powerful, angry crack ricochets around them, cutting her off.
“A storm is coming,” he says. “We need to get back to Blackthorn. Now.” He starts off, into a dense knot of trees and branches.
“Heath!” she says, surprised by how good it feels to shout, as though the thunder has crept inside her throat and become part of her.
He turns. “What?”
“We should go this way,” she says, and begins to run. Let him follow her this time.
The sky fractures as she enters a clearing, and rain gushes down, instantly drenching her. She blinks against the heavy rain, taking in the massive bruise of sky above, swollen and torn through with lightning. She tries to listen to her heart, to the rose lullaby that lives inside her, an internal compass. Heath catches up to her, and neither of them says anything. The sudden storm brews powerfully around them. When lightning flashes again, it lights up the entire woods, and Aurora gets a good look at Heath’s face. He’s staring at her in wonder. Gone are the concern, the skepticism, the sickening disappointment she swore she saw in his eyes during the past few days. He has not, she realizes quickly, underestimated her . . . but she has underestimated herself.
She breathes deeply—the musky wet forest smells of Sommeil lure her one way, but there’s a voice, an urge, lower, beneath that call, a message of truth cutting through the dreaminess of the storm. Once again, she knows which direction to go. She can feel the way back to the wall, back to Blackthorn, back to the queen.
The wind tears past Aurora, nearly knocking her over as she leads Heath through a thick cluster of trees. The rain pounds down on her face, blurring her vision as they push deeper into the aching, pulsing blackness of the forest. Thunder rages. The storm is moving swiftly. If it keeps heading this way, they could easily be struck.
The wall flashes before her; its gray stones shine in the lightning.
Then Aurora is lightning as she and Heath hurtle across the illusion. Pushing through the wall feels different this time. She doesn’t need to sing or even think the lullaby . . . she only needs to be, immutably, Aurora. Instead of trapped in the wall’s coldness, she feels only euphoria—a shot of pure joy—at her ability to fly to the other side unharmed.
The meadows of the Blackthorn estate open up before her, and she runs not from the storm and not to safety but for the easy pleasure of her body moving through space and time. A laugh bursts out of her chest, carrying Aurora’s new aliveness in its wild sound. She is powerful.
She is free.
At the next bang of thunder, Heath grabs her hand and they cover the rest of the distance to the castle together.
Inside, Heath lights a lantern and Aurora sees that they have come through a side entrance, into a gallery. The room is drafty, cool, and empty, the walls lined in paintings, with a few sculptures on pedestals scattered throughout the space. She has wandered through here before, but only in passing.
They stand facing each other, water droplets softly plinking to the floor. A raindrop runs down Aurora’s brow and cheek, trickling into the corner of her lips. Heath runs his hand through his hair, which is dark with rain. He seems at a loss for words, a half smile tugging at his mouth—caught, probably, between reprimanding her and something else. The electricity of the storm has followed them, and Aurora shivers, wanting to touch his dripping cloak, his collar, his chin—to let the lightning shock within her travel out. But she doesn’t.
“We should get you dried off,” he says. A puddle is rapidly forming around both their feet. “Storms are reckless creatures,” he adds. “We could have been killed.”
Aurora nods but remains wordless.
She steps away from Heath, trying to catch her breath, to remind herself of the important discoveries she made today at the cottage.
Rain beats against the shutters, and her eyes start to focus in the dim light. A giant painting looms before her. It’s a large portrait of a young man on a horse. The man is handsome, with wide shoulders and a straight back. His light brown hair is cropped at his shoulders, and a thin beard outlines his square jaw, more filled in than Heath’s faint stubble but not the full beard of an older man. He appears to be around their age, and on his head sits a very simple crown: an oddly familiar circlet of gold, worn low on the forehead, no jewels.
She hadn’t really noticed the painting before . . . but then again, she hadn’t been looking for signs of a thwarted romance until now. Her mind swirls with questions; something about the lush painting has captivated her attention.
“Charles Blackthorn.” She’s startled from her thoughts by Heath’s voice, warm and close to her neck. “People say he went mad over a woman.”
“Charles?”
Heath nods. “I didn’t want to tell you, but that’s why the tower room was empty before you came. People avoid it—they think it’s haunted. They say his ghost comes back, looking for his one true love.”
His one true love. And then she remembers: she saw the letters CB carved with a childlike scrawl among the other initials on the walls of the cottage in the Borderlands.
Could this be the love story she’s seeking, the reason for Belcoeur’s madness? Could Charles be the visitor Belcoeur believes she is waiting for? If so, and if he really did die many years ago, then the queen will be waiting forever . . . which means there’s a chance they really won’t ever escape Sommeil.
Though “escape” is no longer the word she would use—that would imply a desire to leave all of it behind.
“Luckily, I don’t believe in ghosts,” Heath goes on. “Or true love, for that matter.”
Aurora balks. “You don’t believe in true love? That’s ridiculous!”
“Is it? What proof do you have that it exists?” he asks. He seems to be leaning in closer to her.
“I—it isn’t something to be proven.” She’s breathing slowly. His closeness is making her unsteady. “It’s just something you feel,” she says, thinking of the many epic tales of love she has read. “And when you feel it, you know.”
He tilts his head, smirking just a little. “Sounds like the stuff of stories.”
“Well, what evidence do you have that it doesn’t exist?” she challenges. This heady mix of frustration and determination is beginning to feel familiar, and not in a bad way. She finds she likes that he contradicts her, that he’s willing to debate, that he expects her to argue her side. And that, with her newfound voice, she can.
Now his face is so near she can feel his breath. “Just that I’ve never felt it before. That kind of love involves choice—or it should. And that’s something I’ve never had. You can’t have choice if you don’t have freedom.”
“Then I hope that changes,” Aurora whispers. “Everyone deserves true love.”
“I’m not so sure I agree. I’ve heard of people doing terrible things in the name of true love. Wouldn’t want to end up like old Blackthorn, mad and alone.”
“But if you don’t believe in love, then you will end up alone.” She blinks as her words settle into the narrow gap between their bodies. His lips seem to loom before hers, heart shaped and soft looking, even as they quiver into a smile.
“Maybe so,” he whispers back, lifting his hand to touch her face. He brushes a strand of wet hair off her cheek. As his fingers make contact with her skin, she shivers.
He leans back slightly, and she remembers she’s still drenched. Thunder crashes beyond the walls and rain pounds the roof, heavy and whooshing, as though an entire ocean has opened up in the sky.
“Let me build a fire,” Heath suggests. “You must be cold.”
But he doesn’t move to the hearth. He stands there, staring at her, his lips slightly parted. Plenty of men have gazed at Aurora with something akin to hunger, but none of them knew her; none of them could.
“You . . .” He shakes his head, his long hair swinging in front of his eyes. “You make me want things.” He licks his lower lip nervously. She stares at his mouth, horrified at the fire that instantly rages through her.
“You make me want to believe in other worlds,” he goes on. “In other possibilities. And I should hate you for that,” he says, though there’s a smile still trying to cut across the stricken look on his face.
She swallows. “I’m sorry.” Like everything about Sommeil, his words leave her tingly with dissatisfaction, with the fear that she will never be satisfied, never get what she wants, even if she doesn’t know what that is. Or perhaps because she doesn’t know.
“Don’t be.”
His voice is so quiet she almost doesn’t hear him, but something begins to rise within her, tightening around her lungs like vines. She always thought love would come to her just as it did in the romances she read: full-blown and overpowering. Absolute and unquestioning.
What’s happening to her now is nothing like that. It’s tremulous, curious, speckled with dangers and uncertainties.
“I . . . I . . .” But he can’t seem to finish what he was going to say.
She puts her hand on his shoulder, a small gesture but infinitely bold—bigger, even, than when she touched the spinning wheel and its sting changed her forever.
He seems to know this. He takes her hand and lifts it to his lips. He kisses her knuckles softly, hesitantly. His lips linger on her skin, sending currents of warmth through her arm and down her entire body. She feels light-headed as he tugs her closer to him, until his lips graze her ear, his breath tickling her neck. “Aurora.”
An aching desire leaps up in her like flames in a breeze. Her lips catch the stubble on his chin, the high ridge of his cheekbone—still wet from the rain—then find their way to his mouth. She feels his surprised inhale, the way something clicks into place as his body goes firm and urgent against hers and he begins to kiss her back.
She is falling—into the divide between before and after. Her world is changing again, no longer simply with the miracle of touch but this new discovery of how touch can have meaning. She feels the kiss everywhere: a tingling ache in her fingertips, a sigh against the backs of her knees—the kiss she didn’t realize she’d been waiting for, ever since meeting Heath, even when he had a dagger pointed at her throat.
Her first kiss.
The word “oh” drifts into the air around them as if on a swirl of fog.
Aurora pulls away, enough to take a breath.
“Oh.” A soft voice. Not hers, and not Heath’s either.
She turns. Wren. The girl stands framed in the entrance to the gallery, her face pale, her fingers clenched together. “Forgive me,” she says, backing away. And then she’s gone.