THE NEXT MORNING, AS she awaited her lesson beneath the crystal dome, Emeline paced the room, her nerves flickering. She hadn’t slept at all last night. She kept going over their argument in her mind.
She’d drank too much. Gotten too bold. She never should have pressed him.
Her face heated as she remembered the words he’d thrown in her face.
I took him because he begged me to.
The shame of it scorched her. Pa, forced to tithe himself because she’d abandoned him in that place. Because being imprisoned in the Wood King’s palace was better than being alone.
Sorrow welled like a rising tide. Emeline stopped pacing to press her hands to her face.
Her phone buzzed, jolting her back to the present.
She pulled it swiftly out, thinking maybe, miraculously, a text had come in. That she had stepped into some kind of magical hot spot and Joel was trying to get through to her, worried to death and wanting to know where she was.
When she glanced at the cracked screen, her heart sank.
It was only an automatic notification from Elegy, her music app.
She glanced to the upper corner of the screen. There were still no bars. No way to contact Joel. And her battery was almost completely dead.
At the sight of the background image, Emeline gripped the screen hard, staring. An old photo of her and Pa stared back. He sat in the driver’s seat of a tractor and the trailer behind him was piled high with sun-bleached baskets of grapes, green and glistening. A five-year-old Emeline sat on his lap, turning towards him. Her small tanned hands were cupped to his ear while Pa grinned at whatever secret she was telling him.
Emeline swallowed down the lump in her throat.
How can so much change in so little time?
Marring the image was the notification from Elegy. It read: Chloe Demarche uploaded a new file to SHARED FOLDER 3 days ago.
She’d ignored the notification when it first came in. But since she was trapped here, waiting for her lesson to start, Emeline opened the app—which made its files accessible offline—and started to scroll.
All of the music files were written by Chloe, her songwriter.
Instead of opening Chloe’s new file, though, Emeline scrolled all the way to the bottom of the list, stopping at a familiar password-protected folder.
The folder was full of her old songs, many she’d written as young as fourteen, before she’d ever driven away to the city with a dream in her heart and a tune in her throat and the stubborn belief that she could find success playing her own music.
The songs in that folder were less polished than her current sound. If she could even call it her sound.
A few months after moving to Montreal, when she was feeling the weight of her choice, struggling to pay her bills and two months late on rent, her manager convinced her to use a writer. Someone with a commercial ear who could write more marketable songs.
Emeline was reluctant. She wanted to sing her own songs. Ones that meant something. But her bills were piling up. She’d nearly maxed out her credit card simply by keeping her car insured and putting gas in the tank. Emeline didn’t know how much longer she could keep herself afloat.
She finally understood how young and unprepared she was. So she caved.
Her sound changed overnight. She started getting more gigs and exposure. People liked her new music. She signed with a small label and put out a professional album. Suddenly, Emeline could keep her bills paid. Suddenly, she was on an upwards curve instead of a downwards spiral.
Suddenly, she could breathe.
Back then, Emeline had recorded rough tracks of all her old songs, uploaded them into the folder, and locked it. Hoping that maybe, one day in the future, she would come back to those and sing them again.
Ironically, in the time since she’d locked them away she’d forgotten the folder’s password. Probably her subconscious telling her to let go and move on.
But sometimes—if she had time to kill before a gig and needed to calm her nerves—Emeline would open up Elegy, scroll to the bottom, and try guessing the password until it was time to go onstage.
Nothing she thought up ever worked. She couldn’t even remember why she’d titled the folder “Forgetting Is So Long.”
Emeline tapped on the locked folder. A notification popped up.
You haven’t accessed FORGETTING IS SO LONG in 546 days. Do you want to delete?
She hit NO.
This folder is password protected. Enter the password now.
Emeline’s fingers hovered over her screen.
In the end, she didn’t guess it. Just canceled and returned to Chloe’s new song. Hawthorne hadn’t arrived yet. She might as well listen to the file. She had a tour soon—one she fully intended to go on, the Wood King be damned—and she needed a few more songs to add to her set list.
This song could be just what she needed.
Before her phone’s battery croaked, Emeline found the new audio file and tapped PLAY.
Chloe’s raw, smoky voice came through the phone’s speaker as she crooned long and low about an unrequited love. It was classic Chloe. Contemporary pop, with a dash of country drawl. It wasn’t Emeline’s style, but she understood why people liked it. Emeline smiled as she listened once, twice, three times, then started making edits in her head.
Soon, she was singing along, tweaking the song as she watched the sun rise over the King’s City below. As she sang, her gaze wandered over the shining white walls of the palace beyond the dome. She thought of the Wood King sitting on his white throne. Of candlelit halls and attendants fluttering like moths. Of Claw’s silver snout emerging from the shadows, and Rooke falling to his knees before Bog, and that creepy wall of skulls in the crypt …
It was habitual. Whenever she sang a song for the first time, she sealed a memory inside the melody. Like a gift she was packaging for her future self. She’d been doing it for as long as she could remember.
From now on, whenever she sang this song, she would come back to this moment, looking out over the King’s City. She would remember the things that happened here.
If she survived, that is.
When she’d fashioned Chloe’s song into a shape she liked, Emeline sang it back one more time—without Chloe’s original cut—hitting RECORD as she did, then uploaded the file to her set-list folder.
“Did you write that?” said a voice from behind her.
Emeline spun. Hawthorne stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, arms crossed firmly over his chest.
Her insides sparked at the immediate tension in the room. She felt exposed beneath his piercing gaze. Tucking her phone into the breast pocket of her rose sweater, she forced the tone of her voice to match his: cool and uncaring. “I didn’t realize I had an audience.”
He remained in the doorframe. “That song isn’t you.”
Um, what? Emeline stared at him. “I’m sorry?”
Pushing away from the jamb, he stepped slowly into the room. “Is everything you sing like that?”
She crossed her arms over her chest, temper simmering. “Like what?”
“Dull and shallow.”
The words stung.
No. This was perfect. The Wood King’s henchman was back to his callous, surly self. That suited Emeline just fine. She didn’t need his friendship. She only needed his help learning the Song Mage’s music.
He took another step, coming farther into the room. “Like I said: not very you.”
Emeline’s fingers dug into the sleeves of her sweater. “You don’t know a thing about me.”
He didn’t answer. Only looked beyond her, to the city below, his jaw clenching. “Should we begin? Your demonstration is tonight.”
He didn’t get to do that. Didn’t get to provoke her, then move on as if he’d done nothing wrong. But their squabbling was cutting into her lesson, and her demonstration was tonight. They needed to get down to work.
Emeline tamped down on her anger, picked out the next song from the Song Mage’s stack of music, and handed it to him. Keeping the growl out of her voice, she said, “Start with this one.”
ALL THROUGH THE LESSON, the tension between them remained. Emeline’s emotions bubbled, threatening to spill over. Anger, shame, and something else. Some fragile, shimmering thing she needed to keep contained.
Hawthorne, too, was off his game. Now that she was looking, there were dark smudges beneath his eyes, and his maple-dark hair was wild as a raven’s ruffled feathers, as if from running his hands through it.
Maybe she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep last night.
In yesterday’s lesson, he’d been a model of restraint. Controlled and in charge. Leading her through the first two songs.
Today, there was a fault line running through him.
But they forged ahead, untangling the difficult knots of the next two songs together. When Emeline found the heart of each one, when she carried the notes just right, she looked—despite herself—for that slight nod of approval, that tiny hint of a smile that told her he was impressed.
Instead, she found him coming undone: hands clenched, eyes thirsty. As if he wanted to drink in the sound of her voice. As if he wanted to drink her down to the dregs.
When their gazes met, he tore his away, face shuttering closed, entombing himself within a wall of stone. As if her voice did something to him that he didn’t want it to do and he was trying his best to ward himself against it—and failing.
As if yesterday he’d been holding himself in check. Reining something in.
The idea of it—that she could get past his defenses—made something swell inside her. Part delicious challenge, part revenge for his refusing to deliver her message to Joel, Emeline yearned to smash down his walls, just to prove she could. She longed to strip down his defenses and force him to face her head-on.
“Again,” he commanded when she got the notes wrong. Still pushing. Still demanding her best.
Emeline sang it again, then again.
This time, when their voices aligned, Emeline’s blood hummed like a tuning fork. She could feel herself on the cusp of something.
Sensing it, Hawthorne hesitated. His voice wavered as he pulled back, about to close himself off.
Don’t you dare. She stared him down. We aren’t done.
Emeline had an intense urge to force him to stay with her. Letting go of her temper, she reached for him with the melody, fixing him in place with her voice. Needing to know what lay beyond those walls of his. Wanting his secrets.
Face me.
Her voice held him hostage.
Let down your walls before I break them.
To her surprise, he didn’t pull back. Instead, he rose to meet her. Their gazes locked. Their voices mingled and fused, growing into a crescendo. But as their voices became one, so did other things.
A startling warmth flooded her, heady and strong. With it came feelings of happiness and pride.
She isn’t only learning this song; she’s transforming it into something beautiful.
Emeline faltered. It was his thought—spilling into her. Like a tipped cup of hot tea.
Her voice knows its shape better than the notes on the page.
She should have let go right then. Should have broken off the song, for his sake.
But she didn’t.
Emeline dug deeper, to the thing buried beneath his thoughts. Something with bottomless, thirsty roots. Something one pruned and cut and tried to dig up—but never got all of. So it kept coming back, thirstier than ever, until it was a bitter, unquenchable yearning. An ache with no balm …
“Enough!”
Hawthorne wrenched himself out of her thrall. The sudden shock of it made the room spin. Emeline reached for the music stand, gripping it until her knuckles whitened, trying to steady herself.
A heavy cloak of exhaustion fell over her, as if breaking down his defenses had taken more strength than she realized.
Hawthorne stepped back. Away from her.
Emeline’s gaze lifted to find his eyes wild and his breath coming fast. Spots of color appeared high on his dusky cheeks as he blushed the way magnolias bloomed, realizing what she had done.
Her voice had stripped him down. Peered straight through his skin to his core. Stolen something he hadn’t wanted to give her.
“Hawthorne…”
The room shrank around them. Too small and cramped despite all the space. It was dark, she realized. The moon was high.
How long have we been here?
“I think I’ve reached my limit today.” His anguished voice tore at her like a jagged knife. “You’re ready, and it’s nearly midnight. You have no further need of me.” His face was unreadable. “I wish you luck tonight, singer.”
Before she could stop him, Hawthorne turned.
“Wait.…”
The desperate thud of his footsteps rang out through the dome as he moved past her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
But he was already gone.