I saw the Deathwood’s edge just as a light rain began to thrum on my temples, the cool beginnings of a winter storm trickling down the nape of my neck. The ground softened beneath my bloodied feet, and blades of wet grass tore and clung to my ankles. The sky growled low and deep, something sinister stirring in the thick of the clouds overhead. I braced myself against a vicious lash of freezing wind. I held my arms as another gale sliced at my cheek, whipping my hair into a violent frenzy about my face. I shivered and stumbled into the dark maw of the garden labyrinth, threading my way to the House and wandering into its night-kissed halls. The plague of thorns had eaten nearly everything—slit the curtains open, blacked out the windows like hordes of flies on a corpse. I saw no face as I climbed the stairs. Heard no voices. The air was still and sweet with decay.
No longer a House, but a mausoleum.
Aeren’s door yawned wide at my touch, and I stepped inside, tracking grimy footprints across the hardwood floor as I approached the scarlet basin in the center of the room. I turned each of the bottles over, straining to read the names in the darkness.
Vaera. Kaeti. Chalcedony. Jo-zen. Pelwyn.
And I uncorked the fifth and tipped it slowly over the bath.
A stream of red.
It slipped through my trembling fingers and shattered at the bottom of the tub in a mess of sapphire glass and crimson foam.
“Xeanora?” Aeren. His weak voice rasped from the corridor. “Is that you? We’ve been looking for you in the woods all—”
I whirled at his silence.
There, in the dark of his doorway, he stood, his flaking lips knitted together in a frown. “Night.” He barely looked like himself. His face glistened with burgundy cuts, already stiff in their healing. His clothes hung off his bleeding limbs in scraps.
“What did you do?” I took another bottle from the floor and raised it by its neck.
He faltered and ran his hand against the doorframe, trailing blood with his fingertips. “I…borrowed their magic to…to stave off the curse. But they weren’t strong like you.” He flashed a fleeting smile, crimson seeping through his teeth, before frowning again. “They all…died. Burned up from the inside out. Their blood…still works. But I have you now.” He stumbled into me and seized my shoulders, fouling my mouth with the taste of iron when he crushed my lips in a kiss. “We can fight it off together.”
“And Lyali?”
He pulled away, strings of pink spittle clinging to his chin. “What?”
I didn’t blink. “I spoke to the Bone Woman. She never took her.”
“That bitch?” he uttered with something resembling a garbled chuckle. “You believe her over me?” A shaft of lightning set a nearby window alight in an instant of searing cyan fire.
I ground my jaw. “I do.”
His arms fell to his sides in defeat, his willow eyes colored with mourning as he whispered, as meek as a little boy, “I thought you were different.”
“Son, I—” Haenor darted into the doorway, and the lines in his face hardened at the sight of me—and the bottle clutched in my fingers. “You stupid girl.”
I was ready when he lunged for me, dashing around the tub and through the connecting door into my bedroom. I fled down the stairs and into the freezing night, into the thick of the vines and twisted branches of the labyrinth. The rain came down harder, slicking my hair to the nape of my neck. I slipped and fell in the loam, and as I scrabbled to my hands and knees, I grasped something stiff and cold in the soil. An alabaster arm. Severed at the joint, fingertips black and frozen.
All the girls who’d come before me. He’d used them up and cast them aside, gorged his roses on the husks of their bodies.
I fumbled to my feet and sprinted under the garden arbor, through the high grasses thrashing in the wind, past the tree line and into the darkness of the Deathwood again. I yelped when two hands gripped my hair at the root and jerked me backwards.
Haenor.
I dug my nails into his fingers, scratching hard, and he cursed as my hair slipped through his fists. I’d only stumbled forward a few steps before a shadow came down on my head. Then I was on the ground again, doubled over in the muck. He wrenched me onto my knees, and I saw my face in the curved blade of a farmer’s scythe.
“My son,” Haenor grunted as he pulled my head back, stretching my neck as far as it would go, “was fond of you.” He brought the edge to my throat, tearing skin, and my eyes watered as it stung. Blood ran in rivulets down my collarbone, bejeweling the front of my nightgown with crimson blooms. “You could’ve lived if you’d just shut up and done as you’re told.”
My hand brushed Haenor’s thigh, a surge of magic bleeding through my fingertips.
There was a soft gurgling at first, barely heard over my heart’s frantic beating and the pounding rain, and then, the rush of falling water. I turned when Haenor’s grip on me fell away, crawling backwards as he crumpled to his knees, his head tilted back too far, as dark water gushed from his mouth. His burbling screams quieted, his dimming eyes still wide with terror, and he keeled onto his side and never moved again.
I was my mother’s daughter now.
I turned and ran deeper into the forest, as far from the Aflytaer estate as I could flee. Until my legs couldn’t hold me any longer, and I collapsed against the gnarls of a tree, gasping with burning lungs. The ground stirred underneath my feet, and I stepped back as the tree yawned open, splintering like a cage of broken ribs. Hunks of moss dropped from the bark like discarded flesh and gathered at my feet. And with a long, chilling groan, its dark womb spat a heap of bony limbs and rags into my arms.
Blood red sap had sealed its eyes shut and fouled its clothes. Long, black hair lay matted down its back and face. For a moment, I thought it was dead. Until the creature cleaved the night in two with a scream, clawing blindly at my shoulders. The ragged nails cut deep—left scarlet crescents in the sleeves of my shift as I held it.
“Lyali!” I called her name over the howling wind. But she fought me still, shrieking and writhing in my hands. “Lyali!” I gripped her hard, her arms slick with sap, and shook her. And a final cry died in her throat. “Let me—” I sucked in a breath. “Let me help you.” Her eyelids peeled apart, and I stared into her pale green eyes. They’d lost their shine, dulled over time in the darkness. Wide and wild. And full of terror. I knew that look too well. “This is what he did to you?” She collapsed into my chest with an earsplitting wail, her withering body trembling in the cold.
“Xeanora…”
I looked up at the sound of wet leaves squelching underfoot and ushered Lyali toward the shadows. “Go. Hide.”
Aeren stumbled into view, looking more and more like a madman as he approached. “There you are. Come home with me. We can talk.” He frowned when I didn’t respond. “Please don’t say you’re afraid of me.” He followed my eyes to the axe in his hand and gave a hollow laugh, tossing it into the mud. “For gods’ sakes. Stop being irrational. Come home. Please?”
Lyali edged into the path between us, her hair streaking down her face.
“Lyali.” Aeren seemed to sober, his shoulders tensing, as he spoke her name. “You should be dead.”
She said nothing—only stared.
“The curse—it didn’t start until…” he murmured, mulling it over, and looked up when he realized. “It was all you, wasn’t it? Thought you’d punish me for what I did?”
Silence still.
“It was your fault. Tell her,” he spat, but the tremor in his voice betrayed him. “You never listened to me.” He turned to me, feral with desperation. “She never listened. But the people loved her anyway. More than they loved me. But she wasn’t the lord of Phaenn. It was me. Me! I had to make her go away…” Aeren breathed, his eyes dark, and reached for the axe’s handle. “And I’d do it again.”
But before he could raise the blade to her, a horde of brambles shot up from the ground at his feet and impaled his body, black tendrils curling at the crimson blotches that flowered in his clothes. I looked away when he sputtered blood and went rigid in the moonlight, and only listened as he sank and disappeared, lifeless, into the rain-pitted earth.
* * *
Dawn gilded the sky by the time Lyali and I found our way out of the Deathwood, shades of rose and gold streaking over the gables of the House of Earth and Wood. The vines on its façade had gone. Shriveled up in the darkness with Aeren’s and his father’s sins, disappeared by morning light. All that remained were the scars—sickly, sallow imprints on the walls.
And hedges of swollen, sapphire roses.