It’s late. In the starless dark, my eyes are heavy with fatigue. Everyone else is asleep, and the house is silent around me, where I sit in my room. The only light is from the candle beside my bed. In my hands are five vials of the sedative draft Clover puts in our tea. I stole them from her stillroom. The glass clinks together in my cupped palms.
I need sleep. Sleep that feels like being buried alive, that I can’t escape. I need to sink so deep that when the dreams come, I won’t be able to turn away.
I open the first vial. The glass is hot against my lips, heated by the warmth of my nervous hands. It’s horribly bitter as it fills my mouth, so sharp and acrid that when I swallow, the whole world turns virulent green. The little wooden icon that Arien painted for me—set on my bedside table—wavers before my blurred vision.
For the past two weeks, I’ve watched Arien and Clover prepare relentlessly for the next ritual. We’ve spent each day in the library, hemmed in by shelves filled with the jars of inky water and blackened mud they’ve dredged up from the lake. They work until sunset each day. Arien calls the shadows and weaves the magic around the jars of Corruption. Clover stands beside him and calls out instructions, trying not to be frustrated with him when he falters.
But no matter how hard they try, Arien can’t control his magic enough to cast the spell.
“Again,” she says when he slips, and the shadows dissipate into mist. “Again.”
His hands shake. He scrunches them into fists, then grasps the jar. “I can do this. I know I can do this.”
As much as Clover pushes him, Arien pushes himself harder. His arms are covered in sigils. His hands are smeared dark to the wrist with mud and magic and ink. The blackness never clears from his eyes. Again again again.
I’ve sat in the library and watched them and wished I could help. Watched the moon wane, a smaller crescent each night, and wished I could take Arien’s place.
But I have no magic. All I can do is chase the shadows.
I need to dream again. I need to see the visions and hear the voice that knows my name. I’ve tried and tried. Sat awake, my eyes fixed on the corner of my room. Walked the halls and tried to open each locked door. Followed the path through the starlit garden, past overgrown weeds and flowers. I’ve even gone to the lake, watched the water lie inky and still beneath the slender moon.
But no matter how much I’ve watched or waited … nothing.
I open the second vial. Tip it into my mouth. The taste burns all the way down. Nausea rushes through me in a brutal, sudden wave. I curl forward as the world tilts unsteadily. My whole body goes leaden and sluggish, like my skin is full of stones.
All the remaining vials fall from my hands, the glass clinking as they spill onto the quilt. I stare out into the room, watching as the walls start to shiver and shift, as blotches of darkness bloom and fade over the floor.
Water begins to pool in the corners. I get to my feet; the bare boards are cold, like I’ve stepped into a forest of midwinter ice. The candle flame flutters like a frantic, luminescent moth.
The water deepens, rising over my feet. The walls are washed dark. I stretch out my hand. A cold, sharp hush of air kisses my fingertips, as though there’s breath trapped beneath stone and plaster.
I put my palm against the wall. Taste bitter herbs. Taste ash and salt and blood. “I’m not afraid. Please. Tell me. Show me.”
I can hear it—a sound, a whisper. I close my eyes and try, desperately, to listen. Then it comes. The voice. It speaks to me in a stir of night air. In a rustle of dry leaves.
Follow.
My eyes snap open. The room has gone. The house has gone. I’m outside beneath a lavender, dawn-lit sky. There’s a forest behind me; susurrations of wind stir through the pale trees. There’s a stretch of earth. Strands of tall, reedy sedge grass. And water. Endless water. Flat and smooth as mirror glass, it reflects the pastel clouds.
The lake.
I’m alone. I’m not alone. There’s a presence—I’m sure there is—but when I turn, it slips away. I can’t see it clearly no matter how hard I look. Only glimpses. Only pieces. Shadows and the steady drip drip of water. Always just to the side of me, here and not here. I can’t see it, but I can feel it. It’s watching me. It’s … waiting.
Laid out along the shore are shapes. Shrouded in white like the dust cloths that covered the furniture in my new room. I take a halting step toward them. They’re people. They lie still beneath the pale covers, without even a faint movement of breath. All four of them.
The wind rises, tangling my hair. It snatches at the cloth that covers the endmost shape. The hem peels back. I can’t look. I can’t not look. I kneel down slowly. The pebbles are sharp against my knees. Damp seeps up from the ground and over my skin. Waves lap lap lap against the shore.
I take hold of the cloth. Pull and pull until it’s bundled up in my hands.
The boy lies beneath. His skin is pallid, his dark hair plastered in stripes across his face. He’s smaller, younger, perhaps the same age I was when I wandered lost on the road at midwinter. Five-year-old Rowan Sylvanan—still and cold and dead.
He sits up. He looks at me. Streams of water pour from his mouth, his nose. His eyes roll back, pale and limpid. He coughs and chokes. The water starts to turn black. Oily strands drip over his skin. The lake begins to seethe and churn. Waves rush over the shore. Wash past him, past me.
The darkness—the same darkness that oozes from him—spreads across the lake.
The three bodies that remain on the shore are caught by the waves. One by one, they’re pulled out, pulled down, deeper and deeper. His father, his mother, his brother all sink and vanish beneath the water.
The darkness rises like a mist. It closes in across the shore, the lake, the trees. I shut my eyes, frozen, despairing, trapped in the final moment before the darkness claims me.
Then I’m back in the house, on the landing beneath the arched windows. The glass is still warm with residual heat from the midsummer day. The sky beyond is lightless. A new moon, a dark moon, halfway to the next ritual.
I scrub my eyes. I’m awake—I’m awake—but I feel as though I’m still caught by the dream. Footsteps echo, and I look down over the carved balustrade to see Rowan in the entrance hall below. He’s wrapped in his cloak, the hood pulled low over his hair. He has a candle in a jar. The shielded flame is as tiny as a faerie light as he moves through the house.
A few beats later, I hear the scrape of the kitchen door.
I go down the stairs. My nightdress trails around me, a mothlike wisp in the dark. The kitchen is lit by stove coals and a dwindling altar candle. The door is still open.
It’s hot out in the garden, and the heat on my face wakes me a little. The world comes into slightly sharper focus. I can just make out Rowan, far down along the path. I stagger after him in a wavery line, the gravel sharp under my unsteady feet.
I stumble into the overgrown grass and catch myself against the ivy-wreathed wall. I go along, leaning hard against it to keep myself upright. After a few paces, the shape of the wall changes beneath my hand and vines give way to iron. There’s a gate hidden among the ivy. It’s locked.
I peer through the curved rails. I see the dim outline of an orchard, the branches shaded indigo by the night, and a spill of wildflowers that’s come loose from a wooden border.
A garden. There’s another garden there, locked up behind the wall.
Farther ahead, Rowan’s boots crush heavily over the graveled path. I keep following him. Past the gate, past the ivy, until the wall opens out to a familiar space.
The lake.
The water is a lightless whisper. I’ve been back here since the ritual, but never farther than this archway. I take a halting step out onto the blackened ground. I blink, and the earth seems to move. A shiver goes through me when I think of how it tore open. How it fought against Arien and Clover.
Rowan crosses to the place where they carved the sigil for the last ritual. The lake begins to stir, as though the water is trying to draw him closer. His hood falls back as he steps onto the wet, dark mud. He drags a hand through his unbound hair and sighs heavily. Then he reaches into his pocket and takes out a knife.
Under my feet, the ground feels like it’s breathing. It feels hungry.
No no no.
“Wait!” I run toward him. The mud sucks at my feet. Cold and hideous and wrong. “Wait, you can’t!”
He turns, startled. I grab hold of his arm. His face, shrouded by the fall of his hair, is tense and grim. He shakes himself loose from my grasp. “Violeta, get away from me, now!”
Water rushes in around our feet, then recedes with a hollow hiss. “What is this? What are you doing?”
He struggles to speak but manages to choke out a single word. “Tithe.”
It’s almost lost to the sound of the waves. Tithe. I think of Greymere. The tables in the village square. Jars of sour cherries. Syrup and sweetness. I think of Rowan on the night of the ritual, crimson eyed and shadow stained. On his knees with the earth snared around him.
Tithe. It isn’t just the rituals when he gives his blood to the ground and the spell. No wonder he couldn’t tell me how many times he’d come here, to be cut and bled and fed to the Corruption.
Terror floods me, icy as the waves. “No, you can’t do this.”
He kneels down. His hands shake as he roughly unties the laces at his sleeve and bares the scarred stretch of his arm. His pupils are blown wide, irises dark as the night. “Violeta.” He gasps out my name as the darkness spreads across his throat, spiraling out from the scars. “Please, just go.”
He puts the blade to his wrist, and all I can think of is the way he looked at me when he gave me his mother’s dresses. The grief in his eyes after he saw the portrait of his family. Whatever he’s done, whatever he is, I can’t turn away from him. I don’t want to leave him alone.
I fall to my knees in the mud beside him.
He drives the knife into his arm. Wrist to elbow, a deep, vicious cut. Blood streams over his skin, over his gloves. It trails his palm, beads the tips of his fingers.
He shoves his hand against the earth, his fingers digging deep tracks through the ground.
The Corruption reacts instantly. Streaks of mud slice up and wrap around him. They curl hungrily around his wrist, his arm, higher. I snatch back my hand before it can touch me. It goes around his throat, over his jaw. His eyes close tightly. His dark brows knit into a determined, pained expression. His breath comes out in shudders.
Patches of mud flake loose from his mouth with each exhale. It slithers, re-forms, covers him again. It’s inside him, in his mouth, his lungs, beneath his skin.
And then—the Corruption, it changes him. His gaze goes cold and feral; his teeth turn sharp. This isn’t just a bloodletting. He’s lost to it, taken over. The darkness spreads and spreads through him, until he’s barely Rowan at all, but some other creature made of mud and moonlight.
A monster.
I stare at him, feeling so helpless I’m near sobbing. I wish for power, for magic, for some way to fight the cruel hunger of the Corruption. But I have nothing. I can do nothing. Then I remember Arien, caught by the dreams that were never dreams. Lost and afraid as his shadows filled our room. How I’d hold him and think of warmth and try to pull him back from the dark.
I take hold of Rowan’s wrist and push my other hand down against the earth. Usually when I touch the ground like this during observance, I feel the light of the world, feel it glow. But when I touch the Corruption, there’s only cold and dark.
“Let him go.” I work my fingers deeper into the mud. Think of summer nights. Of the banked kitchen stove. Of the locked-up garden, pale and beautiful in the moonlight. Let him go, let him go, let him go.
Heat rushes over my skin. A sharp warmth blooms at the center of my palm. I picture a thread, tied from Rowan to me, wrapped around my hand. I don’t understand what this means. I’m not sure it’s even real. But I can’t bear to leave him like this, alone, devoured by the dark.
I close my fingers around the thread and pull.
The tendrils uncoil. The mud separates and falls away. A final tremor goes through the ground; then Rowan slumps back. With shaking hands he scrapes the mud away from where it covers his mouth.
He stares at me, shocked. “Violeta … what did you just do?”
I look down at my hands. I can still feel the residual heat pulsing through my fingers like an aftershock. Shakily, I put my hands back against the ground. I close my eyes and try to reach for that warmth, the thread, the feeling that the darkness heard me when I called out. But nothing happens. There’s only cold mud and an empty quiet.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I did. You looked so alone, and I…” Embarrassment prickles over my skin. “I just wanted to help you.”
“I don’t need your help. You shouldn’t have stayed.”
“Do you want me to leave now?”
His eyes shutter, and he turns away, his gaze fixed on the lake. Then softly, roughly, he whispers, “No.”
We both get to our feet. Rowan wavers for a moment before falling against me. His skin is fever hot. I put my arm around his waist and he makes a sound, protesting, when I touch him, but then he leans against me with a sigh. Slowly, we start to walk back toward the house.
We stagger along the path, his boots dragging through the gravel. I hold him up best I can, but he’s so heavy. My head barely reaches his shoulder, and I’m still numb and blurred from the sedatives. I stumble over my own feet and veer off the path onto the tangled lawn. Finally, we reach the house.
Once we’re inside, he moves through the kitchen. I go along, pulled by his momentum. He opens a door to reveal a darkened space that might have been a parlor, once. It’s less closed up than the rest of the rooms in the house. Sheets drape most of the furniture, but there’s an uncovered sofa against one wall with a small table beside it. A window looks out over the front garden. The curtains are open, and an unlit lantern rests on the sill.
Rowan collapses onto the sofa with his knees drawn up and his hands shoved against his face.
“You can go now.” He gestures roughly toward the doorway. Blood drips down his fingers onto the floor. “I’ll be fine.”
I grab hold of his arm and turn it upward, revealing a deep, rough-edged wound. “You are not fine. This is not fine.”
He slumps forward, coughing wetly, then makes a choked sound. I dart into the kitchen and snatch up the tin bucket that Florence uses when she cleans out the stove ash. I run back to the parlor and shove it into his hands. He clutches it, white knuckled, and folds over farther. I hesitate, then put my hand on his back.
“Don’t.” Rowan’s protest cuts to more rasped coughs. He begins to retch up mouthfuls of filthy, ink-dark water. My stomach twists. Revolted, I stare out of the window, so I don’t have to watch him.
“The Corruption, it’s inside you, isn’t it?” I start to shiver uncontrollably. “It’s poisoning you.”
“Yes.”
“You knew. All along, you knew, but you kept it from us. Was your family poisoned, too? Is that what killed them?” I turn on him. “If Arien gets hurt because of your secrets, I’ll—”
“He won’t.” He coughs, choking out more black water. He spits, wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “It won’t hurt him like it hurts me.”
I take the bucket, go outside, and tip it out into the garden. Another wave of dizzy nausea washes over me. I swallow hard. Take a slow, deep breath of hot night air that smells of pollen and leaves.
When I go back into the parlor, Rowan has lit the lantern. The top drawer of the table beside the sofa is open. Inside are bandages, cloths, and a jar of the honey-sweet salve that Clover used on my knees. He’s cleaned the cut and wrapped a neat length of linen around his arm. It’s tidy and careful and practiced, just like when he tended his wounds at the wayside.
I sit down beside him. “Promise me—on your life—that Arien isn’t going to end up like you.”
“My life isn’t worth that much.” He sighs, adjusting the knot that holds the linen in place. “He won’t be harmed. The Corruption only wants me.”
“Let me see that.” I look at his wrist. Blood has started to seep through the bandage. I take a cloth from the drawer and hold it against his arm. He tries to pull away, but I put my other hand on him until he stays.
“I’ll get Clover. She can mend you.”
“No. It doesn’t work on this.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t work?” I peel back the cloth. The bandage is stained. Not crimson, but black. And it’s not like blood. It’s darker. Thicker.
“Clover’s magic doesn’t work on me for the same reason it doesn’t work on the Corruption.”
I’m so horrified I can barely speak. I remember the water in his mouth, the hiss of his voice. “You don’t just want to mend the lake—you want to mend yourself.”
“They’re one and the same. Clover believes that if they cast the spell at the place the blight began, on the shore, then it should mend the blight everywhere.”
“Does she know you’ve been doing this between the rituals?
“She knows there’s a connection between the Corruption and my blood. That it reacts to me. But I haven’t told her or Florence about the tithes.”
A laugh catches in my throat, threatening to become a sob. “Yes, it would be a shame for them to know. They might worry about you. Ash, Rowan. You can’t hide this.”
“Please.” His face, for the first time, is open and sad and terribly earnest. “You can’t tell them what you saw.”
“You’ve let it take so many pieces of you. What happens when there’s nothing left?”
“Eventually it will kill me.” He’s completely without self-pity. “I’m not afraid of that. There are worse things than death.”
I think of shadows and whispers and deep, dark water. What I was searching for, when I reached out and put my hand against the wall in my room, when I listened to that strange voice. “I had a dream about you. No, not a dream. A vision. I saw you at the lake. I saw you drown when you were a child. I saw you come back.”
“You saw me come back?” He looks at me intently; the expression in his dark eyes makes me shiver. “Why did you follow me tonight? You’ve been haunting my house like a little, prying ghost.”
“I wanted to know the truth about you.”
“What are you trying to ask? Go ahead. Say it.”
“You drowned. You died; then you came back. And that’s why you’re like this.”
“You truly think I faced the Lord Under, then walked away from death? That I came back poisoned? And that’s why this is happening?”
The room tilts unsteadily. The lantern flares and flutters, though the air is still. I think of moonlight and frost and my hands outstretched into the darkness. The voice that called to me in the Vair Woods. “Yes.”
“Do you think I’m a monster?”
“Yes.”
His voice turns low and cold. “Are you afraid of me, Violeta?”
I don’t flinch. I don’t turn away. I see him, with his ruined arm and his beautiful face: the boy whose life was stolen by the lake, the boy who knows desperation and darkness. “No. I’m not afraid of you, Rowan Sylvanan. But you have to tell me the truth. All of it.”
He looks at me solemnly from beneath his lashes, all fierceness gone. “Each time I do this, it changes me. When the Corruption takes the tithe, I lose myself. It’s getting harder and harder to come back from it. Sometimes I’m not even sure how much is me, and how much is the poison.”
I reach out to him, then hesitate. “Will you take off your gloves?”
Warily, he removes the gloves and sets them aside. Even his fingers are scarred, and there’s a mark on his heartline from where he cut his palm to fight the wolf. I take his hand between my own, and he goes very still. I wonder when anyone last touched him like this.
I squeeze his hand gently. “I won’t let you be lost.”
His mouth tilts into a faint smile. “Are you so unafraid of monsters?”
“Truly, the monsters should be afraid of me.”
“Violeta, I’m sorry that I made Arien come here. I wish there was another way.”
“So do I.”
“Please don’t tell anyone about the tithes. After the next ritual it won’t … It won’t matter, once the Corruption has been mended.”
“Fine. I’ll keep your secret until then. But…” I tap my finger against his chest. “It will cost you.”
He laughs, surprised. “And what is the price of your silence?”
“I’d like a book. One of your packed-away books.”
“Done.”
We sit together, his hand in mine. This new closeness between us feels strange; an easily broken thing that I’ll have to treat with care. Lamplight dances over him: his fawn-gold skin, the silver rings in his ears, the waves of his dark hair. He looks so tired, with deep shadows cut beneath his eyes.
With a sigh, Rowan lets his head rest back against the wall. His eyes dip closed. His lashes are two dark crescents over his cheeks. His features relax for the barest moment, then he sits up with a start. It reminds me of Arien. How he’d fight against sleep when he was afraid of his dreams.
“I could—If you want to sleep, I’ll wake you if you start to have a nightmare.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to stay.” My voice turns quiet; I feel shy, speaking it so plainly.
He frowns, but beneath his uncertainty, there’s a flicker of longing. Slowly, he settles against me. I stroke my hand over his hair, thinking of the stories my mother told Arien and me, about how faeries would tie knots in our curls while we slept. After a long time, Rowan’s breath goes heavy. He sinks closer. His forehead presses into the curve of my neck. When I next look at him, he’s asleep. His hands, tensed, slowly loosen. He makes a sound. A murmur that might be a name.
“Elan.” His fingers clench around mine. “Elan…”
I know I should be angry for how he’s brought Arien into all of this. And my anger is still there, but I can’t resent him for what he’s done. Not right now, when he’s here with poison in his veins and his dead brother’s name on his lips.
I put out a tentative hand and brush my fingers gently over his cheek. He says more words that are lost in somnolent incoherence. Then he sleeps on. He doesn’t dream. I feel the feverish heat of his skin against my neck, but I don’t push him away.