Rowan leaves in the faded dawnlight, when I’m still half-asleep. I stir enough to sit up, but he shakes his head before he gently lays me down. He takes off his cloak and drapes it over me. My last memory of the long, strange night is the brief touch of his hand on my shoulder, then his footsteps going quietly away, back up the stairs.
When I next open my eyes, afternoon light shines gold across the window. I’m curled on the sofa, alone. All that happened feels like a peculiar dream, except that I have the cloak, mud stained and still damp. It was real. The strange vision of Rowan’s death. The voice that urged me to follow. The tithe.
And the truth that if Arien can’t help mend the Corruption, Rowan will die.
I sit up and pull the cloak tightly around me, slip the hood over my hair, and fasten the clasp at my throat. It smells of burnt sugar, of boy, of silt and salt and sweat. I bury my nose against the collar and take a deep breath, then look around the room, blushing at my foolishness even though there’s no one here to see me.
And then I notice that, tucked under the cloak, tucked close beside me, is a book.
I pick it up carefully and take it closer to the window. The cover is patterned with golden flowers, carefully stamped. The title is woven among them, as though each letter were a leaf or petal. The Violet Woods.
It’s close enough to my name that it feels even more transient and magical. As though some strange alchemy took a part of me and transmuted it here. I am a girl. I am ink and paper.
I run my hands over the pages. There are pictures, too, each protected behind a transparent leaf. A princess, sleeping in a tower surrounded by blackberry thorns. A servant girl, wearing a magical dress of moonlight. A faerie queen with wings like mist, floating across a starry sky.
Inside the cover is a small square of card. Two lines, inscribed in neat ink.
You should be out by the orchard,
where violets secretly darken the earth.
The words—violet, orchard, earth—I like how they sound, all strung together. Some leaf-hued, secret place. Only flowers and sunlight. I hold the book close against my chest. My price, for a secret kept.
Now that it’s day, I’m able to see the parlor more clearly. The wallpaper is patterned with curved vines. The sofa is embroidered with roses and bellflowers. And against the opposite wall, still half-hidden in shadows, is an altar.
I step across the room to look at it more closely. The altar is old, much older than the altar in Greymere. Framed in wood, with carved edges that have been weathered smooth. A bank of candles lines the shelf. They’ve been recently burned and are surrounded by rivulets of wax. And the icon itself … I’ve never seen anything like it.
There are two figures.
There’s the Lady with her face upturned. Eyes closed, her hair encircled with rays of sunlight. Her gold-tipped fingers in the earth. And beneath her, painted in reverse …
The Lord Under.
He’s little more than a silhouette. A featureless face, head crowned by a wreath of branches. His hands are raised, and his shadowed arms reach upward. His claw-sharp fingers join the Lady’s hands at the center of the icon. And there are shadows—shadows—threaded around his palms.
Everything I’ve tried so hard to forget comes back, sweeping over me in a sudden, hideous rush. The Vair Woods. The frost on the ground and the ice in the air. The shadows that stretched toward me.
The voice.
The voice that spoke to me in the midwinter forest.
The voice that whispered through the walls in my room, that asked my name, that told me to follow and led me toward the truth.
It was him.
I stumble back from the altar, tripping over my own feet as I rush from the room. The kitchen is dim, stovelight and kettle steam and the sweet smell of almas cake in the oven. My chest feels tight, my throat closed up, my lungs full of a trapped, tangled scream. I can still see the shape of the Lord Under from the icon, see the shape of him as he appeared before me in the Vair Woods. The air is full of whispers and the too-loud echo of my heartbeat.
Violeta, Violeta, Violeta …
He came to me then, and he’s come to me now.
This is impossible. He’s the lord of the dead, and only those near to death can see him. When I met him on that long-ago night, death was close, circling me with want and hunger. But now …
What does he want from me this time?
The walls of the house seem to move closer and closer toward me. I cross the kitchen, throw open the back door, and rush into the garden.
I blink and blink, washed by sunlight, and draw in a deep, greedy breath. The air smells of pollen from the jacaranda tree. The altar beneath—where we will go, tonight, for midsummer observance—is dusted with lilac petals and fallen leaves. This icon is singular. Just the Lady, wreathed in flowers. But then the wind changes and a dark splotch of leaf shadow covers the bottom of the painting, a reminder of what I saw inside.
The Lord Under. I met him in the darkness. I sought him out. I spoke to him.
As my eyes adjust, I realize I’m not alone. Arien is on the lawn beside the tree. He’s carved a sigil into the ground—a dark, muddy track that cuts between purple blossoms and dandelion leaves. At the center of the circle is a line of jars, each full of ink-dark water.
I draw up, startled by the sight of him. He’s on his knees, hands grasped tight around the centermost jar. Shadows spill through his hands. From inside the glass, the water starts to churn. I hear the splash splash splash of it against the jar. It sounds like the water that dripped over my bedroom walls.
The Lord Under came to me. He called to me.
I watch as Arien tries desperately to wrestle control of his magic. His cheeks are reddened, his skin damp with sweat. Piece by piece, the mass of shadows begins to shift and change. It becomes smoother. No longer a cloud of dark, but neat strands of shadows. But then it all unfurls. The shadows dissipate into a cloud of opaque charcoal that wisps the air.
He slumps back and hits the ground hard, with a cry. “Damn it!”
Then he looks up and sees me. His teeth bite into his lip. I walk carefully around the sigil and sit down beside him. He rubs his wrist roughly across his face, leaves a streak of mud. He looks worn down, like a candle left alight too long, about to become nothing but a smear of smoke.
“Arien, my love. You don’t have to do this.”
“I do.”
“If you’re not ready…” I trail off, looking down at the grass, the sigil, the Corruption-filled jars. The ritual is only two weeks away. The ground is poisoned, and the poison wants to devour Rowan piece by piece.
Rowan, who dreams of his dead brother. Rowan, who slept beside me in the parlor. Rowan, who gave me a trunk full of dresses and a faerie book. Who looked at me with such tender fear when he told me he is slowly losing himself to that hungry darkness.
I don’t want Rowan to carve himself apart, to be devoured slowly. But Arien is his only hope of mending the Corruption. And he’s going to push himself to the point of breaking.
Arien huffs out a despairing sigh. “Clover and Rowan went to the village. The tithe goods have come from Greymere. And I thought, while they were gone, I’d practice. I thought I could get it right—that I could surprise them—and—” He wrenches angrily at his sleeve. “If you’re not going to help me, Leta, then just go away.”
“Let me help you, then.”
Arien stares at me, surprised. “You’re not going to argue more?”
“Oh, I want to argue plenty. I’m saving it up for later.”
“Can you just sit next to me?” He reaches out to adjust one of the jars. “I’m used to casting the spell with Clover. So it might help if you’re there.”
I step carefully over the edge of the sigil and kneel on the ground. Arien settles beside me. He takes a breath. Closes his eyes. Shadows fill the air, cold and smooth and slithery. I shift closer, so that we’re pressed together, side by side.
For the barest moment, he controls the magic. The strands of darkness move, stitch by stitch, into a mesh-fine web wrapped around the jar. Arien’s shoulders tense. His eyes scrunch closed. A vein throbs in his temple. His breath catches.
Then the shadows slip loose and cascade out into a thick, dark cloud. It unfurls around us in a rush. The cold is instant, chilling my skin. My lungs burn, and my mouth tastes of ash. The light blots out.
Arien sighs, dejected. “It’s no good. I just can’t do it.”
I put my hand against the ground, remembering last night, how the heat sparked in me and made the ground change. The earth beneath my palm is quiet. There’s no song or warmth under my skin. But doubt prickles me. When I held Rowan and tried to pull him back from the Corruption, something happened.
Slowly, I pick up the jar. “Arien, try the spell again.”
Our hands, together, wrap around the glass. The shadows gather. I think of the cottage, our room at night, the village on tithe day. All the times I’ve tried—and failed—to keep him safe. How I’ve felt since we came here, so frustrated and powerless.
I reach desperately for whatever I felt in the darkness beside the lake. There’s nothing and nothing, but then—a flicker of heat. It’s small and swift and I can hardly see it, hardly understand. Then the light or power or whatever this is washes through me—from me—into Arien.
The shadows knit together. The strands wrap around the jars; neat, fine, controlled. The afternoon sunlight streams back in, the sudden brightness overwhelming. Arien looks at me, wide eyed with shock.
“It worked.” He touches a shaking hand to the jar, now filled with clear water. He laughs. “I did it, I did it!”
The water is not just clear in the jar he held, but in all of them. And the sigil he carved is charred, as if something burned the ground. Arien stares down at it incredulously.
I get to my feet and start to back away, scattering gravel as I stumble toward the house. Arien calls after me, confused. “Leta, what’s the matter?”
He doesn’t realize. He doesn’t know that I helped him, that it was because of me the spell worked and the Corruption mended.
“I’m sorry, I have to go.” My mouth still tastes of ash. I can still feel it, that sudden heat that tore through me. I look down at the jars of now-cleared water and flex my hands as sparks of power burn under my skin.
I think of my desperate whisper into the shadows when Arien and I were lost in the Vair Woods. Please help us. And how the Lord Under replied from the darkness: What will you give me, if I do?
I have no magic. It can’t be possible. It can’t.
In the kitchen, Florence is at the table, dusted with flour as she kneads fresh bread dough. She looks at me and smiles, but I rush past and go down the hallway into the cool, dim dark, past the parlor and toward the stairs.
My room is full of afternoon sunlight. I turn a restless circle and scrunch my fingers into the folds of the cloak. The glass vials of sedatives are still on my quilt, scattered across the fabric like a handful of gemstones. I go from the window, to the corner, to the wall. Shakily, I rest my hand flat against the flower-patterned paper and take a deep breath.
“Why have you come back?”
At first there’s only silence. Then a whisper echoes through the wall.
Not a voice. Just a hush, a hiss. A chill skitters across my back, like a finger scraped down my spine.
I follow the sound out of my room until I reach the end of the hall. Closed doors and locked doors and nowhere else to go.
From the corner of my vision, darkness rises. Water spreads slowly across the floor, a blackened pool under my feet. I wrap Rowan’s cloak tighter around myself, but the cold goes right through it, through my nightdress and my underthings until it’s right against my bare skin. The light turns darker. The whisper becomes louder, taking shape now, until it’s a voice.
The Lord Under’s voice.
The Violet Woods. Violet in the woods. Violeta in the Vair Woods.
“We made our bargain.” I breathe out the word as a shiver, remembering the winter night, when I whispered a plea into the silent forest. “What do you want from me?”
What was it that you said to me? The air changes. A sound—my voice—echoes through the shadows. “Please, I’m not afraid, show me, tell me.”
Are you afraid now, Violeta?
Rowan had asked me the same question as we sat in the dark. Are you afraid of me? I answered truthfully when I said I wasn’t.
But there’s more than one kind of monster in the world. There’s the Monster of Lakesedge. A boy with poison in his veins, leashed to the ruined magic in the ground. There’s the Lord Under. Lord of the dead, of shadows and darkness. He’s here. He’s right behind me. He knows my name.
“I’m not afraid.” The lie tastes as bitter as the stolen sedatives. “I’m not afraid of you.”
I turn and I face him.
He is there. Shadows and shadows and dark. But I can’t see him. I can make out his individual features. Sharp eyes, sharp teeth, sharp claws. I can see the shape of him—the same tall, jagged-edged creature who appeared in the Vair Woods. But though I look and look, I can’t turn the pieces of him into a single whole. It’s as if my eyes won’t allow me to comprehend what he is.
Liar. He makes a harsh, hollow sound that might almost be a laugh. You wear it well, the fear. But I won’t hurt you.
I press back against the wall. He moves forward. A shift and flicker, a shape that won’t become quite real. Shadows wreathe me, and the air is cold cold cold. I think of the lake. The blackened water. The poisoned shore. How the wound tore in the ground when the ritual failed. How the earth rose up and snared Rowan when he put his cut wrist to the mud.
I can’t breathe.
You asked for my help. Did you find what you wanted? His voice is a kiss in the shell of my ear. The boy, the monster, the truth.
“I don’t know.” I don’t know anything anymore. Only the bitten-down taste of my fear.
I think you do, Violet in the woods.
I hold out my hands. Upturned and empty. My skin is cold, but I can still feel the bloom of heat that gathered in my palms when Arien cast the spell. “My magic was gone. It’s supposed to be gone.”
But it isn’t.
“Last night, when I touched the Corruption … it changed. Why is this happening?”
Let me show you.
The vision clouds over me, sudden and swift. I see the lake, black and endless. Twin moons, both full. One above in the night sky, one below, reflected on the water. There’s a sigil carved into the ground. It’s just like at the ritual, except I’m alone on the shore.
A rush of power sparks beneath my skin like a scatter of embers. Warm and bright and mine.
Magic trails through my fingers, but it’s different from the magic I’ve seen Arien or Clover cast. It’s dark; it’s light. Shadowed and golden, it covers my skin with a mixture of intense heat and painful cold. The same as the icon in the parlor, where the Lady and the Lord Under have their fingers entwined, light and dark, dark and light.
The rush of power floods through me until I’m sure my heart will stop. I’m in the lake, half beneath the surface. And the water is clear. The shore is smooth.
The vision ends. I am back in the hall.
“I have the power to mend it on my own?”
Not yet. But I could give it to you. You’ve accepted my help before, Violeta. Don’t you want to be able to keep everyone safe?
I do. I do. I want this magic. I want the terrible, wonderful force of this power that would make it all stop. “But I don’t understand. You made the Corruption, why can’t you mend it?”
I can’t. Not alone. It’s grown beyond me now.
“If—If I agreed to this, what will happen?”
Why don’t I show you what would happen if you don’t?
The floor softens, turning to mud. My feet start to sink. Black water pours down, turning my whole body to ice. I’m pressed right against the door, carved wood and a cold handle behind me. The Lord Under moves closer.
What happens when Rowan Sylvanan can no longer pay his tithe?
“He will die.” It’s the first time I’ve said it aloud, and it hurts more than I thought it would to speak this truth. “He will die, and the Corruption will be gone.”
Is that what you want?
He bends until his face is right beside mine. His impossible features shift and shiver as the light cuts through him. He’s there and not there, real and not real. I tip my chin upward. I keep my eyes open, and I meet his darkness.
Do you want to watch it claim him? Take him apart, piece by piece, until there is nothing left? That’s what will happen.
Will you let me help you?
A desperate yes clings to my tongue. But the Lord Under’s help always comes at a cost; I know that all too well. I’ve bargained with him once and paid the price. I can’t do it again.
“No. I don’t want your help.” I flex my hands open and closed. My fingers are wet and numb, but beneath the chill I can feel the faint warmth of power. “I can do this without you.”
Do you think those scraps you have now will be enough? You know, Violeta, by rights that power belongs to me.
“You can’t unmake our bargain.” I tighten my grasp against the door. “You promised—”
He laughs, a sigh and a rush of waves all caught together. The water rises around me, until it’s at my waist, then my throat, then pouring into my mouth. The world becomes darkness, and I’m lost at the bottom of the lake.
I’m lost, I’m lost … But then a sound cuts through the vision. A staccato tap tap tap, like the branches of the apple tree as they hit the glass of the kitchen window back at the cottage. I’m still holding the door handle. I tighten my grasp and let the hard edges bite into my palm. I hear the strange new sound. I tear myself loose from the dark.
The shadows are gone. The water is gone. The Lord Under is gone.
I spin around and press myself against the door with my cheek flat to the wood. My breath steams hot against the carved panels. The handle won’t turn. I wrench it, hard, and it twists with a rusty scrape. I put my shoulder against the paneled wood and shove.
The door comes unstuck, falling open with a breathy whoosh.
I stumble inside, and I slam the door closed.