I wake in the parlor, alone. My boots are gone, but I’m still in my mud-streaked bonfire dress. Someone has laid me on the chaise, tucked a blanket over me. The air smells of bitter herbs and honey salve. The curtains are drawn back, the walls turned amber by evening light. The altar looms over me from the opposite side of the room: the Lady all golden, the Lord Under darkly shadowed. The fruit I cut is still there, now dark and charred. The floor is still stained by my blood.
I get to my feet, the world tilting in a dizzying rush. I stagger out into the kitchen. Clover and Arien are at the table, while Florence stands beside the stove, feeding wood into the fire. Arien stays seated, his gaze fixed on the tabletop, but Clover stands up quickly and comes over to me. She takes my hands and peers into my face.
“You’re awake.” She brushes her fingers over the cut on my hand. “How do you feel?”
“Like I just fought off a monster.” I scrub my wrist across my face, then look around the room. “Where’s Rowan? Is he—? It didn’t—when I stopped him, was he hurt?”
“He’s in his room,” Florence says. “He went upstairs after he helped you back inside.”
I turn away from them and run up the stairs, stumbling slightly. The door to Rowan’s room is half-open. I tiptoe inside. He’s passed out on the bed, the quilts kicked into a pile beneath his muddied boots. I cross the room slowly, sadness rising in my chest. I kneel down on the floor beside the chaise, and put my hand against his cheek. His fawn skin is pale, and his brows knit into a frown when I touch him.
I close my eyes as, in a rush, it all comes back. I’ve done it. I’ve really done it. I bargained. I’m marked. I’m promised.
It’s what I wanted, and I’m not sorry for what I’ve done. But the hollowed place left behind from where I gave up my memories is a constant ache. It feels painful and wrong to have this vacant, blank space where my family once was. To know that I’ll never see them again, that when my soul passes to the world Below, I’ll be alone, without even Arien there beside me.
I know I made the right choice. Still—it hurts.
I take Rowan’s hand. The sigil on his wrist is a cluster of angled lines, like a sunburst. The identical mark on my own wrist pulses, as though there is still magic left inside it. For a breath I see flashes of color and catch a thread of emotions that don’t seem quite mine. The same uneasy mix of relief and despair I felt earlier, interwoven with some darker thing. Anger. Guilt.
I let go of his hand, and the images fade.
Florence comes quietly into the room. She has a tray set with tea, and a vial of sedative. “Oh.” She looks at him, smiling sadly. “He’s gotten mud all over the sheets.”
“Should we take off his boots?”
“No, let’s not wake him.” She sets down the tray and puts her hand against his forehead for a moment. “Come on, we’ll leave him to rest.”
We go back into the kitchen, where Clover sets a cup of tea onto the table for me beside a jar of honey. I sit down heavily. My whole body feels bruised. When I swallow the tea, I can still feel the grittiness in my mouth, like the mud is inside me. I scoop out a spoonful of honey and stir it into my cup. But even with the honey, the bitterness of the herbs stays on my tongue.
I look down at the tabletop strewn with notebooks. Each page filled with scrawled-out, rewritten, and half-drawn sigils. At the center of the mess is a cluster of jars, arranged in a circle. They’re all full of ink-dark water, with a heavy paste of muddy sediment at the bottom.
I turn to Clover. “What is this? What are you doing?”
“We’re—” She pulls at the end of her braid. “It’s for the next ritual.”
Arien folds the notebook closed and holds it to his chest protectively. “Clover and I are still trying to find another spell to use.”
“Arien, you don’t need it.”
His mouth draws into a tight frown before I can finish.
“Arien. You saw me today. You saw what I can do now.”
“Yes. We saw. You really summoned him, didn’t you?” Clover looks toward the parlor with a shiver. “That icon is…” She waves a hand, unable to find words. Her eyes gleam with a mix of fear and fascination. “We were told in the Maylands that most estates have them, but I’ve never seen one before.”
“You promised me, Leta,” Arien says quietly.
“Do you think I wanted to do this?”
“Yes. I think you did.” Beneath the hurt in his eyes is another emotion. Guilt. “We were going to work this through, together.”
“We didn’t exactly have another choice.” I try to take his hand, but he moves back so I can’t reach him. “I’ve made the bargain. I can’t unmake it. It’s done. I’ve saved Rowan, and now I can spare you all from this. You don’t need to do the ritual. You don’t need to face that danger again.”
Arien picks up the jar with the lake water and turns it around between his palms. The sediment stirs up in a curl that makes smokelike patterns through the water. “What did you give him, Leta? What did he ask in exchange for this help?”
My throat tightens, and the words stick. I don’t want to lie. But I know if I speak the truth of what I’ve done, the ache within me will hurt a thousand times worse. How can I tell him I gave up our family, in this world and the world Below?
How can I tell Arien I gave up him?
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He puts down the jar and he looks at me, his anger softening into worry. “What was it, really?”
“Don’t ask this of me, Arien. I can’t tell you.”
“If I’d been stronger … if my magic had worked, you wouldn’t have done this.”
“No.” I reach out to him again. “I chose this. I wanted this. None of it was your fault.”
“Leta, the magic he’s given you, it’s not safe.”
I laugh darkly. “Arien, my love, none of this is safe. You know that.”
“Whatever happens at the next ritual,” Clover says carefully, “if it’s us or you—”
“There’s no if. It has to be me. On the next full moon, I’ll cast the spell alone, and it will work. I have to do this on my own.”
“No,” Arien says. “You don’t.”
“They’re right.” Florence fixes us all with a long, hard stare. “Honestly. You’ve reached new heights for how much trouble you can get into on a single day.”
She pulls out a chair and sits down beside me, putting her arm around my shoulders. Longing spreads through me at the gesture. It’s like I’ve heard a sound echoed across a far distance. The shape of a caress that was once imprinted on my bones and is now gone. If I’ve ever felt this before—from my mother or father—that’s one of the memories I’ve given up.
My eyes start to sting, and I blink very quickly.
“Listen.” I roll back my sleeve and bare the new, sunburst-shaped sigil. “The whole reason I bargained with the Lord Under is so that no one else need risk themselves.”
Clover rolls her eyes. “You’re even worse than Rowan.”
“An even match, I think.” Florence smiles sadly. She puts her hand over mine, covering the crescent scar. “I’ve watched him tear himself to pieces to protect everyone while he tried to mend this. I knew it was hurting him, but he wouldn’t let me close. He kept it all to himself. I could have pushed him, but I—I didn’t. I kept back. I let him stay alone. And I shouldn’t have.”
“It’s not your fault,” I tell her. “He doesn’t exactly make it easy to help him.”
Arien snorts out a derisive laugh. “Sounds familiar.” He leans his elbows against the table and takes a measured breath. “Leta, just because you can do this alone doesn’t mean you have to be alone when you do it.”
“If you came with me, if anything happened…” I shake my head, remembering Arien caught and pulled beneath the earth at the last ritual. “I can keep you safe now. I’ve paid dearly for it. So please, just let me.”
I get to my feet and go over to the door. It’s closed, when usually we leave it open to let in the air. And the window is shuttered, too.
I go out into the yard, and as I stand on the path with the warmth of heated stone under my feet, I look out over the estate.
It’s ruined.
The space beneath the jacaranda tree where we fought and quieted the Corruption is torn through the center. There’s a trench of blackened earth. Thick tendrils of mud snare around the trunk, and the branches are now bare of leaves. They twist against the sky like desperate, grasping hands.
The altar is all dark. The wooden frame is caked with earth. Swaths of black cover the icon, with only a slice of the Lady’s upturned face visible between the darkness. Her single eye looks up at the skeletal branches above.
I take a halting step forward and go over to the charred remnants of the sigil. This isn’t at all like the ink-dark lake or the blackened shore. This is a whole world made silent. Everything is cold and black and still. There’s no wind. No sound of grass or leaves, no call of birds.
And this wasn’t the only place touched by the Corruption.
I follow the curved path. The ground is still churned, cold and wet under my bare feet. I pick my way carefully across the uneven ground, through tall banks of overgrown grasses, now dead. When I reach my garden, I stop, put one hand on the cold iron of the gate, and look inside. I can’t move any farther.
I made this locked-up place beautiful and alive with my magic. Grew fruit and leaves and flowers. It was never dead, only half-forgotten and half-asleep. But now the brambles are blackened tangles. A tree has fallen across the wildflower lawn, the roots upturned and sharp against the sky. The whole garden is gray and skeletal and empty. The leaves, the fruit, the flowers … they’re all gone.
I sink down in the archway and lean against the ashen remnants of the star jasmine vines. I thought I knew the limits of the Corruption’s horror. But this hits me with a visceral, bone-deep fear.
I put my hand against the ground, and the crescent mark on my palm throbs. I feel the poison that sleeps in the earth. It knows me now. It’s waiting.
Magic stirs beneath my skin. I want to mend this. Make it all awake and alive and safe again. I close my eyes and picture myself on the shore of the lake. The full moon above. My hands in the ground. The whole world dead and silent around me. My power poured into the earth as I slowly bring it back to life.
A sudden rush of wind stirs across the ground. It rattles through the leaf-bare branches, and a sharp pain twinges in my chest. I get to my feet quickly as sparks of magic scatter from my fingers. I swallow, hard, tasting salt and silt and poison.
I will fight this. I will mend this.
I close the gate. I still have the key; I’ve worn it around my neck every day since I found it. I draw it out and slip it into the lock. The rasp turns with a final-sounding scrape. I wrap my hands around the iron rails and lean my face against the bars. I stare for a long time at the destroyed remains of my garden. Watch the shadows lengthen across the jagged ground and fallen trees. The blackened earth turns plum and lilac as the sunset envelops the sky.
When I go back into the house, Florence has set the table for dinner. Fresh bread, olive butter, and a dish of pink salt. Summer squash and sugar peas. And at the center is an enormous layer cake filled with almond cream and glazed with golden syrup.
“Rowan turned into a monster and nearly killed us all,” I say. “The whole estate is Corrupted. I called the Lord Under into our parlor. And you … made a cake?”
“I cook when I’m stressed,” Florence says primly. “It helps.”
I close the door behind me. That, and the still-shuttered windows, gives the space an unfamiliar gloom. We all sit down at one end of the table, gathered close to the stove like we would in winter, though the air in the closed up kitchen is uncomfortably hot.
Arien puts his hand on my arm. “Leta, are you sure about this?”
In the dim light, his face is a pale wisp. His hands are mended now, but marked all over with fine scars that will never fade. In the lamplight, the tracery of slender lines looks like frost laced over a window on an icy morning.
“I’m sure.”
He shifts closer and rests his face against my shoulder. “I don’t want you to go. What if your magic doesn’t work? What if it isn’t enough? Please, let us help you.”
I put my arms around him. He’s grown so much since we came here. I’ve been so caught up in trying to protect him, that I forgot how much it meant to him: to learn how to use his magic, to help Rowan. That night after the first ritual, when he told me determinedly, I want to do this … All of this was a chance to prove himself, and now I’ve taken that away from him.
I imagine myself alone at the lake, with the Lord Under a pallid shadow above the water. My hands in the earth as I fight against the Corruption, the shadows gathered around me. Then I look at Arien and Clover, and remember the feeling of us all fighting together. What we did today—it wasn’t me, alone. It was all of us.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe in this, I don’t need to be on my own.
“All right. On the full moon. All of us will go. We’ll do this together.”
Arien smiles, but his eyes are sad.
“Together,” he says softly.