I wake up breathless, alone in Arien’s room. Crimson sunset spills through the window; it’s the next evening, almost an entire day has passed while I’ve slept. And the nightmare … I can still feel it. Still see it. The shadows that crept over my bed, the blackened water that dripped down the walls.
It was a dream, that’s all it was. There are no shadows in the corners. The walls are smooth, faded paper, and the bare floorboards are dry.
I kick my way free of the tangled quilts and get out of bed. Arien has unpacked. The handful of things he brought from the cottage sit neatly on the dresser: his brushes, his paints, a roll of parchment paper. His shirt from yesterday is crumpled in the corner, the same careless way he always leaves his clothes.
I smooth down the wrinkled fabric of my dress and comb my fingers through my snarled-up hair, trying to reason with myself. What must have happened was this: I had a nightmare, I slipped into Arien’s room. I slept deeply while he woke up this morning and went off into the house. That’s all.
When I step out into the hallway, everything feels just as empty as it did last night. No voices. No movement in any other rooms. The only sound is the echo of my footsteps. On the landing, the arched window is lit up brilliantly by the sunset. I’m so high up that when I look outside, I can see down over the entire estate.
The grounds are cleaved into a strangely narrow shape by an enormous, ivy-wrapped wall. The space is completely neglected, full of tangled weeds and flowers that have sprawled their way past once-tidy borders.
And beyond the wildflowers and the weeds … is the lake.
The water is black. Black as ink, darker than ink. It’s the same. Exactly the same as the water that filled my room last night, in my dream.
The shore is black, too, and torn. A sharp-edged wound all along the ground. It makes me hurt to look at it. I feel like someone has cut my skin and left behind the same jagged scars on me as on the earth below. This is the glass in my knees, the bruises on my wrists, the shadows in the night.
And down at the lake, three figures move across the shore. Clover and Arien, with Rowan beside them. I watch as he puts his gloved hand on Arien’s shoulder and leans close to speak to him. Then they all move forward to the edge of the blackened earth, the line where grass becomes mud, where mud becomes water.
No no no.
I shove myself back from the window. Rowan Sylvanan wants the darkness in Arien, wants his shadows that are more than dreams. And now he’s taken my brother to the lake. The lake where he drowned his family one by one.
I run.
I run down the stairs, through the kitchen, where pots clatter and steam on the stovetop, boiling over, out of the back door, and into the garden.
The Summerbloom twilight is heavy, air that smells burned. As I run along the path, branches scrape my arms and tear my skirts. Gravel scatters. My knees burn with a bright pain, like there are coals under my skin. The cuts reopen; blood washes over my legs.
I run until the garden becomes a forest. Pale bark. Dead leaves crushed under my boots.
“Arien!” My voice is lost in the trees.
I reach the shore. Up close, the lake is so much worse. Dark water that swallows the remaining sunlight. When I step onto the mud, I feel the cold through my boots as if it’s pressed against my bare skin. The darkness feels alive. It feels hungry.
My feet sink deeper with each step. My breath comes out in hard, short gasps as I fight my way across the mud toward my brother.
“Arien!”
Arien looks up, startled. His eyes are as black as the lake. I’m about to reach him when Rowan rounds on me and catches my arm. He wrenches me sharply backward. I fall against him with a thud that pushes out all my breath. He grips me tightly, his gloved hands around the tops of my arms, and pulls me away from the water. Away from Arien.
“Let me go, let me go!” I hit him. Scratch him. He hisses when my fingers scrape his throat.
“I told you!” His eyes are narrowed, his face flushed. He’s furious. “I told you to stay away!”
He drags me back across the shore. I fight him and fight him. I’m strong, my strength built on buckets of well water, on baskets carried to the village, on the ax chopped into firewood. I’m strong, but Rowan is stronger. I may as well be fighting against the rocks or the trees.
At the edge of the forest, he stops. We’re face-to-face for a moment; then he spins me around with a frustrated growl and pulls me tight against him. My back is pressed hard to his chest and I can feel his heartbeat; it’s racing as fast as mine, perhaps faster.
His breath is rough and unsteady. “You shouldn’t be here. I told you—”
“Get your hands off me!” I dig my fingers into Rowan’s arms. I can’t reach his skin because he’s covered by his gloves and his cloak, so I drive my elbow sharp against his ribs.
“Stop clawing at me, you little beast!”
I twist against him. I have to get away; I have to get back to Arien. “Let me go!”
At the sound of my voice, Arien looks up. He wavers for a moment, biting his lip uncertainly. Then he squares his shoulders, and his face sets into a determined expression. “Leta, get away from here! Leave me alone!”
His voice carries clearly over the flat shore. The shock of his words takes all the fight from me, and I go still. He turns away and walks down to the water.
Clover gives me a sympathetic look; then she and Arien begin to move together with slow, ritualistic steps. Five paces—I count them. Their footsteps make a disjointed circle, which Clover connects into a single shape by dragging her fingers through the mud. She leads Arien into the center of the circle. They kneel together. Arien presses his hands against the ground.
I start to struggle against Rowan again, my stomach tight with fear. A terrified confusion of images rushes through my mind. The blackened lake, the dead bodies of his family. His voice, rough, when he spoke to me beside the forest. I can’t promise you safety. “You told me you wouldn’t hurt him!”
“I’m not trying to hurt him. He’s mending it.” Rowan makes a derisive sound. “Haven’t you ever seen anyone use alchemy before?”
“Alchemy? But Arien, he isn’t…”
I watch Arien as he goes very still and the air around him begins to darken. Shadows—his shadows—spill out from his hands like water poured from a rapid stream.
Clover rolls her sleeves back. The symbols on her arms are glowing, and light gleams from her palms. She touches the sigil, and magic illuminates the carved lines in a wash of gold. Then she puts her hands over Arien’s and pushes down, until the earth begins to close over their fingers.
“Now!” Her teeth are set into a determined grimace. She shoves his hands farther into the mud. “Now, Arien!”
“This is what you wanted?” My eyes start to blur, and I blink, hard. I refuse to cry. Not here, not in front of Rowan. I owe so many tears that if I start now, I won’t be able to stop. “You wanted to use him against this—against this—”
“Corruption.”
“Corruption?” The weight of the word stays in my mouth. He has a name for the darkness. When I swallow, I can taste it, heavy as the thickened air in the forest clearing, where the trees dripped shadows.
I shake my head, a disbelieving cry caught in my throat. “Arien isn’t—he’s not the same as this terrible darkness!”
Arien turns, and we look at each other across the shore. His face is filled with the same wide-eyed hurt as when Mother put his hands above the candles. His mouth opens, but he doesn’t speak.
“Is that really what you think of him?” Rowan asks. His grip on my arms loosens, and he fixes me with a scathing look. “No wonder he’s so afraid of his power, the way you made him lie and hide. How long were you going to pretend his magic was just bad dreams?”
I wrench free from Rowan’s grasp and slap him, hard, across his face. He stumbles back, his hand to the brightening mark on his cheek. Before he can react, I shove past him and run toward the water. Clover and Arien are hidden now, circled by shadows. I take a breath and plunge into the darkness.
I fall to my knees, into the cold, black mud. Distantly I hear Rowan’s angry voice as he calls for me. “Get back, damn you—get out of their way!”
I reach out and find Arien’s hand.
“No, Leta!” He tries to shake himself loose. “You’re going to mess everything up!”
A jolt slams through me, and heat sears across my skin. I feel as if all my bones are lit up. At the center of my chest, there’s a swift, taut pull, and my fingers grip tight. The space between our hands hums and hums and burns. And the shadows—they calm. They soften.
The unruly cloud folds back on itself. The billows of dark narrow to focused strands that unfurl through our clasped fingers.
And Arien’s darkness—his shadows—the strands curl and thread together with Clover’s magic, neat as a row of stitches. Never before have they been like this. Within his control.
For a moment everything holds. A latticework of magic across the earth, perfectly controlled.
“It worked,” Clover breathes. Then there’s a tremor. The ground lurches beneath us. I lean against Arien, my shoulder on his shoulder, as I try to keep my balance. Clover looks over at Rowan searchingly, her forehead lined with worry. Another tremor rolls across the ground in an elongated shiver.
“Quick.” She jumps to her feet, pulling at Arien’s arm and reaching out for me. “Both of you, get up. We have to—”
The ground splits apart with an enormous heave that sends us all stumbling. The circle Clover carved in the mud is now an open wound.
Rowan strides toward us. He grabs my arm and starts to pull me back. I struggle against him. “You can’t do this; you can’t make him do this!”
He doesn’t respond. His eyes are fixed on Clover, on Arien, on the shifting ground.
Threads of magic trail from their fingers. Clover pulls Arien closer to the newly torn wound. Her magic sparks around them as she tries to help him guide the shadows back into the earth.
“Arien!” I cry. “You have to stop!”
The lake churns, and a torrent of water spills over the tear in the ground. It cascades down through the darkness. Arien leans against Clover. Her hands cover his as they both press against the mud. And beneath them, the ground wrenches farther open, widening, widening.
I can’t let them do this. It’s like the—what did Rowan call it? The Corruption?—like it’s fighting back. Like it wants to protect itself from whatever Clover and Arien are trying to do.
I stretch out my hand desperately to Arien, but Rowan’s grip tightens on my arm; I can’t get loose.
“No,” he rasps, a harsh plea beneath his breath. “No, no, no.”
My heart spikes sharp with terror as the mud rises up over Arien’s hands. It covers his wrists, his forearms, rising until he’s submerged to his elbows, his face only a kiss from the ground. Blotches of shadows—of magic—shift and swirl under the surface of his skin. He grimaces, teeth bared in a snarl, the muscles cording in his neck with effort.
“Please!” I sob. “Please, it’s going to kill him!”
Arien screams.
The sound comes from everywhere, all at once. This isn’t his voice, not any sound I’ve ever heard him make, even when gripped by the worst of his nightmares. A scream, a roar, a howl, all tangled together. The cries fill my ears, my blood, the world.
Rowan shoves me away. He goes toward the wound, toward the torn-up mud. He grabs Arien roughly by the back of his shirt, pulls him to his feet and away from the water. I rush forward and catch Arien in my arms. My foot twists, and we fall down together, hard against the ground.
I hold him tight against me. He’s stopped screaming now. His eyes are blank.
“I’ve got you.” I brush his hair back from his sweat-damp cheeks, leaving dark streaks of mud on his skin. “I’ve got you.”
Clover stands beside Rowan at the edge of the wound. “You’ll have to…” She trails off, her face anguished.
Rowan takes off his cloak, dropping it heedlessly into the mud behind him. His hand goes to his wrist. His fingers hook under the edge of his sleeve. He pushes it up past his elbow, baring the skin above the black line of his glove.
He has a knife in his hand. Small and neat, the blade fitted into the handle. He unfolds it in a quick, practiced motion. The steel has a sharp, silvered edge that gleams as it catches the fading sunlight. My stomach twists, sickened by the horror of what is happening.
Rowan puts the blade to his wrist.
Everything happens so swiftly. The images separate into flashes.
His skin.
The knife.
A cut.
He carves into himself without any hesitation. That image—of everything—is what lingers when I finally wince my eyes shut. How steady his hand is when he drives the blade deep into his arm and slices himself open.
Rowan kneels in the mud and shoves his opened wrist against the ground. A coil of earth rises up and binds his arm, wrapping around him, climbing higher until it snares his throat. He stays terribly, terribly still, not even resisting as it starts to pull him downward. His arm—the one he cut—is now completely buried in the earth. His head bends, his mouth opens, and the strands of darkness slither inside.
“Rowan.” I whisper his name, a sharp, hurt sound.
His head snaps up. Our eyes meet. His skin is veined with dark all along the sides of his neck. The thornlike scars that wreathe his throat stand out, angry and raised. His eyes are crimson, bloodshot, his pupils huge and black.
This is the darkness I glimpsed when I first saw him. The shadows that limned his edges, always just out of reach. Now it’s here, laid bare. I watch as he changes, as his gaze turns cold, as he is overtaken by feral, cruel hunger.
He stares at me, unblinking.
“Violeta.” It’s the first time he’s said my name. His voice is like the hiss of the waves against the shore. “Violeta, get away from here right now.”
I let the whole world close down. I shut out the sound of the lake. The feel of the ground as it trembles. Clover’s voice, frightened and urgent. I let it all fade away until there’s only Arien’s hand in mine—our skin gritted with mud, his fingers gone cold. I get to my feet. He moves like a sleepwalker as he follows me.
When we reach the place where the forest thins to the narrow garden, we almost collide with Florence, who is coming down from the house. I shove past her. She calls out to us, but I don’t stop. I don’t turn.
I grip Arien’s hand tight, and I start to run.