I trail back upstairs to the room that is now mine. In the flicker of candlelight, it looks much the same as before. An unmade bed. Cloth-draped furniture. Dust and neglect and a window open to the hot summer night.
I pace a restless circle from bed to window to dresser. Wrench loose each cloth until they’re all strewn across the floor and the air is a haze of motes. With everything uncovered, the room looks more alive, more awake, than it did last night. But it still doesn’t feel like mine.
When I pictured where we might go, that day in the village when Arien said we should run away, it was never somewhere like this. Yet here we are, in this strange, haunted place. I turn the thought over as I move through the room. This is mine now. And Lakesedge will be my home.
There are folded sheets inside the dresser. They smell of camphor, and creases lattice the fabric. I make the bed, then take off my torn, stained dress. I shove it into the hearth of the unlit fire, because I want it as far from me as possible.
I put on my nightdress and lie down on the fresh sheets.
My mouth tastes bitter, and I’m so tired that everything looks blurred, like I’m underwater. I trace my fingers back and forth over the creases in the quilt. Think of Arien, in his own room, already asleep. Tomorrow he’ll begin to learn how to use his magic.
He’s in my dreams when I drift slowly into a scattered, restless sleep. We’re in the Vair Woods. Our family is dead, our village lost to fever, our cottage turned to flames. Trees rise around us like sentinels beneath the frost. My frightened breath makes clouds in the air. Arien is in my arms, and he’s so heavy I can barely keep hold of him. We go deeper into the forest. Into the cold, still night. Shadows start to lengthen across the icy ground.
A voice calls out to me through the darkness.
The shadows creep toward us, closer and closer.
Then everything fades and shifts.
I’m back in my new room. The candle is burned down; silver light from the full moon shines brightly through the window. Wind stirs the lace curtains. They flutter back and forth like pale ghosts. Strange sounds come from outside. The rustle of leaves, the far-off cry of a night bird. Shakily, I untangle myself from my quilts and sit up.
The air begins to shimmer, the way light reflects over the surface of water. A droplet lands on my cheek. Then another on the back of my hand. A damp splotch, dark as ink. I look up, my heartbeat quickening. The ceiling is a shadowed pool, blurred and rippled, and dripping.
The air is cold, cold as a midwinter forest, cold as the Vair Woods.
My room is filled with water. It spills down over the walls and pools in the corners. It starts to spread across the floor. It rises and rises, until the cold, black waves wash against my bed. My breath catches, and a horrified sound escapes my throat. It’s just like the water in the lake.
But this isn’t real. It’s just a dream. The same dream I had last night.
I close my eyes and fold myself down beneath the hem of my sodden quilt. Breathe in deep, until my lungs are filled with the scent of camphor and dust and rose petals. All I can hear is a hush hush hush, which might be the wind, might be the lake, might be my own erratic breathing.
Then another sound comes through the wall. It’s soft at first, like the wind as it hisses and stirs through sedge grass. Then it twists and sharpens, skittering around me, until the whisper becomes a voice.
Tell me your name.
I curl up tighter and try not to listen. None of this is real. Not the darkness, or the voice, or the water on the walls.
The sound comes again, closer now. From between my ribs, I feel a sharp wrench. As though there’s a thread knotted around my bones and it’s been pulled.
Tell me your name.
“Violeta.” It tumbles out, unbidden.
Open your eyes, Violeta.
I think of the maiden in the labyrinth. How she faced a monster with only a ball of twine held tight in her hands. I don’t want to look. But I don’t want to lie here cringing in the dark. So I open my eyes.
The room is empty. The corner is just a corner. Silver and shadowed. The floor is just a floor. Bare, dry boards covered with a patina of dust. I peel back the quilt, stretch out a hand, and touch the wall. There’s no water. Just faded paper, rough beneath my fingertips.
There are monsters in the woods, in the world. There’s a monster in the shadows, and now it knows my name.
I slump back down on the bed. I can’t stop shivering. Because the real horrors of Lakesedge aren’t in this room. They’re on the blackened shore of an endless lake, where a monster fed the ground with his blood. Where my brother will go, with magic and shadows, to try to mend it all.
I’m woken by a heavy knock on the door. I sit up to a room flooded bright. Golden daylight streams through the window. I scrub my wrist across my face and look around the room. Everything is as it was before I fell asleep, the room untouched by water, the floor strewn with the cloths I drew back from the furniture.
The knock comes again, rapid and impatient. Disoriented, I clamber out of bed and cross the room.
The monster is outside my door.
When he sees me, he takes a step back. He glances at me, then quickly turns away. “You were asleep.”
I cross my arms over my chest. I’m in my nightdress—faded cotton, a badly stitched mend across one shoulder. My hair is snarled into an enormous tangle. “I was asleep.”
“It’s afternoon.”
“It’s been a tiring few days.”
He raises a brow. Then his mouth lifts into the barest smile. “A slight understatement.”
I search his face for hints of what I saw last night at the ritual. The creature he became when he was cut and snared and consumed by the blackened earth. My eyes go from the scars on his face to the ones on his throat. I know it’s there, the darkness, the wrongness.
But in the daylight, it’s easy to think that Rowan Sylvanan is only a boy with a sharp, handsome face and shadows of fatigue beneath his eyes.
He matches my gaze evenly. He doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t move away.
“Did you wake me up for a reason, or…?”
“Oh. Yes. I’ve brought something.”
He goes back into the hallway. There’s a sound, the scrape of wood over wood, then he returns with a large trunk. As he carries it into my room, his sleeve rides up. He’s still wearing gloves, the same as always. But between the cuff of his shirt and the edge of his glove, there’s a fresh linen bandage wrapped around his wrist.
I think of the way he shoved the knife into his arm. The coldness in his voice when he spoke my name. Get away from here.
He puts the trunk down at the end of my bed. When he notices my eyes on his bandage, he pulls his sleeve back down.
“Clover told me she uses your blood in the rituals.” Even as I say it, my stomach tightens at the thought. “Do you have to cut yourself like that every time?”
Ignoring my question, he tips his chin toward the trunk. “Go ahead, open it.”
I crouch down and run my fingers over the lid. The polished wood smells like beeswax. The clasp is tarnished, but it opens smoothly when I unfasten it. Inside, carefully folded together, are clothes. Enough for a whole summertime wardrobe, packed with paper like wrapped sweets in a jar. Nightdresses and camisoles and pinafores and ribbon-topped socks. And dresses. So many dresses. I trace my fingers over the folds of paper.
“Whose are these?”
Rowan gives me the same look he did when I asked his name, as if the answer should be obvious. “Yours.”
“But I have clothes.”
He looks at the fireplace, where my stained dress is still in the hearth. “I never said you didn’t.”
I close the lid of the trunk and go over to the hearth to pick up my dress. I run my fingers over the torn hem, then trace over the embroidery I stitched around the neckline and cuffs. I was so proud when I made it. The dark green linen sash, the embroidered details. But now all I can see is the uneven hem, the snags and frays where the thread tangled.
“I don’t want anything from you. Except for you to promise that Arien will be safe, and I know you won’t do that.”
Rowan rakes a hand through his hair and sighs. “I meant what I said when I came to your cottage. I’m going to help him. He and Clover have already begun their lessons in the library.”
I think of Arien, how his face lit with longing, with hope, when Rowan made his offer. Then the fear that crowded in when he told Arien what he’d do, if he didn’t go to Lakesedge. “That was a cruel trick, you know. How you threatened him so he’d be forced to come with you.”
“I needed him here before the full moon. There wasn’t enough time to explain the truth of it.”
“And you think that excuses what you did?”
He steps closer and softens his voice. “He doesn’t have to hide who he is now.”
I press my nails so hard against my palms that they dig crescents into my skin. “Don’t act like this is some benevolent gift you’re giving him. If you truly cared about Arien, you’d fight your own Corruption.”
Slowly, Rowan reaches for his sleeve. He pushes it back until it’s past his elbow, and shows me his bared arm. The skin around the pale linen bandage is scarred, old wounds that are torn and ruined and badly healed.
“I have fought it, Violeta.” He says my name quietly, like a word from a spell. “I am still fighting it. And if I had any other choice, a way to do this without your brother, I would take it.”
I can’t look away from his outstretched arm. The scars, the cuts. Before I can stop myself, I reach toward him, the movement almost unconscious. My hand brushes over his skin. He flinches, but lets me touch him.
“How many times have you done this?”
“Clover came here about a year ago with her spell for the ritual. She and I have worked together for twelve moons, more or less.”
“More or less?”
“Before she came, I tried on my own.”
I picture the same ruthless motion from the ritual—knife, skin, cut—made over and over again, moon by moon. So many times that he’s lost count. “How did all of this even start?”
His eyes lower, his lashes veiling his gaze. He stays quiet for a long time. “It started because I did something terrible.”
“Do you mean what happened to your family?”
“Yes.” There’s no apology in his voice, none at all. “That, and many other things besides.”
“You really drowned them, didn’t you?”
“I told you already. Everything they say about me is true.”
My heart starts to beat faster. I blink, and all I can see is dark water. The water at the lake, the water that filled my room when I dreamed. The lake claimed their lives, and now the water, the shore, the earth is poisoned and ruined.
“So this is all your fault. And now you want Arien to fix it.”
“Yes.”
My hand is still on his arm. I press my fingers tighter, fixing my gaze on the scar just above his wrist, long healed and faded pale. He takes a sharp breath.
“You may have spent twelve moons and more hurting yourself this way”—I lift my eyes to his—“but I won’t let you do the same to him.”
A strange expression crosses Rowan’s face. It’s the same way he looked in the woods, when he was wounded and I was about to run away. The same way he looked in the firelight, when I caught him listening to my story.
“Arien wants to stay, and he wants to help. But—” I pull my hand away. “Don’t ever threaten him again. If you want something else from Arien, you’ll make time to tell the truth.”
“I will.”
I go back toward the trunk, kneel down, and open the lid. Part of me still wants to refuse Rowan’s gift, but my hand reaches inside, unbidden, to unfold the scraps of tissue paper. Silk and cotton and ribbons dance under my fingertips.
The dresses are finer than anything I’ve ever owned. Than I’ve ever touched. They’re the colors of sky, of sunset: peach and sage and lilac. Skirts full of lace. Sleeves lined with delicate embroidery.
And I want them. I want them so badly that when I touch them, I half expect the feverish longing in my hands to scorch through the fabric. I take out a dress. Pale cream cotton with a pattern of tiny crescent moons embroidered around the collar.
I hold it against my chest and stroke the delicate fabric. “Thank you,” I say quietly.
Rowan turns, his hand on the door, about to leave. He looks from the dress to me. “You’re welcome.”
“Will you wait?” He stops, startled. “I need to get dressed, but I want you to show me to the library after I’m done. I’ll never find it otherwise. Your wretched house is too big.”
He raises a brow. “Did you want me to draw you a map?”
“Here, I’ll start one for you.” I sketch out an imagined shape in the air, then point at the spaces to indicate rooms. “Locked, locked, locked, library.”
He smiles faintly and shakes his head at me. “I’ll wait outside your room.”
We’ve spent almost a week together. I know what he is and now I know for sure what he’s done. And it feels strange, to tease him like this. More strange for how easily it comes.
I collect a few more things from the trunk—a camisole, lace-hemmed undergarments, and a handful of hairpins—then walk to the corner, where a screen divides the washstand from the rest of the room. I hold my new dress up before the window. Light shimmers over it, and the gossamer layers of fabric glow as they catch the sun. It’s beautiful.
I undress quickly, feeling embarrassed to be doing this while Rowan is just outside the room, even though he can’t see me. I’m embarrassed, too, when I put on the new undergarments, knowing that they were a gift. I scowl at my flushed cheeks in the mirror above the washstand, then slip the dress over my head.
There’s a long, ribboned sash at the waist. A row of tiny, pearlescent buttons all along the back. I knot the sash. The buttons are awkward to reach, but I manage to fasten most of them. Then I sweep my hair into a haphazard braid and wind it into a crown, pinned around my head. My feet are bare, since I left my mud-caked boots down in the kitchen. The skirts wash about my legs like mist.
I feel like some made-up, dewdrop-fine creature from a story. I can’t stop running my fingers along the sash and over the embroidery that edges the sleeves.
When I step out of the room, Rowan looks me over, from my pinned braids to the fall of the skirts. His mouth tilts slightly when he notices my bare feet.
“Come on, then.” He turns and moves farther into the hallway, waiting for me to follow him.
We go across the landing. The air is dim, lit by only the faintest drifts of afternoon light. My bare feet leave prints on the dusty floor. He walks behind me, deliberately measuring his pace so we don’t walk side by side. At the top of the stairs, Rowan puts his hand on my shoulder. “Violeta. You—your…” He trails off.
I turn around to look at him, confused. “What?”
He motions awkwardly to the back of my dress. “You missed some buttons.”
I reach my arm to my back. Bare skin, the lace band of my camisole, then a row of empty buttonholes. Oh. Heat creeps over my face as I twist around, trying to fasten them, but they’re too small, and they slip away from my fingers.
Hesitantly, I turn my back to him. “I can’t reach them. Can you, please?”
He doesn’t move. I wait, feeling exposed with the buttons undone and him just standing there.
Eventually, with a rough sigh, Rowan reaches out and tries to catch hold of the buttons without touching me, but he can’t. He pauses, takes off his gloves, then tries again. His fingers brush over my skin. Without the gloves, his hands are warm, his fingertips rasped by calluses.
“Ash.” His hands drop. “Sorry, I—”
He takes hold of the dress with another muttered curse. I feel the shift and tug of fabric and pearl. Sparks of heat dance through my fingers. At the center of my chest I feel a strange pull, as though a thread has been knotted up inside me.
At last he fastens the final button and rests his hand, flat, over the nape of my neck. I step away from him.
“Thank you.” The words are half-stuck in my throat.
He walks forward briskly, forcing me to catch up. “The library is this way.”
As I follow him down the stairs, my hand drifts up to curl over the back of my neck. I press down on the memory of his touch on my skin.