“Lux—”
“Bequiet,” she snarled and dug her sharpened nails inside.
Shaw jolted, and she did, too, but what was a little discomfort, a little pain, compared to years of feeling a shell instead of your humanity?
At last, when her fingers could dig no deeper, Lux fluttered open her eyes and read the words aloud:
"The weight of past lives, heavy and cold,
Anchors that drag, roots that grow bold.
Have courage to bloom in the darkest of nights.
Untether your chains.
Reclaim your light."
She let the words choose their own pace, and some sentences stretched while others rushed, and with every syllable leaving her lips, Lux felt their energy bolster her instead of take. Just as they cracked her core, expunged the darkness, and polished what remained. Tears fell from her lashes, splashing onto her skirt long before she’d finished, but she could see it, glaring and brilliant ahead.
Light.
Lux gasped as Shaw did. With his next breath, he dragged her to him. Amongst the rubble of her and Riselda’s home, he stole her seat and gathered her into his lap, and when he did release her hands, it was to wrap his arms around her, his head lowering to her shoulder.
Lux’s heart pounded so hard, she knew he must hear it. “Did it work? Have I given you your ember?”
“You have given me more than that, Necromancer. I feel…”
“Warm?” His skin was hot on hers, so blissfully familiar, she wanted to cocoon within it. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he lifted his head to press his brow to hers.
“The pain is there, but the guilt… I’m not drowning any longer.” She had siphoned the frigid shadows from his eyes, and what awaited her made the heat of his hands sear upward and into her cheeks. His fingers traced the path of her blush. Up her neck, until his knuckle pressed to her chin, lifting it. “How do you feel?”
Lux’s lashes lowered, and she breathed deep. Even in the darkness of her destroyed home, beneath the eerie glow of the tree, she still felt the sunlight on her skin.
An enchantment for forgiveness…
An untethering.
A release.
Finally.
“I feel light.”
Chapter fifty-three
When Lux entered themansion alongside Shaw, it was to find it entirely changed. The prison had emptied. Survivors, bedraggled and gaunt, stood in stunned silence over the gold-leaf walls, carved columns, and the destroyed panes of glass crunching beneath their feet. They stepped around the winding branches, silver-run and unmoving, with expressions more akin to terror even after all they’d experienced from below ground.
For the forest had claimed Ghadra as its own.
A smile tugged at the corner of Lux’s mouth, watching Morana scowl over the bowl placed in her hands, given to her by Shaw’s mother with eyes yet red from her reunion with Aline. More and more food appeared from the hidden doorway, carried up from the kitchen. A veritable feast for those of the Dark, even prior to their unfair incarceration.
The familiar head of the Brewing Bog’s barkeep ran hunched down the hall, preceded by a rolling barrel of cider, as the smooth hands of the doctor that had once set Lux’s ankleinspected those who had formed a line before him, even when he himself looked as if he may collapse with fatigue.
There weren’t many—those survivors of the havoc wreaked by the mayor—and Riselda—but those that had made it out greeted one another with relieved smiles and kind gestures. It was a new beginning.
Aline waved from afar, directing the placement of platters upon a newly righted table. Perhaps her brush with death hadn’t fully settled over her, or perhaps she was simply more resilient than most, but when a young servant girl with braided tresses, bent toward her in confidence, Lux observed Aline’s responding grin. She could still find joy amongst the freshness of her sorrow, and Lux was thankful there did not appear to be rules in grief.
Shaw scanned the ballroom, his eyes settling on the gaping hole of the ceiling. Partially obstructed, a curving bough reached out. “What are we going to do now?”
