Not good enough for Levitt to punish the men who tried to kill me, apparently. The bitter betrayal I’d felt in the Ossuary burned up my throat like bile. I swallowed it down.
“So, what are you doing out here?” I asked in an attempt to divert my attention away from the conversation I’d walked out of a few minutes before.
Rosie pulled the edge of my cloak tighter around herself. “I needed to get away from my family for a while. I love them, and they’ve been wonderful the last few weeks, but…” She shrugged. “I haven’t had much chance to be alone. I was starting to get a little overwhelmed.”
I nodded. “Sometimes it's good to be by yourself for a while.”
Her forehead scrunched. “They’re so careful around me now, like they’re afraid to say the wrong thing, but I wish everything would go back to the way it was. Though, I guess it’snotthe same anymore. Not for a lot of us.” She tipped her head to look over at me with a tight smile. “But you didn’t come out here for this. Sorry.”
“I don’t mind. Really. I’m the one who asked, right?”
She chuckled. “I guess so.”
We lapsed into quiet until she tapped her foot against mine. “Why areyouout here? I’m not used to seeing you without Penny around.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “You don’t need my trouble on top of your own.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she fixed me with a scolding look. “I’m the one who asked, right?”
It was hard to argue with my own logic, so I eased into the story from the very beginning. Leaving out our real reason for coming to Ashpoint, I explained how Penny and I met, Merrick’s unexpected presence here, and the tensions between the half-brothers. I only touched briefly on how badly Penny and I reacted to the hemlock, mostly because I didn’t want to dwell on it myself, and ended with my conversation with Levitt and the news that Merrick was actively trying to kill Penny and me, though I kept Isla’s involvement to myself. It would be cruel to put her at risk if nothing was going to come of it.
Rosie listened while I rambled, her brows drawing lower over her dark eyes the further I got. By the time I neared the end of the story, her hands were curled into fists around the edges of our cloaks in her lap.
“When I first got here, I was glad to see Levitt as the Right Hand,” I said. “I thought we finally had someone in leadership who could steer us right.” I scoffed. “But it looks like I was wrong. All the same things that happened under my father are still happening. Levitt is proving himself to be ineffective and too cowardly to face the corruption in his own leadership. He’d rather roll over and close his eyes than do the hard thing.”
I regretted that bit of brutal honesty as soon as it came out of my mouth, and Rosie’s stunned expression made me feel no better.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I shouldn’t have unloaded all of that on you. I don’t have anyone else I can talk to about this other than Penny, so it’s been building for a while, and?—”
“I have concerns about how things are run, too,” she blurted. She took a slow breath and chewed at her bottom lip before continuing. “I think… maybe it was a mistake to start our Oaths. And maybe it would be a mistake to continue them.”
Thoma had voiced a similar sentiment, but I was shocked to hear it from Rosie. She’d gone into her Oaths with her eyes wide open so far as I could tell. Having grown up here, she must have known what the rituals entailed. But seeing strangers go through the trials was very different to enduring them personally. Losing someone from town had a smaller impact than losing someone close. And, for all the drama Tessa caused, she and Rosie hadseemedclose.
“Sometimes I think we should just leave,” she admitted softly, breaking me out of my own thoughts. “Pack our things and go and pretend we were never here. Find somewhere else to settle and go on with our lives. I think my parents would leave if I suggested it, but I’m afraid we wouldn’t be allowed to go.”
“What’s allowed doesn’t matter,” I said. “Break the rules. You certainly wouldn’t be the first ones. If you truly want to go, we’ll find a way to make it happen.” I chuckled bitterly. “Gods, maybe we’ll even come with you.”
Leavingwasthe safest option. I’d briefly entertained the idea of taking Penny and running during the third Oath, but I was too late. He drank the hemlock, and we were stuck. But now, knowing that Merrick wouldn’t relent in trying to finish what he started that night, I considered it again.
Eastcliff wouldn’t be safe, but no one knew I had ties to Forstford. We could pick up Sayla and Amelina on our way and bring them with us. It would forfeit the farm, but we could make it work. We’d be alive and safe, and that would be enough. Ifnothing else, I knew I needed some kind of contingency plan for Penny should anything happen to me.
“I don’t even know where we’d go,” Rosie said. “We’ve been here my whole life. We don’t have anyone else out there to go to.” She sniffed and straightened, and her pained expression smoothed into one of manufactured calm. “It’s fine. We’ll be fine. The worst is over, right?”
I shrugged. “Depends on your definition of ‘worst,’ I suppose. None of the other Oaths are inherently deadly, not like the third, but they present their own challenges.”
Anders’s news from the day before came to the forefront of my mind, and I wondered now what I’d wondered then.
“Speaking of the next Oaths,” I began, “did anyone approach you about being our third? Did you decline?”
Though I doubted Rosie wouldwantto be paired with Otis and Isla, I could understand her hesitance to spend time on the road with Penny and me. She’d had a few weeks and some distance to come to terms with the fact that we were involved and he didn’t feel for her what she felt for him, but like Thoma, I worried it might be hard for her to see us together.
A frown pulled at her lips. “No. It wasn’t given to me as an option. One of the messengers came and told me I would be joining Isla and Otis for the next two Oaths. I would much rather be joining you two than them. I like Isla well enough, but Otis makes me uncomfortable. Especially now knowing that he was involved with Merrick’s plot.”
That meant our being paired with Anders was likely deliberate. With Levitt so worried about his own position and standing, he wouldn’t have dared push back if Merrick suggested the groupings. I couldn’t help but wonder what Merrick had up his ridiculous ceremonial sleeve for us in all of this.
For the first time since I reconnected with Levitt, I felt like Penny and I were genuinely on our own here. I’d gotten used tothe quiet, behind the scenes support, but the time for that was clearly over. Now it was up to us to keep ourselves safe.
“Be careful with Otis,” I said. “Make sure you keep something on you to defend yourself with, should it ever come to that.”
