There was a word for this, I knew. A word for this flame within me. I refused desperately to think of it.
“Ana,” he said pleadingly. As if he meant to sayhave mercy. I had none tonight. I was feeling selfish, and I would rather torment him than be alone.
Gently, I pulled him with me into the mist. He did not resist. “You need not look.” I tried to say it lightly, but it came out terse.“Just be with me. Do not leave me to bathe in these memories alone.”
His exhale came sharp as a knife. “Never. In this life, and in all those that await us Beyond, you shall never be alone again, Ana.”
The steam gathered like clouds in my head, dulling my thoughts. I was faintly aware that I slipped out of my shredded dress, and that Adrik guided me gently into the bath. The water burned viciously as I sank into it. I savored the pain. It sharpened my mind just enough to become aware of Adrik kneeling on the tiles beside me.
“He escaped,” I whispered.
Adrik brushed a curl, damp with steam, from my heated forehead. “He is injured. He might die in the swamp.”
“He will not. He is its lord.”
“Then I will hunt him down. He cannot fool us again. He cannot foolmeagain.”
That he could not. We knew his name and had tasted his blood. Adrik drew a soft cloth from a stool near the pool and soaked it with a trickle of sweet oil. When I reached to take the cloth from him, he only smiled.
“Allow me.”
I nodded tensely. Adrik drew the cloth gently over my shoulders, cleansing me of vileness and rot. I shrank under his cautious, quiet observance. There it was again, that watchful eye which had frightened me so in the beginning. It frightened me no longer. I knew now that it held no judgment. He wished to know how I’d escaped that night, ten winters ago.
“You can ask,” I said, voice thin and too high.
He brushed the cloth softly over my collarbone and through the dip at the base of my throat, drawing a thin gasp from me. “Do you want me to ask?”
I swallowed, heart racing as my mind unraveled with doubt. “I burn sometimes with the words. Other times I wonder… If Ispeak of what happened, will it change me again? Will it become something alive and real—a stain on the world rather than one I bear quietly on my soul? After it happened, I looked differently at the world. I cannot bear that the world might look differently at me too.”
Adrik set the cloth aside to cradle my hand in his. I had not noticed how cold I’d been, despite the scalding water. “After the war, I burned the prince’s mark off my back. I thought that if I erased all traces of him, I could pretend we’d never met.” He smiled sadly. “It was a lie, of course. Whether I spoke of him or not, whether I refused to look at myself in the mirror or stared for hours at the monster I’d become—he haunted me just the same. I did not tell Lorell of my past until I was eleven moons his apprentice. He was utterly unimpressed.” Adrik drew breath, cupping my jaw softly in his palm. “Those who matter know younow, Evana. I know younow. You are made of the stars and of wild and beautiful things. You wear strength and kindness on your tongue, in your eyes, deep within your heart.” He slipped his thumb from my curls to my jaw and traced his finger, so tenderly it felt like a kiss of the wind, over the bridge of my nose and my cheeks, spattered with freckles. He whispered, "You wear it here, on your skin. The constellations of Moonfall and Everwild on eternal, brilliant skies. I see you, Evana. I’d find your heart among one thousand drumbeats. I know that heart of yours, and it is kind and fierce and wild. That will never change.”
He caught one tear with his finger, bowed low to kiss another away. I said, voice distant, “It was the dawn of winter and I was seventeen. Six summers had gone since my mother’s death; six summers of blood and terror. Deep in the forest, on a cracked cliff, stood a strange hut and in that hut lived a hag. She had lived there for three-hundred years. Some said she brewed in her cauldron an elixir of youth. Others claimed she was more wraith than flesh. They whispered of her as they had of my mother,and that was perhaps why I listened so closely. I heard in the night, as a group of villagemen passed the hill, that the hag had been the lordling’s lover, long ago, that she knew his true name. I went to her the next morning, feeling for the first time in six summers a sliver of hope.”
“Down by the river lived the miller with his wife and daughter, and it was that daughter’s youth that the hag asked me to steal in exchange for the lordling’s name. I like to pretend that I hesitated. That I thought first of a thousand other ways and came horribly to the decision that there were none. In truth, I did not hesitate at all. I went that night to the river while the miller’s daughter bathed, and I pierced her heart with the hag’s knife. The guilt came much later, long after I’d left that village behind me.”
“She told me the lordling’s name, the hag, and I ran that same night to his castle in the swamp. The name still echoed in my bones as I pretended to have come to see him. He became imprudent as vile men tend to be when they fancy themselves the object of desire of a much younger woman. He did not notice, as we were in his bed, that I clawed his shoulder not from passion but to draw blood, and that I licked his skin not for pleasure but for a taste of freedom. I leaped from his window that night, and I ran.”
I breathed into the stiff, dead silence, staring blurredly from the window. I felt raw—stripped naked and whipped to the bone, the truth I hid in flesh and darkness torn from me and laid bare.
Adrik’s hand was like a vice around mine, trembling and white-knuckled. He drew breath a few times as if to speak, but from his chest came only a snarl. It was enough. It was enough that his gaze never faltered. That he looked at me, undeterred. That he understood. He did not look differently at me—only more clearly. As if all he had felt for me before had not lessened, but sharpened.
At last he said with a growl, “Tell me someone has paid at least for the horrors you have endured.”
I blinked, struck by how quickly his rage melted the sorrow from my bones and replaced it with a thirst for vengeance. “Oh,” I said, sweetly. “I ran for the river after I fled the castle, but I did not run there at once. I returned to the cabin first, where my father had passed out over the kitchen table. I left with blood on my hands.”
“Good,” Adrik snarled, a wild glint in his gaze. “You wear that look of murder well, Ana. You wore it well in the forest, too. I watched you tear that faerie apart. I watched as you became the wild. I cannot help it. What I feel for you—” He drew a shuddering breath. “What I feel for you burns even through magic meant to numb the soul.” I tensed, afraid he’d say something to shatter whatever tenuous illusion lingered between us. He chuckled quietly. “No need to look so frightened, Ana. I shall not say another word.”
A whisper of the wind plucked my answer off my tongue, eyes wandering past Adrik to the window. My gaze slipped to the edge of the forest and through the thin gap between the elms.
The wind spurred me on, ruthless and thick with the scent of a coming storm. I walked stiffly along the riverbank, thinking wistfully of sprightlier times.
I knew these forests like the back of my wrinkled hand; I had grown in their shade and when the spirits took me, I would come to rest beneath them, as it should be. I knew that the thickest strangleroots grew in a grove just past the second river-bend, that the thistles in the far meadow bloomed late in the spring but sprawled far and wide, and that the lichen taken from the sunlit birch beneath the cliff was more potent than any other I had found.
I knew, even if I could not see it, that a pond nestled between reeds and three thin-stemmed birches, and that the forest beyond brimmed with a strangeness that had deterred me until now from finding out what lay there.
A rustle came from afar. It belonged to the little fox I’d seen only in my mind. I followed the wind, knowing it would lead me to that fox.
I huddled deeper into my coat, clasping its seam with aching fingers…
