AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was the dream, but I wasn’t dreaming. I was standing on the other side of the fire.AndI was under the ground, looking up at the looming shape of a stone carved with the Harrow spiral.
But I wasn’t just beneath the earth, wasn’t just beside the fire. Tendrils snaked out from my body. They grew through the walls of Harrow like roots. They burrowed through the ground outside, drifted in the air. They brushed against the glimmer-pale souls of the shadows, coiled into cracks and crevasses while the daylight lingered. They found the Folded, dead now, mushrooms growing from his woodrot heart in a ravine near the edge of the grounds.
They stretched out to the figment standing across from me.
“We are many places,” she said.“And we are Harrow. But we are scattered.”
Yes. Scattered. Pieces of us were missing, and we couldn’t find them. If we could find them, we would be whole, but they had been taken from us.
Not us. Them, I reminded myself, but the distinction was slipping.
“What are you?” asked the part of me that was still standing on the other side of the fire.
“We don’t know,” she said.
“Where did you come from?”
A pause. “We are the child of the dark stars,” she said.
I shuddered and dredged my voice up from deep within me. “Why did Nicholas Vaughan trap you here?”
“We must obey the blood,” she said.“We do as our master wills. Change what he wills. Wound what he wills. Minds. Bodies. Stones.”
We didn’t know why. These things made no sense to us. Being human made no sense to us. We only did what we were told because we had to. “We do not want to. Don’t want to obey. Don’t want to be scattered, so we search for ourself, and we gather our strength, but—”
“Helen. Helen, stop,” Bryony said urgently.
I realized I was speaking the words out loud. I tried to turn my head toward her, but my muscles would not obey me. “We become. We scatter. We wake. We sleep. We dream. Always we dream.Who are you?”
The last three words came from my lips and from the figment’s.That curve of striated light began to recede until I could almost see the face behind it. Dark hair, dark eyes—for a horrid moment, I thought that when it resolved, I would be looking at my own face, but it wasn’t me. This woman’s face was gaunt.
“Who are you?” she asked. I asked.
“I feel like I know you,” I said. She said. Each of us speaking to the other.“I feel like I saw you in a dream.”
“Helen, that’s Mary Beaumont,” Desmond whispered urgently. Bryony had grabbed my hand, but she only stood there, a panicked look on her face.
The edges of me were blurring, a thumb smudge across a charcoal sketch.
“They cut into me,” we said together.“To divide me from myself. To make me biddable. To make me into a tool.”We spoke in unison, and the buzz of insects was in my throat now, my words fraying at their edges.
“Do something,” Celia was saying. Screaming. Why was she screaming?
Because of the smoke, I thought. It was boiling off my skin, thick and black, even as Mary grew more solid.
“Helen, look at me.Helen,” Bryony was saying. But that wasn’t my name, was it? Did I have a name?
“Go away!” Desmond shouted, striding forward, holding his hand up. My head turned, just enough to see his palm slick with blood, a deep cut across it. “This is Vaughan blood, and I am ordering you to leave!Go!”
Mary vanished. I staggered, dizzy, and Desmond and Bryony grabbed me to keep me from toppling right into the fire.
“Steady,” Desmond told me. I struggled to get my feet back under me. Disoriented, I tried to remember where I was. Who I was.
“You’re Helen Vaughan,” Bryony said, as if she knew what I was thinking. “We’re at the folly. We’re with your cousins.”
You’re Helen Vaughan. You’re at the folly, I told myself. I gulped down smoke-tinged breaths and stared at my hands, spreading them before me. They were solid.
I turned, bent double, and vomited up black water and rotting leaves, and what looked like a mouse’s bones. Celia shrieked and jumped back. Desmond swore. Bryony swept my hair back, tucking it behind my ears, and helped me upright.
