The Glass Arrow(81)

I turn on her, and she jumps back a step.

“That’s stupid. They wouldn’t do that. Salma knows better.”

Lorcan’s chest rises and falls in a slow breath.

“No,” I say.

Daphne is smoothing down the front of her dress. “Remember Rose and Lily? Both of them were from the outliers. Their fathers turned them in when they were of age for auction. Maybe your family did the same.”

The look on Lorcan’s face tells me it’s true.

I don’t believe it. I can’t. But it must be true because everything I’m afraid of is. My mind flashes to Salma, to all the times she resented our home in the mountains. Without me to stop her, would she have gone to the city? Looked for work? Turned Nina in to the Garden?

Everything I know is shattering apart.

“Clover.” Daphne’s voice is as gentle as I’ve ever heard it. “Where else would they go?”

She stands before me, red hair matted and wild, face smeared with muck, and for the first time maybe ever, I’m really, really glad she’s here.

Lorcan hands me the reins to his horse. I don’t say good-bye. I don’t even look at him. By the time Daphne and I are in the saddle, he’s gone.

*

DAPHNE AND I RIDE north until the mountains begin their steep decline. I don’t know why she’s come with me, but I don’t ask. The truth is, I want her to stay. It’s better than being alone.

At night we make camp against a landslide overlooking Glasscaster. From here we have a clear view of the Witch Camps and the sinister gray-green smog that blankets the bright lights of the Black Lanes.

The city spills out into the distance, impossibly big. My family is somewhere inside those walls. There are as many places they could be as there are stars in the sky. It’s almost funny. I never worried about finding them in the mountains, but in the city, I’m overcome by the feeling that they are truly lost.

The crack of a branch behind me makes me turn, and I blink as a red-haired girl with her arms crossed comes into focus.

“You should get some sleep,” Daphne says.

Her saying so reminds me of how exhausted I am.

My feet drag as we walk back to where the palomino is tied, and I can barely keep my eyes open as I build a small fire. The camp is secure, we haven’t seen any other tracks since noon, but that doesn’t stop me from walking the area with Brax.

When I return, Daphne’s sitting beside the flames, twisting her neck from side to side, trying to place each rattle, yelp, or whir of the forest’s song. The hardest part of a new place is the not knowing.

“Did you eat?” I ask her, looking down at the charred jackrabbit I left to cool on a stone beside the fire. She stares at it, then lunges forward and digs in like she’s famished.

I blink, realizing that she’s been waiting for my permission. Daphne has never lived anywhere someone wasn’t telling her what to do, when.

After a while she stops and wipes her mouth clean. Her shoulders sag and she won’t look me in the eye. At an owl’s hunting cry, she jolts to a stand. When I don’t move, she sits.

“When I first came to the Garden, I thought there was a monster outside,” I say. “I swore I heard it stomping down the streets.”

She smirks. “What was it?”

“Music,” I say. “From the Black Lanes. It took me a while to figure it out.”

She gives a small laugh.

“Maybe he … the old Driver can help you find your cousins,” she says as she scoots inside the bedroll from Lorcan’s saddle. I notice how careful she is not to say the word father.

I shake my head, trying not to think about how we left him with nothing—no horse, no supplies.

“He seems decent,” she adds.

“He’s not.”

It never mattered what kind of man he was before, but now all I can feel is betrayal when I think of him.

“Well at least he didn’t sell you to the Garden.”

I face her, surprised, and find her picking the leaves out of her hair. My feet tuck under Brax’s belly while he happily tears apart a fish he pulled from a nearby stream.

“I thought that’s what you wanted. A nice home. People to look after you.”

She shrugs. “Maybe I want something else.”

She tilts her head up then, and I remember the night before auction when Buttercup turned her away.

“Someone who’ll fight for you,” I say.

She nods. “Who doesn’t care who you are.”

The crickets have begun to sing, but Daphne doesn’t even flinch. I wonder if things would have been different if Kiran hadn’t known, or cared, who I was.

“I bet it was hard giving you up.” I don’t know why I say this. I don’t know anything about her father.

“My birth mother was my father’s forever wife,” she says quietly. “He kept her and sent me away. I lied when I said I was his favorite. He was capable of love, he just didn’t love me.”

Daphne once told me how rare it was to become a forever wife. I don’t think she ever really thought it would happen to her. In that moment, I feel worse for her than I ever have.

Images of Nina on the auction stage plague my dreams, and when I can’t sleep anymore I sit on one of the logs by our fire and stare ahead, watching how the leaves that dance in the breeze are sucked into the flames and twist into tiny glowing flowers. Lilies, sweetpeas, daphnes. They flash gold for just an instant, just long enough to catch your eye, before burning to ash and disappearing forever.