Bloodleaf (Bloodleaf #1)(48)
“You’re sorry?” Rain and tears were stinging my eyes.
“I’m upset too. We should have done it ourselves. At least then she could have gone humanely, but we failed—?”
I lunged at him; I wasn’t sure what I meant to do, but I didn’t get close enough to find out before Nathaniel stepped in front of him. Impeded by the human barrier, I was forced to retreat, and I began stalking up and down on my side of the divide.
“You failed!” I futilely wiped my eyes on my soaked sleeve, chin quivering. “I almost killed myself working your spell because you said you’d protect her, and you didn’t. I don’t even know why I believed you; you can’t even protect yourself. That’s what Nathaniel is for, right? To make sure you never have to ruffle a hair on your head, never have to get your hands dirty.”
Zan said in a quiet, dangerous voice, “Maybe you should go. Calm down, and we can talk again when you’re back to your senses.”
“Oh, I’ll go,” I said. “But this? This is over. I’m done with you.”
“Emilie,” Kate said, “wait!”
“If she wants to go,” Zan said, “don’t stop her.”
* * *
Back at the hut, emotions roiling, I slammed the door shut with a deafening crack and then collapsed against it as the expenditure of fury left emptiness and exhaustion in its place. My clothes were wet and cold, hanging heavy on my frame. I unlaced the ties of my bodice and dress and stripped it off, abandoning it where I stood, and moved toward the fire, wearing nothing but my white shift. I crouched, shivering, by the fire, and pushed the sodden lumps of hair from my eyes.
I was surrounded by the papers that had fallen from Zan’s lap that morning. I gathered them together just to get them out of the way at first but found myself unable to set them aside unviewed. The first two were charcoal sketches of a twinkling city, as seen from our high vantage on the wall last night, captured effortlessly in Zan’s bold, dramatic style. The third was of hands—?my hands. In one there was a luneocite knife. In the other, nothing but black blood seeping between long, white fingers.
Letting go of the papers, I stared at them. Last night’s cut had already knitted itself into a thin red weal. I closed my fingers into fists to hide the mark and the old, familiar shame. In my head I heard the distant echo of the Tribunal mob’s fevered chants: Witch! Witch! Witch!
My focus caught on the corner of a new drawing that had shaken loose from the others when I dropped them. I plucked it from the pile and rose to my feet, feeling sick, wanting to strike the image from my mind forever and yet unable to look away.
The girl in the picture had wild hair flying around her face in a twisted halo, her eyes wide and staring, her mouth parted in what looked like a scream—?of pain or ecstasy, I could not tell. The touches of beauty and elegance found in the detailed hand study were gone; in this rendering, the girl’s fingers had become stiff and curled, like claws. Her cheeks and eye sockets were marked by cavernous shadows, hollowed by the tongues of flame from the blood and hair burning in the bowl.
No wonder, I thought. No wonder they hate us. No wonder they burn us. No wonder the Empyrea wants to rid the earth of us. This . . . this person . . . she was power and danger and death.
She was what Zan saw when he looked at me.
I cast the picture into the fire. While it smoked, I scrabbled on my knees for the other drawings, and then I burned them, too.
The fire roared in the grate, and my body flushed in the stifling heat, as if I and my effigy were inextricably bound and I, too, was being consumed by the flames. Desperate for air, I fled back out into the rain and then did not stop at the doorstep. Past the trees, the pond, down into the culvert and the passage beyond.
When I climbed up the rocks and out onto the field of bloodleaf, the Harbinger was already waiting for me. She knew I would come, the same way she seemed to know everything but what paths might actually help me.
“All these years I’ve let you guide me. I’ve put myself in danger to do as you bid me, and look where I am now. Just look at what’s become of me. Is this what you wanted?”
She waited, wordless as ever.
“I’m sick of it. All of it. Of you, of magic, of death.” I took out Achlev’s luneocite knife and made a quick nick on my index finger. “I don’t want you to visit me anymore,” I said. “I don’t want to see you following me. I’m done. We’re done.” I gathered every ounce of feeling I had left inside of me and let it loose at her. “Just . . . be gone!” I cried, and felt a strange, unsettling snap.
She stumbled backwards, as if I’d cast not words at her but weighty stones. She fell into the web of bloodleaf that encased the tower, and the vine reacted to her touch, snaking around her limbs and torso, up around her throat, and entwining itself in her hair. It enveloped her, it became her, until I could see nothing but her black-orb eyes, glowing darkly inside the tangle of red-shot vine.
And then she let out a silent scream as she and the bloodleaf turned to glittering orange ember and drifting ash, leaving a cavernous space in the hedge and revealing an ancient door beneath it.
I raised shaking fingers to the rusted iron inlay. It was a mess of swoops and swirls. There was a corroded lock set in the aged wood, but I didn’t need a key; a soft push made the door give way. I took my first nervous step inside.