Bloodleaf (Bloodleaf #1)(49)

Rain was leaking through old cracks in the walls and spilling from thin lancet windows onto a mosaic of the triquetra knot.

At the foot of the stairs I saw her again, the ghost woman whose body was too broken to identify. She glanced at me over her shoulder and then moved up the stairs, revealing a painting behind her on the wall. Though age had worn much of it away, I could make out three figures: a woman between two men—?one with dark hair standing in the light and one with light hair standing in the dark.

The paintings continued panel by panel, telling Aren’s story alongside my ascent up the stairs. Black shadows slipped out from a tear in the barrier between the material and spectral planes, each one more grotesque and frightening than the last.

Aren and her brothers followed the ley lines to the spot, which sat in an ancient basin, next to a fjord, in the midst of a thatch of wild red roses. There they had joined hands to cast the spell that would seal up the hole forever.

As I neared the top of the tower, more and more of the panels were faded to obscurity. I could make nothing out until the second-to-last panel, which showed Cael with a knife in his hands and Aren dying in Achlev’s arms. At first it looked as if Achlev was wrapping the rose vines around her, but a second glance showed me the truth—?the vines were becoming part of her. As they overtook her, the red roses became pure white.

Instead of dying, she had been transformed into bloodleaf.

I was at the top of the tower now, looking up at an overhead door. Not unlike the entrance, it was aged and ineffectual. I pushed it open, emerging onto a platform in the rainy gray daylight.

I turned to find a huge sculpture of a woman, rimmed by a dim halo, looking down at me. A luneocite knife, not unlike the one I had in my pocket, was locked in her stony hands. I knew her face well now. My ancestress. The Harbinger. Aren.

I felt cold pricking along my arms in the dreary drizzle, and turned. The ghost woman was standing at the brink of the tower platform, beside the crumbling parapet. She reached out her hand; she wanted to show me how she’d died. Too tired be scared, I reached back.

More shocking than the cold was the jarring transition from day to night, from my perspective to hers in the last moments of her life. In this echo of the past, I had no eyes or ears of my own. I saw what she saw, I heard what she heard.

She was speaking to another woman in the same spot where we were now standing. “I can’t watch him suffer anymore,” she was saying. “Every day he gets worse. I can feel him slipping away, Sahlma. And I can’t let him go . . . I won’t . . .”

Sahlma? I recognized her now, the healer from town. Younger, but with the same pernicious scowl. “Best to let nature take its course,” Sahlma said. “Bloodleaf is both foul and fickle; even if I do manage to collect one of those petals—?almost impossible to do; they disintegrate the moment you touch them—?what if it doesn’t work? Then you’ll have died for nothing.”

The woman was looking down now, and I could see a ring on each of her slender hands. One was a spread-winged raven, the Silvis signet. The other was a clear white stone, cut into a thousand triangular facets. “If I don’t do it, then Zan will die.” She looked up at Sahlma. “A mother should never have to be without her child.” Then she slipped each of the rings off her fingers and placed them in the center of Sahlma’s palm. Trembling, she said, “After you give him the petal and he’s better, will you make sure he gets these? Will you tell him that I love him? Promise me.”

“Don’t do it, my lady. Don’t.”

She climbed onto the edge of the parapet and looked out across the expanse one last time. The city—?the entire city—?was built in the shape of the triquetra knot, I saw through her eyes. Each gate was a point. The lines of the city streets and the trees and the shape of the fjord all made up the curved swoops of the knot, contained within the circle of the great wall. We stood high above it all in the exact center, protected by the castle on one side and the fjord on the other.

Then she looked down at the carpet of bloodleaf far, far below. Taking a deep breath, she gave Sahlma one last look from over her shoulder and said, “Better hurry.”

Then we turned and leaped over the side, she and I together.

But before I fell, two arms went around me, throwing me out of the vision and away from the ledge. I pitched backwards, screaming as I hurtled through the disintegrating door and down the stairs behind it, entangled with another body. I felt my ribs and head and arms and legs crack on the unforgiving stone until we crashed together onto a wide stair and slammed to a stop against the wall. I rolled over, dizzy with pain, and saw Zan.

His eyes were glassy, his face covered with a thin layer of sweat. He looked wild.

“Zan? What’s going on? What—?”

He was clutching his chest, each gasp a knife scraping against stone, sharp and metallic and desperate. “Don’t. Jump. Please.”

“What?” I looked from his shaking body to the square of light of the tower overlook, and knew. He’d saved me. And at great cost to himself.

“Zan? Zan!” Nathaniel was scrambling up the stairs behind Zan, frantic and stricken. “Is he all right? He saw you going up, and he ran. I tried to stop him, but he pushed me.” Zan, trying to stand, had collapsed and was lying on his side, his breathing a piercing staccato. Nathaniel said, “It’s his heart. I don’t know what possessed him to—?he knows his limits. He knew he couldn’t make it all the way up here, or he’d be in trouble. He did it anyway.”