Bloodleaf (Bloodleaf #1)(78)

I slipped out before any more was said; I had an appointment to keep.

Zan’s kisses lingered on my lips. Waterfall. Midnight.





?30




I had not returned to my hut since Forest Gate had fallen, and the earthquake had left it in a shambles. It was as if someone had lifted the structure and vigorously shaken it. The window was dashed to pieces, the brick fireplace was nothing more than a pile of rubble, and bits of broken tonic and herbal bottles covered the scene like colored glass confetti.

I searched the mess by candlelight, finding Kellan’s blue cloak first, then my empty satchel. Beneath it lay the ribbon-tied parcel that held my wedding dress. I pulled the ribbon and watched it flutter out one last time, marveling at how faint the bloodstains were, and how very like Kate it was to attempt to clean it. She was always trying to save the unsavable.

I kept the black ribbon from the parcel—?it could still prove useful in communicating with Conrad—?and laid the dress out in the center of the pile of debris I’d once called my home. Then I tossed my candle onto it and watched it go up in flame.

The fire spread rapidly, climbing up the curtains and into the thatch roof in a matter of minutes. I watched it start to cave from several yards away, with a near-empty satchel on my shoulder and Kellan’s cloak on my back. But despite the heat from the burning hut and the warmth of the cloak, cold crept slowly up my neck and across my limbs. A feeling of dread came over me as a mist began to form between me and the fire, knitting itself together in slow, fitful lurches. The cold deepened.

When the apparition was fully formed, she was almost unrecognizable—?a haggard shade of herself.

“No, Aren. Not now. Please, not right now.” I begged her. “It’s almost over. Dedrick is dead; the collusion between Domhnall and the Tribunal has been uncovered. I’m going to get my brother, and then he and I will escape with Zan . . .” I twisted Zan’s ring around my finger. “We’ve almost won. If someone is going to die, I don’t want to see it. Please don’t . . .”

She dragged herself closer, clamping her frigid, bony fingers around my wrist like iron shackles, sucking every last scrap of warmth from me and plunging me headfirst into a sputtering, shifting vision.

An exchange of rings.

The flash of a knife.

A girl in a swirling snowstorm, sobbing—?me. Leaning over the broken body of the boy I so desperately loved.

Blood on the snow.

My head on his chest. A ring on his finger, his ring on mine. His dark, dark hair stark against the terrible white storm.

Blood on the snow. His blood.

“No,” I said, tearing my hand away. The storm and the snow and the blood disappeared. “I’ve been misled by your visions before. I won’t let you take this—?take him—?from me.” I tried to dismiss her with a decisive turn on my heel.

I didn’t get far. The ground groaned and convulsed beneath me, forcing me to my knees. Another aftershock, timed as if to remind me of my insignificance. When it stopped, Aren was advancing on me again. I shrank from her expanding shadow. Gone was the regal queen I’d grown up with; in her place loomed a twisted wraith, an unholy amalgamation of vein and vine and bone. She reached through the black ribbons of her hair with thorny fingertips, which skittered spider-like across my cheek and around my skull. When she had my head cradled in her hands, she drove her thumbs into my eyes.

I cried out, first from cold and pain and then in anguish as she forced me to watch it all again. Over and over. Rings. Knife. Death. Rings. Knife. Death.

Blood on the snow.

Blood on the snow.

Blood on the snow.

Firebird.

It was just a fleeting glimpse, a mere flash in the procession of more frightening pictures, but it was unmistakable: at his death, Zan is wearing my charm.

I hardly noticed when Aren removed her spiny thumbs from my eye sockets and withdrew; the awful images continued their cavalcade without her. I slumped where she left me, racked by full-body shivers despite the waves of heat rippling from my hut.

She wanted me to see, and now I could see nothing else. When I tried to imagine Zan’s eyes now, there was no more green clarity to them; they were vacant and staring. I couldn’t think of his lips without envisioning them blue and breathless and cold. I wouldn’t be able touch him again without revisiting the way his body looked as I knelt over it in grief. I’d burned my hut to raze my past, but as it was eaten away by flame, it was my future I saw crumbling in the embers. My future with Zan.

Blood on the snow.

Aren had made her message clear.

Leave him, or he dies.



* * *



I waited on the wall for three hours, pacing and practicing what I was going to say, but when I turned and finally saw Zan approaching me in the dark, lit by a shard of moonlight, my composure cracked.

“This is where I first knew I loved you,” he said as he drew near. “Watching the lengths you went to for my people, for me . . . feeling the strength of your spirit in that spell . . . How could I not?” He reached out and tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “I never dared to let myself hope that you might . . . that you could ever possibly . . .” He trailed off, flushing.

Stars save me. I wanted to kiss him, cling to him, melt into him and into this wall and become stone so I’d never have to let him go. But the minute I let those thoughts into my mind, I was confronted again by gruesome images of his death.