Lakesedge (World at the Lake's Edge #1)(43)

Everyone’s voices fall to silence. Arien stares at me wordlessly as Clover takes my hand and holds it gently between her own. Tears prickle at the corners of my eyes. The candles at the altar shift and blur.

“I can help you,” I tell them. “I can help with the ritual.”

Silence stretches as I search for how to explain what I’ve done. There’s so much I’ve kept hidden that I can only think to go back to the very start of it. Before the dark water in my room, before the voice that asked my name.

“When our parents died of winter fever, the lord burned our house. He meant to burn everything the sickness had touched. I thought he would burn me, because I’d been in the house with the fever.” I look at Arien. “I thought he would burn you.”

Arien doesn’t remember, I know. He was too small. But when I close my eyes, I’m back there again. Arien and me, lost in the mess and chaos of the epidemic that swept through our village. The lord with a cloth tied across his mouth and a torch in his hand.

Clover touches her fingers against my shoulder. “What did you do?”

“I took Arien and I ran away. We followed the road out of the village. We’d never been so far from home before. The farthest I’d walked was from our cottage to the village altar. When I turned back and looked behind us, I could see the light from the fires. I could smell the smoke.”

It returns to me now. The ash in the air, how the flames painted the night sky in a wash of sickly orange. The weight of Arien in my arms—I’d had to carry him because he was too small to walk. I tried to put him on my back, tied up in my shawl, the way our mother had done.

“You must have been in Farrowfell,” Florence says solemnly. “I remember hearing about that, how everyone died and they burned the village. You went into the woods, didn’t you?”

I nod. Summer heat fills the twilight air, but I shiver, chilled by memories of an endless road beneath the winter moonlight. Of nowhere to go but deeper into the trees.

“It was so cold.” I glance toward Arien. “And you were so heavy. I walked and walked, and the woods went on, and we were lost.”

His expression darkens. “Then what happened?”

“The Lord Under.” I look down at my hands. “He came for me.”

Florence touches her fingertips to her heart and draws them slowly across her chest. She shakes her head. Her eyes are fixed on the altar.

“I didn’t know the name for him then. He was just a figure who appeared through the mist. All I wanted was for Arien and me to be back in our cottage, by the fireplace. I wanted my mother’s honey tea. I wanted my patchwork quilt. I wanted to be home again. But our cottage was gone. Our family was gone.” I take a breath and rub my hand across my face. “And so, I asked him to spare me. I asked him to show us the way out of the woods. He was silent for a long time. Then he asked, ‘What would you give, to make it so?’”

Clover’s eyes, behind her glasses, are bright. She looks at me with a shocked, protective fury. “What did you give to him?”

I hold out my shaking, earth-gritted hands to show them my upturned palms. “I gave him my magic.”

Arien sucks in a breath. “But you don’t—You said you didn’t—”

“I didn’t even know that I was an alchemist. I thought I had nothing.” I had my cloak, and my shawl, and my boots. The meager sum of my small, untidy life. “But then the Lord Under told me to hold out my hands. When I did, he touched me, and the magic woke up.”

At the memory, heat pools in my palms. I can feel how it once was, rather than the remnants I now have. When the Lord Under stroked my hands, the magic was sunlight under my skin.

“He took my hand, and together we walked through the forest. After a long time we came out onto a road. The Lord Under laid Arien down at the edge of the trees. And then—”

“You were alive,” Arien says. “And your magic was gone. Except—it’s not.”

“It was gone. I don’t understand how, or why, it’s still here. My magic belongs to him. What if using it again means I’m still indebted?”

“Well.” Florence looks at the altar thoughtfully, where the icon is illuminated by candlelight. She runs her fingers over her heart again. “Your bargain had clear terms. You didn’t deceive him; you gave your magic. But that power comes from the Lady. It’s woven through everything. Maybe it was so woven through you that he couldn’t take it all.”

“That makes sense,” Clover says. “We’re all made by the Lady, and her magic is part of us, even people without the ability to use that power for alchemy. The Lord Under had to leave these traces behind, because otherwise you wouldn’t even be alive.” She touches her fingertips to my palm. A lopsided smile crosses her face. “I want to see.”

She strokes across my heartline, the same way that Rowan did, but no light sparks.

“I don’t really know how to control it,” I say.

“What did you do before?”

“It just happened with Arien when he was casting the spell.” I fold my hand closed. “And Rowan, when he touched me.”

Clover arches a brow. “Was that before or after you wore his clothes?”

“It was a cloak. I borrowed it.” Heat creeps over my face. “It’s not like I undressed him.”