Page 35 of Her Blind Deception (The Dark Reflection #2)

Chapter Thirty-Five

M uted sunlight reached around the door and into the dark little room when I woke. I stretched, hissing at the stiffness in my neck and shoulders, then rolled my feet to the floor. I was going to get up, I was, but instead of rising I buried my face in my hands. My skin felt foreign, so rough and warm. I was glad I hadn’t seen any mirrors in the house.

When I finally emerged into the main room, I was greeted with the sight of Gwinellyn and Baba Yaga seated next to each other at the table, speaking with intent, quiet voices. They looked up when I entered.

‘I didn’t realise you’d be wanting to sleep your life away,’ Baba Yaga said. ‘If I did, I mightn’t have given up my bed.’ I didn’t reply. I didn’t have the energy. She huffed and got to her feet, pottering over to the fireplace. ‘If you go down to the hen house and collect eggs, we will have some breakfast.’

‘Of course,’ Gwin said, and I was relieved to see how steadily she rose from the chair, slowly but with none of the trembling limbs I’d seen the day before. I made to follow her.

‘Not you,’ Baba Yaga cut in, pointing at me. ‘You, sit.’

With a sigh, I did as I was told, and Gwinellyn left us alone. The witch peered into the cauldron over the fire.

‘Is she alright?’ I asked.

‘Her body will be. She must take the tea for a few more days to rebuild her blood supply. And she is in better spirits than you.’

I nodded, grateful we’d made it in time and I didn’t have her death on my hands. As I watched Baba Yaga, I tried to find the courage to ask her the questions I kept asking myself.

‘What’s your history with Draven?’ I finally began, watching her face closely for a reaction.

She stirred the pot steadily. ‘What makes you think I have one?’

‘The way you speak of him like you know him well.’

‘And how well do you know him, iaral?’

Not as well as I’d thought. But I didn’t want to admit as much to her. ‘He said something to me. About you reading the future.’

‘The future is not something so simple that it can be read. It bends around so many tiny choices. I see threads of possibility strung out, wrapping around people and their plans, their desires, their pains.’ She didn’t speak for several rotations of her spoon in the cauldron, and I had the sense that she was weighing her words, measuring them out like doses of her herbs to administer. ‘He came to me years ago,’ she said finally, ‘as a young man in possession of a magic he should never have been given. An angry halfling who had been betrayed by first his father’s people, then his mother’s. He’d been to Yoxvese before me, but they’ve long memories and know the harm bonding magic with humanity has done. They didn’t believe he should ever have been given it in the first place and they wouldn’t teach him. So he came to me.’

‘And you helped him?’

‘For a time.’

I processed this. I had so many questions, I hardly knew where to start. ‘There was something he said that made me think things didn’t end well between you,’ I began, remembering the way he’d looked when he’d realised she’d helped me tamper with the enchantment on the apple.

‘He was very charming until I wouldn’t give him what he wanted.’ She straightened and looked me in the face, her expression severe. ‘There is too much anger in that boy. Those who band together with him won’t know what they’re really following until it’s too late. Though, that is no business of mine. I refused him not for a concern about the destruction he would wreak, but because I am old and tired and I have no interest in taking sides in a war.’ Leaning back over the soup, she waved her hand though the air as though brushing off the heavy subject.

‘He wanted you to join him?’

‘I’m sure he is wishing he tried harder to persuade me now. His other plan seems to be twisting around, ready to bite him.’ She tapped her spoon against the side of the cauldron and hung it from the mantle.

I picked my next question carefully. ‘Something you told him made him come and find—’

Gwinellyn re-entered with a skirt full of eggs, and Baba Yaga turned to her immediately. ‘Ah ha! Perfect timing.’ She bustled over to ferry the eggs to her kitchen bench, and I had the distinct impression that this was a ploy to avoid the question I’d been halfway through asking.

‘Go and sit,’ the witch ordered Gwinellyn, directing her to the fireplace. ‘Rhiandra will make your tea and then we will eat.’

I didn’t argue with being ordered around again. I simply did as I was told. There was some relief in just following orders instead of having to give them. I couldn’t be blamed for the consequences if I didn’t make any decisions. When Gwinellyn had a mug in her hands, I returned to my chair, studying her as Baba Yaga clattered around the kitchen. It was good to see her looking lucid, her eyes clear and bright, but I didn’t like the anxious frown she wore as she looked back at me.

‘I made a deal,’ I said, answering the question she hadn’t asked when the silence became too sticky to bear. ‘With Draven. The one who made you jump.’ Her frown deepened, and I leaned forwards, suddenly bursting to tell her all of it, like I could somehow be forgiven if I confessed. ‘He gave me a magic mirror to hide the scars on my face, and I had to deliver three enchanted apples in return. The one I gave you was supposed to kill you, but I asked Baba Yaga to tamper with it so it would put you to sleep instead. I… I always intended to wake you.’

She dropped her head forwards, clasped her hands so tightly on her knees that I could see the whites of her knuckles through her skin. ‘That’s how my father died, wasn’t it? One of the apples was for him?’

I said nothing. I couldn’t get the words out.

‘It wasn’t your fault, though, was it?’ When her eyes met mine, they shone with tears beneath a brow crunched with determination. ‘ It was his. Draven’s.’ She pronounced the name with a hesitance, like it was sharp in her mouth.

I licked my lips, but my tongue felt as dry as cotton. ‘He gave me the apples—’

‘Not only that, though,’ she pressed. ‘You were under his control, weren’t you? The way I was when I climbed onto the parapet.’

‘Well, I don’t… I mean…’

Her expression was beseeching, almost desperate. I thought of his hands on me, of the insatiable hunger for him that lived and breathed in me, making me senseless, unable to think.

Tell yourself that. Does it make it easier to swallow?

‘Yes.’ I finished, changing tact, setting myself on a course that would sever me from that husband of mine more surely than my vows of revenge. ‘I was under enchantment. He was controlling me the whole time.’

Gwinellyn’s face remained grave, but she relaxed a little, some of the tension falling from her shoulders. She gave a small, resolute nod. ‘Then you can’t be held accountable for what you’ve done. It wasn’t your fault.’

‘It wasn’t the same as the way he forced you to jump,’ I amended. ‘That absolute control. I’ve never seen anything like that.’

‘But you lived with him for all that time. He couldn’t have done it so outright. You were married to him.’ She paled as she seemed to consider the implications of this and she laid a hand on my knee. ‘I can’t imagine… It must have been terrible.’

I want to watch you. Tell me how you like it.

If you’re so indifferent to me, tell me to stop.

Hate me while you come for me.

‘Yes,’ I said, my neck flushed with remembered heat. ‘Terrible.’

‘Enchantment, is it?’ Baba Yaga’s voice cut in, and she was regarding me with sharp eyes and a small, hard smile. ‘If only you’d said so the first time you came to visit me. I could have helped you defend yourself.’

‘If only,’ I muttered, shame lighting my face.

‘Lucky we know now then, eh?’ Her tone was patronising. ‘I’ll help you guard against it in future.’

‘Good idea,’ I muttered.

Even if Baba Yaga didn’t swallow my lies, Gwinellyn seemed satisfied with the answers I’d given her. I knew there would be more questions that I might have to answer, but for now she was content to leave the past alone. I spent the day helping the witch cook and clean and care for her chickens and her garden. She kept finding me things to do, and I was actually grateful for it. The focus on physical tasks kept my mind from spinning down thought paths I didn’t have the energy to face. We didn’t speak of the world beyond the clearing, and I tried to pretend there wasn’t one.

Any time Gwinellyn spent too long on her feet, she grew pale and breathless, so she sat in a chair and sorted seeds for most of the morning, but by midday Baba Yaga had harried her into the bedroom, and while the witch grumbled about giving up her bed for bones less than a quarter of her age, she checked on the girl frequently, bringing her a never-ending stream of stews and herbal concoctions.

In the late afternoon, the temperature dropped so dramatically that a sprinkle of snow began to fall. I’d never seen snow before. I felt like I should have found it a more compelling experience, but I only resented that it drove me back inside, where I had to stew about with nothing else to do. Baba Yaga hobbled back into the room after shutting her chickens away, her hand against the arch of her spine, her face scrunched up with pain.

‘I can do more for you,’ I said as she sank into the chair opposite. ‘If you need rest, just ask me and I’ll do more.’

‘It’s only the cold that makes me ache so. I’ll have plenty of rest soon.’ She sank into the cushions and closed her eyes. ‘Very soon,’ she repeated with a sigh of exhaustion that spoke of a long, hard life.

‘Go and sleep. I’m sure Gwinellyn won’t object to you sharing the bed.’

‘Not yet.’ Her eyes opened again, and she gave me a hard look, grinding her jaw back and forth, seeming displeased with what she saw. ‘You can’t avoid the future forever. We have much to discuss.’

‘Surely nothing that can’t wait until morning.’ I shifted under the scrutiny, folding my arms as though I could shield against whatever judgement she was making.

‘None of it can wait until morning. Fetch mugs. We’ll have tea.’

How quickly I’d grown used to taking orders from her. I did as she asked, spooning crushed herbs from the big jar and craving the smell of coffee as I did. I’d grown too pampered in my time at the palace, had enjoyed the array of foods on offer at every meal, with any delicacy I could dream up always only an order to the kitchens away. But coffee was imported from across the sea, or sometimes found its way from Myrshda in those rare caravans that made it across the Shifting Plains. I might never smell it again, let alone begin my every morning with it.

What would my life look like now? Was I doomed to hide out in the Yawn forever, relying on the protection of the old witch, paying for it with my service as a housemaid ?

At least there were no mirrors.

‘Come, girl, you move as fast as treacle,’ Baba Yaga called, and I bit down against a retort. I was too tired to argue with her, despite the bottomless sleep that had welcomed me the night before. It was the sort of tired that had nothing to do with the state of my body.

Ladling hot water from the pot perpetually bubbling over the coals, I handed her one of the mugs and sat to nurse my own silently. I watched bits of dried herbs bob around on the surface of the water and tried to find the will to even lift it to my lips. Maybe I could just sit here, in this chair, hot mug warming my hands forever, and never have to make another decision about what to do next. I was so tired of trying to decide what to do next.

‘This won’t do, iaral.’ The witch’s voice broke the silence. ‘There was still fire in you when you arrived. What has drowned it?’

‘I’ve spent my whole life trying to keep from being helpless,’ I said, not even looking up. ‘Everything I’ve done, and now I’m right back where I started. I have nothing. I don’t even have… have my face anymore.’

‘So we are back to self-pity, are we? Why don’t you stop wallowing in the mire of your own woe and consider that girl next door who has lost just as much, but because you took it from her. At least you are suffering the consequences of your own decisions.’

A part of me recognised the combative tone, but I didn’t rise to it. It only made me feel like I might cry again. Usually, I would have despised myself for such weakness. But I didn’t have the energy for even that.

We didn’t speak for a long time, and the crackling of the fire seemed to grow louder and louder. There was never any comfort in that sound for me, but that night it was somehow worse. It made me think of my nightmares, of a warm body at my back and a calming voice in the night, of a late kitchen visit and a different hot drink in my hands. All those moments, he had known he didn’t stop them burning me. He had looked me in the eyes, had kissed my lips, had held me tenderly and known.

Baba Yaga rose to her feet again, and she gently squeezed my shoulder as she shuffled past, but she seemed to have nothing else to say. Perhaps she could see that I was in no state to hear whatever it was she had wanted to discuss. She didn’t bid me goodnight, and I only knew she left the room by the sound of a door closing.

I finished my tea without tasting it—which was a blessing, really, given that Baba Yaga’s teas seemed to be universally awful—and leaned back into the chair to stare up at the roof, my thoughts tracing back through my memories, turning them over and over. When my eyelids became too heavy to stay open, I lived them all again in the dark quiet of my mind. Why had he found the binders? Why had he encouraged me to take vengeance on them? Did it amuse him, to know he was as much a villain as they were? That he was the one guiding my hand when I should have been turning the blade on him?

How seductively he’d told me to kill them. Have your vengeance. Defeat your nightmares.

How tenderly he’d washed the blood from my skin. You have to want it. And not just want it—enjoy it.

How readily he’d fucked me against the wall on our way out of the tower. I’m the one who can hold your self-interest, your ambition, your fear.

What a pack of lies.

I never saw your glamoured face. I only ever saw your scars.