Page 10

CHAPTER 10

Blue is the Eye

A mongst humans, James stood out like an exotic neighbor, a Ruhaven amongst the mundane and the ordinary.

But Bryn could never be mistaken.

He was something bred in and of Ruhaven. Mythical, like the gears churning in the sky, or the silky long-haired trees gliding through my fingertips.

In the doorway of his office, I could do nothing but stare. The photograph really hadn’t done him justice, but my imagination that day on the road had been painfully accurate.

Bryn stood in front of a stained-glass window, the bright colors of it playing rainbow hues over his crisp linen shirt. Hands made for the piano flicked through a stack of stapled papers, maybe exams. On the corner of his gleaming desk, a black coffee cup sat next to a wilted vase of roses—from a lover? Admirer?

Bryn probably didn’t lack for either.

His skin was white as milk, a kind of impossible porcelain that explained why, as Willow had once told me, women used to take arsenic. Whipped, golden moonlight—I couldn’t think of another color for his hair—fell in short waves to his ears. Angel-wing cheekbones swept to a wide, sculpted mouth of pale rose. His bottom lip glistened under the window light like he’d been biting it while marking papers.

Delicate, bone-china features and a firm, angular jaw gave him an aristocratic look. He was someone who suited this office, this university, someone probably well-accustomed to the length of his own nose.

Meanwhile, I felt like something the office cat had dragged in.

It was all the worse because I was still standing here in his doorway, spying on the man I needed answers from, breathing in a snowy scent that was either from him or the room.

I was lifting my hand, preparing for the most awkward knock of my life, when he froze. Stilled.

Stopped.

Knuckles whitened as he flattened his palm on the exams. A ripple rolled over his shoulders, shuddering down a body as tall and whip lean as a willow tree. He had to be at least six three, maybe four. Taller than Tye.

“Bryn?”

His nostrils flared, once, twice, and for the first time in my life, I think I regretted not wearing perfume.

Then his head snapped up.

I took a fumbling step back.

The papers on his desk fluttered, like they, too, could feel it. A pencil rolled with a clatter that seemed piercingly loud until it plopped onto the carpet.

His eyes . They were like the lake back home—depthless and cold. Empty. Aching.

“ Rowan ?”

I shivered at his voice, at the otherness of him, at the memory of how far I’d sunk before my twin had dragged me out. How the stinging cold felt wrapped around my ankles, how the water had been black and lightless. How I’d imagined all the leeches gathering at my toes, yet felt nothing. “I—yes?”

“Come inside, Rowan.”

His brisk tone snapped me out of it, and I glanced down the hallway towards James, but the corridor was empty. So he wasn’t going to help me.

Don’t mention Ruhaven , that’s what he’d said. But how could I talk about Willow without bringing up the Gate?

Still standing in the doorway, I asked a simpler question, “How do you know me?” Though Bryn seemed like the kind of man who would know, someone Ruhaven would have plucked out to be all hers—so opposite of me in every way. I tried to picture him next to Willow, and that image suited a lot more.

“I know all Ruhavens in the Ledger .” Or he thought he did.

Avoiding his eyes, I stepped inside.

The office was like an overcast beach, all sandy beiges and gray blues and seaweed greens. The only bright color in the entire space was a mustard yellow—and that was in a cabinet of dead moths . Even the binders on the desk were boring, empty, the dividers in clear plastic with white labels and black marker. Sterile, like hospital tiles that click-clicked under black shoes.

Busts of some Roman emperor, or maybe it was Greek—my sister would have known—sat next to a rocking chair. Certificates hung in dreary but likely expensive frames. An award for portraiture, for oil, the latest from three years ago for something called Plein Air in Ireland.

Before he’d been exiled.

I stopped feet from his desk.

Stiff and tall, he stood at attention behind it, one hand bunched in a fist at his side, the other still pressing into the stack of papers. The collar of his blazer, a striking royal blue, brushed his tensed jaw.

Definitely six four.

“I did not expect to see you here,” Bryn said in an accent coated with musical German. “In my office.”

“Sorry,” I said immediately, shivering from him or the lifeless room. “I can make an appointment. It is Bryn, right? Bryn Stornoway?”

The corners of his lips tugged upward, like maybe I’d mispronounced his name. Probably butchered it with my accent. But the movement revealed his only flaw—a mouth just a bit too wide for the face.

“Do you wish to sit?”

I eyed the hard, wooden rocking chair and the breakable art pieces beside it. “No, but thank you.”

A clock tick-ticked on the wall behind him. Air whistled through an ancient heater. Traffic puttered along the street below.

I cleared my throat. “Bryn, I’m here about my sister, about Willow.”

His face betrayed nothing. No flicker of recognition of what had once been my entire world.

“I take it you have seen Ruhaven?” he asked instead.

“I—yes. Tye showed me.” He stiffened at the name of my recruiter. “James told me about the infection that’s been spreading to Ruhavens,” I said, lowering my voice. “I saw your research, the books in your old room in Naruka. James said you might have more answers, ones that he couldn’t give me. And—” he waited in that utter stillness, “—and James said you’d been infected once as well. That you survived, unlike the others.” Unlike my sister.

His eyebrow rose so slowly, I expected to look up and find a stage manager lifting it. “You are here because of my encounter?”

Encounter ? That was an odd way to describe a disease. Maybe he meant to add “ with death” at the end. “Yes, that and your research, your notes, anything you can tell me.”

“Why?”

Silence hung as heavy as the thick drapery.

How could I move on without knowing the truth behind Willow’s death? Was it an aneurysm like the doctors claimed, or had something from the Gate infected her? If she’d never visited Ruhaven, how could a connection to the Gate cause her death miles away in L’Ardoise?

I took a breath. “Because my twin died three years ago.” I hated that word. Died . One syllable. Clean and painfully to the point, when her death had been anything but.

“Your sister died from an aneurysm,” Bryn stated, not a question.

I answered anyway. “Yes, in L’Ardoise.” Long before she’d had a chance for James to recruit her.

He reached for something behind his desk. “Yet your twin is not Ruhaven, should not have been… infected , as you say.”

If I admitted what I knew, that it wasn’t me in the Ledger , he’d tell James. Then what?

“James doesn’t know enough about the disease to tell me either way. Doesn’t know if there are any symptoms, any signs, that might indicate it’s connected,” I said, wetting my lips. His eyes tracked the movement. “So when I discovered you were not only researching the disease, but survived —no, were the only one to survive—I thought maybe you could tell me if there was something to look for—tell me if…”

I trailed off when I saw what he’d been reaching for.

A cane.

I dropped my eyes as Bryn limped around the desk.

“I take it, by your reaction,” Bryn drawled, “that James did not inform you of the result of my infection .”

I stared at the cane. “No,” I managed. “He never said—he said you survived, but…I didn’t know.”

The three clocks in the room ticked in unison, so hauntingly familiar to the constant drone at Naruka.

As Bryn moved past me, a hint of snow followed, though he made not a sound until he gripped the door I’d come through and closed it with a soft click .

His pants were ironed to knife-edge pleats, his linen shirt tucked in at a cinched waist. But the cane was even higher quality than the clothes, with symbols carved from the staff’s curved handle to the end biting into a plush rug.

Tick. Tick-tock.

Bryn turned with all the slowness of a minute hand.

I didn’t meet his eyes, but I felt them all the same—a wintery shimmer that raked down and over my cardigan, lingering on each loose thread and embroidered patch, sweeping a path to my work boots, to where my toes curled inside.

Inspection complete, his eyes found my face again—my nose tingling where they landed. “Tell me, Rowan, what do you know of Ruhaven?”

How to answer? “Just what James explained to me,” I said vaguely, noting the single trail of dirt marring his creamy carpet from where I’d entered.

“I am asking of your own experience.”

James’s warning dinged in my head, so loud I wondered if his power didn’t extend beyond Ruhaven to more than just scones.

“I’ve only been through the Gate a few times,” I admitted. “At first, not voluntarily. How would I know if the aneurysm killed—”

Bryn straightened off the door. “Voluntarily?”

“Yes. I was wondering if there are symptoms or—”

“No. What was involuntary?”

“It doesn’t matter. About Willow—”

“Rowan,” he said with all the false calm of a tidal wave approaching shore. “I am aware that James is, even now, slinking outside this office. That he has likely warned you against mentioning Ruhaven, or anything that may reference Naruka and the Gate that lies there. Am I correct?”

I might have wondered how he knew that if the answer wasn’t written all over him, in every inch that said—no, screamed —that Bryn wasn’t part of this world.

I nodded.

Bryn took a step closer. “Answer my question. Was it Tye that showed you the Gate involuntarily ?”

Heat crept up my neck until I was sure, even with my bronze skin, my face burned. “Yes.”

As if in confirmation, his eyes flickered over my cheeks, then up again. “And the other time?” he asked coldly.

I forced away the image of Tye. “The second time, when I still wasn’t convinced of Ruhaven, James forced me in again. Then I believed.”

Bryn circled the room, his cane padding softly into the beige carpet. “Yet you are here, looking for answers for your sister, instead of experiencing the Gate, when at these early stages, it is important to visit frequently. To build up a tolerance, else you shall not be able to witness the memories for more than a few minutes.”

Her memories.

“I don’t need to. I’m not going back.”

He stopped, and the look he aimed my way could have boiled molasses. “Not going back? Why? Where are you going?”

“Home,” I said, hugging my cardigan against the sudden chill. “To L’Ardoise.”

Bryn took another step forward. “You are leaving to pack, then? So you may return to Naruka?”

Why was he looking at me like that? “No,” I said slowly, deliberately. “I’m moving back home—permanently.”

His shoulders went rigid before he turned in a slow circle, forcing me to pivot. “You would so easily turn away from what is, in every sense, an honor and duty that is afforded a rare few?” His perfect lips tightened in disapproval. “Why?”

I scanned the award-studded office. Of course he’d been enthralled by Ruhaven—with the idea of someone wanting him to be found, wanting him to witness what awaited up in Naruka’s mountains.

“Because Ruhaven isn’t real,” I offered at last, mixing half-truths and lies. “It’s just memories. But it’s not here, not reality, it’s some…anomaly. A fantasy for someone else.” Even if I wanted it to be mine.

He blinked at me, thick, golden eyelashes shuttering over painfully blue eyes, and this close, I could see the faintest smattering of golden freckles over his nose, barely visible. I counted the imperfections like they were a currency I could exchange for my own fragile ego.

“An anomaly ?” Bryn repeated, voice going dark, and I blinked at the sudden change. “A hallucination? A fickle story? Or perhaps a sickness that has spread to your mind?”

“No, I—”

“Then is Ruhaven a cult? A raving religion, a vision, a fairytale for the Irish?” he whispered in a low rapid-fire until he was all but standing over me. Until my neck hurt from staring up into a face that was no longer amused, no longer patient. “A bedtime story for children, a madman’s ramblings, a fever dream?”

I stumbled back, nearly falling over a marble bust before righting myself on Caesar’s nose.

“Well, which is it, Rowan?” Bryn demanded. “Since you have come here to disrupt my life for a thing of which you do not even believe.”

My heart beat wildly in my chest. Fear, anticipation, nerves. I wanted to throw up. “Whichever.”

Bryn’s eyes solidified to steel. “Get out,” he said softly.

What ?

Disgust curled his upper lip before he turned away from me and circled his desk.

My breath came out in embarrassingly harsh gasps. I hadn’t done anything to deserve that. “I’ll go if you tell me whether there were any symptoms—”

“Why?” Bryn cut me off.

“Why?” I repeated, throat dry.

He flicked through the papers on his desk with quick, jerky movements. “Yes. Why do you care whether Willow was targeted with a disease from Ruhaven?”

Why? Why?

Because I should have felt the aneurysm that killed Willow. Should have felt it right here in this space below my heart that was now empty, and hungry, and hollow.

But I hadn’t.

Despite being my twin, my mirror, the closest person I’d ever known or would know, I’d slept soundlessly while she died. We were supposed to have a connection. Something that would wake me. Something that would tell me my own twin was dead .

“Because she’s my sister. My twin.” The best of both of us.

Behind the crossbars of the window, the sun wilted into the clouds. “I fail to understand why you would seek answers for a thing you do not believe in. That despite having no belief at all in Ruhaven, you have chosen to travel here to interrogate me about a disease born of Naruka’s Gate.”

Slow rain began to pound the window.

“To ask that I provide you, a stranger, with intricate details of a terrifying moment of my life, so that you may discern whether this part of the fairy tale concerns you. Am I correct?”

It wasn’t true, but it wasn’t entirely a lie either. “Bryn, I’m sorry about what happened to you, but—”

“You cannot be, as you do not possess any true concept of what did happen to me, Rowan.” His eyes flickered once. “Or what I have chosen to give up.”

Despite the dismissal in his voice, I latched on to that one word— chosen . Chosen, not forced? Not exiled?

Bryn continued to say nothing, looking like he could exist in this void long after my bones had withered to dirt.

“What did you give up?”

His eyes roamed over me—not like the men at construction sites I’d worked on, but not brotherly like James either. It had the frightening quality of an owl sizing up the chain locking it to its handler. “We do not know each other well enough for me to answer that,” Bryn said, dismissing me. “Nor for me to answer questions about what has left me a cripple.”

He pointed to the door.

My heart hammered against my ribs. Maybe I’d messed this up. Maybe. But I owed this to Willow, owed everything good I’d ever had to her.

So I steeled my spine, planted my hands on his desk, and tried a different tack. “How does your roommate know me?”

For the first time, I’d surprised him. Not in a good way.

His eyes went to crystal slits. “You should not have spoken to Abby.”

“You should have answered James’s calls.”

Bryn’s hand curled on the desk. “Yes, I see I have chosen unwisely, as not doing so has brought you to my place of work. However, you are mistaken about Abby. She does not know you, and I do not appreciate James interrogating those in my life.”

“Then tell me if there’s any sign of this disease.”

“Attack.”

Attack ?

“Wait, what? What do you mean? Do you think you were—were targeted with it?”

He stared down at me, dwarfing my height. “Not in the way you mean.”

“Bryn, if it—”

“— they —”

“—killed my sister, and you know something, I’m not—well, I’m not leaving your office.”

There. Let him throw me out. Though he could probably manage it, even with the leg.

His eyes flickered to simmering fire before banking. “You should leave— now , Rowan.”

“It’s Roe.”

Bang.