Page 22

CHAPTER 22

In Painter’s Light

I was like the slugs that skidded over Naruka’s mildew walls and dried out in the rare sun.

And now I’d upset—wounded—the one person who’d tried to help me from the moment I stepped foot in Ireland.

I’d smeared their entire belief system under my ugly shoes. Then I—this caused a line of embarrassment to flame up within me—I’d actually gone to Norway and accused a cripple of lying and maybe even injuring himself.

Slug? No, I was a speck of ant.

So I spent the next week avoiding the Gate, avoiding everyone, and cleaned the chimneys as my personal penance. My clothes were blackened with irreparable damage that I wore like a convict’s chains.

At night, I slept fitfully, with dreams of Willow, James, and Essie all mixed up into one, with the grand finale of Nereida jumping off a massive cliff for the Fall.

What did I say to James? That I wished I was Essie for him? Or that I just wished I was someone for anyone, like I used to be for Willow?

Now I was no one. I wasn’t even Nereida.

When the chimneys were so clean even Bryn would eat off them, I moved to the gutters. I’d roped in Tye to help me because I needed the reassurance there was at least one person who could still stand me here.

“Ya know, I kinda thought you’d have a lot more questions about the Fall,” Tye mused as he grabbed a fistful of weeds.

Up on the roof, the wind slapped hot color into Tye’s cheeks, and he somehow suited the rare blast of sun today, with his plaid jacket thick enough to withstand the October wind.

“I made a few notes. A number of journals mentioned it. I didn’t know what it was before.”

He squinted from the sun. “Look, you don’t gotta worry about it now. It might be years away—twenty, thirty, could be tomorrow too. But the thing is, this is all normal for James and them. He grew up in the Gate. Ain’t nothing that scares him when sometimes I think it oughta. Ya know?”

“Yeah,” I said lamely. But James was scared—of not finding Essie.

Tye scratched his beard thoughtfully. “I saw someone make the Fall once, ‘bout seven years ago. He heard the call at the end of the memories and up the mountain he went.”

“Heard the call? What, like some dinner bell?”

Tye chuckled, deep and throaty, and tossed another handful of hogweed over his shoulder. “Something like that, yeah. I don’t know what it sounds like, ‘cause I ain’t never been near the end.”

“But if I go to the Gate when the memories end, what actually happens?”

Tye stabbed his glove into the eaves trough and ripped the weeds out by the roots. “Nothing,” he said at last. “‘Cause that’s what happens to ya, Roe. You ain’t you anymore. Your soul gets reborn some thousand years from now, or however long it takes your energy to get back to Tallah. And then you’re what? Some fucker cleanin’ toilets, maybe.”

I smiled a little. “Ruhaven doesn’t have toilets.”

“Ya, don’t I know it. But ya know what I’m saying. You ain’t you. No memories, no ‘hey, thanks, past life, for makin’ that sacrifice.’ You’re just nothin’.”

James didn’t think so, though. He’d give it all up for a chance for Essie and him, if she was here.

What had Nereida thought before her soul made the crossing? Had she wondered who she might be reborn as, and whether they’d ever remember her? Was that why the memories existed at all? Maybe they were a kind of thank you to what had been, but then, why allow us to make the Fall?

“But what did you see ?” I pressed. “During the Fall?”

Tye sighed long and deep. “I watched them disappear, watched Ruhaven steal them back,” he said bitterly. “Their soul is stripped from their body, and through whatever damn connection exists between Tallah and here, it makes its way back. Then it’s someone else with your soul.”

“Isn’t it mine still?” Or Willow’s? Would it be hers that was sent back? If it took your soul?

“Technically, yeah, but who cares when ya won’t remember who ya were?”

“Rowan?”

I didn’t need Tye’s annoyed sigh to tell me who stood below, but I slid my goggles over my head anyway, and glanced down.

Where the sunlight had given Tye a hearty glow, it had a different effect on Bryn. His skin appeared even paler than usual, his hair nearly white as the light simply melted off him.

Did he know about James and Essie? That James wanted me to be her?

“Are you certain it is safe to be up there?” Bryn asked, blinking back the light from his eyes. “The ladder is rotted, and the roof as well.”

Tye guffawed beside me. “Don’t ya ever get tired of cluckin’ around here all the time, Stornoway? Go haunt the attic.”

“I prefer other excitement.” He held up a familiar paper bag. “Is this for me, Rowan?”

I scratched my cheek. “Yeah, I—I’m sorry about the Gate, and the lunch I missed.”

Unbothered by what was likely the worst apology he’d ever heard, Bryn withdrew the sandwich until it hung limply from his hand. “You are not attempting some revenge by hiding chicken in it?”

Tye cocked his hip. “Why don’t ya toss that on up here for the real men, huh?”

“I don’t think real men turn into creatures in a Gate in the mountains,” I said dryly, earning a small smile from Bryn.

“Indeed, Rowan. I came by to ask if you wished for me to anchor you from within the Gate, if you are ready now.”

“What?” Tye barked, head whipping to me. “So just ‘cause ya don’t want us to hear a few moans, you’re letting Stornoway—”

“Tye,” Bryn interrupted as the wind stung my burning cheeks. “It is quite safe.”

Tye’s face went a shade of puce that the sun definitely hadn’t given him. But whatever silent battle they were having was lost when Tye grumbled, “I don’t like it.” Like James, he seemed to give in to Bryn’s demand.

I patted Tye’s shoulder. “I’ll be back for dinner.”

“Yeah? As long as you ain’t cookin’ it, I’m happy. Otherwise, ya can just stay up in those woods a little longer.”

I laughed as Bryn limped toward the forest.

Then Tye said quietly, “Roe, let’s talk tonight, okay? Wanna talk to ya ‘bout something.”

My stomach lurched. Was this about what I’d said to James?

But I said, “Sure, Tye,” with as much conviction as I could muster, and crawled down the ladder.

Somehow, I had to run to catch up. When the forest loomed, Bryn was already a pale shadow limping between the moss- covered trees. Weeks of rain had dragged up every critter hiding in the woods. Slugs oozed over the grass, worms peeked under logs, and spiders dried off their soaking webs. Willow would have hated it.

We walked in silence, with Bryn eating the sandwich I’d made him, not talking, not touching, until Bryn gripped my elbow and pulled me up the last step to the Gate.

“Thanks, I’m fine,” I said quickly.

“Rowan, I was not raised to let you trip over rocks,” he answered mildly, but released me. “Though it is preferential to be walking beside you and not chasing your shadow through the woods for once,” he mused.

I huffed a reluctant laugh as the light over the Kerry hills draped over Bryn. It wouldn’t set for hours, but it was low enough to turn the trees a dark black, twinkle off my eyelashes, and when it disappeared behind a tree, the world looked almost blue.

With a careful shrug, Bryn slid the knapsack he wouldn’t let me carry off his shoulders and dropped it between the oaks. “Are you comfortable sharing a blanket?”

Sharing a— oh , for the Gate.

I scratched at my throat. “Sure, yeah.”

I itched at my oversized wool sweater, wiped the dirt from my thrift-shop jeans. Then I stopped myself. This wasn’t a date. Bryn was doing me a favor. And after I’d made him bound through the woods “ like a gazelle .”

As he stooped to unroll a striped blanket, I said, “Um, thanks for doing this, anchoring us.”

Bryn struck a match, lit the oil lantern, and strung it on the rope above. Candlelight flickered shadows over all the interesting shapes in his face. “I promised you I would,” he said simply. “Have you and James come to terms with the truth of the Ledger ?”

I kicked at a stick. So he had heard. “I don’t know what I can say to him. I’m not her, and I can’t make it so that I am. There’s nothing else I can offer.”

Bryn snapped the lantern shut. “You could be his sister, Rowan.”

No. That I could never be—wasn’t. But maybe I could understand what I hadn’t before. “What exactly is a mate?” I asked, grabbing the other end of the tarp he’d unraveled, and tugging the rope through the two corner holes. The sky gave a flicker of warning, proving Bryn had been right to bring this for the rain.

He lifted his end, looping it around the trees, then adjusted the height when I couldn’t reach as high. “There is no word for a mate here,” he replied, tightening the cord in his fist. “But it is like a Tether, in that you are bound to another. Tallah is a planet which thrives on exchanges of energy—Tethers, the Gate, Marks—and a mate is yet another type of energy transfer, a binding,” he explained, once we’d secured the tarp as a roof.

“But the difference is it’s…” I searched for a word that didn’t make my neck heat. “Romantic,” I finished. Not like a Tether that most Ruhavens would never meet.

Bryn’s mouth quirked. “Indeed. In the case of James, his mate is also his bonded spirit, his Mark.”

I thought of the Azekiel. “Will Nereida’s Mark be her mate as well?”

He rolled out another blanket. “As I understand, she does not have a bonded spirit yet, so it is theoretically possible. However, it need not be the case.”

“Is it normal for mates, like James, to never marry? Never be with anyone but Essie?” Would I be expected to go along with this if Nereida fell in love with a blade of grass?

Bryn’s hands clenched on the blanket. “Yes, that is to be expected,” he said shortly.

I sank back on my haunches. That might explain why James wanted so desperately to find Essie here, if he truly believed this was some promise he couldn’t break. Because while Ruhaven may have felt real, it wasn’t actually real. “Why doesn’t James find someone here? Instead of living in a dream?”

I flinched when Bryn’s eyes flashed. “Is that all Ruhaven is to you, Rowan? A dream?” He pinned me with his gaze. So this is how the dead moths in his office felt. “Perhaps you do not need to visit the Gate at all then, if that is what you believe.”

I forced myself to hold his stare. “What is it to you, Bryn?”

His lips prickled on an exhale, his breathing unsteady and quick. The wind tossed a strand of blond-gold over his left eye and I tensed, preparing for that sudden change I’d witnessed in Oslo.

But he drew himself together, draining the rush of energy like a squeezed sponge.

“It was ,” Bryn said evenly, “my life.”

Then he shook the blanket and gestured for me to lie back.

I could see how Bryn might lose himself in Ruhaven. In its rolling drumbeat, in the milky lakes, in the thick spice of it. Seven years he’d spent here—not as long as James, but there was an unearthliness to him like a man touched by magic. Or Tallah.

When I rolled down, Bryn draped the blanket over me, tucking the corners under with unhurried and somehow intimate movements. Up close, his face was all angles and shadows, with that faint dusting of freckles like distant stars.

He tucked the blanket under my shoulders.

“Mummies were less secure,” I joked.

“It is twelve degrees and we will be lying in the shade, unmoving,” he reminded me, but there was a subtle authority in his voice, like the tone he’d used with James in the kitchen.

“Tye and James, they both seemed to—to back off when you said something about Ruhaven. Like in the kitchen about anchoring me, and then again on the roof. Why?” James, by everyone’s admission, was the one in charge of Naruka and the Gate.

“Because, Rowan,” Bryn said, sliding the blanket to my chin. I blinked up at him, trapped by his weight and the material, his breath fanning dizzyingly over my face. “I outrank them in Ruhaven.”

When he pulled away, I let out a tiny breath. “Is that part of the Ruhaven rules?” I asked, toeing off my boots.

“Of a degree.” When my feet popped out, Bryn eyed them warily. “Will your socks be warm enough?”

“Only because Kazie’s been mixing up the laundry and giving me James’s real wool ones.”

He tilted his head, then bent to tug the blanket over my feet before lying back himself with a single throw.

“So when you anchor me, you’ll be in the Gate, and you’ll feel like you normally do?”

He turned his head, curled his lips. There was more than a bit of amusement in the look now. “And what do I feel like, Rowan?” Bryn murmured.

His voice shivered over me. What did he feel like? A command, a promise.

“Oh, just…” I shifted under the blanket, like the movement could dislodge the sudden charge in the air. “A pull.”

“Then it shall feel the same.”

I propped my head on my wrist. “What do I feel like?”

He mimicked my movement, turning so we were face to face. “You, Rowan? You feel like an old song. Now, will we attempt forty minutes? Since you were so ambitious with your alarm clock.”

He could stay in a lot longer than that, but I nodded. “Bryn,” I said hesitantly. “You said you had a theory before, in Oslo, about why the Inquitate targeted us—targeted you.”

His eyes cooled to stone. “Yes. What of it, Rowan?”

I swallowed, shifting until I was staring up at the leaves. It was easier to talk to him like this. “You won’t tell me what it is?”

His voice was crisp. “No.”

“Why? It could help me figure out if Willow—”

“No. It is not relevant. And it is personal.”

We weren’t exactly friends, but what would make a theory too personal to share?

He exhaled a long, low breath. “I will assist you in finding out what happened to Willow, Rowan, but in this, I will not bend. It has no relevance to you.”

That was a very Bryn way of saying “ Keep your nose out of my business .”

I clasped my hands over my belly. Fine, I didn’t need his theories. I had my own notes, and with this broken Tether, I might be getting somewhere.

I let my eyes close, tried to settle into the blanket.

Miles away, the neighbor’s tractor puff-puffed , the farmer oblivious to what was about to take place. And beyond that, I might have heard the distant waves only in my imagination, lapping at the shore.

Bryn broke the silence. “What would you choose as your Token? If you were to make the Fall?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“But if you did?” he insisted.

“I don’t know, drywall?”

Bryn’s laugh was a low huff of breath beside me. “I will not allow James to bury drywall for you.”

“Alright, what would you pick?”

“Your burnt casserole, as we can rest assured it will never decompose.”

When I didn’t muffle my laugh fast enough, he warned, “Careful, you may find yourself on a slippery slope to enjoying my company.”

Was that what he wanted? “Oh, don’t worry, I have excellent balance.”

“That remains to be seen. Now then, shall we hold hands like you woke me before? Whisper in a sultry voice? Kiss in the dark?”

My heart gave an answering thump . “Go away.”

“As you wish.”

And when I fell through the Gate at last, there was a smile on my lips.

R owan ?

Only Willow called me Rowan. Was that her?

Something touched my cheek. Cool, gentle, then it was gone. “Rowan?”

I sucked in air, the first breath after being summoned through the darkness, through Ruhaven, and opened my eyes.

I saw endless seas. Seagulls cawed in sharp clacks, like they had all those years ago on Port Michaud beach with Willow.

I blinked rapidly. Not the Atlantic, not L’Ardoise, but Bryn. His hair, as perfect and golden as the Azekiel’s, falling in silky waves over his forehead. Some of Ireland’s green reflected into it, turning it brassy in places.

Another brush of my cheek.

The Gate. I was at the Gate.

Bryn smiled slightly. “There you are,” he said, sliding an arm around my back and lifting me to sitting. The blanket fell away, and I shivered from the promised chill and the sweat drying on my spine.

They hadn’t had sex—Nereida and the Azekiel—but it’d been close. Too close.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “The anchoring worked, I just…” Was still burning up from Sahn.

Bryn pressed a canister to my lips. “Water, Rowan.”

I gave it a quick sniff. Not whiskey. I took it from him and drank greedily. Water—and a bit of honey.

He draped his coat over me, cozy and warm from his heat. “You must dress warmer and keep your boots on, even if you find it uncomfortable to sleep with them.”

I nodded.

That hadn’t been so bad. He’d anchored me like he said, and he hadn’t witnessed my reaction to Nereida undressing Sahn. Maybe this could work.

“Do you wish to talk of it?” Bryn asked, not unkindly.

I searched his face, but there was no judgment, no hint of a joke somewhere. “No, I—well, thanks for anchoring me.”

He smiled, crookedly this time. “Of course, Rowan.” Then held out a hand.

O ver the next week, Bryn and I continued visiting the Gate together and I experienced the same near misses with the Azekiel. When I wasn’t in Ruhaven, I repaired the gate lodge, or reviewed the journals of dead Ruhavens in the library.

And it was on one Thursday evening when I had my first breakthrough.

Sitting at the library’s desk, I dragged a thin line across my notebook from my own name to Patrick’s, the Ruhaven killed in Marseille, which I’d discovered was nowhere near Paris, where my sister had once visited.

But we’d both experienced broken Tethers.

My notes were a constellation of connections: broken tethers, intersections at Naruka, countries, friends, Ruhavens I’d heard about—a month’s worth of scribbles and research.

Patrick Dubois I knew well now. Before he’d been killed, he’d enjoyed drinking wine on the south coast of France, visited Naruka often, and—above all—loved his orange tabby cat. Patrick was also a pattern detector like Kazie. James explained this to mean he could detect small reoccurring frequencies and larger groupings. Why did this matter? Prediction. And that was a powerful Mark.

Not like mine, which didn’t exist, but anyway.

I tugged Patrick’s journal toward me, one of many I’d laid out on the library desk, along with Bryn’s extensive notes.

“So Patrick experiences a broken Tether in 1986, but he keeps visiting the Gate until 1987, when he relocates to Marseille,” I said out loud to the empty room.

According to his last entries, he and another Ruhaven had been trying to locate his Tether—just like Jamellian and Kazmira were trying to do for Nereida. Connection? Both searching for their injured Drachaut? Or lured? Maybe someone wanted them to find their Tether, wanted them to go to Drachaut too.

I sipped my tea, let it simmer.

Levi, like Tye, had been recruited by Carmen, and had been missing ever since he left Naruka and returned home to Mexico. James had written to him over the years, but he’d never responded, and no other Ruhaven knew his location or whether he was alive or dead. Unlike Patrick, Levi hadn’t been interested in Naruka and left after a few months, according to Bryn’s records.

I tapped the notebook with the end of my pen, looked up from my notes. Through the foggy window, Bryn’s flashlight played over his canvas where he stood painting the…well, I couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe the barn.

It’d been nice of him to anchor me, and I could tell it was taxing. He always woke with sweat beading his pale temples, like a horse carting around a too-heavy load. But he never complained.

So I’d gotten him something at the thrift store in town this week, when Tye and I had gone in for groceries, and left it where Bryn was sure to notice it. A little joke, I hoped, he wouldn’t be too offended by.

As I watched him, something appeared to his left. A woman. Barely there, her long, black hair hanging in a thick rope, bronze skin reflecting none of Naruka’s lanterns. Willow?

My pulse skidded.

No, not Willow. Me .

Me standing next to Bryn, my hair completely still as the wind slapped at his apron.

Bryn !

I rose, reached toward the window—

And stopped. Blinked. My reflection stared at me in the misty glass, the apparition outside gone.

My heart thudded louder than the clocks that had suddenly chilled to silence.

As if sensing me, Bryn turned, a paintbrush in one hand, the end glowing a searing orange under the lanterns with a matching smear marring his borrowed jacket.

Our eyes met, hummed.

Are you quite alright, Rowan ?

Of course.

I worried my bottom lip, Bryn’s puzzled stare a burn I felt through the window. More than a month I’d been working with him and what had I discovered? Nothing. Maybe because the answer was more likely something we did to the Inquitate in the Gate that led them to kill us here—not some encounter, not something Willow had done or an Inquitate she had crossed in this life.

But why had Bryn believed that?

As I thought, I gravitated toward the Ledger at the apex of the library. Even the baroque chandelier, with all its medieval carvings and candles, paled next to the ancient book.

How many times had I stared at this one line? Mine. Willow’s. Hoping that I’d been wrong, that one day I’d walk into this library and find I’d read the day incorrectly. Or maybe, the nearly duplicate line below was actually mine—the time was right, at least, a few minutes after midnight.

8 Iúil 1965 00:02 47.8344143, -110.6582699

Fort Benton, Montana. Tye .

I thumbed the spinner at my belt.

Behind the pristine glass, bog-covered pages revealed the locations of the Ruhavens that would be born this century. Each line was inscribed in deliberate strokes. Artwork lined the border in inky swirls of gold that should have never survived this long.

What did it mean that I could witness the memories without being in the book? Was I some abomination? Like an Inquitate, or a Drachaut that had slipped through, or something else entirely?

No one had ever been born with a twin before—that’s what Bryn had said all those months ago. Was it pity then? A backup the Gate had created in case Willow died? Yet, in a way, there was another type of twin in the Ledger as well—a triplet, actually—like Tye, Bryn, and I.

7 Iúil 1965 23:52 63.519469 9.090167

Odda, Norway. Bryn .

What did it mean for us to cross so closely together? An anomaly, maybe.

I scanned the Ledger, noting the spacing of other births.

There were no doubles, quadruples, or other combinations—always triplets, or individuals born alone. Which meant those born together must have died at almost the same time, maybe because of some freak accident, but if that were true, then surely there’d be a few odd groups of Ruhavens together? Like a volcano erupting (if Ruhaven had volcanoes) or a disease…something.

Whatever the cause, Bryn, Tye, and I had died at the same time, which meant we were bound to meet in the memories eventually. The alternative being that we had coincidentally perished only minutes apart, without any knowledge of one another. But then, perhaps something—or someone—had caused that, executing each of us separately. That seemed far-fetched…

But this was Ruhaven, and I was living the memories of another realm—nothing was off the table.

Either we had met and died together, or something had killed us separately, at the same time. But wouldn’t it make more sense that we had met, and that meeting—or something we’d done—had triggered the crossing here? Perhaps the same thing had triggered the Inquitate to target us.

Because the idea felt right, I flipped open my journal and pressed it to the glass, quickly jotting down my ideas next to where I’d noted Patrick’s information. His birth was nearly a decade before mine, on the thirteenth of Meán Fómhair , which James explained was September in Irish. Two others were born on the same date as well, with a similar time span as Tye, Bryn, and I, but…

Oh. Oh.