Page 37

CHAPTER 37

Samhradh Samhradh

I raced through the woods.

Fat raindrops slapped my cheeks, branches whipped my palms, nettles stung my ankles. The river, bursting from the storm, howled a bone-chilling song as it carved a swarthy path through the grove. Thick fog oozed between the trees, making all but the nearest invisible, and those that I did see were only smears of gray against a boiled-egg canvas.

Bryn was missing.

He wasn’t in the woodshed, the gate lodge, or the vegetable garden where I’d once tricked him into painting. He wasn’t in the tack room, his own room, or the mud room.

Naruka had tried to warn me—those clocks had stopped twenty minutes ago. But I’d been too lost in my head, and now my own heart was shouting at me.

Had he gone to the Gate? Fallen on the way? Seen an illusion of the Inquitate? And because I refused to believe the latter, I charged up the mountain path.

It was hard to run with my thoughts shouting at me, reminding me of my last words to him. So I allowed them one brief replay of the man who’d listened to my stories of Willow, who’d sketched me so tenderly my skin tingled, who’d been by my side from the moment he arrived from Oslo, who’d taught me how to live in the Gate.

Then I pushed it all down, deep into the monster that nestled in my gut for it to spit back at me later.

I needed to focus and find him—and he was probably fine. The clocks might not mean anything, but just the thought , just the idea that he might—might— and with one leg, he couldn’t—

No, stop, focus.

The path to the Gate was barely visible in the rolling fog, yet it had become so well-worn over the last months that not a leaf dared inch across.

When I got to the bridge, I dove across the rotted boards, ignored the clacking under my feet, ignored the bitter taste in the back of my throat and the water sloshing up and over the sides.

Then I was out the other end, shoes soaked and my legs already tiring. I pushed up the slippery hill, up to the Gate, where I was sure Bryn would be. The Gate was his life, and I’d insulted him, swore at him, told him to leave. Where else would he go?

Am I truly so loathsome to you?

No. God, no. Never.

Nettles whipped my ankles as I struggled up the steep incline, slipped, and tumbled back a few feet before regaining my footing. I hadn’t changed into boots before I careened out of Naruka and now I was losing time.

I have waited years for you.

Couldn’t I have been more understanding? I knew what James had gone through, how much he’d hoped I’d be Essie, but I couldn’t forgive Bryn?

Scaling the first bend, I lunged from rock to rock without slowing, using the branches worn by centuries of Ruhavens to propel myself up. My lungs strained for breath, the tightness unbearable with the adrenaline petering out.

Yet the forest was eerily quiet.

The chirping blackbirds and starlings and magpies and robins were so familiar, I hardly noticed the silence before. But now, only the slurping river echoed behind me. That, and the patter of rain on thick leaves, the wind creaking the branches before the next storm hit.

Higher up, the path widened, letting in the bone-white light of the sky so that what should be green twinkled a bleached blue.

Bryn had stopped Colm for me. Maybe he’d done it for Nereida, but I owed him better than this. He’d met his own nightmare while trying to find me in L’Ardoise, then been crippled for it.

Were they here again now? Was that what the clocks meant? Or was I losing my goddamn mind in a reckless panic?

As my thighs shook with exhaustion, I stopped dead. And all the fear, all the anxiety, all the worry dissolved as I spotted his easel perched on the jutting edge of a rock.

I breathed in, out. Painting. He’d gone painting, that was all. Just as I’d told him to, up in the woods where there were flowers or whatever I’d stupidly shouted at him.

Dizzying relief had my voice trembling when I called out, “Bryn? Bryn ?”

One eye on his easel, I started up the rocks, slower this time, and allowed myself one belly breath before I rounded toward the spot where his easel sat. He was fine. He was fine. I drew back curtains of vines and thorny bushes with shriveled black berries that hadn’t been picked in time by the birds.

The trees grew sparse as I approached the edge, the river thundering ever louder below.

Then I burst through at last, into the open air and the mountains that rolled into the sea and disappeared in a blue fog.

On the edge of the rock sat Bryn’s easel, wood-framed, with three tripod legs extended and a metal toolbox for paints. The tray was pulled out and the faint puddles on the palette told me he’d been vigorously mixing color.

But Bryn wasn’t here.

Maybe he was taking a break, eating a sandwich he’d packed or searching for another location to paint. The rain-drenched bluebell on the easel did look finished, and might have been his best work yet if it weren’t for the drops of rain smearing it.

I called his name as I approached. My boots squelched in the tall grass, unflattened by a painter’s boots, as if he’d only set up his station moments before wandering off. Paint tubes floated in an inch of water, with the cadmium red leaking a bloody stream down the palette.

I curled my fingers around the easel, half for support, half to peer around it and over the ledge.

The cliff descended into boulders covered in yellow moss and sprouting twisted trees from between them. Couch grass flickered in the heavy winds that lifted the back leg of the easel an inch off the ground. Far below, the river swam in a thundering mess.

I peeled away my shaking fingers and wiped the smeared paint on my jeans.

There were no flowers here, bluebells or otherwise.

My chest tightened as I stared at the painting, at the clever brushwork that had rendered a flower almost nauseatingly beautiful.

Where was the burn of paint thinner? Usually, I could smell the turpentine, but now there was nothing. Maybe the rain had washed away the scent.

I wiped a hand over my trembling throat. “Bryn?” I croaked.

The woods remained silent but for the river below me and my furiously beating heart.

I had to move, had to make a choice. Up to the Gate? Or back to Naruka? Even after what I’d said, would he have left me at Naruka, gone to the Gate alone?

Down. I’d go down.

I started to turn, to retrace my steps through the now-flattened grass, when something golden caught my eye.

My muscles seized with a fresh jolt of adrenaline as I gripped the easel, peering over the edge again.

I squinted through the trees, seeing little except the burnished leaves fading in the blinds of fog, branches that twisted like a witch’s gnarled fingers, the river a few meters below, the overgrown shoreline and—

Bryn.

Fear kicked me square in the stomach. I clenched the easel, then stumbled forward before I realized I’d never make it down this slope.

Backtracking, I flew through the woods and around the bend, hopping rocks to reach him.

It was easier going down, easier when I knew what waited for me at the bottom, on the twisted bank of the river.

I rounded the last bend, frantically searching for the body I’d seen half in the water, drenched and shaking and clinging to the shore.

Relief flooded me when I spotted him.

I tripped over something—a branch, a trunk, whatever—but dropped beside him in the puddling mud. Had he slipped? Fallen? And where was his cane?

Bryn lifted his head. “Roe?”

I drew in a ragged breath, a razor blade scraped over my lungs. “Hold on, hold on,” I said, and gripped him under the soaked armpits of his jacket. “Sorry, I—I thought…” No, that was for later.

His face was so white, his lips blue. He must have slipped on his painting break, but how long had he been here?

I shifted, dug my heels in, and heaved. Freezing water spurted from his clothes like a sponge, but he slid only an inch. “Can you grab that branch?” I asked as his teeth chattered.

“Roe?” Bryn said again, calm though, deadly calm, like we weren’t slipping in mud on a riverbank with him shivering from exhaustion.

With sudden renewed strength, he pushed up onto a forearm and slid a hand behind my neck. I frowned, awkwardly tugging at his jacket to urge him to push with me but he didn’t move.

His hands on my neck were like burning ice, his eyes a washed-out blue in skin the color of bone. The painter’s clothes he’d worn earlier were gone, replaced by a t-shirt.

Did he want my confession now? “I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “For telling you to leave. I didn’t mean it.”

“That’s okay,” he murmured, pulling me toward him, pulling my mouth toward him.

My heart scattered. Here? Now? He was still half in the water. “Wait, wait…”

I curled my fingers in his jacket, unwilling to push him away, but I couldn’t kiss him now .

His lips parted, his breath like warm cinnamon as his hand tightened on my neck. I sucked in a quick gulp of air—it was all I could manage.

Our mouths met, his freezing from the river, mine hot from running. Even his tongue was cold as it thrust between my lips, and I nearly pulled back at the sudden intrusion, the urgency of the kiss.

He devoured my mouth, gripping my neck so hard I couldn’t pull back. Where had this come from? It was more like being eaten than being kissed.

But he wouldn’t stop .

“Bryn, wait,” I mumbled through teeth and tongue. He groaned against me, but when his mouth dropped to my neck, I shoved him—hard.

It was enough to have him pull back a fraction, to look up, and I saw my own blood staining his lips.

Concerned blue eyes frowned at me. “What?”

“What the hell was that?” I demanded, rubbing a hand over my mouth to erase the kiss. “One minute I think you’re dead, then you’re in the river, and—and —”

Blue eyes.

Blue. Shouldn’t they be gold? Or maybe I wasn’t what he wanted anymore. Not Nereida, but—but that hadn’t stopped the change before.

I started to inch away.

Bryn’s eyes went flat. “I don’t think so,” he growled, and tightened his grip, no longer friendly, no longer a question. And then I knew real fear.

It was thick and numbing and slid in my gut like oil.

I grabbed at his hand, tried to wrench it away as he slid from the river, effortlessly, without favoring his left leg.

His grin was a horrible, bloody grimace when he rose and dragged me toward the shore.

I pitched forward, palms squelching into mud, acorns, and river roots as the shoreline dipped to the rapids. Yellowed foam gathered at the jutting rocks like saliva at a dog’s mouth.

No, no, not the water.

“In you go,” Bryn chirped. “And I do know exactly how much you fear it. I know all about you, Nereida. Knew you would come here looking for O’Sahnazekiel. You’re a shit kisser, you know that? I’m gonna save him from that and your whining. Willow, Willow, Willow,” he sing-songed.

It wasn’t Bryn, it wasn’t him, and yet it still hurt to hear the words in his voice, from his wide lips.

But as he wrenched me toward the rapids, I dug in to the hogweed and rocks with every muscle in my body, stabbing my toes into any root or crevice that would anchor me. Sharp pain burst through my scalp when he gave one vicious yank on my hair that brought me eye to eye with my terrified reflection.

Tears blurred my vision. Not like this. God, not like this. There would be no Willow to pull me out this time.

My lungs burned like they were already underwater. Would I pass out first? Would I choke to death? Would I—

Bitter spray flew into my face, freezing my nose and cheeks. I sucked in a breath, preparing for Bryn to shove me under.

The fist in my hair tightened, then the thing whispered in my ear, “Do you know what I showed O’Sahnazekiel before I took his leg?”

My horrified face stared back at me. Show him? What did he mean? Or was this—was this what had attacked Bryn in L’Ardoise? Crippled him and ruined his leg, had turned it into the mess I’d seen in the Oslo hotel room?

An Inquitate.

I had to warn Bryn, had to… but what if it’d already found him? What if I’d driven him straight to them? My fault. Because I’d been selfish, stupid—

As the Inquitate shoved me forward, my reflection wavered.

Feathered wings flowed under the rushing current, not angelic and dappled gray like in Ruhaven, but twisted, broken. The hair that should have been brilliantly gold was a lifeless gray and shorn to the scalp. The eyes—the beautiful eyes that looked at Nereida like two spinning planets—were gone.

I was screaming when the Inquitate shoved my head underwater.

Icy runoff straight from the Kerry mountains shocked my system. My breath bubbled out on a long, high-pitched scream that flooded my mouth with the taste of dirt and diesel. This would be how I died, with my body floating next to Sahn’s. I’d die like Willow had, my brain exploded into a mess worse than Bryn’s leg, and some doctor would eventually circle the scan of my corpse and write cause unknown .

Everything that was me in that scan—the frontal lobe and whatever else made up my worries and hopes and skills and dreams—would become nothing. I would be nothing. Nothing but a black-and-white image in a binder like the one Bryn had handed me.

Would I be buried here? Or in L’Ardoise? Would my parents care? Would anyone? Would Bryn?

I squeezed my eyes shut. Was Willow waiting for me?

I didn’t want to be nothing, didn’t want to die here with the Inquitate’s fingers twisting in my hair, holding my head under as I choked on the water.

If I died, James might come home from the market to find the Inquitate waiting for him at Naruka, Kazie might never see Ruhaven again, and Tye would suffer because I hadn’t told him about Oslo, and he’d never understood how close the danger was. And Bryn—was he still alive?

I stabbed my hands into the riverbed, into every weed and slug that had once terrified me, as I stared at the vision of O’Sahanzekiel, broken and bloody on the bottom of the river.

The Inquitate yanked hard on my hair, dragging me up through the current a second before my head broke the surface. God, the taste of air. I sucked it in like a trout. Gagged. Liquid spurt out of my mouth and nose. Awful and burning, but the storms of Ireland had never tasted so good.

Distantly, through my waterlogged ears, someone was screaming. James? Bryn? What was real? And how did I know?

A hot breath blew in my ear. “I said, don’t you want to know what I showed him?” the thing asked in Bryn’s voice.

I fought the hands at my hair, arching away from the river.

It shook me again. “Ask me,” he demanded. “Ask me what I showed him before I took his leg.”

“Did you kill my sister?” I had to know—had to know if this thing was what had ruined my life, had taken hers. “Did you—”

This time, a startled cry left my lips when he yanked on my hair. “ Ask me what I showed him!”

I swallowed shards of glass. “What—what did you show him?” I said to the Inquitate, some abomination born from the Gate.

It slid its slug-like tongue down my neck, cool, slick, slow. “I showed him Nereida ,” it hissed, and now it no longer sounded like Bryn, and the fingers no longer felt like his hands. The breath rolling over me was the stench of rancid acid, worms, rot.

I started to turn and face it.

“ ROWAN !”

Bryn? Bryn!

His voice rang through me, echoing in my pulse like he’d struck me with a bell, and with it came an unexplainable relief. Alive, he was alive. Or was he just an illusion?

A sudden force yanked me back.

My jaw hit the earth, my brain rattling in its skull. The Inquitate reached for me, grabbed empty air as I was dragged through the trees by an invisible rope.

Leaves scratched my cheeks, my knees banged into roots as I careened through mud and brambles and acres of clovers that turned into a flattened trail in my wake.

I dropped face down in a bundle of sharp ivy, like whatever had dragged me had grown too tired to lug my body further. My breath huffed out in a trembling cloud as I shivered from shock, from the river, from the feel of Bryn’s icy lips on mine. I searched for the rope at my waist, but found nothing as I expected.

But something had grabbed me.

There might be two of them—two Inquitate—and the other had pulled me away for whatever game they were playing now. That scream I’d heard could be it too—it could all be an illusion. The forest, the river, the feel of the ivy beneath me.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

No, look. Nereida would—she wouldn’t sit in a pile of weeds and wait for the Inquitate to kill her.

I sucked in a breath, and my wits, and rolled over.

Vines hung from twisted branches, spiderwebs glistened on leaves that faded into a blank sky, but there were no terrifying illusions of Bryn.

I loosed a breath that turned into a hacking cough of river water. Then cocked my ear and listened.

The woods were still silent, as still as the clocks had been. No bees hummed, no birds chirped or rustled the trees. Wind slapped my frozen cheeks, but I didn’t hear it.

I rose slowly on leaden legs.

Blankets of fog enveloped the trees. Empty, silent. I reached for the branch at my feet, clenched my fingers around its soggy bark. The sound of it dragging through leaves was louder than a whistling axe in the woods.

I gripped the stick with both hands. Lifted it.

“ Rowan !”

Froze.

Bryn?

Or was it the Inquitate, hoping to lure me to him?

“Rowan, please. ” His voice was almost pleading, and that was never like Bryn. He quietly demanded, he subtly ordered, but he never begged. Even his anchoring call was a silent command straight through my gut.

I jerked as something tugged my ribs again. It was real. Not just a feeling but a familiar force.

Rowan, finita Rowan. Please, I cannot live through this again.

I dropped the stick. Could they speak to me like Bryn? But then, it’d called me Roe before. Not Rowan, as Bryn did, and if it knew…

Something golden glowed in the distance, a shimmer against the mist.

Oh god . Bryn.

I flew toward it and his echoing shouts, through the muffled rain beating on the treetops, bracing myself on new saplings as my knees gave out.

Ahead, the same golden light that had lifted me from the Gate flickered like two ships firing volleys in a stormy sea, then winked out. I kept my eyes glued to where I’d seen it last. My boots squishing in the moss were the only sound in the woods, reverberating through the trees. Boom, boom, boom.

I passed over the trail to the Gate, slapping hard dirt for a brief moment before plunging into the soaked carpet of the woods.

Then I saw him.

It was Bryn this time, so obvious that the Inquitate’s replica was no more than a poor painting next to the man. His hair glowed in the evening sun, his eyes burned a fierce blue.

Panting heavily, he leaned against a tree barely twenty yards from me, wearing the same rolled-up shirt he’d painted in. Rain or fog had soaked it to transparency, revealing every shadowed gear of Sahn.

But he didn’t turn or blink when I desperately called his name. He just stood there, trembling against the birch tree, eyes fixed in horror on something invisible between the leaves.

I batted aside branches, spurs, and the thorny brambles that ripped at my legs like piranhas. If we were together—if we stayed together—the Inquitate could only conjure one vision.

But why couldn’t he summon his Mark, the one that had leaked through on the night of An Béal Bocht? The Mark of protection. He’d been able to walk again, but now he clutched the tree for support, his leg quivering as something I couldn’t see flooded his vision.

Bryn! Bryn! Bryn!

I screamed his name as I ran, but he never turned. Was it Nereida he saw? Was it my soul who drowned him? He stared unseeingly, like an angel waiting for the final blow. Rain trickled over the taut veins in his neck. Ivy spilled over his shoulders.

Then he convulsed.

An imaginary shock sent his head ricocheting into the trunk behind him. His eyes jittered in his skull.

No! I was only yards away, my own incompetency slowing me down. Because I hadn’t been eating right, hadn’t any Mark from Nereida to use here, and my quick spike of adrenaline had bottomed out long ago.

I hurtled over a stack of trees abandoned by old loggers and dropped a meter down the other side, the impact zinging up my ankles. Where was O’Sahnazekiel? Why wouldn’t he protect Bryn?

That’s when it clicked. Him running out of the Oslo pub, anchoring me when the Tether broke, the dream of him healing me after I’d stolen to the Gate, the imaginary force dragging me from the river.

Because it wasn’t Bryn that Sahn protected. It was Nereida.

A yard away, I dove on him.

I crushed myself to Bryn’s shaking frame, buried my face into his neck like I had that night outside An Béal Bocht, and inhaled the smell of night and winter, of something at the bottom of a lake. Not terrifying, as I’d first thought, but wild and exhilarating in the unknowing that awaited.

He didn’t react as I tried to block whatever he saw, didn’t move at all.

O’Sahnazekiel’s Mark had never been protection for himself, but for others, for Nereida. It had allowed Bryn to walk so he could reach me after An Béal Bocht, and I was taking a wild gamble that it’d do something against the Inquitate too.

If they attacked me, if I was threatened. Just like Sahn had for Nereida.

Then, everything happened at once.

The claws of the Inquitate reached through my skin, its skeleton fingers curling around my bones like it was measuring the meat on a chicken. It grabbed hold.

And twisted.

Pain like I hadn’t felt since the broken Tether ripped through my spine, wrenching a cry from my lips that I barely recognized. Was it eating me? Eating my spine and—

Bryn came to life.