Page 39

CHAPTER 39

Tangerines

A week had passed since the threat to break Bryn’s leg had nearly put James on heart medication. The incident had left us shaken and wary of another outburst, even after Tye apologized the following day. James, with his good nature, had chalked it up to Tye’s overprotectiveness. And whiskey. But even Kazie now gave him a wide berth.

Maybe Tye was right and we’d cursed ourselves with the Gate. That it was the wanting of something this deeply that summoned the corruption of the Inquitate. They were everything Tye feared. An enemy he couldn’t fight, bargain with, or threaten. For someone who spent their life facing problems head-on, he’d come up against the immovable.

And although I understood his fear, I’d never forgive him.

I didn’t like to think that kind of cruelty existed in Tye, in anyone. He’d worked Bryn like the horses he broke. Pushing, threatening, intimidating, until the thing caved.

Except Bryn hadn’t.

Outside the gate lodge, Kazie supervised my work. She wore an enormous pair of earmuffs shaped like kittens, with whiskers protruding from each side of her head. To combat the cold spell, she’d opted for her preferred seagull-feather jacket, likely handmade, and boots that rose to her knobby knees.

“Why are you reading Beautiful Banshees now?” I asked Kazie, dumping the cement mixture into the MDF molding I’d nailed together. “Wasn’t Maiden and her Hens good enough for you?”

She lowered the romance novel. “Maid. Henchmen. We can’t all be so well-loved in Ruhaven.” Eyebrows wiggled. “When you going back, Roe? You know you’re totally going to throw up again now that you’ve waited this long.”

“Never.” I yanked my Blue Jays cap over my eyes, blocking out the rare heat of the Irish sun. Even Naruka seemed to frown at the cloud-free sky, disappointed to find she was the only gray thing in sight.

“Oh c’mon, Roe, you can’t hide forever. Don’t you miss O’Sahnazekiel?”

“No,” I lied. “Do not ,” I warned as she wiggled jazz fingers at the wet cement, “do that.” I dumped another bag of concrete mix into a red pail. “Oh for—are you five?”

Giddy, she kicked off her boots and posed like one of Bryn’s naked models in the wet cement. “Rowie, take a breather.”

“Never call me that.” I lifted my ball cap and wiped my forehead as she wiggled her toes. “Maybe we don’t all want your sparkly pink nails in this…” I swept an arm at the gate lodge surrounded by sheep dung, “historical artifact.”

Kazie shielded her eyes. “Uh-huh. You want to read this when I’m done?”

“Absolutely not. I’ve had my fill of fantasy men in the Gate. The next time you’re at the library, why don’t you get something useful? Like a book on changing oil so you can help me.”

Kazie scrunched up her bubble nose. “Ew, that’s what men are for.”

I smoothed out the second concrete batch while Kazie eyed it like I was preparing her canvas. “Just think how ‘ew’ it’ll be when you’re stranded in the middle of a bog in the Ford, whining to me, hoping…”

Crack.

My attention snapped toward the sound of a whistling axe.

In the shadow of the woodshed, Bryn split kindling with efficient strokes. Glistening sweat traced a path along the nape of his neck, curling strands of golden hair. His cotton T-shirt bared a tapestry of tattoos and clung to every long, damp line before tucking neatly into snug jeans.

“…and there’s no oil.”

“No oil?” Kazie repeated, twisting in the cement. Her smile was as coy as a cat after enjoying its bowl of milk. “Does watching someone do manual labor always get you so hot and bothered? Because I’m worried about that oil change.”

She yelped as I shoved her off the cement, leaving behind two Kazie-shaped impressions.

From the corner of my eye, Bryn turned and glanced at the noise. The sun ran tender fingers over his wide shoulders as we stared at each other.

“Is it really so bad what he did?” Kazie asked.

I planted my boot on the shovel. “Yes.”

Kazie plopped back into the dew-licked grass she’d promised to cut a month ago. “Bryn just does what he thinks is best, you know. For you, and him.”

“Yeah? Is that why he nearly let Tye break his leg?”

Kazie’s eyes sharpened on me. “No. Don’t you know him at all, Roe?”

I stabbed the screed into the ground. “Obviously not.” That was probably my fault for focusing too much on Willow, on the Inquitate, and not enough on what it’d be like for him to return after exile.

“Ruhaven is everything to him. He lives by its law, and you’re Nereida whether you want to be or not. He was supposed to protect you. He didn’t.”

“So that means he should have his leg broken?”

“Do you have to be so literal?” she huffed. “Bryn’s been punishing himself for a lot of things, for a long time. Why don’t you come to the Gate with us tonight?” she suggested, tone lightening. “Tye said he’d anchor; he still feels bad about what he said to James.”

Though not, apparently, for what he’d done to Bryn.

Kazie floated her body into a grass angel. “Even if Tye is right—and we’re like, drawing the Inquitate at the Gate—I’d still go in. Yeah, I’d still go in.”

It was a declaration of love if I’d ever heard one. And now I knew exactly how much Kazie was willing to risk for Ruhaven.

But when the evening came around, and James packed the backpack with his tea, whiskey, and sandwiches, I stayed behind. I didn’t want to wake next to Bryn, didn’t want to feel the tension between him and Tye, didn’t want to taste James’s guilt.

So tonight, with its clear, cloudless sky, I climbed to the roof armed with the telescope I’d borrowed from James.

In L’Ardoise, Willow and I had sat on the roof of Mrs. Baker’s, eating fries with too much vinegar and watching the stars, but I couldn’t remember the sky being such a royal blue. Here, the silhouettes of the trees were black, the spotted buildings not lit up by stoves and candlelight were black, but the sky was not. It was a color straight from the ultramarine paint Bryn applied too liberally.

While a million starry lighthouses speckled the blue, only one glowed from a planet thousands of light-years away.

“Are you cleaning the chimney?” Bryn’s voice cut through the night’s buzzing crickets.

Far below my dangling boots, he watched me with an annoyance usually only found in cats. And occasionally Kazie when I forgot to water this plant or that.

His pinched cheeks were as sharp as the eyes scrutinizing me, and the freezing wind had slapped color into his face so that his blue eyes glowed like a doll’s.

I held up what I’d borrowed from James. “Cleaning the chimney with a telescope ?”

His voice was as cool as the night. “Perhaps, because I cannot think of any logical reason why you would be alone on the roof after we have so recently been attacked by the Inquitate.”

I checked my watch quickly—still ticking. “I thought you were ignoring me now.”

His jaw tightened. “Rowan, I will not have this conversation with you on the roof. Come down.”

“No.” This was the only clear night we’d gotten in weeks. “I’m looking for Ruhaven.”

His eyes flickered. “Why?”

Because when the memories ended, this would be all I had left—the view of the planet I’d once visited, somewhere past the Milky Way.

“Because there’s nothing else to do. I haven’t found a reason the triplets matter, a reason Willow died, a reason I can live her memories. I want something real of Ruhaven,” I admitted. “Not something that belongs to her. Not a dream. Not a memory. Something I can have here. ”

Bryn was silent for a moment. Then he said softly, his voice raw, “You have me, Rowan.”

I looked away from him because god help me I did want that, want him. But that wasn’t fair to either of us. So I steeled my voice and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me about the protection?”

He braced a hand on the ladder, any brief softness gone. “Do you wish for answers now? I was under the impression you preferred to hurtle tea at me in the Gate.”

That’d been an accident . “You could have trusted me with your Mark. I was terrified for you. I thought they were going to kill you. I couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything, and then I just happened to put it together. If you had just told me how the protection worked, then—”

“I did not know !”

I recoiled at his sudden burst of anger.

“You assume I have unhindered knowledge of how my protection works? Have you considered that until Norway, I was unaware there was any convalescence from my attack? When I saw you bolt out of the pub, I did not know I could run again and was as surprised, I expect, as you and James.” His fist tightened on the ladder’s rung. “Throwing yourself between me and the Inquitate was an incredibly foolish risk, for if it had been anyone but you who did so, they would be dead .” His voice finished on an echo.

“Why?”

“Perhaps you will figure that out as well. Now, will you come down?”

I stared at the telescope in my hands. He was right—I was foolish. It’d been foolish to pretend I was Willow, foolish not to tell James from the beginning, foolish to think I could find a reason for what killed my sister.

“Rowan?”

I looked at him, at the loose strands of hair tickling the tops of his cheeks, and wished I’d never known the truth. “I’m staying up here until I find Ruhaven.”

He blew exhausted impatience out his nostrils. “Very well, Rowan. If you wish to forever dwell on what I have repeatedly apologized for, far be it from me to dissuade you from your commitment.”

I was in the middle of telling him exactly how much I wished to dwell— had dwelled, spun, slid under, rationalized, and cried over—when he turned and limped into Naruka.

I watched him disappear between the hotel’s double doors, until his shadow blocked the glow from the stained-glass windows. It paused there, hovering in the hallway, then it was gone.

I kicked at the eavestrough. I needed to focus, get the gate lodge over with, figure out what Carmen knew about the Inquitate, find Levi.

Instead, I smoothed out the solar map on my lap and spent the next fifteen minutes trying to find the violet planet through light-years of silky sky.

When I finally located something close, and adjusted the focus dial, piano music drifted up the chimney.

Willow.

I rubbed at my throat. No, of course not. But for a moment, it had felt like her again, before Bryn’s unique style echoed through. His trills and triplets were effortless, the rhythm flawless, and the asynchronous left hand varied its tempo as little as the man playing.

A thousand times better than I had ever been.

I’d had no talent for the thing, no inherent skill that would somehow materialize in the hours and hours I used to practice. To sit there, playing a scale for the hundredth time, while watching Willow skip ahead with less.

I hugged my knees to my chest, listening as the song crept toward its melody, winding its way to it like an Irish horse and buggy up Naruka’s trail.

If there was anything to convince me it’d been Willow meant for Bryn, this was it. Both talented, both musical, both charismatic in their own way—two missing pieces of a puzzle I wasn’t part of.

I’d thought, just for a moment, when James had shown me the Ledger… That there might have been some chance. But no, not even in an imaginary world light years away, was I worth remembering.

I clenched the telescope in my grip. I shouldn’t be upset—I should be grateful the Gate had accepted a replacement. Grateful that it’d chosen Willow, that it’d seen how special she was from the beginning.

Bryn started the same song for the third time, some vaguely familiar melody he must have liked. Willow had such an ear for notes, she’d have heard the minor drop, the augmented seventh, then—

Wait. Wait…

I knew that song. Didn’t I? I’m sure that I’d—

I stood abruptly. I did. I definitely did. It tasted like a smoky pub, sounded like an argument with the manager, felt like the low lights of the bar where I’d worked.

Because I had heard it before—played by a man I hadn’t known on a rainy night in L’Ardoise. A night I’d forgotten about until this moment. A night exactly one year ago.

I cursed Bryn each rung down the ladder.