Page 45

From her throne, Severine watched. Her hands rested in her lap. Her expression was cool. Serene. But when Willow foolishly glanced her way, the queen lifted a single eyebrow.

I always win, that arch said. Don’t you know that yet?

Willow wished they would get on with it, that they would send Jace to the ice vault and be done with it.

She’d be fine. She was strong. Or, even better, they could let Jace go with a warning and send Willow to the ice vault.

Anything would be better than to live in this interminable agony for another second.

Aesra unsheathed her sword and drew it swiftly down. A clean, terrible sound split the air, and Jace’s head—her dear, sweet head—

Screams rang through the hall. One voice in particular pierced the chaos. “I hate you!” Poppy cried, shrill with grief. “You’re not my favorite mortal! I wish you were dead!”

Willow heard a different small and awful sound and turned just in time to see a flash of movement behind a marble column. Maeve. Disheveled. Her face streaked with tears.

Willow’s vision blurred. The world blurred. She stumbled to her knees, her hand brushing cold stone. There, waiting, was Jace’s spoon.

She picked it up, pressed it to her chest, and ran.

~

The Grand Hall fell away behind her, all candleflame and whispers and dark red blood.

Her slippers slapped the polished stone, too soft to echo but loud in her ears.

She fled to her chambers, watched by Serrin after Serrin, all the portraits lining all the corridor walls.

His face had once made her chest ache. Now it made her ill.

The eyes were too young. The smile too forced.

How had she ever mistaken that for destiny?

She reached her chamber and pushed through the door. She stumbled forward. Sobs tore through her chest. Her legs gave out, and she crumpled to her knees, clawing at her stupid, horrible dress.

“Get it off,” she muttered. “Get it off, get it off—”

She clawed at the silk and pearls, yanked the bodice down, kicked away the hem. The fabric tripped her as she tried to stand. She cursed it. She cursed the whole kingdom, and especially herself.

She wanted out. She needed out. Where was her backpack with her jeans and her blouse and her sandals?

She shoved her hands under the bed, searching.

Her fingertips found canvas, and she dragged the pack out, upending it and spilling the contents onto the floor.

Her old jeans—she laughed through her tears and tugged them on.

Her peasant blouse—up and over her head, her arms finding the armholes and pushing through.

Her boots, the ones that were too small.

She pressed them to her chest, doubling over from the relief of cotton and denim and leather. These were hers. These were real.

Something else peeked out from the backpack, something soft and nubby and familiar.

The blanket. The gray baby blanket Miriam had worn as a shawl.

Willow pulled it free and pressed it to her wet face, rocking back and forth.

And then—oh, God, it had been a while—a great rushing filled her head, and everything went fuzzy.

Willow fell out of Eryth and into Hemridge, into the forest where everything had begun. Only she wasn’t really there, not in her body. Maybe not even in her soul. Did she have a soul?

A scene played out before her, and at first it was familiar. A young woman emerged from the forest and strode through the high grass of a meadow, a baby on her hip. Wrenna with baby Lark.

Wrenna carried Lark into a clearing where the high grass had been flattened and tamped down, and this, too, was familiar. Wrenna knelt and placed Lark on the waiting quilt, and Lark bounced and clapped her hands. Willow heard Lark’s happy giggle, and this—this—was new.

When Willow had seen the vision before, it had been silent, just like an old-fashioned silent movie.

This time, nothing was muffled. Willow heard birdsong and leaves.

She felt the warmth of the sun and smelled the sweet scent of lilac.

All of Willow’s senses were heightened, fully turned on, and her vision most of all.

Before, she had seen through a glass darkly, not that she’d known it. Now the scales fell from her eyes, and the story that unfolded was sharp and clear and true.

“Mama’s not going far,” Wrenna told her daughter. “Don’t you worry.”

Then she rose and turned toward a young man who stood waiting at the tree line. He was lean and sandy-haired, and when he spotted Wrenna, his face lit up.

This man wasn’t the pastor who’d raped Wrenna and then denied it. The man in Willow’s vision was Orrin, and he was a kind man. Too kind for his own good.

Wrenna and Orrin walked together, never straying far from the quilt where Lark sat. Wrenna let Orrin take her hand, but she didn’t smile for him the way she’d smiled for Lark. Her mind was elsewhere, and Orrin must have sensed it because he came to a sudden stop and turned to her.

“I’ve thought about it like you asked,” he said earnestly. “If it’s a hope chest you want, then it’s a hope chest you’ll get.”

Wrenna’s face lit up. “Oh, Orrin, do you mean it? It’s not for me, you know. It’s us I want it for. A girl can’t get married without a hope chest!”

“Well, now, a girl sure could,” Orrin said. “I’d marry you at the courthouse this afternoon, Wrenna. You know I would.”

“I do. I know.” Wrenna clasped her hands and drew them up beneath her chin.

“But I want to do it right. A girl’s parents are meant to provide the hope chest, of course, but my parents, well.

..” She shook the thought away. “I know it’s silly, but I can’t help it.

I want this one thing, just this one. Is it too much to ask? ”

“No, you goose. Did you not just hear me tell you so?”

“Then you really do mean it? You’ll build it for me—and you’ll carve it from the Stillwood Tree?”

Orrin’s brow furrowed. “No other tree will do? The Stillwood Tree... you know what people say.”

Wrenna’s eyes flooded with tears, and her chin wobbled in a way that Willow recognized. Wrenna was an actress, too. A good one.

“Those old rumors?” Wrenna said vehemently, twisting away from him. “If you don’t want to, just say so. And anyway, I don’t care what people say! Why should I? They don’t care about me!”

Orrin’s face went ashen. “Wrenna, don’t cry. Wrenna, please.” He fumbled for her. She pulled away.

“I thought you loved me. I really did!”

“I do love you. More than the world. And little Lark? I love her like she’s my own.” He managed to turn Wrenna around, and once he did, he took her chin between his thumb and fingers and tilted her face upward. She was more lovely in her tearstained state than anyone had the right to be.

Orrin wasn’t handsome, but he was true and steady, and he was head over heels for Wrenna. Any fool could see that.

“I’ll make the box—”

“The hope chest,” Wrenna corrected, widening her eyes.

“Yes, my love.” His expression strengthened with resolve. “I’ll make it out of whatever tree you want, and I’ll carve all the pretty drawings, just like you described. I’ll make it exactly how you want it.”

Wrenna made a sound of joy and flung her arms around him, pressing her cheek to his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly, kissing the top of her head again and again.

In his expression, Willow saw wonder and wild happiness at the miracle that Wrenna, so full of passion and fire, wanted to be his wife.

Willow slipped sideways, and the world flew by. She saw Orrin—not the pastor but Orrin—with an axe slung over his back. The Stillwood Tree loomed over him, majestic and eternal. Sacred. Its roots pushed up through the ground like ribs. Its branches brushed the sky.

No, Willow cried soundlessly.

Orrin raised his axe. “For her.”

The first crack rang like thunder.

The second deepened the cut, and bark went flying.

The third brought with it a low, long moan, like the tree, too, wanted more for Orrin than this. When it finally gave way, the crash was catastrophic, something sacred cleaved in two.

Now Orrin was in a workshop, sleeves rolled up, his face damp with sweat.

He bent over great slabs of wood that were as smooth and pale as bone and carved Wrenna’s designs into the grain.

Spirals and keys and eyes frozen wide. A pomegranate tree lush with fruit.

A serpent twining round and round its massive trunk.

Orrin bled three times while carving. Shallow nicks on the fingers, a scrape across the back of the hand. The wood drank it all.

The final scene came fast. Wrenna stood in her cabin, dressed in white. Her hair was unbound. Her eyes were feverishly bright. In front of her sat the Box. She’d been there all along. She was the one pulling the strings, not the bastard of a pastor and certainly not lovesick Orrin.

Orrin ran his hand over the lid. “Do you like it, then?”

“Orrin, my love, it’s perfect,” said Wrenna.

He smiled bashfully. “It’s yours.”

“I want you to try it,” she said. “Oh, would you?”

He blinked. “Try it?”

“Lie inside it, just for a moment.”

Orrin laughed uneasily. “I don’t much like the sound of that. It would feel like climbing into a coffin.”

Her smile didn’t falter.

He laughed awkwardly and rubbed the back of his neck.

Wrenna closed the distance between them. She placed her hands on Orrin’s chest, then slid them to his shoulders. “For me?” she whispered, rising to her toes so that her lips were a hairsbreadth from his. “Just once?”

And he did. He stepped into the box and lay back inside it.

“Well, yep, feels like a coffin,” he said, trying to make a joke where there was none. He made to rise, but Wrenna closed the lid.

Bumps and rustlings came from inside.

“I don’t like this, Wrenna.” Orrin’s grunts grew strained and his efforts more labored.

A grown man trapped in a box with only a woman—and a slight one at that—applying pressure to the lid?

Willow was horror-struck by its warped logic.

She didn’t want to watch, but she was the eye frozen wide.

The vision held her in its grip as tightly as Wrenna held Orrin in the beautiful, terrible box.

Her fingers curled around its edges. Her face went rapt.

Orrin thrashed, a rabbit in a pot. “Wrenna!”

The box rattled. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, a devil’s dance and a fiddler who couldn’t stop fiddling. Wrenna juddered, and Willow saw her skull beneath her flesh. There was a deep, guttural sound—a swallow—followed by silence.

When Wrenna lifted the lid, Orrin was gone.

Not the pastor. Never the pastor.

Orrin.

From the back room of the cabin, a baby wailed.

The noise sent Willow hurling back into herself, and a terrible sorrow pierced her heart. How had she gotten so many things so terribly wrong?

She looked around her palace room one last time. It hadn’t been all bad. But the good parts... the best parts...

Willow tugged on her boots, crying for Jace, for Poppy, for Maeve.

Crying for Orrin, still lost in the cracks.

Then she got to her feet. She kept Jace’s spoon, shoving it into the pocket of her jeans.

She grabbed the gray blanket, woven with its treacherous tale and therefore a piece of living history, and strode from the room.