Page 53

Chapter fifty-three

When Lux entered the mansion alongside Shaw, it was to find it entirely changed. The prison had emptied. Survivors, bedraggled and gaunt, stood in stunned silence over the gold-leaf walls, carved columns, and the destroyed panes of glass crunching beneath their feet. They stepped around the winding branches, silver-run and unmoving, with expressions more akin to terror even after all they’d experienced from below ground.

For the forest had claimed Ghadra as its own.

A smile tugged at the corner of Lux’s mouth, watching Morana scowl over the bowl placed in her hands, given to her by Shaw’s mother with eyes yet red from her reunion with Aline. More and more food appeared from the hidden doorway, carried up from the kitchen. A veritable feast for those of the Dark, even prior to their unfair incarceration.

The familiar head of the Brewing Bog’s barkeep ran hunched down the hall, preceded by a rolling barrel of cider, as the smooth hands of the doctor that had once set Lux’s ankle inspected those who had formed a line before him, even when he himself looked as if he may collapse with fatigue.

There weren’t many—those survivors of the havoc wreaked by the mayor—and Riselda—but those that had made it out greeted one another with relieved smiles and kind gestures. It was a new beginning.

Aline waved from afar, directing the placement of platters upon a newly righted table. Perhaps her brush with death hadn’t fully settled over her, or perhaps she was simply more resilient than most, but when a young servant girl with braided tresses, bent toward her in confidence, Lux observed Aline’s responding grin. She could still find joy amongst the freshness of her sorrow, and Lux was thankful there did not appear to be rules in grief.

Shaw scanned the ballroom, his eyes settling on the gaping hole of the ceiling. Partially obstructed, a curving bough reached out. “What are we going to do now?”

Lux followed his gaze, sunlight glinting off the silver veins of the leaves. “Rebuild?” Shaw’s side-eye left her chuckling. “The trees are content. You shouldn’t have to worry about them any longer.”

He turned toward her fully now. “You? Not we ?”

Lux hesitated, and Shaw’s eyes lost a little of their luster. “I can’t stay here.” She fought against avoiding his severe stare. “The incantation worked, I’m sure of it—the pain is more a wave now than a maelstrom. But it didn’t erase my yearning to see what else is out there.” She gestured upward. Toward the clear sky. Had it ever looked like that?

Not in her lifetime.

Silence brewed between them, thick with what he held back. Then, “Where will you go?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere. Morana will know how to get through the marshes; I thought I could journey with a group of merchants for a time.” Shaw’s gaze refused to relinquish her; she didn’t know how much more she could take. “Remember your landscapes? I want to feel them for real. I want to touch the bark of a red tree. I want to climb a rugged mountain. I want waves of ocean lapping across my feet. I want to see all of Malgorm, whether there’s truth to the rumors or not.” She breathed in deep, her eyes fluttering closed. “And I want to feel the sun…always.”

When warmth enveloped her next, it came from strong arms encircling her waist to clasp at her back. Lux buried her face in Shaw’s chest, inhaling his scent. Her fingers tangled in the fabric at his back.

His words were a tattered whisper against her temple.

“Then I want that for you, too.”

Lux wiped the sweat threatening to drip into her eyes, her bedroom finally righted at last. She stepped over the stain upon the floorboards, the lifeblood spilt there now a permanent fixture of the house, to settle onto her bed. In her hands, she held the missing page of Shaw’s journal.

The mayor’s latest favorite has settled in nicely. A gifted healer, we are told. She is young, not much older than his daughter, but with penetrating eyes aged before her time. I think he underestimates this one, as there is something unusual at work behind the placid mask.

I do not enjoy her presence.

Lux flipped over the page.

The young healer grew attached to one of the hounds kept on the grounds. It followed her everywhere, and its loyalty clearly left that of the mayor. He was not pleased. She’s an odd way with such creatures.

The Shield dispatched the animal, and the feral screams of the girl still haunt me. She dragged the dead body away. To where, I do not know.

Lux shuddered, imaginings of a child Riselda attempting in vain to revive an animal without the brilliance to do so.

That was all. All that had been torn from the original, and the thought of it caused her to pull the old journal toward her. She flipped to the final entry. She’d read it before and chalked it up to an old man’s disjointed musings. But now—

The weather has changed much in my lifetime. Ghadra’s fog is inevitable come twilight, but the sun: it hides now. The mayor once commissioned his study to be window-less—to keep out the light, and now rain and clouds greet me every morning. What will become of this town? It grows dreary and bleak.

The mayor’s birthday is unnaturally cold for high summer, and—alike his family—his favorite doesn’t seem to age any longer. I confiscated a dagger she’d abandoned in the garden. Unnatural women should not have weapons, and this blade is exceptionally strange.

Then:

I discovered it.

The key to it all is beyond the eyes.

Lux shut the cover, resting it in her lap. She glanced out the window. Not a single cloud had crossed the summer sky, and now twilight neared. Would today be documented as a lucky accident with tomorrow unfolding in grey skies and drizzling rain once more?

She left her room.

An endless expanse of black greeted her when she paused at the bridge. Moss drying—dying—beneath its first taste of sunlight. The wood was gone. Only a fraction remained as a soaring silver grove far away, and she knew an empty cottage sat within, never to be graced with the grey-cloaked phantom’s presence again. Belatedly, she wondered at the whereabouts of the howlers and whether they would find a new forest, a new home.

Lux glanced back at Ghadra. At its shattered stone walls tumbling with silver-run roots. Trees rose from within and amongst buildings. They surrounded the entire city’s expanse like its life force resided within, and it had. Now they slumbered. They didn’t speak to her as the fog rippled in from the marshes, less thick and no longer impenetrable. Content.

She understood why Riselda could hear them; her brilliance irrevocably connected with Life, the souls that make up everything that grows and the world at her fingertips. But Lux was not so tied to Life as she was to Death and dark things. And the trees, while certainly living, began as dark things. There were enough similarities between her and Riselda’s brilliances; Lux wondered if Riselda felt the darkness as she could, too. That difference between a soul’s warmth and cold. Perhaps with practice, she could even determine its cause. Guilt was not the only source with clawed fingers.

A task for another time. Her parents rested within the grove. Knowing their souls had traveled to the tranquil Beyond, unable to be dragged back and forced within a body once more, made her sigh with an unfolding inner peace. She tugged the black-handled dagger from her waist, turning it over once before dark waves cascaded into scattered piles about her feet.

Lux tucked the blade back within her corset, shaking out her shoulder-length tresses. She ran her fingers through them, and the weight of the world dropped away upon reaching each severed end.

Once upon a time, she’d made a terrible mistake.

But it was not unforgivable.

Lux lifted her face, and she smiled into the silence.