“I wonder,” Rose said.
“What’s the deal you’re making?” the High Priest asked.
“Look at Blake’s feet,” Rose said.
They did.
I did.
The branches that made up my feet had broken away. They’d split up, and they’d set root in the forest floor.
Sealing me here.
When had that happened?
The sensation in my head was getting worse.
To be filled with noise and violence and ruin, yet frozen in place. Eternal restlessness. Only freed when it came time to guard the gate, to dash the hopes of others. A far cry from my hopes to leave the world a better place than it had been before I was a part of it.
Once I realized it, I might have screamed, snapped, broken.
I looked at Alexis, and rather than relief, I thought I might break in an entirely different manner.
“I hereby request Blake,” she said. “I request passage to the outside for me and my allies. In exchange, I’ll give you what you desire, and I’ll give you us. You’ll have my services as a scourge. Bit of a step down from being the town’s diabolist, but I’ve done a bit of it before, and I can do more. A lifetime of service.”
The silence lingered.
Birds moved through the trees, just out of sight. Rustling, nervous, their cries hesitant.
To be a birdwatcher, but to have the birds forever out of sight…
I wondered if I’d find the rusted hulk of my bike somewhere in this mess of trees and snow. It’d top it off, as far as the taunting went.
For a moment, in the midst of the disturbance in my own head, the idea fresh on my mind, Alexis lingering in my field of vision, I thought I heard the rev of the bike.
But the sound was a tearing, a breaking.
The trees, burdened by ice and snow, dropped the debris on either side of the throne. They stood straighter, and more trees did the same.
A path had formed.
I could see Peter and Ainsley there, at the end of the path. Peter had one arm around Ainsley, the two of them hunched over, trying to stay warm.
The other members of the group practically broke out into a run, on seeing the path.
I remained where I was.
“Stop!” Alister bellowed the word.
“Stop!” Evan shouted, a shriller sound.
Most did. When one of the younger Knights continued to run, Rose touched a knife to her palm, then gestured, tripping the Knight and sending them careening sideways into a tree. A rough fall, but no damage.
“Not yet,” Rose said.
She turned to look at me. The roots hadn’t released my feet.
Just in front of me, Green Eyes was tense. Her mouth was slightly parted, narrow fish’s teeth more clear without the lips in the way.
It was harder to convince the others to stay put when the way out was there. The deal was the same, me being imprisoned here, them going, but the choice wasn’t in my hands anymore.
“Not yet,” Rose said.
They were restless, freedom so close.
As if to taunt them, the branches began to slowly descend, the way disappearing.
She approached me, even as the exit was fading. She put hands on my shoulders.
“You could have thrown me off the side of the pillar,” she said. “Or at least let me fall.”
“Could have,” I said.
“Alister,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Do you know the familiar ritual off the top of your head?”
“You’re not considering-”
“I’m not,” she said. “Honest. I’m not.”
“Then yes, yes I do.”
The front of my torso was destroyed, and though it healed, the healing was only partial.
Rose seized my heart, and hauled it out of my chest.
Narrow cords of wood, the roots of smaller plants, entangled branches, all followed, like so many veins and arteries.
“Woah, what!?” Evan cried out.
Green Eyes hissed, violent.
“Shhh,” Rose shushed them. Her eyes and much of her focus on my heart.
“If you do anything to him-” Green Eyes said.
“Don’t finish that sentence,” Rose ordered, with a bit of Conquest in her voice.
Green Eyes shut her mouth, though she was tense.
I stared down at it. A dark thing, a knot of wood encasing a bird, or a bird made of wood, both and neither, thumping and thrumming and beating without rhythm.
“Not a real heart,” Rose said. “Spiritstuff, filling the gap.”
“They’re running,” Alister commented.
I looked to see. Tiff and Ty were staying, and Nick was lingering, but backing slowly toward the exit.
Rose frowned. “That makes this harder.”
“What are you thinking?” Alister asked.
“The Abyss has a claim to Blake.”
“Yes. It’s going to claim us if we don’t get out of here.”
“What if there’s no clear Blake to claim?” Rose asked.
“Whatever you’re going to do, do it,” Alister said.
“Give me a prompt, any prompt. Need a bit of ritual in this.”
“Um. I, practitioner’s name, invite you to the world of man and mortal. Let this be the port-”
“Skip ahead.”
“He accepts your hospitality. Then you offer shelter, hospitality, demesne, sustenance…”
“That’s enough,” Rose said. She glanced over her shoulder. “I, Rose Thorburn, invite you within. Let my body be the gate and the dwelling. We were once one, then two, and now we will be an incomplete whole, for just a short time. I offer you mercy, and I bare my throat to you, knowing what you are to me. May my body be your shelter, my strength your strength, my being your sustenance.”
“Damnation,” Alister said. “Should have known what I was getting into, marrying a Thorburn.”
I replied, “As the willing spirit, I accept your offer. I agree to share in my own power and strength.”
Rose continued, “I give you me, my body for your spirit, for enough time that we might put old affairs to rest. I give you time, up until we reach the moment where one might destroy the other. I give you this with the hope that we both will strive for balance, and the knowledge that we will likely not find it.”
“I accept,” I said, not because I didn’t have better words, but because we were out of time.
Rose pulled, and the dark tendrils of the Abyss’ wood held on to my heart.
Alister handed her the Hyena. Green Eyes tensed, now out of the chair.
Rose cut, severing me from the body, and I lost my eyes, my wings, and everything else.
■
The scene was broken, two sets of sound, two different views. I might have been viewing it all through a shattered television screen with two sets of audio out of sync. Out of the left eye, I could see my mother fussing over me. Out of the right, she was standing still, distracted, fixing her hair.
In the left, I was Rose. In the right, Blake.
Rose’s view was fractured, in a thousand pieces, painting a very different picture. She was taller, simply by virtue of the images reflected through each piece of glass.
Blake, getting ready for church. Rose… the time and placement of it wrong.
“Your grandmother b- -e there,” our mother fussed. “Inheritance.”
It was a broken soundtrack, a bad edit, with imagination left to fill the gaps. Rose’s memory of the event was rearranged, putting her at home, with our parents, just before the big meeting at Hillsglade House.