I squeeze the Will Stone, pretending it is just the Telling Stone once more, urging it to lead me to Maekallus. It weakly points me toward the glade, which surprises me. I’ve freed him to roam the entire forest, or at least a good league of it. Why would he choose to linger in the place he claimed was driving him mad?
Why didn’t he stay with me? Was I so foolish as to imagine the intimacy we had shared?
I try to shake the thoughts from my head. Speculation is pointless when the answers I seek are so close. I will myself to keep going, to not need a break. I’m breathless by the time I reach the glade.
I pause at its edge. The binding spell remains just where I left it, glimmering and red, embedded into the ground just as it is in Maekallus’s chest. Maekallus, who kneels not three paces from where the spell sinks into the earth.
I stare at his feet. Human feet. Peachy and wrinkled and filthy from the wildwood.
“Maekallus?” I ask.
He flinches, like I’ve stung him.
I take a moment to catch my breath before walking to his side. “I don’t understand.” I hold my hand out to him, but he doesn’t look at it. Or at me. His gaze is pinned to the binding spell. “The scar, the mark of the bargain. It’s gone. Maekallus?”
He is silent.
“Are you hurt?” I crouch beside him. When he does not answer, I grab his right hand and open his fingers. The scar on his palm has disappeared, too.
I touch his cheek, turning his head until he looks at me. I try to search his eyes. There’s new depth to them, new darkness.
“You know,” I whisper, guessing, but I feel the truth of it. “You know what happened.”
He pulls from my touch. “Our bargain is broken.”
I stand. Despite all the exercise I got in my trek through the wood, I hug myself for warmth. “How? The gobler has not returned, or the spell would be broken.”
“You aren’t bound to me, Enna.”
“But the gobler—”
“You were never bound to me,” he says, low and gruff, like he bleeds the words. “The spell affects only me, not you. Were I to perish—when I perish—it will have no effect on you. Nor would it have if the scar remained.”
I loosen my arms. My heart’s beating too quickly. “I don’t understand.”
“The bargain is merely a token. A token I could break at any time. Your life was never in danger.”
I step back from him, my body reacting before my mind can unpack his meaning. A blackbird cries from a nearby tree. This would rouse my curiosity, as I thought all wildwood creatures had left this grove, were it not for Maekallus’s words.
My throat is dry, and I tremble, but not from the cold. I stare at him, waiting for him to move, to do anything, but he doesn’t, and that solidifies his guilt.
“You lied to me.” The revelation burns like inhaled smoke.
He studies the line of the gobler’s spell. The only change in his face is a crease that appears at the center of his brow.
“You lied to me,” I repeat, louder. Even the blackbird quiets at the accusation. I clutch my stomach, as though I could reach that deep, unidentifiable part of me where what’s left of my soul resides. That gaping hole that aches like a pulled tooth, only so much worse. Less than half remains. “You promised my peril! You said if I didn’t . . .”
His stillness infuriates me. I charge him and shove my hands into both of his shoulders, forcing his attention to me. “You took my soul !”
Again he looks away. “I needed it to live.”
“I need it to live!” My throat constricts around the declaration, forcing me to choke it out. “How could you?” Tears start to sting my eyes. I clutch the Will Stone and demand they leave, but they won’t listen.
His jaw is tight, his shoulders taut, as he speaks. “I knew you would leave me to die. I told you, En . . .” He pauses, swallows, as though unwilling to say my name. “There is no afterlife for me.”
“And are you so certain there’s one for me? You have half my soul, Maekallus!” I’m shouting now, and tears stream down my cold cheeks. “More than half! How could I possibly cross into Shava with only . . .”
I push my fists into my middle and turn away, trying to compose myself, but anger is a beast inside me, pressing against my skin as though it could tear itself free.
What did I expect? That there could be a happy ending for this twisted story? That I could ever love a mysting?
That a mysting could ever love me?
I wipe tears off my face and fling them into trampled clover. Wheel on him. His stare remains fixed on that damnable magic thread.
“Can’t you give it back?”
It’s a weak plea, too heavy to carry far. A drop of rain hits the side of my nose, and it alarms me that it feels warm against my skin.
Maekallus finally meets my gaze. “I might.”
Hope flares within me, hot enough to scorch.
“But not while I’m bound to the mortal realm.” More raindrops fall, hitting my hair, my coat. They echo off leaf and branch, louder than Maekallus’s voice. “Attaby had a theory once. I’ve never . . . but I can’t, here.”
He sounds defeated. Rain douses my hope.
I shake my head, wishing I could deny the truth, almost wanting to remain in ignorance. This, this is what they meant, the poets and bards who wrote and sang about heartache. I feel it now, so much sharper than those flowery words. Like my very chest is being rent in two by long, rusted knives.
“I’m sorry.”
I laugh. It hurts coming up my throat. It’s made of briars and gravel and poison. I wipe more tears from my face. “Bastard,” I hiss.
“I am what I am.”
It might be the truest thing he’s ever said to me. I glare at him, clutching the Will Stone in my fingers, a violent array of possibilities whirling dark colors through my thoughts. But I release it, tired, aching, and defeated. Shaking my head, I whisper, “I wish I’d never summoned you.”
He flinches again, granting me some sort of pathetic victory.
The rain comes down hard. I flee into the wildwood, clutching the hilt of my dagger in one hand, the Will Stone in the other. I break the power that allows Maekallus to roam.
Let him rot in his prison.
I’m too tired to cry, so the rain weeps for me.
It resonates all around me, pattering logs and earth and trees until it sounds like a mess of insect wings or the shushing of a thousand mothers. It thuds without rhythm onto my skull, soaking my hair. It drips into my eyes and runs down my cheeks just like real tears.
I shiver and grip the front of my coat with frozen fingers. Cold, because of him.
Fresh mud sucks on my shoe. I rip it free. I barely feel the iciness of the Will Stone as it warns me of grinlers. I will them back to the monster realm with a single hard thought, and in seconds the stone warms.
I breathe deeply, both to fuel my already sore body and to fill the open chasm in my chest. The air doesn’t help the latter.
I curse him. I curse him with every obscenity I know, which isn’t many. I curse him with every step of my feet and shudder of my shoulders, with every drop of rain that dilutes my path.
I needed it to live.
I shake my head and curse my foolish interest in mystings and the monster realm. Where would I be now if I had never crossed into the glade that night, where Maekallus was a heap of gasping tar? If I’d waited another half day, and let him perish? I’d have a full soul. I’d have been with my father when he fell ill. I’d be able to look Tennith in the eye, happily.