Forestfall by Lyndall Clipstone

Author:Lyndall Clipstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

Chapter Sixteen

VIOLETA

I take off my boots and my cloak and my dress. Let them fall to a crumpled pile of rain-wet, mud-stained fabric. Barefoot, I cross my room and stand beside the fireplace. I pull the wreath from my hair and hold it out above the flames, picturing the woven branches burned away to ash and smoke. Just like the pyres in the mourning field.

But I can’t do it. I can’t let go.

With shaking hands, I set the wreath down carefully at the end of my bed. My heart still beats erratically, loud inside my ears. I press my fingers to my wrist, search out my pulse. The rising throb beneath my skin feels like it should belong to someone else. Not to me.

I am dead. And that is all I’ll be, forever.

I let my hand slide down my arm. Touch the sigil, still aching with a faded heat. I trace the lines of the spell and close my eyes. Reaching again for the magic that was strung between me and Rowan in the Vair Woods.

But no matter how hard I try, how desperately I reach, there’s only a soft, distant flicker—like a faded echo.

He’s too far away. This is not enough. For all the strength of my new power, I can do nothing to cross the distance between us.

It would be so easy to give up, give in. Except for one, undeniable fact.

That, when I asked the Lord Under about returning to the world Above, he didn’t answer me no.

He told me I’m no longer human. That he’s given me half of all his power. Hidden beneath those words is a veiled truth—about my magic, about our connection. And maybe, if I can find a way to uncover it … If I can speak with someone who knows the ways of this brutal world …

I think of the lake, how I washed to the shore numbed and windswept after I mended the Corruption. A bone, a branch, a piece of driftwood. How I lay in Rowan’s arms as the poison started to devour me. What sacrifice is too much for a chance to go back, to be with him again? Not blurred by dreams or death, not tied by a breakable thread of magic. But with him, forever.

I put my hands over my face, let out a ragged sigh. Feel the burn in my lungs as I remember the horrible emptiness, when Lady Fawn stole my breath.

Anything—that’s what Rowan traded for his life, and the same word rises easily to my own lips now. I whisper it—a sound that tastes of shadows and pyres and sacrifice.

Slowly, I get to my feet. I go to the chest in the corner and take out a new dress, a dark silver gown with an embroidered sash. I leave my feet bare, let my hair fall loose around my shoulders. At the door, I hesitate, then turn back to pick up the wreath. I place it on my head.

I step out into the woods, closing the door firmly behind me.

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