The Secret World of Briar Rose(73)

The girl’s voice cut through the noise like a lacy embrace.

“It’s okay, Mal. Let her do it.”

Briar tilted her head back, exposing the soft blue veins that ran down her throat where Corin’s dagger touched. Corin could hear the flutter of breath, the swirl of emotions that rocked her body on top of Briar.

“You have that little regard for your life?” she hissed.

Her hand pressed the blade harder to Briar’s throat like a challenge. She could feel the princess suck in a breath and let it go, the slow rise and fall of her chest beneath her damp dress. She wanted to cut the girl open and demand answers from the wretched, beating heart that gave her foolish hope. Somewhere, between the crooks of Briar’s limbs and paths of her veins, Corin searched for the truth.

Yet when Briar replied, her voice carried a lightness. Like she could float away at any moment, even as Corin pinned her body to the ground.

“Why not? Death means no uncertainty. No pain. No sadness. Why, it’s almost like being in a dream.”

The shock of Briar’s calmness spread through Corin’s body. She didn’t know why it felt like she was the one being cut. She needed to patch the wound the only way she knew how: with rage. She wanted Briar to show she was afraid. That the girl wasn’t so resigned to toss away her life like it meant nothing.

Corin raised her weapon in the air and plunged it down.

The blade hit the rock beside Briar’s head with a hard crack. The dagger shattered like ice, and the waterfall split into opposite directions, a flood that rolled across stones and emptied the pool. Without water, the sleeves of Briar’s dress looked deflated, her hair slicked wet against her face, eyes closed and waiting. But Corin was still on her knees, staring at the flutter of her lashes, watching her cheeks gleam as a single drop of water hit her face.

Briar’s eyes fluttered open. Disbelief flickered across her face as she realized Corin was crying.

“I looked for you,” Corin whispered. “In the tunnels, in Gyldan—I looked for you.”

Then a new flood came, one of her own doing. She thought she couldn’t cry anymore, but her broken heart was an endless pool, and Briar was going to drown in it.

“I cried out for you when I found El. I called your name. I prayed and begged to a god, any god, that somewhere, out there, you would wake up and make things better. But you never came.”

The memories came rushing back. Elly’s body cradled to her chest. Her throat turning raw from screaming. The name of a sleeping princess echoing through the tunnels. The deafening silence that told her nobody was going to help them.

For so long, she had told Elly not to get her hopes up with magic and fairy tales. She had dismissed the stories as desperate imagination for fools who had nothing else to live for. Yet even after discovering Elly’s body starved to death with the other lost souls, Corin had continued wandering through the tunnels in search for the castle ruins. She had done it because, more than anything, it was Corin who wanted to believe the fairy tale was real.

In the end, she had been the fool who dreamed.

Briar recognized this truth as well, because her face crumpled under the weight of it. She let go a shuddering breath as if she were in pain, even though Corin no longer pinned her to the ground. Something heavier pressed against Briar’s chest, forcing tears to spring to her eyes, a broken sob to crawl out of her throat.

“I’m sorry,” Briar said. “But there would be no difference in the world if I was in it. In fact, the world would be better off without me.”

“Why?” The question sounded more like a beg. Corin saw the image of the perfect princess crumbling before her, an ethereal vision cracked into glass shards. Briar’s flowers washed away in the river, her skin turning pale like the sleeping princess Corin had seen in Gyldan. Blond, limp hair slicked her real face.

“Because I am a coward,” Amelia answered, “and cowards do not change lives.”

Corin stared at her, remembering every clue of Amelia’s life she had witnessed, every wound the princess tried to hide. Broken crowns, dented chain mail, rows of pearls with specks of blood. An act of defiance ending with a dead king’s blood crusted beneath her nails. They came in flashes, the memories diluted from suppression, like watching something submerged underwater. Corin had only seen pieces in Autumnland, yet she felt the weight of Amelia’s pain, the way it suffocated her. It was the same sinking feeling Corin possessed when she held Elly’s body to her sobbing chest, knowing that even when her sister was alive, Corin couldn’t have given her a better life anyway.

She had been suspicious of Briar Rose, not because of her unfamiliarity, but her uncomfortable likeness. Beneath Briar’s facade, Corin had seen the very thing she hated within herself.

The realization washed over her like the last wave of an ocean. The sun broke through the sky in fractured light, shining through the waterfall that streamed over the cliffside again. What once were walls surrounding them shrank back to rocks. Malicine and Talon stood from the other side, watching in stunned silence.

Corin could not stand up or apologize. Instead, she broke down in Briar’s arms.

The stream trickled past their skin and tried to wash away their pain, but the sounds Corin made were too loud and horrid, disrupting what should have been serene. She cried like someone who felt the whole truth: that sometimes people died and the world was cruel and there was nothing left to do but feel every loss.