There, she begins to write.
If you read this, I am safe.
Her father’s drawings are lost, but her mother’s words are safe, read a thousand times and pressed into the pages of her memory. And there, in the dark, her pencil hisses over the page as she resurrects each and every one.
I dreamed of you last night.
If I gave you my hand, would you take it?
What will we call her?
And with every reconstructed line, she understands, Grace Prior wasn’t mad. She was lonely and lost, wild and free, desperate and haunted.
And she did everything she could.
Even if it meant leaving her daughter.
Even if it meant letting her go.
There is so much she still doesn’t understand, but that, at last, she knows.
Olivia writes until she reaches the last entry, scrawls the letter to herself in the back of the red book.
Olivia, Olivia, Olivia
Remember this—
the shadows are not real
the dreams can never hurt you
and you will be safe, as long as you stay away from Gallant.
She stares at her mother’s words in her own hand for a very long time and then closes the journal and presses it to her front.
Exhaustion curls over her like smoke, but she does not sleep.
Instead, she keeps her eyes on the window, on the garden, the thinnest trails of daylight winding through.
She will not go back to Merilance. The car may come to take her there, but it is a long road, and it will have to stop at least once, and when it does, she will leave. She will run away, as her mother did, as she always meant to do herself. Perhaps she will flee into a city, become a vagabond, a thief.
Perhaps she will go to the ocean, sneak aboard a ship, and sail away.
Perhaps she will slip into that quiet little town and work in the pasty shop, and be a mystery to everyone who comes and goes, and she will grow up and grow old, and no one will ever know she was an orphan who saw ghouls and once met Death and lived in a house beside a wall.
The master of the house is angry.
He makes his way to the garden wall, a pair of yellow boots hanging from one hand like just-plucked fruit.
The shadows stand there, waiting.
“You let her get away,” he says in a voice like frost.
Their heads droop as one, eyes on the barren ground, and he wonders what excuses they would give if they could speak. He studies the door, where two small palms have struck again and again, knocking away the crust of long-dead leaves, exposing the iron beneath.
He runs a hand thoughtfully over the stain, then turns and makes his way back up the garden path. The dead roses lean away, but a single, bursting bloom hangs across his path, the petals full and heavy.
The master of the house traces the life back down its leaves, its stem, its roots.
“Very good,” he says, plucking the flower.
And then he smiles, a small, wicked smile, a smile the moonlight doesn’t land on, a smile just between the garden and his teeth.
Very good indeed.
Part Five
Blood and Iron
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rain drums its fingers on the garden shed.
The ghoul stares out from the corner.
Olivia shifts her weight, feels something crack under her shoe. She looks down, expecting to find one of the many clay pot shards littering the ground, but the piece is porcelain, roses and thorns curling over a white ground, and she knows it belongs to a vase, though she isn’t sure how. The ghoul holds a half-formed finger to the empty space where its lips should be. The rain has stopped, and Olivia knows she better be getting back, if she’s going to go, but when she steps outside, there is no gray gravel moat, no grim stone building, no Merilance.
Instead, she’s in the garden at Gallant. A riot of color blooms to every side, and of course she is here—how could she forget?
She turns toward the garden wall and sees her mother standing there by the gate, in a yellow sundress, in the shadow of the stone, one hand lifting to the iron door. Olivia opens her mouth, wishing she could call out, but she can’t, of course, so she runs.
Flings herself down the garden path, hoping to catch her mother before she opens the gate, but just as the woman at the wall turns to look over her shoulder, Olivia stumbles and falls. Lands hard on the ground, which isn’t grassy and soft but a tangle of brittle ivy over dead earth. She scrambles up again, but it’s dark, and she’s on the wrong side of the wall.
The house that isn’t Gallant rises like a broken tooth, and she twists back to the gate and sees her mother standing in the open door, a tall shadow at her side. Olivia stumbles toward her parents but as she gets closer, she realizes the shadow isn’t her father. It’s the man who isn’t a man, the master of the other house, bone jaw shining through his torn cheek as he smiles and slams the door shut, and Olivia wakes up.