Laid out along the shore are shapes. Shrouded in white like the dust cloths that covered the furniture in my new room. I take a halting step toward them. They’re people. They lie still beneath the pale covers, without even a faint movement of breath. All four of them.
The wind rises, tangling my hair. It snatches at the cloth that covers the endmost shape. The hem peels back. I can’t look. I can’t not look. I kneel down slowly. The pebbles are sharp against my knees. Damp seeps up from the ground and over my skin. Waves lap lap lap against the shore.
I take hold of the cloth. Pull and pull until it’s bundled up in my hands.
The boy lies beneath. His skin is pallid, his dark hair plastered in stripes across his face. He’s smaller, younger, perhaps the same age I was when I wandered lost on the road at midwinter. Five-year-old Rowan Sylvanan—still and cold and dead.
He sits up. He looks at me. Streams of water pour from his mouth, his nose. His eyes roll back, pale and limpid. He coughs and chokes. The water starts to turn black. Oily strands drip over his skin. The lake begins to seethe and churn. Waves rush over the shore. Wash past him, past me.
The darkness—the same darkness that oozes from him—spreads across the lake.
The three bodies that remain on the shore are caught by the waves. One by one, they’re pulled out, pulled down, deeper and deeper. His father, his mother, his brother all sink and vanish beneath the water.
The darkness rises like a mist. It closes in across the shore, the lake, the trees. I shut my eyes, frozen, despairing, trapped in the final moment before the darkness claims me.
Then I’m back in the house, on the landing beneath the arched windows. The glass is still warm with residual heat from the midsummer day. The sky beyond is lightless. A new moon, a dark moon, halfway to the next ritual.
I scrub my eyes. I’m awake—I’m awake—but I feel as though I’m still caught by the dream. Footsteps echo, and I look down over the carved balustrade to see Rowan in the entrance hall below. He’s wrapped in his cloak, the hood pulled low over his hair. He has a candle in a jar. The shielded flame is as tiny as a faerie light as he moves through the house.
A few beats later, I hear the scrape of the kitchen door.
I go down the stairs. My nightdress trails around me, a mothlike wisp in the dark. The kitchen is lit by stove coals and a dwindling altar candle. The door is still open.
It’s hot out in the garden, and the heat on my face wakes me a little. The world comes into slightly sharper focus. I can just make out Rowan, far down along the path. I stagger after him in a wavery line, the gravel sharp under my unsteady feet.
I stumble into the overgrown grass and catch myself against the ivy-wreathed wall. I go along, leaning hard against it to keep myself upright. After a few paces, the shape of the wall changes beneath my hand and vines give way to iron. There’s a gate hidden among the ivy. It’s locked.
I peer through the curved rails. I see the dim outline of an orchard, the branches shaded indigo by the night, and a spill of wildflowers that’s come loose from a wooden border.
A garden. There’s another garden there, locked up behind the wall.
Farther ahead, Rowan’s boots crush heavily over the graveled path. I keep following him. Past the gate, past the ivy, until the wall opens out to a familiar space.
The lake.
The water is a lightless whisper. I’ve been back here since the ritual, but never farther than this archway. I take a halting step out onto the blackened ground. I blink, and the earth seems to move. A shiver goes through me when I think of how it tore open. How it fought against Arien and Clover.
Rowan crosses to the place where they carved the sigil for the last ritual. The lake begins to stir, as though the water is trying to draw him closer. His hood falls back as he steps onto the wet, dark mud. He drags a hand through his unbound hair and sighs heavily. Then he reaches into his pocket and takes out a knife.
Under my feet, the ground feels like it’s breathing. It feels hungry.
No no no.
“Wait!” I run toward him. The mud sucks at my feet. Cold and hideous and wrong. “Wait, you can’t!”
He turns, startled. I grab hold of his arm. His face, shrouded by the fall of his hair, is tense and grim. He shakes himself loose from my grasp. “Violeta, get away from me, now!”
Water rushes in around our feet, then recedes with a hollow hiss. “What is this? What are you doing?”
He struggles to speak but manages to choke out a single word. “Tithe.”
It’s almost lost to the sound of the waves. Tithe. I think of Greymere. The tables in the village square. Jars of sour cherries. Syrup and sweetness. I think of Rowan on the night of the ritual, crimson eyed and shadow stained. On his knees with the earth snared around him.