As I fall into the rhythm of the song, I close my eyes and surrender to this moment of sound and voice and light. Even after everything—the cottage, Mother, the endless nights of fear and shadows and only dreams—this moment, this observance, is still so beautiful to me.
I can feel the hum and glow of the Lady’s light woven through the world, woven through me.
I feel her magic.
I feel my magic.
Faint and small and so long buried. But there.
I think longingly of the Lord Under’s offer. If I let him, he would help me. I could mend the Corruption all on my own. I could keep everyone safe. I could make sure that no one I love would ever be hurt again.
But what would it cost? Rowan had to give up his entire family. I can’t begin to imagine what the Lord Under would demand from me in exchange for the terrible, wonderful power he offered me.
Bargaining with him isn’t my only choice. I still have the magic that has inexplicably slept inside me all this time. It isn’t enough to use alone. But I helped Rowan when he paid the tithe. I helped Arien control his magic when he cast the spell. I still did something.
I take a breath. The air is full of song. The earth is full of light. I feel the heat in my hands and let it unspool. The Lord Under has a claim on this power. What will he do to me, to Arien, if I refuse his help and use these bare traces of magic instead?
At the altar, the bank of candles glows. In the ground, a second light reflects. Gold and warm and mine. I let the magic come from my hands. I let it gleam through the earth.
Everyone’s voices fall to silence. Arien stares at me wordlessly as Clover takes my hand and holds it gently between her own. Tears prickle at the corners of my eyes. The candles at the altar shift and blur.
“I can help you,” I tell them. “I can help with the ritual.”
Silence stretches as I search for how to explain what I’ve done. There’s so much I’ve kept hidden that I can only think to go back to the very start of it. Before the dark water in my room, before the voice that asked my name.
“When our parents died of winter fever, the lord burned our house. He meant to burn everything the sickness had touched. I thought he would burn me, because I’d been in the house with the fever.” I look at Arien. “I thought he would burn you.”
Arien doesn’t remember, I know. He was too small. But when I close my eyes, I’m back there again. Arien and me, lost in the mess and chaos of the epidemic that swept through our village. The lord with a cloth tied across his mouth and a torch in his hand.
Clover touches her fingers against my shoulder. “What did you do?”
“I took Arien and I ran away. We followed the road out of the village. We’d never been so far from home before. The farthest I’d walked was from our cottage to the village altar. When I turned back and looked behind us, I could see the light from the fires. I could smell the smoke.”
It returns to me now. The ash in the air, how the flames painted the night sky in a wash of sickly orange. The weight of Arien in my arms—I’d had to carry him because he was too small to walk. I tried to put him on my back, tied up in my shawl, the way our mother had done.
“You must have been in Farrowfell,” Florence says solemnly. “I remember hearing about that, how everyone died and they burned the village. You went into the woods, didn’t you?”
I nod. Summer heat fills the twilight air, but I shiver, chilled by memories of an endless road beneath the winter moonlight. Of nowhere to go but deeper into the trees.
“It was so cold.” I glance toward Arien. “And you were so heavy. I walked and walked, and the woods went on, and we were lost.”
His expression darkens. “Then what happened?”
“The Lord Under.” I look down at my hands. “He came for me.”
Florence touches her fingertips to her heart and draws them slowly across her chest. She shakes her head. Her eyes are fixed on the altar.
“I didn’t know the name for him then. He was just a figure who appeared through the mist. All I wanted was for Arien and me to be back in our cottage, by the fireplace. I wanted my mother’s honey tea. I wanted my patchwork quilt. I wanted to be home again. But our cottage was gone. Our family was gone.” I take a breath and rub my hand across my face. “And so, I asked him to spare me. I asked him to show us the way out of the woods. He was silent for a long time. Then he asked, ‘What would you give, to make it so?’”
Clover’s eyes, behind her glasses, are bright. She looks at me with a shocked, protective fury. “What did you give to him?”