“To keep him safe, I had to keep going back to the lake. The Corruption would stir, and the poison inside me would call, and I knew if I didn’t let the Corruption claim more from me, it would spread, and it would hurt Elan. But each time I gave my tithe, I took on more of the darkness. I wrote to the Maylands for an alchemist, to see if there was anything else that could be done. They sent Clover, but before she arrived…” Rowan closes his eyes as tears trail a slow path down his cheeks. “One night when I went to the lake, Elan followed me. He saw what I was doing and tried to stop me. And when he stepped onto the shore, it was like he was entranced. He started to walk into the water, and I tried to pull him back. Then the darkness changed me. I was still there, but alongside me was this other thing. I couldn’t do anything to stop him. I didn’t want to stop him. I watched him drown, and that terrible, poisoned part of me was pleased.”
He’s crying in earnest now, though he fights to hold it back. I reach out to him, feeling sick, thinking of the cold, lightless silence at the bottom of the lake.
“Rowan.” I wrap my arms around him. “It wasn’t your fault.”
He struggles for a moment, trying to move away, then he relents and leans against me. “I was ready to die for Elan,” he says, the words ragged between sobs. “But in the end I just let him go.”
His hand goes to my waist and he pulls me closer, his fingers clutched into the fabric of my nightdress. He presses his face into my shoulder, and I rest my cheek against his hair. I’m almost certain he’s never let anyone comfort him like this before. His shame, his grief, is like an open wound, and I know there’s nothing I can say that will take away the hurt. So I just hold him. I hold him, and I let him cry, like he did with me in the garden.
We stay like that a long time, then he takes a deep breath and roughly wipes his eyes with his sleeve. “It wasn’t a lie when I said everything you’ve heard about me is true. My family, they’re all dead because of me. Even if it wasn’t by my hand, I still killed them.”
“No. You made a mistake, a terrible mistake.”
“How can you be so kind after what I’ve done, Violeta? When I’m to blame for the Corruption?”
“That night in the garden, when I told you how I’d traded my magic for Arien, you understood me immediately.” I remember his words. There’s no fault in what you did. “You were afraid. You wanted to protect your brother. I would have done exactly the same.”
Rowan is a monster. He’s put all of us, especially Arien, in terrible danger. But I can’t hate him for it. Because when I look at him, all I can see are my own choices. I have been in those same shadows. I have faced that same darkness.
And I would go there again if it meant everyone I care about would be safe.
I brush back a loose fall of hair from his tear-streaked face, then run my fingers across his scars. His brow, his jaw, the edge of his mouth. He leans his cheek against my palm. The gesture calls to something buried far within me. Hurt and want, all mixed together. I can feel my heart pressed hard against the inside of my chest.
“I’m sorry.” His voice is a newly tender bruise. “I’m sorry for everything.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
He lies back onto the bed. He looks up at me, sad and shy, a hesitant invitation in his silence. I stretch out beside him and he tucks the quilts over me as we settle together. Neither of us move for a long, drawn-out moment.
“Leta.” He breathes my name and reaches to me. He takes my hand. He bends to my wrist, to the place where I’m marked by the sigil. Then—so slowly that it aches—he brushes a kiss across my skin. It’s the barest touch, but it echoes through me with liquid heat.
I gasp. A soft note that turns to a whimper. I’m pleading, though I don’t know for what.
I’ve never wanted this before, to be so close to another person. Sometimes, in the cottage, in the dark, I’d curl up far down beneath my quilts and trace my fingers against my skin. But I never pictured, never wanted someone else there. Following the paths I made in the hidden corners of my body.
And now, here with Rowan, I’m not sure how to find words for what I want from him. He lost his parents to the cruelty of the Lord Under, then stood powerless as his brother died. How can I ask him for this, to care for me, to let me in?
I reach out, tentative, uncertain, and draw him closer. He starts to stroke my hair, following the length of it down to the curve of my shoulder. His fingers are hot on the bare skin above the ribboned collar of my nightdress. My breath comes loose in a desperate sigh. Sparks of magic light from my hands. They drift upward and glimmer over us for a heartbeat, gone by the time I’ve blinked.