Roses and Rot (39 page)

“How will you know when it’s time?” Ariel asked.

The wind picked up, whipping the river to white.

“Storms come in fast here,” I said. I let go of Ariel’s hand and held on to the chain around my neck, the elf maple leaf, pressing the points into my skin to keep my mind and eyes clear.

I wanted the storm to come.

The ground beneath my feet shook with the thunder of hooves. The wind blew harder, sending my hair stinging into my face, pulling leaves from the trees and scattering them. I was buffeted, pushed. Unwelcome.

My mother’s voice rang in my ears, telling me to go. To take my jealousy and get out of Marin’s way. That I didn’t deserve anything good.

But it was nothing that I hadn’t heard before. The same insistence that I was worthless, that I was nothing, that I would fail.

All the things that I had proven wrong. I had done everything she said I couldn’t. She hadn’t even been able to burn my stories out of me. I was nothing that she said I was, and she couldn’t touch me.

My mother didn’t matter. Marin did.

The first horse was black as a raven’s wing, and Gavin sat upon it, his face stern and unreadable. Not the face of a lover waiting for his beloved, but the face of a king who had made a bargain for his country. He held the reins of a second black horse, and Evan rode that one, the tithe at the end of his sentence.

Evan wore the tithe’s circlet, silver thorns binding his head. Everything silent but for the rush of the river, and as they reached the foot of the halfway bridge, the horses halted.

Evan dismounted, lifted the crown from his head, and handed it to Gavin. His service done, his burden passed, Evan walked away. Away from the horse, from the bridge, from the assembled hosts of the Fae—and came to stand at my back.

Gasps and hissing as he did. The fangs and the claws of the Fae were out, and the worse things, the things we couldn’t see, were here, too. Greed reached out with clasping fingers. Hunger. Such hunger I felt like I might starve from it. Despair to weaken legs, to stop a heart. Counterfeit memories that sent flames licking over my hand. I closed my fingers around the burning, held it tight.

Gavin set the tithe’s crown on his own head.

The horses came faster then. Not quite the gallop of a hunt, but fast enough to race the wind, in shades of brown from the dried blood of a bay to rich chocolate to near sand pale. The Fae rode these horses, in clothing made from cobwebs and silver, from the leaves of autumn’s trees woven with velvet, in roses and brocades. Watching them pass was an ache. Surely I should be there, should throw myself after these riders, or perhaps below their feet.

I stepped forward.

A hand on my shoulder yanked me back hard. “If you go now, they will take you into Faerie with them. Wait for Marin. The white horse.”

I turned to glare at whoever had kept me from the riders. Evan. Blood at his temples from the crown worn by the tithe.

Marin.

I fought my racing heart and stood, weeping, as they rode past and left me behind.

Then. And then.

A white horse—white as death, white as truth, white as hope—galloped past. On its back, the tithe.

Marin.

In a dress as white as her horse, seven braids woven into her hair, fairy lights binding her hands before her.

I ran. The ground itself rose up to trip me, sending me tumbling forward in a headlong heap. I clawed at the grass, digging with hands and feet to stop the slide. Fetched up hard against the stones at the base of the bridge.

Clambered to my feet, the reins burned through my hands. Trying again for purchase, I grabbed at the hem of my sister’s dress, clutched at her ankle. She kicked at me and urged her horse to run faster. I held tighter, felt my fingernails tear from my hands, and pain like burning iron as the horse crashed down on my foot.

I took hold of my sister, and I pulled her from her horse, and I held on as if she were my life.

“Let me go!” She struggled and flailed, her elbow cracking into my cheekbone, her knee slamming the breath from my lungs.

And then it was not Marin beneath me, but a swan, beating violently with its wings. I nearly let go in shock, looking around for my sister.

“Imogen, hold on!” Ariel’s voice, clear above the chaos. The swan’s beak stabbed at my eyes, its feet scraped my stomach raw.

Then gone.

A snake, small and fast and hissing, that nearly slithered into the darkness before I grasped it again. It whipped itself around, sinking fangs deep into my wrist. My blood burned.

The poison bubbled through my veins, and my legs went out from under me. Bile rose up in my gorge, and I turned, vomiting
pale green foam onto the ground, the snake that was my sister still writhing in my hand.

A bear, carrion-scented and roaring, its breath hot on my face as it snapped at my eyes. In its eyes, not my sister, but my death. Then a lion, its claws sharp through the thin fabric of my dress. Tight as the lion’s claws pierced me, I held tighter, and then smelled my skin burn as the lion turned to red-hot iron in my hands.

The crackling stench of burning skin, the hiss and drop of metal beads melting and falling from my dress. The voices of the Fae in shrieks and cheers.

Somehow, impossibly, Ariel singing. The very first thing I had heard from her, her rock-star voice mourning through
“O, mio babbino caro,”
singing of a lost love that drowns itself in the river.

The river.

Running water breaks their magic.

I rolled across the ground, clutching the iron to my chest as I did. Farther still, down the bank and into the rushing water of the Mourning, falling as deep as I could below its surface, deep enough to drown. The water hissed and steamed around us. My lungs burned, and pain like a knife pierced my head. White sparks burst behind my eyes.

As we drowned, me and the white-hot flame of my sister, I felt her hand on mine, shelter in the darkness. Tight, so tight, and if I just held on, if I held on long enough, we would be safe.

We drowned in a sky full of stars. One slipped away from me, and I watched it float, up and away, into the bubbles of our fading breath.

And then the weight in my arms was no longer the weight of iron, but the weight of my sister, of Marin.

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Weighted down by dress and cloak, by Marin, limp in my arms, I kicked back toward the surface, heaved her onto the bank of the river, and struggled out after her. Dropped my head to her chest, where I waited for her heart to beat.

Nothing.

She was naked. The transformations that had wracked her destroying her clothing. Cold, I thought. She was cold. I had to get her warm. I struggled out of my sodden cloak and wrapped her in it, the green silk pressed to her skin.

Someone was sobbing. It might have been me.

“God damn it, Marin,” I said, “wake up.”

Nothing, and nothing.

I pressed my hands against her chest, my breath into her body. She didn’t move, and she didn’t breathe.

Too long. It was too long, I knew. The voice in my head wasn’t my mother’s. Not this time. It was Janet’s.
It’s not everything you ever wanted. Not really.
I hung on to Marin, laid my head on her unmoving chest, and sobbed, begging her to not be gone, to come back.

“I’m so sorry, Marin. Please. I love you.”

The lonely echo of hooves, and the shattering of a crown.

A riderless white horse galloped across the bridge, and into Faerie. Half of the bridge disappeared behind it.

Marin’s eyes opened, and all the clocks struck midnight.

This is how happily ever after begins.

These are the things that happen.

After.

Pain. Skin burned and torn, a foot smashed under a horse’s hoof, fingernails ripped from their beds. Marin’s hand ripped out of mine.

Other hands then. Gavin’s, and the pain diminishing. “I’m sorry. There will be a scar.”

I didn’t ask where. I already knew there would be. One that was visible was just a more obvious reminder. Besides, I had others.

The worst of the pain receded. I sat up. The bank of the Mourning River. Dress in tatters. My boots much the worse for their drowning. I probably was, too.

Marin and Gavin, and he looked fully human now. Exhausted and diminished, and there was no crown of any sort on his head. She was shouting, wrapped in my sodden cloak and her own anger. Bits and pieces floated down to me. “You kept her from telling me!”

Gavin, implacably calm. “And if she had told you, and failed. If you had gone, believing that you would not survive. If believing that had made it happen. What then?”

“At least I would have gone knowing my sister loved me. Believed in me.”

“I love you!” His voice not calm then.

“It wasn’t your choice to make.” The crack of her hand against his face. His eyes closed, his head bowed as she walked away from him.

Her arms around me, and even though the weight, the pressure of them was an agony, I didn’t ask her to let go. “Come on,” she said. “It’s over. Let’s go home.”

I shook my head, looking at Gavin’s ravaged face, the blood on Evan’s temples, on Ariel’s scratched arms. “It won’t be that simple.”

It wasn’t.

“You should go,” Gavin said. “Leave Melete. All of you, as soon as you can. Probably Beth, too. I’ll tell her. I’ll buy you what time I can, but we, the Fae, aren’t generally gracious losers.

“They can’t harm you directly—”

“But we all know how well that’s worked out for Imogen the past month or so,” Ariel said. “You really are shit at this, Gavin. We’ll go.”

“I’ll help if I can,” Gavin said, watching nothing but Marin.

“We’ve taken care of things just fine on our own so far,” Ariel said.

We stumbled home in the darkness, as if that helped, as if the Fae wouldn’t be able to see what we did. But they would be weaker with no tithe, and maybe that would help. We stuffed what we could carry into tote bags and wheeled suitcases.

“Do you need any help?” Marin asked, voice hesitant.

“Can you get the stars down for me? I want to bring them, but it hurts to lift my arms that high.”

She climbed onto my bed and started undoing constellations. “I dreamed about the stars, when we were under the river.”

“I brought one with me. I wanted something that would remind me of you.” It was gone. Floating somewhere in the Mourning River, a wish carried beneath a bridge.

“Imogen. I’m so sorry.”

I held up a hand. “I know. But we can’t, not now. We need to go.”

“Right.” She nodded. “But thanks.”

The three of us shoved together in the back of a cab that we’d had to walk to Melete’s front entrance to meet. We drove away as dawn broke over the horizon, Evan and Beth in a second car behind us.

“Just like a fucking fairy tale,” Ariel said.

After.

As the cab sped away in the dark, Marin’s phone and mine lit up. Same number. I answered. Listened. Hung up.

“There’s been an accident.”

“Gavin!” Marin gasped, horror in her voice.

“No. Our mother.”

“Is she—”

“She’s still alive, but partially paralyzed. They’re not sure if it’s permanent, and there’s other damage. Serious damage. She’s asking for us. They say to come now.

“Marin. We don’t have to go.”

I wasn’t sure I could. I was so tired. So goddamned tired from the night, from the month, from the most recent forever. And I had nothing I wanted to say to that woman.

“I need to,” Marin said. “This one last time. I need to go, and then I never need to see her again.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Imogen.” Her voice so small, and I knew what she would ask. “I need you to come with me. Please.”

I closed my eyes, leaned back into the seat. “Of course I’ll come with you.”

“Would it help if I came too?” Ariel asked. “I can change my plane ticket.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But no. This is the last time. We need to do this on our own.”

“Okay. I’ll tell Evan and Beth when we get there.”

In the dark, as the cab took us toward the airport, Marin held my hand.

The hospital smelled like antiseptic and fear. Marin and I were bleary-eyed and travel-faded. She had closed her eyes on the plane, but I didn’t think she had slept. I hadn’t. Adrenaline and nerves raced beneath my skin.