“This is beautiful.” Pénélope stepped out of my grip, making her way down the incline to stand on the platform, where she slowly turned, a smile on her face and her eyes bright, fear vanquished. And for me, all the world fell away, leaving only her. “Very beautiful,” I responded, my voice rasping over my dry throat.
On unsteady legs, I followed her down to stand next to her on the platform, the only sound the gurgling water running beneath us. My stomach felt as though it were doing somersaults, my skin flushing hot then turning cold as I struggled with what to say. How to ask. How to breathe.
“It smells different in here,” she said. “Clean. Like…”
“The outside,” I finished for her even as wind that tasted like pine and frost blasted down through the hole above, tasting of freedom that we’d never have. I extinguished my light, then gently tipped her face up so that she’d see the opening to the starred sky above. But I never took my eyes off her face, because there was nowhere I wanted to be but with her.
She was quiet for a long time, then asked, “Marc, why are we here?”
And I knew she knew. That the scene I’d staged to be as similar as possible to that in Trollus had revealed my intentions, eliminated the need for explanations even as it forced one from my lips. “Pénélope, I love you.”
A tear escaped the corner of her eye, barely visible in the darkness as it trickled down one cheek.
“These past weeks have been a dream, but they’ve also been a nightmare.” I inhaled a sharp breath, then another, but it didn’t feel as though any air was reaching my lungs. “A dream, because I never imagined that you’d ever see me as more than a friend. That you’d…”
“Love you?” she whispered. “Because I do. I always have. I always will.”
I nodded once, because anything more would have broken me.
“But also a nightmare?”
I swallowed hard. “Because it isn’t enough.”
“Marc, I–”
I pressed a finger gently to her lips, knowing that I’d said it wrong. That she’d misunderstood. “Stolen moments aren’t enough. I’m tired of sneaking around when what’s between us is no secret to anyone. I want to go to bed with you every night and wake up in the morning with you by my side. To build a life with you without fear. To raise our…” The sentiment strangled in my throat. “I don’t want anything to stand between us anymore.”
Reaching into my pocket, I extracted the vial that I’d kept on my person since the moment I’d stolen it from the well in the glass gardens. The contents glowed faintly in the darkness, a magic that bound worlds, and which could bind hearts.
Pénélope stared at the Élixir, and then jerked away with such violence that she almost fell off the platform, knocking away my hand as I tried to steady her. “No!”
Stumbling down, she knelt next to the stream of water, face in her hands. “You’re doing this because you think sacrificing yourself is the only way to save my life. But what you don’t understand is that I’d rather die a thousand deaths than drag you down with me.”
My feet felt fixed to the platform. “That’s not true.” And it wasn’t. At least, not entirely.
“Isn’t it?” Her features scrunched up as though she were in pain. “My grasp on life has always been a fragile thing, but now my fate is certain. If you’re bonded to me, your life will be equally in jeopardy. And even if you manage to survive my death, this magic only works once. I won’t risk your life and steal your chance to build one with someone else. I want you to have a family. To be happy.”
“I want that, too,” I said. “But I want it with you.”
“We both know that’s not possible.”
Whatever cowardice had been binding my feet in place released, and I dropped off the platform to kneel next to her. “It is possible, Pénélope. The only thing that’s stopping us is everyone else, but we can take that power away from them if we want to.”
“And if I don’t want to?”
Tears were flooding down her cheeks, her shoulders shaking, but I was careful not to touch her. Not to push her. All her life she’d been forced this way and that, and I refused to do the same. “I won’t make you do anything, Pénélope. But if you don’t want this, don’t want me, I want to hear you say it. I deserve to know that it’s you making the choice, not your father. Or the King. Or anyone else.”
The wind whistled through the cavern, and I caught the faintest glimpse of moonlight. We were running out of time, and I didn’t think the Duke would allow Pénélope to survive until the next full moon. “Pénélope?”
“This is cruel,” she whispered. “You know I want to be with you more than anything. And if the cost was mine alone to bear, I’d shoulder it in a heartbeat.” Her sob echoed through the cavern. “But you are the one who’d bear it, along with all of those who are relying on you to save them. And how selfish would I be to want that?”
“Then be selfish.” I sounded angry, but it was desperation. I couldn’t lose her like this. I refused to. “Your life has been dictated by your father, by your affliction, by circumstance. When have you ever done something meaningful because it was what you wanted?”
“I shouldn’t want it.”
The anguish in her voice was like a knife to my gut. “But you do,” I said. “I know the risks. I know there is every chance that this pregnancy will kill me along with you. But I’d rather live a short life bonded to you than an eternity without knowing what it was like, because all it would be is an eternity of regret.”
Her fingers crept toward mine, latching onto the vial that held our salvation. Our damnation. And I was afraid to let her take it lest she shatter it against the stone, leaving all our wants and dreams scattered in pieces among the broken glass. I was afraid.
But I also refused to be a coward, so I let her take it.
Sitting on her heels, she pulled out the stopper, letting it drop from her fingers and roll away into the darkness.
My heart slowed to a crawling thump, thump as I held my breath.
“To selflessness,” she said, then drained half the contents in one gulp.
Excitement and terror rolled through my veins, but I took the vial back from her. “To selfishness.” Then I swallowed the rest, the liquid sticky and sweet on my tongue, burning its way into my stomach.
The world trembled and blurred as the magic stole into my veins, and I pulled Pénélope into my arms, lifting her onto the platform right as the edge of the moon crept across the opening, spilling its light into the cavern. The mirrors caught its brilliance, and it seemed we were not buried beneath curse and rock, but kneeling in a field surrounded by sky and stars.
Pénélope’s fingers interlaced with mine, and I kissed her, her lips tasting like salt and dreams and desire. Everything I wanted. Everything I was willing to die for.
Then she was there. In my mind. In my heart. I gazed into her eyes, knowing for the first time with certainty that she loved what she saw. That she would not change me. And I wouldn’t change her. What souls we fey creatures had were now bound by the greatest magic known in this world and the next. It was the greatest joy I’d ever known, something that nothing – nothing – would ever make me regret. But it was also the greatest heartbreak.
Because I knew it wouldn’t last.
Chapter Nineteen
Pénélope
There was no less to fear as we crept back through the labyrinth, yet my heart and mind were free of that malignant emotion for the first time in what felt like an eternity. For, perhaps, the first time in my life. Because Marc was in my heart and in my mind, and no one – not my father, not the King, not Tristan or Anaïs – could do anything to change that. It was a magic that could not be undone by anyone and, to me, that was like a castaway coming across a raft in the open seas. A chance. A hope. And I intended to cling to it, to fight for it, with all the strength I possessed.
We made it back to Trollus without incident, Marc concealing us with magic as he locked the gate, his
hand immediately returning to mine after he’d tucked the key away in his pocket. My face ached from smiling, and though his hood concealed his mouth, I knew he was doing the same. The knowledge, the feel of it, made me giddy with delight, and I tugged on his hand, wanting to drag him at a run through the city streets until we were back in his home, in his room, in his bed. I wanted that intimacy: not just to know what he felt when we were together, but to feel it.
But rather than allowing me to hurry him forward, Marc pulled back on my hand, his unease flooding my heart. “Something’s happened.”
Turning my head, I scanned the city. It appeared as it always did, with no sign that the tree had failed and rocks had fallen. Yet there was no mistaking the charge of magic in the air, roiling and excessive and… dangerous. A sign of angry trolls, great either in number or in power, and my skin prickled with the certainty that the unrest had been caused by us.
On silent feet we picked our way down the stairs and through the streets, the anxious eyes peering from windows causing my heart to pound a rapid beat and making me glad we remained hidden under the cover of illusion. Marc avoided my family home, but the presence of magic only grew as we approached his family’s manor, and before we rounded the bend, he pushed me to a stop. “Stay here.”
My fingers did not want to let his go, but I satisfied them by gripping the wall, peering around the corner to see what – and who – awaited him. At the sight of Anaïs pacing before the gates, I almost followed, but there were other powers nearby, so I held my ground.
The magic concealing Marc vanished, and though her back was turned, Anaïs went still.
Too still.
“Where. Is. She?”
Each word was punctuated with a tremor in the earth, steam rising from the fountain in the center of the street.
“She’s safe,” Marc said, and I wanted to scream that his confidence was misplaced, that his belief she wouldn’t hurt him was wrong, wrong, wrong, because my sister wasn’t just angry. There was no doubt in my mind that my father had told Anaïs about me. And she believed she’d been betrayed.
I moved to intervene, but collided with something hard. A wall, invisible but strong as stone, blocking my path. I tried to backtrack, but came up against more of the same. “Bloody stones and sky,” I snapped, more panicked than angry at his attempts to keep me from harm. Because he was going to get us both killed.
“Safe?” Anaïs’s voice was so quiet, I barely made it out. But the tone of it turned my hands to ice. “You call what you’ve done to her keeping her safe?”
I hammered my fist against the magic, then lashed out at it with my own, screaming that he hadn’t done anything to me. That he’d done more to keep my life safe than anyone, including her. But Marc’s shield muted my voice, allowing only theirs to pass through.
“I asked you to protect her.” Anaïs’s hands balled into fists, and the ground shook again, tiny bits of rock and gravel raining down from above. “Instead you killed her!”
“Anaïs, she’s not dead. Pénélope’s f–”
“Murderer!” she shrieked, and the rocks above us groaned and shifted, the columns of the tree glowing faintly as the magic attempted to compensate. I had to stop this, or she was going to kill us all. Or be killed, I amended, as the King stepped out of the gates of the manor, followed by Marc’s parents.
I had to get through.
Holding up the sluag spear clutched in my hands, I backed up a few paces, then gripped the steel with my magic, ignoring the way it recoiled from the toxic metal. Then I threw every ounce of power in my possession behind thrusting it through the magic barricading me away from this disaster. The effort knocked me onto my bottom, but even as it bent and warped, the steel punctured through Marc’s magic and the wall fractured, then shattered.
“Anaïs, stop,” I screamed, scrambling to my feet and running into the fray.
Everyone turned toward me, even the King, who was on one knee next to a column of the tree, flooding it with power. Tristan was sprinting up the street, shirt tails loose as though he’d been torn from sleep. “Anaïs!” he shouted, even as paving stones tore up from the ground, hovered briefly in the air, then rippled away from her and toward Marc in a tide of wrath, my sister’s fury making her deaf and blind toward everything but vengeance.
“No!” I flung myself in the path of her magic, expecting to be incinerated or pummeled to death by rock, but everything froze. Falling to my knees, I looked up to see stone and magic swirling in a barely contained vortex, and behind it all, Anaïs staring at me with wide eyes. “Penny, I could’ve killed you,” she whispered, brushing away Tristan as he reached her.
“Don’t do this,” I said, feeling Marc’s hands on my arms, pulling me to my feet. “He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“He’s killed you.”
“No, he hasn’t.” I wanted to go to her, but there was no way through the mass of unspent power in front of me until she relaxed and relinquished it. “I’m fine. Surely you can see that?”
“But you won’t be. Father told me that you’re… you’re…” Tears flooded down her cheeks, evaporating almost immediately from the heat of magic.
“Tristan, control that girl or I’ll kill her myself,” the King snarled. “She’s putting the entire city at risk with her outburst.”
Stepping between Anaïs and the King, Tristan eyed the storm of magic, but wisely refrained from clamping down on it. “Anaïs, what is going on?”
“Pénélope’s pregnant. She’s going to die.”
Silence.
Everyone was staring at me. Tristan and Anaïs. Marc’s parents. Even the King’s attention had been torn from the threat above, his gaze, which was normally so terrifying, full of pity. All those who’d risked coming out to see the commotion – their expressions were solemn, as though I were nothing but the paramount of tragedies. As though the life inside me were not the greatest of gifts, but a sickness. I hated them for it. Hated that my fate was deemed certain. That I was to be given no credit for having power over my own destiny.
Marc’s hands tightened on mine, the only person who understood. The only person who felt the same way as me.
Tristan broke the silence. “Marc’s no more at fault than she is, Anaïs. And killing him won’t change her fate.”
“It is more his fault.” Anaïs was shaking, anger rising once again. “I trusted him with my sister. I trusted you, Marc.” Her gaze bored past me, and I could feel Marc’s guilt, building in his mind and mine, toxic as iron. Anaïs, by both character and necessity, put her faith in almost no one, but she had put it in Marc. And she believed he’d violated it, and for that she was unforgiving.
My hair lifted and swirled on the twisted surge of magic, and I knew this was a battle that my sister wouldn’t survive. Not with the King present. But it was a battle that I could stop before it started.
Stepping out of Marc’s grip, I pulled off my glove and held up my hand, the silver bonding marks glittering in the light. “He has saved me, Anaïs. More than you can ever know.”
Chapter Twenty
Marc
The maelstrom of power extinguished so swiftly that my ears popped, paving stones landing with a crash on the street, shards of white spinning off in every direction.
“What have you done?”
The words came not from Anaïs, but from Tristan. He strode past Pénélope as though she didn’t exist and grabbed my arm, tearing at my glove. I tried to pull from his grip, but magic took hold of me like a vice, implacable and painfully tight, and it occurred to me that never in all our years had he used his power to force me to do something.
The leather of my glove tore down the back, revealing the gleaming silver bonding marks that magic had painted across my knuckles, and Tristan went still, his eyes glassy and unblinking. “Why?”
“Because otherwise, her father would’ve killed her. He tried to today when he found out about… about the child.”
“And this was your solution?
To sacrifice yourself so that she might have a few more days?” His grip tightened to the point I thought my wrist would snap. “Why didn’t you come to me for help?”
“Would you have given it?” I asked. “Or would you have merely done everything in your power to stop me from walking this path?”
He dropped my arm. “I suppose we’ll never find out.”
It was no answer, which was so painfully typical of him. As he turned to walk back to Anaïs, I said, “I didn’t just do it to save her, you know. I did it because I love her and we deserve the chance to be together.”
He didn’t respond, instead taking the arm of the weeping Anaïs, steadying her and bending to say something in her ear before pulling her against him. Fresh tears burst across her face, and she clung to him with enough force that the fabric of his shirt tore. He said something else to her that I couldn’t hear, then lifted his head to meet my gaze. And I could see that he didn’t understand – that for him, no amount of self-sacrifice was too great to ask in pursuit of his vision. An almost feral anger burned through me, and in that moment, I prayed to fate that one day he’d love someone enough to throw caution and logic and reason and his cursed plans to the wind for her sake, and to have to bear those consequences and the judgment that came with them.
“Well then, congratulations,” Tristan said. “I hope she’s worth it.” With Anaïs tucked under his arm, he turned and walked away.
I wanted to lash out. To hurt him. He was my best friend and my future king, and I’d supported him in everything – every damn thing – he’d chosen to do, no matter the costs to myself. And the one time I needed something from him, he walked away.
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