“You asked,” she said, more pain than logic.
“We’re so different.” Brella’s words were barely a whisper. “I shouldn’t have thought . . .”
“Thought what?”
“Nothing.”
It was just a moment. Only seconds squished together, a blip in time that could have so easily been arbitrary, except that Brella had molded those seconds like liquid steel into a piercing blade. The disappointment in her eyes. The dismissal as she turned away. It was a moment that scraped and scarred.
Perhaps the moment was the blade that finally pried off the last of her armor. Perhaps, under her armor there was nothing.
“Brella, I—”
“I should go see what Vel’s up to. You can get off this bed yourself, right?”
“Brella—”
“Scratch.” She held up a hand. “Give me a moment, all right? Just . . . a little time.”
She left Scratch alone in the bed, her parting gift something sad and small in the shape of a smile.
Chapter Sixteen
Nana grinned across the dining table, which had either recently materialized in the middle of the living room or had been there the entire time. It was laden with dozens of small bowls, each housing some sort of aromatic, vibrantly colored dish. A basket of freshly baked flat bread released curling steam up toward the low buttressed ceiling. At the center of the table, garlanded in greens like a woodland noblewoman, lay a whole grilled fish.
“I’ve figured it out,” the goat woman announced. “How to keep yourselves safe out there, I mean.”
Vel paused, a bite of food halfway towards his open mouth. “Are we meant to guess?”
“Blood bonds.” Nana grinned. Her plate was entirely empty. “You’re doing them tonight.”
Brella pushed a piece of fish around her plate. “That’s what I thought.”
“Why do you look so morose, Umbrella? A blood bond is a joyous occasion.”
“I am joyous,” she drawled. “You’re just not familiar enough with human emotion.”
“Oh.” Nana furrowed her brow. “Of course. My mistake.”
“And James?” A bit of something bright green clung to Vel’s upper lip. “Will he be up for it?”
“Of course! He’s been awake for hours. The other one’s up, too, but he’s rather sulky.”
Scratch perked up. “He is? Can I go see him?”
“The sulky one? I can’t imagine why. Oh, you mean James. Not yet, Scratch child. We are not through with dinner.” Nana pushed a bowl of something red and chunky in Scratch’s direction. “Do you not appreciate the Tangled Lakes food I made for you?”
“I, uh . . . Tangled Lakes?”
“Of course, child. I smelled the water on you the moment you crossed my threshold. Now eat up, there’s a dear.”
Scratch sheepishly surveyed the food. She didn’t recognize a single dish.
“Oh, goodness.” Nana wrung her hands. “You don’t know any of these, do you?”
“Well, no.” She felt Brella and Vel looking at her. She cast her eyes down at her lap. “I was raised in the Royal City.”
“Yes, child, I do know that. But didn’t Purpose make you food like this?”
She laughed, rough and mirthless. “No, she didn’t.” A thought occurred to her, bright and bloody. “How do you know my mother’s name?”
Nana ran her tongue over her teeth. “Ah, now. Yes, by the way you greeted me I could tell she hadn’t told you.”
“Told me what?” She could feel her heart pounding in her ears. The few bites of food already in her stomach danced along her ribs. “How do you know her? Was she here?”
“She’s been here, yes.” Nana gestured to the door, the walls, the threadbare rug twined with glowing threads. “But the rest is not for me to tell.”
Acid burned Scratch’s throat. Purpose had never told her daughter about the life she had led before the Royal City. She had said nothing about the Tangled Lakes or why she had left. Nothing about the journey. Nothing about Scratch’s father. Nothing about who she had been back then. Scratch was used to being left in the dark, but this, that her mother had stepped across this magical threshold and decided to withhold the wonder, stung like fresh betrayal.
“Of course.” She ran her hands over her hair, her scalp buzzing. “Of course she’s been here.”
There was a hand on her arm. “Scratch?”
She blinked. Brella stared at her, the gold tint in her eyes bright against the warm brown.
A spike of anger slammed through her temples. “Did you know about this?”
Brella recoiled. “Of course not. Why would I know?”
“I . . . you . . .” The anger seeped away, just as quickly as it came. Maybe if she had learned to expect more from Purpose, she’d have huffed off. Cried into a pillow. But she had learned to hope for nothing. She couldn’t even be surprised. “You wouldn’t. Of course.”
Brella’s cheeks darkened. “Right.”
“Oh, I do love human dramatics!” Nana clapped her hands. “Now, should we go discuss our plans with your lovely little archer friend?”
Scratch followed morosely, her mind gluey and elsewhere. Purpose had been here with Nana. How? Why? The Shaes had some sort of magical woodland inheritance, but her mother? She was nothing but a Lakes fugitive, a nowhere person with no one to share her days. A harsh sentiment, but from Purpose’s own mouth: “Patience, girl. Do you know what I did for you? Do you know what I gave up to get us somewhere safe? Do you understand that I mean nothing? I have nobody?” Scratch had no idea what great, dangerous bogeyman they had run from, nor could she vouch for the relative safety of her own childhood. Her own bogeyman was her emaciated, wild-eyed mother.
Swallow it down, she told herself, compressing acid over rings of muscle, through a tight throat, a burning chest, a churning stomach. Maybe bile would dissolve the feeling. Hopefully there wasn’t a wound. No rough edges, nothing to fester.
She had James to think about. He was sitting up in bed, very at home in a white-and-gold embarrassment of pillows and throws.
“Hello!” he cried, cheeks pink with health. “I hear you all wept over me. How fun!”
Vel trembled from his very large feet to his high-up head. “Can I touch you?”
“I’d be offended if you didn’t.”
Scratch dutifully stood back as Vel launched himself into the bed, devolving immediately into quiet, shaking sobs. She dug her heels into the wooden floor. Loneliness spread before her, a crevasse.
There were two fingers on her elbow, warm, a centimeter deep in an arm she hadn’t realized was shaking. Brella looked down at her with unblinking amber eyes. Scratch turned away.
“You almost had us, idiot,” Scratch croaked, because the air was stifling and if she didn’t use her voice, she couldn’t be sure she still had one. “If it weren’t for—” she gestured around the room “—you’d be dead.”
James held out the arm not teeming with Vel. “Come here, fool.”
She hesitated. He rolled his eyes.
“Come on.”
So she did, settling in to his other side. The bed was wide enough, and though her skin prickled at being so close to the large and weepy man who had claimed her best friend, she didn’t bolt.
Brella flopped down in a round, sculpted chair beside the bed, the seat so low her legs popped off the ground, crablike.
“What’s the prognosis, Nana?”
“He requires rest,” Nana said meaningfully. James blushed, wriggling into the sea of down. “But the bond will hopefully accelerate the recovery.”
James let loose a carefree smile that Scratch could only envy. “The blood bond? We’re doing that now?”
Nana nodded. “It’s the only way to keep you safe. Vel and Umbrella have certain protections in these woods. You do not. There’s only so much that being beside them can do without the bond in place.”
“Ooh, is there a ritual?” James’s eyebrows danced like a pair of voles engag
ed in a mating dance. “Robes? Candles? Sacred symbols drawn on the floor?”
“Ah, humans!” Nana clapped her hands, her bosom bouncing jovially. “You always have such funny ideas. No, all you need for this is a knife, a good friend, and a few sacred words.”
Nana pulled two scraps of parchment from her apron, handing one each to Scratch and James.
“Now, the Shaes know the words. They’ve been taught to speak them all their lives. But you two are new to them.” Nana’s smile was wide and crinkly, and Scratch noticed for the first time that the old woman’s canine teeth were sharp and pointed. “Read them, but don’t say them out loud yet. Get to know them for a moment. If you just recite the words, the bond may not take.”
Scratch glanced down at the paper. The ink was a black so dark it looked like holes, deep portals through paper to flesh and beyond. She ran her finger over the print. It seemed like it should have been wet, but it stayed put, firm and glossy. She read:
I enter a room through a borrow-bought pass twixt where swiftly-sweet grasses a dew’d
With her blood in my blood tilly-tumping through vein we emerge rolly-polling renew’d
I escape my mean flesh through between-gate refresh’d and touch world through the room to explore
’Tis a gift I receive, so I promise to leave of myself when I pass through the door
“Leave of myself?” Scratch swallowed thickly. The words rattled around in her mind, pieces meant to fit but slipping away, skittering under the folds of her brain like cockroaches exposed to light. “What does that mean?”
Nana smirked, her lips newly plump and youthful. Or perhaps they had always been that way. “Come, now. Nothing is for free.”
“She always takes something,” Brella murmured. “So does the Between.”
“But it’s not always bad.” Nana planted herself on the bed. The mattress barely shifted underneath her. “You could be holding onto something. Tension. A difficult memory. Perhaps the Between could free you of a curse like that.”
She already knew the answer, but she had to ask. “And do I get to choose?”
Nana’s eyes twinkled. “Everyone loves a surprise.”
She could turn back now. She could run, scoop up James and go. But where? Back to the Royal City, where she would be hanged or beheaded as a killer? To build a new home in a forest riddled with bounty hunters? To her mother’s house, to suss out the woman’s newly discovered untruths? The only way forward was the wet and thorny path, where unknowns hunkered in inky darkness.
She chanced a glance at Brella and immediately regretted it. The woman, usually so golden and tall, was slumped and gray, her ember eyes cooled and miserably cast down. She fiddled morosely with her apron. She frowned.
Scratch was sick of the lies and sick of the loss, but Brella had lost something, too. She had killed someone today, and Scratch knew from personal experience how that changed a person. Brella would have to be made of stone not to ache. And the woman wasn’t done losing. In forming a blood bond with Scratch, a Passenger she hadn’t chosen, Brella would lose the promised, special thing her parents had told her to wait for. Scratch had told Lollie that Brella would be fine. Brella wasn’t fine. Only Vel and James, gazing at each other like a pair of loons, seemed to be on the good side of all right.
“Well.” James looked up from his parchment, green eyes gleaming. “Shall we get bloody?”
Chapter Seventeen
Brella and Scratch were dispatched to the lavender room by a giddy Nana, who insisted the pair perform the ritual on their own. Brella trudged silently to the giant’s guest room, Scratch following nervously behind. When they got inside, Brella stood in the middle of the room, her shoulders hunched. She stared out a window, watching lavender set ablaze by the orange light of the setting sun.
“Brella,” Scratch tentatively ventured, “are you sure you want to do this?”
“It’s not about what I want.” She didn’t turn around. “We’re doing this. We have to.”
“You seem . . . Do you want to . . .” She searched for the word, which, all things considered, wasn’t a particularly good sign. “Talk?”
“You want to talk.”
It didn’t have the inflection of a question, but Scratch answered anyway. “Uh, yes?”
“About . . .”
“I get that this is a big deal for you.” Scratch jammed her hands into the shallow pockets of her borrowed pants. “You know those magic words by heart. Your parents did this together. They told you it was—” She swallowed. “Special. If you don’t want to do this with me, I get it. We can find another way.”
Brella turned to face her, expressionless. “Another way?”
“Look, I get it.” She cursed the lack of easily accessible chairs. This conversation was knocking at the back of her knees. “I’ve run out of options. I had this whole life planned.” Her voice broke. She swallowed shamefully, hoping the lack of direct sunlight hid the redness around her eyes. “I had a whole plan, you know? I thought I would be a commander. And then the king I spent my whole life either serving or training to serve declared me his enemy without even affording me the dignity of an interrogation. So I get it. I’ve lost . . .” The list was too long. “I’ve lost everything that matters to me, aside from James. I don’t have a lot of choices left. I can either come with you to rescue the princess or die in the forest, I guess.” She managed a weak laugh. It hung sticky in her hot throat. “But you . . .”
She forced herself to look up at Brella, blinking away the sting. Brella was staring back, open-mouthed. She was flushed, her freckles dimmed by the dark honey warmth over her cheeks. “This was supposed to be special for you. And I’m taking that away.”
“You aren’t.” Brella’s voice was nearly free of inflection. “It’s not your fault.”
“Maybe not entirely, but I can’t . . .” She choked. “I can’t do to you what’s been done to me.”
The silence was thick. Through the enchanted windows, the lavender swayed in an impossible breeze. It was nighttime out there, but Scratch couldn’t vouch for the truth of that. It could be any time, really. The two of them could be anywhere, or nowhere. The realest thing in the room was Brella’s gaze on her, those eyes like wet, fresh earth, her skin like rain-dappled road.
Brella opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “Why are you like this, Scratch?”
“What?”
“Like—” Brella tugged on her braids so hard Scratch’s eyes watered. “I mean, you’re a person.” Her topaz eyes were open, her voice heavy with meaning. “A whole person.”
Scratch shifted on the balls of her feet. “Yes? I am.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t. I could . . .” She swallowed, feeling unsteady ground beneath her feet. “Try?”
“The octagon.” Brella’s breath was high, her chest rising and falling. She began to pace the room, window to window, looking so small in the shadow of the oversized furniture. “Ivinscont wasn’t supposed to come back with victory in a day. Victory after one battle, Scratch. Do you realize how unlikely that was? And the things I thought when I heard that the person who had made that call, who had devised that plan was—was just a nobody from the Tangled Lakes.”
Her lungs clenched around something hot and hard. “A nobody.”
“Like me. A nobody like all of us. I just . . .” She groaned. “I needed to know who you were.” She looked down, then back up again. Her eyes were so huge. Criminally huge. Who gave them the right? “So I asked around. I know you were the best in your class at the Academy.”
Her shoulders tensed. “Okay.”
“And that you bought your mother a house in a nice part of town. And that you don’t visit.”
Scratch’s nails cut into her palm. “That’s none of your business.”
“Who are you, Scratch? And why did you work so hard for a country that doesn’t give a shit about you?”
“Because I didn’t know.” Her mind was a mora
ss, wet and foggy. Her skin stung from sharp-edged questions. “I thought if I worked hard . . . The Academy saved me, okay? They saved me. Without them, I would have been nothing.”
“I doubt you would—”
“I didn’t have another choice, Brella. I had to get out of that house.”
Brella stopped pacing. “What house?”
“My mother’s house.” Scratch gave up, flopping onto the floor, crossing her legs. Brella reluctantly joined her, slowly lowering herself onto the oversized wooden planks. “It wasn’t great.”
Brella raised her eyebrows in dawning awareness. “Oh.”
“Yeah. I bought her a new house so she’d stop harping on about everything I needed to be grateful for. The things she supposedly did for me.” Scratch sucked in some air. It shuddered through her. “I send her money so she doesn’t have to . . .” She absently scratched a line across her thigh. “Work.”
“What sort of work?”
“Trade.” She shrugged. “When she worked in brothels, it was okay. But when she had men in the house, I didn’t really have anywhere to go. I liked the brothels, though. We always had food.”
“You were hungry.”
Scratch nodded. “The Academy recruiter saw me nicking apples. Thought I looked trainable.”
“You looked hungry.”
She turned her face to Brella’s. There was something new there, strange and soft. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. I—Scratch.” Brella furrowed her brow, considering. Then she reached out. “Can I?” Scratch held her hands open, and Brella clasped them loosely, so gently. Brella’s hands were warm and rough, bigger than her own, with very square, very clean nails. “I want to do this with you. The blood bond. It’s my choice. I’m making it.”
Shock struck her, cold and then warm, seeping into her shoulders and down to her ribs. “But you hate soldiers.”
“You’re not a soldier anymore.”
Scratch tried to pull her hands back, but Brella gripped, firmly, keeping them in place. “You’re not, Scratch. Not anymore.”
Walk Between Worlds Page 11