In my mind, I could see them all by the edge of the forest waiting for me. They’d all be standing there right now, their eyes hopeful, their smiles starting to wane as each second of sunrise passed. Mike would lower his head, Emily would cover her mouth, and everyone would turn away slowly and go home. And that would be that. It was over before it even begun.
But I would be here. I would be lost in this forest for the rest of eternity, and still, that wasn’t what scared me. What scared me most was what would happen to those people without me. My bite turned Mike, my existence made others change their allegiance, and now Drake would come back and kill them all for it. And it was, without any doubt in my heart, my fault.
I stood up and turned on my heel, indifferent to the beauty of the day, wandering aimlessly forward with nowhere really left to be—a weary princess wearing a broken promise.
* * *
Throughout the hours that passed me, I thought about my dad a lot. I wondered if Mike would tell him the truth about why I disappeared for eternity. And a part of me smiled because, somewhere inside, I felt like Dad would come out here to find me. If anyone would, it’d be my dad. Of all the people I needed in my life, he was always the one who was there—through everything. He came to me when I lost my mom; he wrapped his arms around me and told me it would be all right. And he made it all right. He gave me a home and a bed, and he hugged me every day. And maybe I was hurting inside, and it was a hurt he couldn’t heal, but I knew he wanted to. I knew he would give up everything and anything to make me safe.
But I never felt safe. Not really. And the worst part was, until now, I didn’t understand some of that feeling. It was never in the sense that I was afraid I’d be kidnapped or tortured—this was before all that; this was when I felt afraid of having nothing. I used to wonder back then how I would live if I didn’t have a bed or food or my mom and dad, and now I’d come to understand a new truth altogether: you don’t need any of it. You don’t need a bed or food or love because, at the end of the day, even without all that, you’re still alive. While you’re missing the smell of roast chicken or crying because you can’t hold those you love, you are surely and definitely still alive. It’s the cruelty of the world, I suppose, to take everything we need, everything we thought we needed to survive, and show us our hearts will keep on beating, we will keep on breathing without it.
And that’s when you have to hope. That’s what hope is.
Nothing is final until you’re dead.
I looked up at the clouds and closed my eyes as the warmth of the day made my skin feel yellow and bright all over.
Where there is life, there is hope. And I wasn’t a little girl anymore; I couldn’t lay in my bed, safe and warm with my dad down the hall—the one who always knew what to do; the one who always told me it would be okay. It was my job to be that now. And maybe I didn’t feel like it would all be okay; maybe I was scared all the time, but I at least had to be the one who said it would be okay. I had to be the leader.
But I learned that too late.
I opened my eyes again and let out a long breath, then poked at the seeping gash on my arm. It was swollen and red, probably infected since, out here, I no longer seemed to be Lilithian. I was more human than I’d ever been before. And it hurt, and it sucked, and I hated every breath of it. But this was it for me now. This would be my new life, and all I could do was find some food or some water and wander every tiny inch of this forest until, maybe one day, I might find the border again. Who knows? It wasn’t much, but it was… a hope.
And at least if I eventually did make it out, I could say that I’d done it on my own; that I may have failed my people, but I did not fail myself.
* * *
As the day wore on, I trudged up an endless hill. I could see the top, but as the sun moved to the west, that distance hadn’t changed, and when I looked back behind me into the mouth of the valley, it looked as though I’d only taken forty steps.
The sun glared down on my faded tattoos and sweat beaded across my brow, seeping into the swollen, yawning cuts all over my body. The muscles in my upper thigh were tight and burning from the constant uphill, and I was sure my mind had been turning the small shrubberies into sandwiches as I passed them, just to tease me.
By now, everyone would know I failed. David would be worried; he would’ve pinched his brow, probably even shook his head. Deep down inside, he knew I wasn’t capable of this. Mike knew, everyone knew. I was the only one who didn’t. I was the only one who actually believed I might stand a chance. But, like Mike always said: I needed to learn that the hard way.
I smiled then, thinking of another: Arthur. He believed in me. He always did. And I couldn’t understand why. I never gave him any real reason to believe. Everything clever I knew about ruling had been learned from him. But maybe that was the point. Maybe it wasn’t that I was dumb and young, but that I was capable of learning. Of all the people who would shake their heads in disappointment at this useless princess, Arthur would be the one man who would take me up in his arms, probably kiss my forehead and say he was glad to have me back. If I ever made it out of here.
As I distracted myself with his memory, I felt the unusual sensation of flat ground under me. I fell to my knees and locked my hands into the dirt, a snap decision away from kissing it, but I knew, with my luck, I’d end up with an ant biting my lip or dirt in my mouth which would just dry it out even more and send me into a coughing fit.
Not bothering too much to cover myself from Nature’s eye, I spun around disgracefully and sat on the ground, my gaze on the cavernous valley below. The grot around my fingernails stung like the blood was tightening as it dried, peeling the delicate skin around my cuticles back. I didn’t even have enough saliva to spit on them and wash some of it off. I blew on them instead, trying to rub the skin back the right way.
In the forest beside me, a beam of light broke the dimness, and fluttering along, ignorant to the agony I’d suffered, was a beautiful blue-and-black butterfly. It let the soft breeze carry it, landing right on the corner of my elbow.
“Hello,” I said, trying not to breathe on it. “What are you doing out here all by yourself?”
Without answering, it rose up into the air and fluttered to the border of the trees, where it sat on the ground for a second, shaking its wings. And something glinted under the soil, the sunlight beaming for a second. I struggled to my feet, gravity weighing me down, and wandered over, flopping onto my knees in the dirt.
The butterfly took flight, leaving me alone with this mysterious silver thing hiding in the earth. Each grain of dirt stuck to the dried blood, wriggling under the lifted skin around my nails as I burrowed my fingertips under the metal and dragged out a solid little key.
“How did you get all the way out here?” I said, wiping my thumb over the symbol on the top. It looked like a headless snake winding and tangling around itself; no beginning; no end. A thin silver chain hung down from it, delicate and shimmering like a spider’s web in the sunlight. The key was old, that much I was sure of, but it wasn’t rusted to decaying. It looked as though it belonged to something—to someone, once.
“Well,” I said, fastening the chain around my neck. “It belongs to me now.”
It rested neatly just below my collarbones; my own little treasure; the key to all my secrets.
As I stood up again, dusting my knees off, my ears pricked to attention. Somewhere in the distance, I was sure I heard voices. A newfound idea of hope awakened my positive internal thinker and so, I farewelled the endless valley with one loathsome glimpse, and walked toward the possible chatter.
But I only took two steps before my heart stopped and my feet froze, eyes widening around the most magnificent sight I’d ever seen. People! My insides went on a frenzy, jumping and cheering inside my belly. They’d found me.
“Mike?” I called, my dry throat amplifying the angst in my voice but drowning out the volume.
I looked inside myself for some strength. I hadn’t
used my voice for so long now I could hardly remember how to say my own name. Swallowing, I moistened my throat with the last stratum of saliva and took a breath. “Mike!”
The sun was almost gone again, but darkness shouldn’t affect his hearing. I trudged over the dry ground and stood right beside him, laughing.
“Mike.”
But he didn’t hear me. He plain didn’t hear me; he stared forward, focusing on something, as did every person in this small clearing with him. I looked at each face, studying each concerned gaze, and realized they were all watching one thing. My head turned slowly to the center of the clearing and my heart washed away with a breath of pure shock.
The blood oath.
There, kneeling by the Stone of Truth with her eyes closed, bloodied wrist outstretched, was me! I hadn’t left yet? I was still there.
“No!” I ran toward me. “What are you doing? We’ve done this! We’ve done this!” I yelled at her, but she didn’t hear. “Please? I walked all night. Don’t you see?”
None of them saw though. They all watched her as she cut herself open and bled on the Stone, her lips moving with the words of her promise.
I felt hollowed out, numb, walking backward until I found the welcome embrace of wiry branches to hold me up. “Please stop,” I whispered to myself. “Please don’t say the oath.”
Her words trickled through me like a bad memory—one you wish you could forget—and without looking up, without taking a breath, she lifted the dagger and held it to her chest.
“No.” I reached out, buckling over with wide eyes bulging when a jagged, burning sear scorched the bones inside my chest. And with a tight-fisted grunt, I drew back, hitting my head against the tree as the tip of her blade popped the surrounding pocket of fluid inside my heart, pausing its ragged beat momentarily.
Her breath stopped; my breath stopped, and time flattened out around me. She slowly scraped the dagger out, every inch like a slather of wood grating over teeth.
Sound came rushing back, and I gasped a wild, shrieking breath, clutching my breast. My heart started back up again, pumping gushes of blood out over my fingers, soaking through the silver silk and dribbling in a warm tickle down my stomach.
“What’s happening?” I said, my breath barely a whisper; my eyes open, unblinking. “I don’t understand.”
Mike and Emily watched as I bled my oath—the real me—or the impostor, I didn’t know, but I watched on too. She rose to her feet, and with her eyes closed, her lip stiff—trying in vain to hide her pain under the mask of deception—she walked toward the edge of the forest.
As she passed each subject, they read aloud the words that burned her skin—my skin—each sentence like spiky, acid spears of hot lava. Wasps, bees, bashing my knee on a step was nothing in comparison to this. But she walked, her face perfect, her lips red with blood, her skin pale under the dark inks of her Markings. She was flawless and so beautiful, while I fought to breathe—a sticky, sweaty mess of my own tears and blood.
Mike reached for her as she passed him, and though it was a small movement, I saw her shake her head, keeping her eyes closed as if she knew, as if she needn’t see him reach out but knew he would. I wanted so badly for her to fall into his arms, have him make everything okay, just to know that somewhere out there one of us was safe. But she wouldn’t. She had a path to walk, and she walked it blindly, not knowing the hell I’d been through—the hell we would go through all over again as soon as she set foot over that border.
Morgaine edged forward several times, hesitating before launching after Ara and wrapping a dark-purple cloak over her shoulders without disturbing even one step. I saw it wrap her, but felt the warmth on my own skin, and when I looked down, the silky velvet rested softly over my shoulders, hiding the silver dress. I touched my bloodied fingers to it, matting the velvet slightly.
“She looks so beautiful,” Morgaine said, covering her mouth.
Mike blinked a few times, practically biting his own fist. “I don’t like this, Morg.”
Her fingers floated slowly up through the air and came to rest on Mike’s arm. He looked at her. “She’ll be okay, Mike.”
“I’m not so sure anymore, I… we gotta stop her.” He darted forward, and everything disappeared in a cloud of whitewash as Ara placed her foot to the doorstep of this ever-holding prison.
“No!” I screamed at her, grasping the air where Mike’s hand had been. “What have you done!”
Each step she took forward, deeper and deeper into the Walk of Faith, saw the burn of our promise mark my skin once more. I held my arm out and watched it snake its way along, the words becoming clear to me once more.
I closed my eyes and listened to the ghostly whispers of the warning. “Never step foot in the Forest of Enchantment—never step foot in there at dawn.”
Dawn.
The word echoed all around me in the haunting silence of eternally consequential mistakes. My failure would repeat itself over and over again for me to watch, to relive.
I rested the back of my head against the bark of the tree, but stumbled back instead, falling through nothing as the world went white around me …
… My eyes flashed open.
I looked down, standing where Ara had been only a second ago.
We merged. I became her, but with the memory of a treacherous night too fresh in my mind to stop the tears. I just wanted to go home, be normal, be with David. Nothing more, nothing less.
I sunk to the ground, a pitiless soul in an empty world, and hugged my knees to my chest, weeping into my arms. I was alone. Forgotten. A memory they would mourn, for sure, but evermore only that.
* * *
Trudging endlessly down an entirely different path, I shivered at the thought of the darkness to come. My legs hurt, aching as if hands of reverberating sharpness were rubbing up and down my thighs, and my stomach felt like I swallowed a big empty bowl of space. Even the grumbling hurt.
I rubbed the tops of my legs, letting my skirt rise higher than I would if there were others around. All over my skin, the Markings made me look like a favorite old Barbie doll someone’s little brother had gotten hold of and scribbled on with a permanent pen.
“This sucks!” I flopped down on my back, blowing my tantrum out with a hard pant. Overhead, my only friend shone down on me, lighting the sky pink as it had done on the last dusk, and beside that, my enemy crept in like purple shadows, disguising itself as clouds.
Hope was lost. It was my job to find it out here, but I failed. Now, I couldn’t even seem to find the beauty of the forest, either. It wasn’t pleasant like a national park or the forest by the lake. This was wild and untamed and open, and no one knew where to find me. I wished the trees weren’t so high, so that maybe I could feel sheltered. I just felt so out in the open, like anyone, anything could be watching. But nothing ever showed. That rude crow hadn’t even returned.
Though this world maintained it was dusk, I felt time passing again. I lay on the dirt, semi-conscious, singing to the sky as I twirled the key around and around. Every now and then, I held it up to the light and moved it along so the pink sun made the silver sparkle. I wondered whose key it was, what it locked away, whether it was a good secret or maybe a bad one. And wondered if perhaps it was a secret of the heart, like the ones I held. Maybe whoever owned this key felt love for another man, even though she was married.
Or maybe, in truth, it opened the lock to her lips—perhaps unburdened her of the lies she told herself purely because she didn’t want to admit the secrets.
The longer I laid on the cold dirt, the clearer the sounds around me became: the lonely song of twilight humming to my heart, the crickets, the buzzing of mosquitoes, the distant, sleepy ballad of a bird. I closed my eyes and let myself imagine home.
Home. Mike. His smile. His smell—all powdery-smooth. And the scratchy stubble on his chin that would prickle my forehead when he’d kiss my brow.
And David. His eyes. Green. Greener after we’d make love and the e
lectric blue surge of my uncontrolled passion had run free of them.
I shut my eyes tighter around the memory and held it all inside. Eventually these memories would fade, just like all the faces of my past. But right now, while I’d only been lost for a few days, they were as clear as a summer sky.
When I opened my eyes again, with the memory of summer so strong in my heart, midday actually filled out the forest around me. A sweet chocolaty scent ran through me with a deeper breath as I rolled onto my side, seeing a shape through the glare, like a beautiful man laying right in front of me face-to-face. His green eyes stared into mine, but even though the day was so bright that sadness seemed misplaced here, his soul looked lost, broken. I reached up, slowly tracing my thumb over each grain of hair along his jaw, feeling every bump, every rise in his skin, stopping on a small scar at the base of his chin—one he got when his six-year-old brother kicked him for losing a paper boat he’d made.
“Jason?”
His smile was so filled with kindness that my heart burned with the almost forgotten feeling of being loved.
“Jase, are you really here?”
“Ara?” he said in that smooth, low voice. “You have to get up. You have to keep moving.”
“I—” My eyes rolled back, closing. “I can’t. I failed, Jase—”
“No. You only fail if you don’t get up.”
“But I didn’t find it—hope. I thought I did, but… it was only a thought, an idea, and I keep losing it. I just keep losing it.”
“Hope was never to be found, Ara. Hope is something you always had in you.”
“But I’m not what my people needed me to be.”
“No, because you are more than they hoped you would be—capable of more than they allow you to believe.”
I shook my head against the dirt. “I couldn’t finish the walk. I’m no good to anyone.”
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