by Jenny Moss
Kenway and I rode the other horse, me in the back, my cloak and dress bunched up around me, hiked up, revealing my calves. I cared little about that, although Tayte cast a reproving look my way.
I had suggested to Kenway that I ride in front, because he was still recovering. He grimaced, shaking his head. “I am well enough.” His eyes flashed. “We danced last night, didn’t we?”
He did seem better, with more color in his cheeks. But his eyes were red and tired. The world he knew was no more.
All was quiet as we left. Looking back at Stillman and Tayte in front of their hut, I saw a neighbor with them, pointing toward us, or perhaps in the direction we were headed. Something was wrong.
A crowd of villagers huddled around the shaft by the well, talking loudly and gesturing with wild arms. We jumped off the horse. They backed away as we approached, as if they were afraid. Hadn’t we all danced together in fellowship just last night?
“What’s wrong?” Kenway asked.
The people moved aside to show us.
Ingen let out a gasp and jumped off her horse.
A wild bush of blackberries spilled forth from the hole in the ground. The leaves were dark green and plentiful. The berries looked large and luscious. I dropped down to get a closer look, breathing in a fresh sweetness. The roots of the plant ran along the black soil of the shaft. Thick roots that looked as old as the trees by the river.
“This bush wasn’t here yesterday,” said Kenway. He plucked a large blackberry, squishing it in his fingers. My favorite fruit.
“It is wonderful,” I said, reaching for one, full of wonder.
Ingen wore a radiant smile. “All will be well,” she said, looking at me.
Then I noticed. They all stared at me. The old man who’d played the fiddle. The boy who carried my pail of water from the well. The girl who gave me the bright green ribbon.
“I saw you,” she said, stepping toward me, her shyness gone. “You gave your ribbon to Erce. You tossed it in the hole last night.”
“I saw her, too,” said a mother with a babe tugging at her skirts. The other villagers nodded.
“All of you gave things to Erce,” I said, rising.
I stepped back from their eager faces. What did they want from me? Erce had given them a blackberry bush. Or maybe it was the witch who had done this thing. Not me.
No one spoke. I glanced at Kenway. He was looking at me in the same way they all looked at me. As if they expected something.
I backed up, trying not to stumble over my feet. They circled me as I got on the horse. Why weren’t Kenway and Ingen coming?
“I pray you, stay,” pleaded the old fiddler, pulling the reins from me. “You’re in Erce’s favor. We need you.”
I jerked the reins back, but he grabbed my hand.
His fingers bore into me as if they were roots, crawling under my skin, winding their way into my veins, twisting around my lungs. Desperate faces all around me, pushing me toward feelings I didn’t understand. I was a child at the foot of a father’s grave, a wife mourning a husband taken away. I felt panic. They were reaching for my soul.
I tugged at the front of my dress. I couldn’t breathe.
“Let’s go, Kenway,” I pleaded.
He did as I bade him. Ingen swung up on her horse, a wide smile on her face. We left a silent square, so different from the one filled with music and laughter the night before.
I tried to shrug off the unsettling feelings. I found I was clinging to Kenway, my arms wrapped around his waist. Embarrassed by my need, I released him.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, breathing a little easier.
Quickly, we left the village behind and took the pass up into the mountains. It was a good trail, although rocky and steep in places. Ingen was in the lead. I wondered if she knew the way. Then I remembered her people were from the mountains. Did she know this witch Kendra after all? Perhaps she was our guide.
Kenway fell back against me as our horse moved up the path. He smelled of soap and sweet herbs. I felt a little dizzy and put my forehead on his back.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “How did that bush grow overnight?”
I kept my head against him. “I don’t know,” I whispered, not wanting to talk. I didn’t understand, either, but the bush wasn’t what troubled me.
It was those feelings, digging into me, like I was the soil that would feed them. Only a witch could make me suffer so. What did this Kendra want from me? This newfound interest in my person amazed me. I had always been nothing to those around me.
Eldred had a hand in this. The past would not stay behind me, no matter how far I traveled.
It was almost midday when we stopped by a bubbling stream of clear water. It was so quiet. No birds that I could see. No deer. No rabbits. Only red ants crawling on rocks. The sun was out, but it was getting colder. I pulled my cloak around me.
Kenway and I sat on a gray boulder beside a scrawny bush, the horses not far from us. Ingen squatted down and peered into the water. Kenway handed me some of the remaining figs in his bag. I took them, squishy as they were, but lay back without eating them. A breeze whispered to me, blowing strands of hair across my face. I fancied I heard the soothing sounds a mother makes to her child.
“That blackberry bush,” Kenway said. “I have never seen anything like it before.”
“A witch’s trick,” I said, trying to listen to the breeze. “Eldred’s sorceress.”
Ingen took some figs and ate them as she walked on rocks in the stream. When she playfully jumped from one slippery rock to another, I bit back chiding words. I was not her mother. If she fell in, it would be her own doing.
“So you believe this Kendra we seek is a witch?” Kenway asked.
“Whatever she may be, she’s allied with Eldred.”
“What could she want of you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, not wanting to think about it. Perhaps she wanted Ingen, not me? Then why was I here, too?
“You were so afraid this morning, in the square. The bush, the words of the townspeople…it was disturbing. Is that what frightened you? Or was it something else? Was it…this Kendra? Do you think she’s responsible for the blackberries?”
I turned on my side toward him, propping my face upon my hand. “I was not afraid, just confused.” I handed the uneaten figs back to him. I wasn’t hungry.
“You do have a strong heart, which I’ve always admired,” he said. “I confess I don’t understand it, though. You come from nothing.”
I clucked my tongue. “You still only see rank, even after staying with Tayte and Stillman?”
“It’s what I’ve been taught, I guess. We’re each born to our station.”
“Rowe’s a brave boy. He comes from nothing.”
“Yes, but he is loved and wanted. You were neither.” He flushed. “I’m sorry—”
“It is all right, Kenway. Don’t bother with it.” I lay back down and took in a breath of blue sky. This was my tonic: the boulder I lay upon, the air around me, the sun in my face. “I don’t know how to explain it to you. It…seems odd, I know, but I think I am being watched over.” There, I had said it. The silly thought I had refused to voice, to even think on.
“You mean, as if your mother were still here?”
I looked over at him, curious. “No, she is gone, and I never knew her anyway.” I wondered if he thought of his own mother. His face was soft as if his mind was lost in a child’s memory.
When I caught his eye, he smiled, somewhat sadly, it seemed to me. “If not your mother, then your father?” he asked.
“I don’t think I had one of those,” I said, laughing.
“That could be fortunate,” he said. “So who is watching over you?”
I shrugged. “At times it feels as if it is the Earth itself.”
His lips quivered into a smile. “Do you mean Erce?”
“Perhaps the villagers are right, and she’s real.” I wa
s starting to believe it. It could be Erce taking care of me. Maybe she had sent me the blackberries. I hoped it was her, not Kendra. Eldred’s witch wanted something, or Eldred would not have sent me to her.
“I find it difficult to believe Erce exists,” said Kenway.
“And yet you believe in ghosts and witches.”
“A ghost has visited me, Shadow.”
I nodded, wondering if he would tell me more. I thought back to the night his father struck him and called him a coward for being afraid of ghosts.
“It was my mother,” he said, not looking at me. “Right after she died.”
I wanted to ask him, but he was very guarded. My curiosity felt wrong, like I was intruding on something private. “Perhaps you’ll tell me about her one day,” I said.
“Perhaps.” He smiled at me, twisting the gold ring on his finger.
“Your father is wrong, Kenway. You are very brave.”
“I think you fear nothing. Not Erce, Kendra, Fyren.”
“Only living a life not my own.”
There was a pause. “I can see how your life must’ve been at the castle.”
“Can you?”
He lay beside me, his sleeve against mine. His skin, so far from my skin. “I have a confession.”
“What?”
“Remember when I accused you of…watching me when I was with the queen?”
I blushed, flustered again. “You are quite sure of yourself, Kenway.”
“I’m not fin—”
“You must think all the ladies are in love with you.”
I’d embarrassed him. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do. You think me arrogant—”
“Indeed you are arrogant.”
“Not any more than you.”
I sat up. “Me?”
He gave me a crooked smile.
“How can I be arrogant? You yourself have let me know many times how lowly I am.”
“Well, I’m sorry for it.”
I narrowed my eyes, suspicious.
“I am, Shadow,” he said, sitting up. “But despite my feelings about it, you never felt that way. I saw your eyes when you were yelled at or slapped. There was defiance there and a steady will. You’ve never believed you are less than anyone else.”
I thought of his father hitting him and his defiance. I remembered how he had stood up to those in the castle who beat him and called him a traitor. “We are not so different, I think.”
He reached for a strand of my hair, twirling it in his fingers. I thought of the queen and how he did this to her and pulled back from him. I lay down on the rock.
“I didn’t finish my confession, Shadow,” he said softly.
“Confess, then. I will give you absolution.”
“You weren’t the only one spying. I used to watch you when you’d lie just like this.”
My heart skipped. I felt his eyes on me, but I couldn’t look his way.
“You were not like the queen or her ladies, who were always so proper.”
“So I wasn’t proper?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
I laughed and stole a glance at him.
“You were brazen,” he said with a smile, “lying on the ground, with dirt smudging your skirts and leaves in your hair.”
He reached toward me, and my heart sped. He smoothed back some loose strands of my hair, his touch tender. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. I was glad for it because he would’ve seen the depth of emotion there.
But I couldn’t stop looking at his face, the beauty there, the kindness.
He lingered for a second before dropping his hand. “You seemed so far away.” Then he looked right at me, and my feelings were there for him to see. “You were there, but never really there,” he said softly. “What were you thinking of so intently?”
“Escape,” I whispered. I had thought myself so watchful, so clever. I had not been. I had misread Piers, Fyren, Eldred. And Kenway, too. My mind had been too cluttered with dreams of escape.
“It was on our picnics,” he said. “Do you remember?”
“Those were the queen’s picnics.” I had been wrong about much, but I knew one thing. “You did love her,” I said, sitting up. “I saw the way you looked at her.”
“I was desperate to protect her because she was my queen and…and to please my father.”
It was more than that, I thought.
“She was beautiful,” he admitted.
“Was she?” I picked up a rock and studied it.
He gave me a look I couldn’t read, but I might have said that it was knowing. I lifted my chin. Did he think me jealous of his feelings for her? I felt my stomach twist when he didn’t drop his gaze.
“She was cruel to you, and you didn’t deserve that.” He looked away. “But she was more than what she showed you.”
I remembered when she and I were children, when she cared nothing about our ranks of queen and shadow. At night, she’d lean over the side of her high bed, her blond hair flowing down like bright gold water, and whisper to me so Ingrid wouldn’t hear. I felt a pang at the memory. I missed the child that she was.
But she grew up. I threw the stone hard and fast at nothing. It hit the rocky ground and bounced along. It was my own fault for trusting her.
“I was committed to her,” he said, watching me closely. “But not in the way she imagined, that I think you imagined. It didn’t matter anyway. She was destined for a prince.”
We were silent. I felt his eyes on me, looking at me in a different way.
“What?” I asked, blushing.
“You confuse me. I wish you were…”
“Yes?”
“I’m a knight. I have a duty to my family.”
“Now you confuse me, Kenway.”
“I have no choice in whom…”
“In whom…?” I asked.
Standing, he held out his hand. “We must go. We need to reach Kendra’s by nightfall.” He called to Ingen, who had ventured far up the stream. We took the horses to her.
We moved higher up into the mountains. An icy wind blew against my cheeks and ruffled my fur-lined cloak, but I welcomed the chill. Unexplainable warmth filled my chest, like my heart was on fire.
How had I lived for fifteen years and not seen such beauty? The heavy stone blocks of the castle had not hidden us from harm, but only from wide rivers, sweet blackberries, and yellow wildflowers.
Toward late afternoon, we’d almost reached the top of a peak. The horses struggled so much that we got off and led them up. A smell I did not know was thick in the air. I felt a rumble in my chest. Piles of snow lay on the ground.
We were at the top. The wind whipped around us. We were flying in the deepening blue sky, touching wispy clouds. Craggy hills and more mountains stretched out on all sides. Straight before us was something I had only heard about, but had never seen.
Water going on and on until it fell off the Earth. I ran, hearing Kenway calling me to stop. At the edge of the cliff, I looked out on the deep blue ocean with its white-capped waves. Elegant birds swooped down and back up again. The salty smell, so rich and full of life.
Kenway joined me at the high cliff. I looked back to see Ingen holding the reins of the horses, her long hair flying in the mountain wind.
“Have you never seen the ocean?” Kenway asked, putting his hand on my shoulder. That simple touch sent a thrill through me. I felt a fight within me—a longing to reach for him and a strong resistance to that yearning.
“I’ve never seen anything,” I said, trying to keep my unruly hair from blowing in his face or mine. The wind gusted cold and strong.
And then he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to him, enveloping me into himself. I’d never been held like this before. Not by anyone that I could remember. It felt strange, disorienting. I gave in. I leaned into him, no longer caring if he knew of my feelings. He tightened his hold on me and nuzzled his scratchy face into my cheek. “Shadow,” he said.
I could feel hi
s heart beating. I could feel my heart beating.
I turned my face to look at him. He looked back.
“Shadow,” he said again, as if it were the only word he knew.
He leaned down to me. His lips gently touched mine. Sweetly, and I wanted more.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her. “Ingen is watching,” I said.
“I don’t care,” he said, not taking his eyes off of me. He put his hands in my hair and pulled me in, the next kiss less gentle, but still so sweet.
Finally, he spoke.
“I have to do it,” he said, his words warm and thick in my ear. I cared little what he said, just wanted him to keep speaking. “It’s my duty. I’ve failed at so much. I have to do this last thing for Eldred. For the queen.”
I didn’t understand it, so I said nothing.
“I will protect you,” he said, with emotion. “I promise you.”
“I’m not afraid, Kenway.”
“I know that.” He turned me around, but kept me close with one arm draped around me, and pointed to a cottage perched on a lower hill, precariously close to a cliff overlooking the sea. “That’s our destination.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The cottage was made of gray weathered wood and had a thatched roof. It was sealed none too well. Through the cracks, I glimpsed something moving inside. The witch.
Kenway gripped my arm as if to hold me in place. The door opened.
She was tall. White hair flowed down her back, almost to the ground. Her eyes were a calm green, like a resting pond, and wide set over a perfect nose. Her skin was lined, but soft and white.
She put her fingers to her forehead, letting them linger there for a moment before pulling back her hair. The gesture reminded me of someone.
Kenway saw it, too. He bowed. “You are so like the queen. Who are you, my lady?”
“I am not royal,” she said in a low voice. “Do not bow to me.”
Her cottage was smaller than Stillman’s. A square shape, with a fire in the middle. Smoke drifted up.
A single cot was shoved against the far wall. A gray table with two benches on our right. A long window on the left faced the ocean, but the shutters were closed. Food had been set out for us.