I’ve remembered so little compared to all that I have yet to remember. The black void inside my head seems to watch me, nodding. I can’t fathom why I would have touched down like Fyel did. Who was I looking for? What did I want? And why couldn’t Fyel tell me the truth?
I step back from the half-formed batter in the bowl before me. I should throw it out and start again. Who knows what I’ve inflicted into this mess that was intended to be petit fours. Uncertainty. Anguish. Fear.
I push the bowl aside and rest my elbows on the counter in the back of my bakeshop, setting my forehead into my palms. Taking a deep breath, I trace back over everything Fyel has ever said to me, for I remember all of it. I think very hard about steel. The void within me darkens in protest.
The door to the shop opens. I spring up, brushing my hair back and beating flour off my dress, leaving white clouds in my wake as I hurry out front. I half expect Franc to be there to tell me Allemas has either worsened or recovered, but it’s a man in his late thirties, a young boy at his side. The child fists part of his father’s pant leg in his hand and looks around with eyes full of wonder.
“I know you,” I say.
The man smiles, but the expression fades as he studies me. “I don’t . . . No, is it you? I know the baker who works here, but you . . .”
“I’m her cousin,” I say with a smile. “From Rust.”
He nods slowly, his smile returning, unsure. “I’ve never seen the likes of you, if you don’t mind my saying so. You’re certainly unique. What color are your eyes?”
“Oh,” I say, glancing away, “they change with the weather, really.”
Another hesitant nod, and he looks over the shelves. “No eggs today?”
I shake my head. “We’ve only just returned from a . . . long vacation. We’re getting things in order.” I wonder if he knows about the marauders. Surely he’s traveled through these parts since. Perhaps it’s merely decency that keeps him from mentioning it.
He gestured with his chin to the chocolate cake—a confection made with love—sliced and waiting on a shelf. “Then we’ll just take two pieces of that, one for me and one for my boy. Every time we pass through here we’ve got to stop. Your cousin is the best cook I know, though don’t tell the missus.”
I smile at the compliment and hurry to fill the order—my first paid request since our return. It makes me feel my place in this small village. Makes me feel myself.
“Heard there was a bandit problem around here,” the man continues, resting a hand atop his son’s head. “That why they’re building a wall?”
I nod and bring the cake to him, taking his coin without complaint. We need every cent. “Hopefully it’ll mean the roads are a little safer.”
The boy points to my boot and tugs on his father’s pant leg.
The man ruffles the boy’s hair. “Thank you,” he says, and guides the boy out of the shop.
I watch as they head down to the wall, and only then do I return to my baking. I dump the botched recipe in my bowl, scrub the dish clean, and start again, this time adding lavender. Today, I want to bake confections of hope.
I close shop a little early. I haven’t heard word from Franc and Arrice, and the last several months have made me prone to worry. I lock the door and set out for the three straight lines that will lead me home.
“You need to come home.”
I close my eyes for a moment, pondering the words, savoring his voice, but I stumble over my booted foot and come to again. I grasp the handle of my satchel in both hands as I walk, squeezing hard enough that my knuckles almost return to their old color.
I turn onto the second road, and Cleric Tuck calls my name. I look toward the shrine of Strellis, which was only ravaged on the inside, to see him approaching me, his gait somewhere between a hurried walk and a jaunt. His navy clothes—priestly garb—rustle around him as he nears, and I’m taken back to that evening before all of this, before Fyel and Allemas and the marauders. When I focus on Cleric Tuck, I can pretend none of it ever happened, that my cozy life had continued uninterrupted, that the black space in my brain was only ever a simple shadow and readily ignored.
There is brightness to Cleric Tuck’s eyes and a huff to his breaths. Yes, I am there again. I am back to the start.
But then I see the deep color of my hands and I realize it’s all a fancy. But no—fancy isn’t the right word. Fancy would denote something desired. Something that I want, and I do not want this.
I meet Cleric Tuck at the edge of the road. There’s a sort of eagerness in his mouth, and all at once my stomach clenches and the muscles in my shoulders tighten into boards. Once I would have craved to see Cleric Tuck look at me this way. Now my feet yearn to flee.
“Maire,” he says, but he says it wrong. Not the way Fyel says it—an accented, right way I can’t define, a way my Raean mouth can’t quite form. The way my name was meant to be said.
Cleric Tuck reaches out a hand to me, but my arms are heavy at my sides. I look at the path ahead and wonder, briefly, if Allemas has improved. He still slumbered, almost death-like, when I left the house this morning.
Cleric Tuck takes my left hand in his. My fingers are warmer than his own. “I’ve been wanting to speak with you.” He pulls me toward the shrine. My knees refuse to yield.
He smiles in a half-mirthful, half-patronizing kind of way. “Surely after all we’ve been through you’re not still squeamish about the shrine.”
All we’ve been through? I think. In so many ways, Cleric Tuck is a stranger to me. He wasn’t there for most of my story. He was a wish in the beginning and a support at the end, but there is so much he doesn’t know, doesn’t understand.
But Cleric Tuck is insistent. He pulls me not to the shrine, but to the thin privacy of an outcropping of trees, branching off from the wall that separates the city from the farmland, their leaves turning amber with the changing season. It isn’t cold outside, but my skin prickles with a sudden chill.
“Maire,” he says in a husky tone and takes up my other hand as well. “I feel like a different person after this . . . adventure,” he says, tasting the word.
I swallow and reply, “I have a similar sentiment.” There’s a weight to my words, but I don’t think he feels it.
His thumbs rub the backs of my hands, but I find no pleasure in the touch. I look away from him, toward my shop, toward the grove where I first and last saw Fyel. My lahst. How can I explain without hurting him?
“After I saw you at the shrine in Ecru, I knew I had to find you,” Cleric Tuck continues. “I couldn’t stop thinking of it. I prayed for you night and day. When I heard you might be in Cerise, I was overjoyed, though I never expected . . .”
His lips twist ever so slightly as he stands back and looks me up and down. There’s no need for him to finish the sentence; he never expected me to look like this. Fyel rejoiced in the changes that brought me closer to my true self. Tuck preferred me as I was before.
He smiles again, soft and hopeful, and in my throat I taste lavender that has gone bitter after being left too long on the stem. “Tuck,” I say, but he shakes his head and talks over me.
“We’re back now,” he says. “It’s over, and I never wish to be separated again. Not from Carmine, and not from you.”
My body stiffens. No, this isn’t right. This isn’t right.
He pulls on my hands, bringing us closer together. I feel a tingling in my chest—not one of excitement, but one of him, the prickling before he appears. I want to turn my head to look, but one of Cleric Tuck’s hands comes up and takes my chin, catching me off guard.
“I want to call you mine,” he murmurs, and those dark eyes blind me. His lips press against mine before I can turn away, but they’re different from how they felt before—too fervent, too salty, too moist—
I hear a guttural sort of roar behind me, as though the trees have grown mouths and are bellowing at us. I jerk back from Cleric Tuck just as the earth rises up between us, sweeping out and over him
, knocking him away. I yelp and stumble back and can see Tuck landing hard on his shoulder several paces from where I stand.
“Fyel,” I breathe. I turn around, searching, and find him between the trees, hovering there with uneven flaps of his wings, his face contorted in a mixture of anger, pain, and confusion. He lifts his hands and stares at them as though seeing them for the first time.
Thunder booms overhead and clouds darken the sky. This storm looks and smells just like the one that brewed while Allemas wailed at the creek. No rain, only churning darkness and uneven thunder.
I look back at Fyel, who takes in the sudden storm and curses in a language that is not mine, but I understand the hardness of the word nevertheless. He vanishes in an instant.
“Fyel!” I cry, limping to the space where he had been, reaching for him, but there is nothing left of him. Rain falls from my eyes. “Fyel, please!”
Cleric Tuck groans behind me, holding his bruised shoulder. “What on Raea?” he asks, eyeing the upturned earth.
“Fyel,” I whisper, leaning on a tree. My leg is aching again. Cleric Tuck calls out to me, and I slowly pull my body toward him. I help him sit up and press my hands into his shoulders—he hisses as I touch his left—and over his collarbone. “Nothing seems to be broken,” I say, my words caught up on the wind. I look up. The clouds no longer churn, but they linger as thick as smoke, lurking, waiting.
“Maire—”
“I can’t, Tuck,” I say, barely more than a whisper, avoiding his dark gaze. “I’m sorry.”
I stand and stagger away from it; Cleric Tuck hobbles to his feet, his dark brows drawn.
“What do you mean?” he asks, his voice hard.
I shake my head. “What I am can’t be fixed,” I say, recalling his words from the inn. “I’m not who you think I am. I’m so sorry, Tuck. It just . . .” An especially cold breeze runs through my hair. “It never was you.”
I avoid his gaze, looking instead at the shrine to Strellis over his shoulder. To my eyes it seems to grow silver teeth, smooth on one side, serrated on the other. I stumble away from it, away from Cleric Tuck, and run home, ignoring the sharp protest of my leg and the hard obsidian of Cleric Tuck’s gaze.
He tried to cut off my hand. I took a fruit and he tried to cut off my hand but it’s mine now. The knife is mine too. His hands are mine. His hair and his pumping thing and his skin but I don’t want the mess. It’s so messy and red. He looks like her, on the inside. They all do.
CHAPTER 24
I am beside myself when I arrive home, but when Arrice inquires after me, I can’t bring myself to tell her about Cleric Tuck. She’s always had such high hopes for him, and what little I can tell her about Fyel—about my life before—will sound too far-fetched, even though my looks alone whisper that I am not what I once seemed. Arrice knows it, and Franc does, too, but it’s so much easier for them to pretend they don’t.
But I tremble, and my foot throbs anew. Arrice coaxes me by the fire, props my foot up, and hands me a bowl of stew. I hold the hot dish in my hands and stare out the window, watching the storm recede as night descends, the changes slow, subtle. Franc comes home, his trousers splotched with mortar and dirt, his shirtsleeves stained with paint. He’s been working on the wall and the barn sunup to sundown since we arrived, and it’s aging him. I say nothing, only watch him rub his lower back. Arrice fusses over him as well and sticks him in another chair with another bowl of stew. He sighs, takes off his hat, and looks at me.
“You should take it off,” he says, gesturing with a rise of his brow to my wooden boot. “Let the doctor look at it.”
Arrice stiffens in the kitchen and mumbles, “The doctor is dead, Franc.”
Franc licks his lips and grunts, dropping his attention to his dinner.
I eat slowly, staring at the fire, each bite settling my stomach. My foot feels better by the time I’m done, and I mull over Franc’s words as I take the dish to the kitchen. Arrice near-wrestles it from my hands and sends me upstairs to rest, and to “get your head on straight so you can tell me what all this hustle and bustle is about.”
I trek upstairs, leaning on the rail—I haven’t used my cane for some time—and peek into my old bedroom, where Allemas lies on the bed, his position unchanged since morning, his large feet hanging off its edge. His breathing is even and heavy.
“Allemas,” I say. He doesn’t stir. I shut the door and slip into Arrice and Franc’s room, which Arrice and I are still sharing. Twilight seeps through the window. The bed is made, the covers turned down.
Sitting on the edge of the mattress, I wiggle the toes of my right foot. They’re all mobile, but my ankle remains stubborn, bending no more than a hair’s width in either direction.
Footsteps trudge up the stairs, and Arrice pokes her head into the room. “Franc’s going to carve a new cane for you, one better suited for your height, so you can take off the boot. Might be ready by tomorrow.”
My shoulders slump. “He doesn’t need to do that, I—”
“It gives him something to do that isn’t manual labor,” she chides. “And that thing on your foot is awful.”
I look down at the wooden boot Allemas fashioned for me. That feels so long ago now. Dirt has embedded itself into the grain, making the wood look weathered and gray. “It’s pretty atrocious, isn’t it?”
Arrice just smiles and shuts the door. I listen to her descend.
Leaning down, I unhook the straps of the wooden splint and free my leg from it. I palm the crystal hidden there and tuck it into my breast-binds. The bones and muscles of my damaged leg are stiff. I remove the bandages—I don’t need them anymore, save to hide my scars—and gently, tenderly, rub spots on my ankle, avoiding the ones I know will hurt. I wonder if I’ll need to keep it splinted always, in order to step right. That, or I’ll rely on a cane for the rest of my life.
Careful, holding on to the night table, I stand, keeping my weight on my good leg. I space my feet shoulder width apart and bit by bit lean onto the bad foot. It starts to ache before I’ve straightened. I try to add a little more, a little more. Dull pains, blunt pains, but nothing sharp. A cane might work. Maybe.
I lift it to try and take a step, but a sensation like cool mist, like powdered sugar hanging in the air, prickles my senses, and I know without turning.
“Fyel.” I whisper his name and turn around, watching his shape materialize in the space across the bed. He truly does just . . . appear.
My heart grows its own crystalline wings at the sight of him. He’s here, he came, but peachy hues still cling to his skin. Other than that, he looks as he should look, every part of him.
“I’m sorry,” I say, rushing out the words. “Cleric Tuck, I didn’t mean to—”
“Who is Cleric Tuck?” he asks, his brows drawn together.
I swallow. “The man, out where the fields meet the forest. Where you were.”
He rubs his forehead, wincing as he does so. “You were harder to find,” he says. There’s a formality in his voice that clips my heart-wings. “I found you . . . but . . . I do not understand myself.”
“The storm—”
“There are laws,” he says, “that prevent me from—”
“I know,” I say, thinking of how intently he listened to the heavens when he set off the traps in Allemas’s cave. He’s not supposed to interact with Raea. Holding in a sigh, I murmur, “You still don’t remember.”
He shakes his head. “Not . . . Maire. I know you, but I do not . . . know.”
The words should be nonsensical, but I understand them. Even now, looking at him, I know Fyel in a way I cannot explain. I know him somewhere in the murky fog of my own memory, like smelling something new in the kitchen and recognizing it by taste, but not by sight.
“Where do you go, when you leave?” I ask. He studies me as the words leave my lips, staring at the cut of my hair and my Carmine-style dress. His gamre eyes linger on mine for a moment, but then they shift to my wingless arms. I look like a craf
ter, but I don’t.
He doesn’t trust me yet, so he doesn’t answer. The silence pricks me like sun-dried pine needles.
“When we met . . . the second time,” I begin, trying to move around the bed toward him, but when I put my full weight on my foot a sharp pain stabs my ankle. Gasping, I sit on the bed and pull it toward me, gingerly rubbing the ache away.
I let out a stunted breath.
“You are hurt.”
“I tried to run,” I say, resting my foot on the bed. “When I was at the house where Allemas kept me, a house surrounded by blazeweed. You visited me there several times. Do you remember?”
“Blazeweed,” he repeats, lines creasing his forehead. It’s a familiar expression to me, both from the past several months and the fog.
I nod. “I climbed over the house to avoid it and ran into the woods, but I got caught in an animal trap—”
I shiver at the memory. Though it’s grown less vivid with the passing days, I will never forget the moment those teeth sank into my skin, back when it was still brown with a carmine hue. I remember breaking, searing, burning. I remember the earth beneath my hands.
“You were there,” I murmur. “In a way. Do you remember?”
“I am sorry,” he says.
I backtrack, trying my first approach. “I had a dream about the time before . . . you had put rings in the sky.” I assume now that this was another world, though I can’t imagine how either of us came to be there, or how something so curious and massive could be built by a single individual. “Rings of stone . . .”
I still don’t remember this story myself, so relating it is challenging. “I found you because I liked them, I think. Does that sound familiar?”
“I know what you describe. Sky-rings,” he says, flapping those liquid wings. They look chalky in the light filtered by the dregs of the storm. “But there have been many, and I would have remembered you.”
“Because I’m red?”
His lip quirks at that. “There are many crafters of many colors.”
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