Bloodleaf (Bloodleaf 1)

My focus caught on the corner of a new drawing that had shaken loose from the others when I dropped them. I plucked it from the pile and rose to my feet, feeling sick, wanting to strike the image from my mind forever and yet unable to look away.

The girl in the picture had wild hair flying around her face in a twisted halo, her eyes wide and staring, her mouth parted in what looked like a scream—?of pain or ecstasy, I could not tell. The touches of beauty and elegance found in the detailed hand study were gone; in this rendering, the girl’s fingers had become stiff and curled, like claws. Her cheeks and eye sockets were marked by cavernous shadows, hollowed by the tongues of flame from the blood and hair burning in the bowl.

No wonder, I thought. No wonder they hate us. No wonder they burn us. No wonder the Empyrea wants to rid the earth of us. This . . . this person . . . she was power and danger and death.

She was what Zan saw when he looked at me.

I cast the picture into the fire. While it smoked, I scrabbled on my knees for the other drawings, and then I burned them, too.

The fire roared in the grate, and my body flushed in the stifling heat, as if I and my effigy were inextricably bound and I, too, was being consumed by the flames. Desperate for air, I fled back out into the rain and then did not stop at the doorstep. Past the trees, the pond, down into the culvert and the passage beyond.

When I climbed up the rocks and out onto the field of bloodleaf, the Harbinger was already waiting for me. She knew I would come, the same way she seemed to know everything but what paths might actually help me.

“All these years I’ve let you guide me. I’ve put myself in danger to do as you bid me, and look where I am now. Just look at what’s become of me. Is this what you wanted?”

She waited, wordless as ever.

“I’m sick of it. All of it. Of you, of magic, of death.” I took out Achlev’s luneocite knife and made a quick nick on my index finger. “I don’t want you to visit me anymore,” I said. “I don’t want to see you following me. I’m done. We’re done.” I gathered every ounce of feeling I had left inside of me and let it loose at her. “Just . . . be gone!” I cried, and felt a strange, unsettling snap.

She stumbled backwards, as if I’d cast not words at her but weighty stones. She fell into the web of bloodleaf that encased the tower, and the vine reacted to her touch, snaking around her limbs and torso, up around her throat, and entwining itself in her hair. It enveloped her, it became her, until I could see nothing but her black-orb eyes, glowing darkly inside the tangle of red-shot vine.

And then she let out a silent scream as she and the bloodleaf turned to glittering orange ember and drifting ash, leaving a cavernous space in the hedge and revealing an ancient door beneath it.

I raised shaking fingers to the rusted iron inlay. It was a mess of swoops and swirls. There was a corroded lock set in the aged wood, but I didn’t need a key; a soft push made the door give way. I took my first nervous step inside.

Rain was leaking through old cracks in the walls and spilling from thin lancet windows onto a mosaic of the triquetra knot.

At the foot of the stairs I saw her again, the ghost woman whose body was too broken to identify. She glanced at me over her shoulder and then moved up the stairs, revealing a painting behind her on the wall. Though age had worn much of it away, I could make out three figures: a woman between two men—?one with dark hair standing in the light and one with light hair standing in the dark.

The painting

s continued panel by panel, telling Aren’s story alongside my ascent up the stairs. Black shadows slipped out from a tear in the barrier between the material and spectral planes, each one more grotesque and frightening than the last.

Aren and her brothers followed the ley lines to the spot, which sat in an ancient basin, next to a fjord, in the midst of a thatch of wild red roses. There they had joined hands to cast the spell that would seal up the hole forever.

As I neared the top of the tower, more and more of the panels were faded to obscurity. I could make nothing out until the second-to-last panel, which showed Cael with a knife in his hands and Aren dying in Achlev’s arms. At first it looked as if Achlev was wrapping the rose vines around her, but a second glance showed me the truth—?the vines were becoming part of her. As they overtook her, the red roses became pure white.

Instead of dying, she had been transformed into bloodleaf.

I was at the top of the tower now, looking up at an overhead door. Not unlike the entrance, it was aged and ineffectual. I pushed it open, emerging onto a platform in the rainy gray daylight.

I turned to find a huge sculpture of a woman, rimmed by a dim halo, looking down at me. A luneocite knife, not unlike the one I had in my pocket, was locked in her stony hands. I knew her face well now. My ancestress. The Harbinger. Aren.

I felt cold pricking along my arms in the dreary drizzle, and turned. The ghost woman was standing at the brink of the tower platform, beside the crumbling parapet. She reached out her hand; she wanted to show me how she’d died. Too tired be scared, I reached back.

More shocking than the cold was the jarring transition from day to night, from my perspective to hers in the last moments of her life. In this echo of the past, I had no eyes or ears of my own. I saw what she saw, I heard what she heard.

She was speaking to another woman in the same spot where we were now standing. “I can’t watch him suffer anymore,” she was saying. “Every day he gets worse. I can feel him slipping away, Sahlma. And I can’t let him go . . . I won’t . . .”

Sahlma? I recognized her now, the healer from town. Younger, but with the same pernicious scowl. “Best to let nature take its course,” Sahlma said. “Bloodleaf is both foul and fickle; even if I do manage to collect one of those petals—?almost impossible to do; they disintegrate the moment you touch them—?what if it doesn’t work? Then you’ll have died for nothing.”

The woman was looking down now, and I could see a ring on each of her slender hands. One was a spread-winged raven, the Silvis signet. The other was a clear white stone, cut into a thousand triangular facets. “If I don’t do it, then Zan will die.” She looked up at Sahlma. “A mother should never have to be without her child.” Then she slipped each of the rings off her fingers and placed them in the center of Sahlma’s palm. Trembling, she said, “After you give him the petal and he’s better, will you make sure he gets these? Will you tell him that I love him? Promise me.”

“Don’t do it, my lady. Don’t.”

She climbed onto the edge of the parapet and looked out across the expanse one last time. The city—?the entire city—?was built in the shape of the triquetra knot, I saw through her eyes. Each gate was a point. The lines of the city streets and the trees and the shape of the fjord all made up the curved swoops of the knot, contained within the circle of the great wall. We stood high above it all in the exact center, protected by the castle on one side and the fjord on the other.

Then she looked down at the carpet of bloodleaf far, far below. Taking a deep breath, she gave Sahlma one last look from over her shoulder and said, “Better hurry.”