An exchange of rings.
The flash of a knife.
A girl in a swirling snowstorm, sobbing—?me. Leaning over the broken body of the boy I so desperately loved.
Blood on the snow.
My head on his chest. A ring on his finger, his ring on mine. His dark, dark hair stark against the terrible white storm.
Blood on the snow. His blood.
“No,” I said, tearing my hand away. The storm and the snow and the blood disappeared. “I’ve been misled by your visions before. I won’t let you take this—?take him—?from me.” I tried to dismiss her with a decisive turn on my heel.
I didn’t get far. The ground groaned and convulsed beneath me, forcing me to my knees. Another aftershock, timed as if to remind me of my insignificance. When it stopped, Aren was advancing on me again. I shrank from her expanding shadow. Gone was the regal queen I’d grown up with; in her place loomed a twisted wraith, an unholy amalgamation of vein and vine and bone. She reached through the black ribbons of her hair with thorny fingertips, which skittered spider-like across my cheek and around my skull. When she had my head cradled in her hands, she drove her thumbs into my eyes.
I cried out, first from cold and pain and then in anguish as she forced me to watch it all again. Over and over. Rings. Knife. Death. Rings. Knife. Death.
Blood on the snow.
Blood on the snow.
Blood on the snow.
Firebird.
It was just a fleeting glimpse, a mere flash in the procession of more frightening pictures, but it was unmistakable: at his death, Zan is wearing my charm.
I hardly noticed when Aren removed her spiny thumbs from my eye sockets and withdrew; the awful images continued their cavalcade without her. I slumped where she left me, racked by full-body shivers despite the waves of heat rippling from my hut.
She wanted me to see, and now I could see nothing else. When I tried to imagine Zan’s eyes now, there was no more green clarity to them; they were vacant and staring. I couldn’t think of his lips without envisioning them blue and breathless and cold. I wouldn’t be able touch him again without revisiting the way his body looked as I knelt over it in grief. I’d burned my hut to raze my past, but as it was eaten away by flame, it was my future I saw crumbling in the embers. My future with Zan.
Blood on the snow.
Aren had made her message clear.
Leave him, or he dies.
* * *
I waited on the wall for three hours, pacing and practicing what I was going to say, but when I turned and finally saw Zan approaching me in the dark, lit by a shard of moonlight, my composure cracked.
“This is where I first knew I loved you,” he said as he drew near. “Watching the lengths you went to for my people, for me . . . feeling the strength of your spirit in that spell . . . How could I not?” He reached out and tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “I never dared to let myself hope that you might . . . that you could ever possibly . . .” He trailed off, flushing.
Stars save me. I wanted to kiss him, cling to him, melt into him and into this wall and become stone so I’d never have to let him go. But the minute I let those thoughts into my mind, I was confronted again by gruesome images of his death.
So instead of leaning into his touch or returning his confession with one of my own, I pushed every ounce of emotion into the coil inside me. It twisted and tightened, so taut now that if I so much as breathed wrong, it would snap and I’d shatter, torn apart from the inside.
“Emilie?” Zan asked.
“My name is not Emilie,” I said emotionlessly, not daring to look at him. “My name is Aurelia.”
“What?” He stepped back, as stunned as if I’d slapped him.
“Emilie is the name of a girl I knew in Renalt. And the Aurelia you know . . . her name is actually Lisette. We’ve been friends since we were small. I used to read your letters to her and we’d laugh at them. Made it something of a game. Whatever responses you got back from them, they were all from her. She thought it was great fun. We both did.”
“I don’t understand.” Zan leaned heavily against the battlements.
“I never wanted to come to Achleva,” I said, pinning my lies to a plausible truth. “I resented being wed, without my consent, to a man rumored to be afflicted with such a wide variety of infirmities. So I came up with a plan to make it so I didn’t have to.” I could hear Zan’s breathing become more painful and labored, and I almost lost my nerve. To keep from faltering, I plunged forward. “I offered to pay Lisette to take my place. I arranged everything. She wasn’t too keen at first, but the amount I offered was substantial, and the prospect of becoming a queen was quite appealing as well.”