“I lied to you when I told you the bell could break your blood bond. It can’t . . . The bell allows its bearer to walk the Gray without leaving her body behind. That is all it does.”
She looked at Kellan, her yellow eyes shining with something that looked less like regret and more like . . . anguish. “It won’t save you. It can’t save you.” Her chin trembled.
I gaped at her. “Why, then? What did I walk the Gray for all those times—what purpose did any of that serve?”
“I wanted the bell so I could destroy it,” she said. “And in destroying it, let this thing in which my spirit is trapped finally, finally die. I’m a Warden of the Woods, descended directly from the Ilithiya’s flesh and blood. I’m supposed to guard the natural order, to maintain the balance between the planes—and I’m not fully human myself.”
“I know what you are,” I said. “I know what Galantha did to save you. Would you take her sacrifice so lightly? Is the prospect of eternal life so terrible?”
“Eternal life?” she shrilled. “I’m not living. I’m a spirit bound to a quicksilver body. I don’t eat. I don’t sleep. I don’t bleed. I can’t have children. There will be no daughters to whom I can pass on my mantle.” She advanced on me, tremulous. “I don’t even have a reflection. I will outlast every living thing on this earth. You ask me what’s so terrible about eternal life? Well, I ask you: What could be worse than living forever, alone in a dead world?”
I closed my eyes. “You put us on the wrong path, Rosetta. You gave us hope we didn’t have. How could you do that?”
She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Kellan. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t expect to . . . to . . .” She didn’t finish. She couldn’t admit out loud that, sometime between their acquaintance and the end of their incarceration, she had come to love him.
Overhead, the clouds had thinned to wisps, gilt into silver threads by the bright white moon. The earth’s shadow had already begun to carve away at the disc, turning it into the curved blade of a scythe.
Kellan said nothing to Rosetta, instead laying his brother’s sword beside the fountain so that he could put his good hand on my cheek. “It doesn’t matter,” he said softly. “I knew this was a possibility, and I accepted it.” Then he reminded me of the bloodcloth ritual: “Bound by blood, by blood undone.”
I stepped back.
By blood undone.
Not by death undone.
The bond can be broken only by death, Simon said, or something like unto it.
The light was waning; only a sliver of moon remained. In seconds, the world would become red.
This was it. This was the Bleeding Dream.
I’d lived this moment a hundred times in the last months. I’d done everything I could to keep it from coming to pass, pushing Kellan away, separating myself from him and anyone else I could hurt, but with no luck. And now I’d walked right into it.
His hands. His beautiful musician’s hands. Even as mutilated as his right hand was, there was still the possibility that it could heal. That it could hold his sword again. That it could give him the reputation he so desired: the brave knight, loyal to the kingdom and crown until the bitterest end.
It was that possibility I had to take away.
In one fluid motion, I kicked Kellan’s knees out from under him and grabbed for Fredrick’s sword.
Kellan put his hands down on the edge of Urso’s fountain to steady himself, crying out as he hit his right hand too hard upon it. “What are you doing? Aurelia, wait—”
“I’m sorry.” I sobbed, raising his brother’s sword above my head. Then, “Bound by blood, by blood undone.”
As I said it, the last bit of shadow covered the moon.
I brought the sword down on his right hand. It cleaved through his flesh and bone to the marble of the fountain underneath.
And the world turned red.
31
He screamed. When he looked at me, holding the bloody stump of his right arm, his eyes were full of rage and regret and a new emotion I never thought I’d see: hatred.
Kellan was a soldier. Born to protect. Bred to fight. The noble and loyal gryphon, and he was now rendered useless, his future felled in one fateful stroke.
Bound by blood, by blood undone.
I felt the connection between us snap.