I run back toward the heart of the Corruption.It will hurt.The sun has set behind the hills now, and everything is streaked in darkness. I stare out into the night sky above the lake. Black water, black sky, twin moons. I reach desperately for the burned-down scraps of power I have left, feel it heat my palms.
I run across the shore until I’m beside Rowan. He’s cut his arms—both of them. Blood streams from his wrists. He turns to me, and his eyes are crimson, his throat snared with dark. “Get away from me.”
His voice iswrong: low and terrible, like a clotted-over wound.
I kneel on the ground beside him. “No.”
He holds out his hands, bloodied and trembling, as tendrils of earth rise up and tangle around him, gripping his throat until the darkness seems to sink into his flesh. He hisses through clenched teeth.
The creatures come toward him in a rush. One after another, they fall onto him. He chokes out a desperate, hurt cry, but he doesn’t fight, doesn’t move. He lets them come. Their rounded, hungry mouths fasten at the wounds on his wrists. They tear into his skin. They bite at his arms, his chest, his throat.It will hurt; it will hurt.
Rowan sits with his arms flung wide, eyes closed, as the creatures writhe and feast. Cut and bled and devoured. I swallow down my cries, remembering how it was last time. When I put my hand to the earth and thought of warmth and made the Corruption leave him alone. I stretch my fingers toward the ground.
“No.” He shakes his head. His voice is thick, water and mud and lake. “Let them.”
I draw back and watch helplessly. There is more than one way for me to be hurt—how did I not understand this until now? I thought I could burn myself down to save the world. But I never thought of what to do if the world burned all around me instead.
After a long time, the creatures start to change. They soften, becoming more and more formless. Finally, finally, they letRowan go and seep back into the earth. He falls forward. The tendrils of Corruption unwind from him. The ground gives a final shudder, then goes still.
There’s no sound but thelap lap lapof waves against the shore. The creatures are gone. The wound in the shore has closed. The ground is black, still poisoned.
“Rowan?” I crouch beside his collapsed body. His shirt is stained with blackened blood, and his face is ashen. I can’t tell if he’s breathing. I press my trembling fingers against his throat in search of a pulse.
His lashes flutter, then he stares up at me with bloodshot eyes. He tries to push me away, but he’s overtaken by coughing. He curls up on his side, fighting for breath. He coughs and coughs, then chokes out mouthfuls of ink-dark water. He sits up, slowly, gasping for air. Spits out more of the oil-slick darkness and scrapes his wrist across his mouth.
“Arien.” He scans the shore, then sees Arien and Clover huddled beside the trees. Florence is holding a cloth to Arien’s arms; the contents of her basket are scattered across the ground. “Is he hurt?”
“Yes. I—” Tears fill my eyes. How can I tell Rowan—or anyone—the truth? “He was hurt, and it’s all my fault.”
Rowan’s expression darkens. “Never again.” He grips my arms with his bloodied fingers, fear and fury clear across his face. “Do you hear me? We are done with the rituals, with all of it.”
“You can’t give up. You know what will happen if it doesn’t stop.”
“Let it,” he whispers roughly. “Let it kill me. I don’t care. I’ll not have you—or Arien, or anyone—hurt again.”
He gets back to his feet, wrenching down his sleeves. More blood soaks through the cloth in dark streaks. He storms away, but when he reaches the gate, he falters and starts to stumble before catching himself against the scrolled iron arch. Florence goes to him quickly and wraps her arm around his waist. I watch him trying to shake her off as they disappear into the garden.
I go back to where Clover and Arien sit, and sink down beside them. I lean against one of the pale trees and press my face into my hands, breathing hard as I try to gather myself. The shore sprawls before us: cold and black and still. Clover rests her head on my shoulder and sighs. Arien stares out blankly toward the water. His hands are wrapped in a cloth, but he’s bled through the pale linen.
I’m relieved to see that the stains are crimson, not black. But this small moment of relief is quickly swallowed by guilt. I wasn’t strong enough. The wounds, the hurt, it’s all because I gave in to the Lord Under. I called on the lord of the dead, andthisis what he did.
I thought I could help, but all I did was make everything worse.
Chapter Sixteen
Night folds around me. I’m in the hall outside Rowan’s room, a candle jar cupped tight between my hands. His door is closed.
A thread-thin gleam of light edges the frame. But when I knock, there’s no response.
I close my eyes and lean my forehead against the paneled wood.
The house is silent and still. I feel as though I’m the only one awake—or alive—in the entire estate. After we came back from the lake, Clover mended Arien’s arms, but his skin still looked charred and raw and ruined. She promised him it would be fine. She said it the same way Rowan did, after the tithe—fine fine fine. Hope knotted up in a lie.
While she worked, I lit candles, as many as I could find. In Arien’s room, I lined the sills and the mantel and the bedsidetable with them, and set them on the floor in each corner. Never again would I let the darkness come for me or for Arien. When the wind stirred through the walls, when it sounded like my name, I refused to listen.
Florence came into the room and dragged a chair over to the bed. Sent Clover and me away and said she would watch over Arien. I left him shrouded in light, sound asleep. I went to my own room and tried to sleep, too. But when I closed my eyes, all I could see was the ritual. Images that came in swift, hideous flashes. The claws. The teeth. The sound of Arien’s screams when the Lord Under hurt him.
And Rowan. Poisoned and wounded and full of hard, cold resignation.Let it kill me.He’s lived for so long with that darkness inside him. Fought and fought, let it take him apart in a slow bloodletting to delay the inevitable. It makes me think of a dry well: the widening space between surface and water, the scrape of the bucket across the stones. He’ll give up, give in, and I’ll have to watch the Corruption slowly ruin him, piece by piece, before it destroys him entirely.
