34
The next morning, I dressed Lara in a bloodred robe.
“It’s tradition,” she explained as I fixed a single ruby on a golden chain around her neck. “Everyone wears red the day of this trial.”
“There’s no one left to care if you wear red. Why not wear what you want?”
“You don’t understand.”
I did, though. For all their restlessness and obsession with change and stimulation, the Fae were tied to their traditions.
Someone knocked on the door. “Come in,” Lara called.
Alodie entered holding a wooden box in her pale blue hands. “I found this by my bed,” she explained in a dazed voice. “I know I have to give it to you, but I don’t know why.”
Lara took the box. “It’s all right. It must be part of the trial.”
We studied the box after Alodie left. It was roughly the size of my hand and had been carved with depictions of weaponry between the twining branches of a tree. The wood was worn almost smooth, as if it had been handled for centuries.
“What are you supposed to do?”
Lara examined it. “I’m not sure.” She pried at the lid, then yelped, sucking her finger. “It’s sharp.”
I ran my finger over the seam, looking closely at the box. A tiny thorn popped out and stabbed into my skin. “I suppose we’ll need to figure out how to open it.”
We tried for long minutes, but nothing seemed to unlock it, and we were cut by minuscule thorns every time we touched it. The box drank our blood as quickly as it appeared.
This is like your magic , I thought at Caedo, but the dagger didn’t respond.
It was evident this was some kind of puzzle box, but how were we supposed to open it? There was nothing on the surface but the tree and the weapons: no lock, and nothing to dig my fingers into.
I started pressing instead, ignoring the small pinpricks of pain. I crowed with glee when one of the daggers compressed into the surface. Something within the box clicked, and the lid popped open.
Inside was a small dagger, a silver cup, and a note.
Fill the cup with blood at the Blood Tree. Water it well.
Lara frowned at the note. “That sounds bad.”
“What’s the Blood Tree?”
“It’s this ancient tree at the entrance to Blood House. They tried to cut it down after the rebellion, and then they burned it, but nothing worked.”
“Sounds like you have to cut yourself there, fill the cup, and feed the tree your blood.”
Lara made a face. “I don’t want to.”
“You have to. People will be watching, which means I can’t help you this time.”
She stared at the knife as if it were a serpent ready to bite.
Seconds ticked by, and I sighed. This wouldn’t go well if Lara couldn’t cut herself. “You have to fill the cup there,” I said, “but maybe we can collect some blood in advance so it won’t be so bad.”
I found a vial that would fit behind a bracelet hidden beneath Lara’s sleeve. Once she began the ritual, she’d be able to combine it with the blood she drew at the tree, which meant she wouldn’t need to cut as deeply as the other candidates.
I handed her the dagger so she could start filling the vial, but Lara didn’t take it. She still looked petrified.
Perhaps I could help in this trial after all—I was certainly used to giving up my blood to Caedo. “It’s not so bad. See?” I dragged it lightly across my own forearm, well away from any prominent veins. Blood dripped into the vial as I tried not to wince at the sting. “I’ll help you fill it.”
She gritted her teeth and cut into her arm. Together we squeezed the wounds, yelping in pain as the vial slowly filled. We bandaged ourselves after, with Lara hiding the cut under her billowing sleeve. Then we attached the vial to Lara’s bracelet and headed for Blood House.
For once, the corridor leading to the forgotten house was well lit. I almost didn’t recognize the entrance when we reached it; I was used to a pitch-black room, and today the space was flooded with light.
Dismal light, though. The torches burned a gloomy red, flickering over the checkered floor. At the end of the antechamber I finally saw the elaborately carved archway that led to Blood House. We passed under it and entered a large hall with the same checkered black-and-white floor. Every inch of the gray stone walls had been carved with depictions of Noble Fae, Underfae, and Nasties. They seemed to crawl with life as the torchlight cast dancing shadows over them.
An enormous tree stood in the center of the hall. Its trunk was so wide at least six people would need to link hands to measure around it, and its branches reached towards the far-distant ceiling. It had no leaves, yet I sensed the tree was very much alive. Beyond the tree was a large metal door covered in protruding spikes; probably the entrance to the house proper, and not something I wanted to get anywhere near. Caedo hummed contentedly in my mind as we approached, pleased to be home.
I joined the other servants at the back of the room, but Lara took her place in the line of candidates facing the tree. Soon all six were there. They knelt as one and sliced into their hands, letting the blood drip into the cups laid before them. Lara flinched at the cut, but she managed the opening of the vial in her bracelet expertly—it was only because I knew what she’d done that I could tell the flow of blood into her cup was more substantial than her fresh wound merited.
Once the cups were full, the candidates rose and poured their blood onto the gnarled roots rising from the tiled floor.
My vision went dark.
I stiffened, wondering if the torches had been extinguished, but then a faint ruby glow filled the space. The tree’s branches were now covered with crimson leaves and the room was otherwise empty—the candidates and servants were gone.
Look , the tree whispered.
I was back in the hut I’d grown up in. It was just before dawn, and my nose was pressed against the cold glass of the window. I could see my father’s back retreating down the narrow path behind our home. He looked over his shoulder, but when he saw me waving a tiny hand, all he did was turn around and keep walking. Something in my chest seemed to break.
I was in the village, hunkering behind the tailor’s shop as a pack of other children threw stones at me. My forehead started bleeding, and the pain made me furious. I threw the rocks back at them and screamed as they ran. When I hit one of the girls in the head, I laughed.
I was fighting boys in the Tumbledown schoolyard, no longer willing to wait until rocks were thrown. They pulled my hair and punched me, but I punched harder, and besides, I bit. The parents called me a wild animal when they came to retrieve my latest victim. “She’s half feral.” “She shouldn’t be allowed near the other children.”
I was thirteen years old and desperately hungry and angry. When my mother tried to teach me herbcraft, I told her the work was boring and I’d rather be a trader. That I’d rather be rich and free than poor like her—poor like she’d forced both of us to be.
I was shouting at the teenage boys who harassed Anya, then jumping on one who had groped her. I wrapped my arms around his neck and bit his ear while he shrieked and tried to shake me off. “ Anya’s guard bitch ,” they called me that day, and the name stuck.
I was staring at my reflection in a pond with the angst and fury of adolescence, wishing I was dead so the villagers who looked down on me would feel the guilt they deserved. Wishing they were dead. Wishing all of us were dead.
I was throwing a rock through the window of a woman who mocked my mother for being unable to keep a husband.
Smacking the first boy who tried to kiss me.
Bickering with Anya about our families.
I was lying awake late one difficult night towards the end of my mother’s illness, resenting her for the time spent caring for her and the worries that piled up and the coins that left my hands faster than I could earn them.
I was scowling and shouting and hating and lying and wishing harm on those around me. Every foul thing I’d ever done, every dark thought I’d ever had, churned up in front of me before spinning away into the darkness. Between each flash of vision I saw the tree, ancient and waiting.
It had tasted my blood, I realized dimly through the torrent of memories. I’d just wanted to help Lara fill her cup, and now the tree was punishing me with my failings.
I was wailing after my mother died, screaming at the unseen Fae for failing her. Hating them and hating the faith that had made my mother turn her face to the window instead of to me in her final moments, that had made her look for a rescue that was never coming.
I was running in terror across the bog, listening to women dying behind me, and when I turned, only empty air remained where my best friend had been.
I was wielding a dagger and threatening to kill the first Nasty I’d ever seen while it dug its claws into my ankle. I was cutting into other Nasties as they hunted me through the lowest levels of Mistei, killing them without hesitation because it had come down to them or me, and I had chosen me.
I was baring my teeth at Kallen, wanting to hit him to make up for my humiliation at Garrick’s hands.
I was slicing into my skin to feed Caedo.
I was scratching Drustan during sex, overwhelmed with a primal rage and lust I didn’t know how else to express.
I was twisting the knife in Garrick’s gut, smiling as he stared up at me in terror. His blood was hot on my palms. His throat gaped open in front of me, and for a terrible moment I felt joy.
Look , the tree said, and the memories cleared. A small woman with wildly curling hair stood facing me, one hand on the rough bark. It was me, but I was baring my teeth, and blood ran from my hands and pooled at my feet, so much blood…the blood I had shed and would shed, the blood I was capable of shedding.
Look.
I looked. Every wound had been torn open inside of me all at once, and what I’d learned from it was how small and terrible and violent I could be.
Are you sorry?
I stared at the bloody apparition that represented my darkest self. Was I? Sorry for the fighting, for the well of rage I pulled from so easily, for the deaths I had delivered?
For hurting my mother and Anya—yes. For the rest of it? I paused, thinking. No . I won’t apologize for defending myself or my friends.
That wasn’t the entire truth, though, was it?
I regret enjoying it , I admitted, knowing the tree understood I was speaking about Garrick.
Did you enjoy it? The tree seemed genuinely curious.
Yes.
You enjoyed it, or Caedo did?
Both. Seeing my past laid out in front of me and feeling the visceral pain beneath the images, I’d been confronted with a dark truth about myself. I enjoyed getting revenge. I enjoyed making Garrick afraid of me. It was only for a moment, but I felt it.
It was both awful and freeing to admit my crime to the Blood Tree, to speak the truth I had known all along. I couldn’t blame Caedo for my violent impulses. I couldn’t pretend my reactions had been beyond my control. All I could do was face who I was and refuse to look away.
My bloody twin vanished. The tree’s branches were bare once more, and the room was filled with faeries.
I blinked, wondering if this was another hallucination, but nothing else happened. The candidates stared at the tree with wide eyes. Were they, too, reliving their past crimes? Or was the test something else entirely, and the tree had punished me for feeding it my blood?
Lara sagged to the floor. I rushed to her side, but she held me off with an outstretched hand and wobbled back to her feet. “I think it’s over,” she said in a dazed voice. One by one the other candidates stirred, stumbling or twitching as they returned to their bodies. All of them looked haunted by whatever they’d seen.
The magical energy that had filled the space drained away, and we were left standing in a dusty room before an ancient, silent tree.
The trial was over.
All Lara would tell me in the following days was that she’d seen ugly visions. I pressed for more details, but she refused, saying she didn’t want to think about it.
“I don’t know,” she admitted when I asked if she thought she had passed the test. “It asked me if I was sorry for…well, the bad things it showed me. I said I was. I think it was pleased, but how would I know?”
The tree had been pleased? Had it been testing whether the candidates could feel remorse? I supposed that counted as strength of character. It seemed unlikely for the Fae, but then again, Blood House had once been full of healers, and they’d chosen death over bowing to a tyrant. It would make sense for the Shard to seek out the trait its house had once had in abundance.
It was a good thing I wasn’t the one being tested.
I visited Triana and Maude soon after, bringing a pot of vegetable soup with me. Triana pulled me aside after our sign language lesson. “Are you nervous?” she asked.
“About what?” I signed in response.
“The trial result. If your lady fails…”
She didn’t need to complete the sentence. As Oriana had once promised, if Lara failed, I would die or become one of the lowest servants. “She won’t.”
Triana didn’t look confident about that assertion. “Be safe.”
“Of course. Are you well?”
“I worry. You are my friend.”
I smiled, touched by her concern. “And you are mine.” I switched to speaking aloud when I couldn’t think how to sign the rest. “You’re very kind, but I can take care of myself. Save your worries for yourself and the people around you.”
Her mouth twisted, and she rubbed a palm over the soft stubble of her growing hair before speaking again. “There’s a new girl today.”
I tried to puzzle out what she meant. New girl…“You mean you’re getting a new girl from the brothel?”
Triana’s eyes were sad, and she signed the confirmation near her heart. “Yes.”
“You’ll take good care of her. You’re a strong woman. Focus on helping her heal, and I promise I’ll be safe.”
A tear traced down her cheek as she hugged me, and I marveled at her strength and compassion. Seeing the new girl would remind her of everything she’d suffered, yet in the midst of that emotional turmoil she’d found the time to tell me she cared for me and that I should be safe. Because we were friends.
I reflected on that as I returned upstairs. Anya had been my only friend in the human world. Somehow in a little over six months in Mistei, I’d made more: Lara, Aidan, Triana, Maude, Alodie. And that dance with Kallen, the way we’d laughed…It had felt like discovering solid ground in a bog where I’d only encountered treacherous mud before. Perhaps given time we could have become friends, though Drustan’s rebellion would come before that could ever happen, sometime during the months between the end of the trials and Samhain.
I supposed Drustan, too, could be counted as a friend, but something in me rebelled at the thought. He had become so much more, even if I’d never let him know how much he meant to me.
I stopped walking.
What if I told him?
The encounter with the Blood Tree had been cathartic. It felt like my emotional wounds had been ripped open, drained of infection, and rebandaged in order to heal properly. Facing the truth had been difficult, but I’d been sleeping better ever since.
What if I faced this truth, too? I cared for Drustan and wanted to be with him openly and proudly. Or rather, for us to be with each other. In the new world he would build, we should be able to.
I was going to tell him. Not tonight—there was too much preparation to do for the final ball announcing the results tomorrow night—but after that, I would corner him in our secret room, clasp his face in my hands, and tell him exactly what I wanted.