Chapter One
There are monsters in the world.
There are monsters in the woods.
They slip inside at night. Crawl through the walls of our cottage. They find their way into my brother’s dreams.
It’s been weeks, longer, since Arien’s last nightmare, but I knew they would come tonight. All day it’s followed me, that familiar heaviness in the air. I can feel them coming even before he does.
I’m still awake. Curled up on my narrow bed in the small, plain room we share. Watching him. Waiting. It’s past midnight. A hot night, airless, even with our window wide open.
“Violeta?”
He calls my name and reaches out as the darkness rises through him. Shadows spill from his hands like unfurled ribbons, shrouding the floor with an inky mist. He looks at me with eyes gone solid black; they change when he dreams, and those blank eyes in his frightened face are so wrong. Arien is gentle and sweet. This darkness shouldn’t be in him. It shouldn’t be him, and yet—
I move toward him as the shadows cloud over us, filling the room. At first they’re smoke, a haze that thickens. Then they build and build, until all the light is gone, and there’s only me and Arien and the gathering dark.
“Leta?” He calls for me again, sounding frightened. Then his voice changes to a drawn-out snarl. “Leta, Leta.”
I take his hand, starting to tremble, hating myself for it but unable to stop. Darkness pours through our clasped fingers, blotting out the moonlight. The shadows are like midwinter frost against my skin, a cold that burns.
I cling tight to Arien, whispering to him, “I’m here, I’m here,” not letting go even when he growls viciously and starts to claw me. He scrapes my face, my throat, my arms. I bite back a cry at the pain, grabbing his other hand before he makes the scratches worse.
He’ll hurt me more than this. I push the thought away, swallow it down until my mouth tastes of copper and salt. He’s my brother. He would never, he won’t—
More shadows come, faster now, violent, and I hold Arien close against me as they wreathe us, winding tighter and tighter. They’re like vines, like thorns. I feel the darkness all over me, feel it slip and slither inside my skin. Panic knots my stomach and there’s a scream caught in my throat. I take a deep breath and try to speak calmly.
“Arien, my love, you’re safe, you’re safe.” The same words I’ve spoken over countless nights. Ever since the dreams began. Ever since we came to live here.
This is my seventeenth summer, Arien’s thirteenth. Mother found us on the road beside the Vair Woods. Arien was a baby, and I was old enough to tell her our names—Arien and Violeta Graceling—and that our parents were dead, but little else. Whatever happened to send us into the forest at midwinter … I don’t let those thoughts in too closely.
Fire to burn out the infection. Sparks that cut through the night sky. The scent of ash. Trees outlined against the moonlight. A whisper through the branches.
I still remember the way Mother’s hand cupped my cheek for the first time, her fingers streaked with paint from the icons she made. The way the winter sun gleamed over her corn-silk hair as she bent toward me. The smell of linseed oil.
She picked up Arien and took my hand and brought us back to her cottage.
The Lady sent you to me, Mother told us once. At first it didn’t sound like a threat. But we have spent our entire lives here, almost. Things are different now.
Now all I know is that I can’t let my brother be overtaken by this terrible darkness. No matter how much it frightens me, I have to protect him. “It’s a dream, Arien.”
“You can’t make it stop, Leta. You can’t—”
He spits the words between bared teeth. I want to flinch away, but I force myself to be still. Arien’s voice, the way he fights me … it’s not him. It can’t be him. I have to help him through this. He has to come back. I won’t let him stay lost in the dark.
“It’s a dream, Arien. This isn’t real.”
“You can’t make it stop.”
Shadows fill my mouth and lungs, tasting of smoke and ash. I wrap my arms tighter around my brother and cling to him. I shove aside my fear and imagine we are somewhere else, outside in our small garden. I think of sun and flowers. My hands sunk into the earth. The baskets of Summerbloom cherries I’ve harvested all week. I hold the picture vivid in my mind.
There’s a single, insistent pull from deep in my chest. Like there’s a string tied to me, the other end anchored to Arien. Warmth begins to hum beneath my skin. I think of gardens and sunlight. Not darkness, not shadows, not my brother with those blank, inhuman eyes.
Slowly, slowly, the shadows stop coming from his hands. The darkness settles and softens into the corners of the room. I hold my breath until the final traces clear, then sink against Arien with a heavy sigh.
He touches my wrist, quickly pulling back when he feels the raised welts. “Did I hurt you again?”
I close my hand over the marks. “You didn’t. I’m fine.”
Outside the window, the moon is low, pocketed between the thickened clouds. It glows dimly across the collection of stones I keep on the sill. I trail my finger over the one with a ripple that looks like gold, the one so smooth and heavy it fits perfectly into the curve of my palm.
I force myself to breathe steadily, willing my still-racing heartbeat to slow. “You didn’t hurt me,” I say again, trying to reassure Arien, trying to reassure myself. “It’s over, my love. You’re safe now.”
He starts to cry. Loud, angry sobs that echo through the room, through the house. “I’m sorry, Leta.”
I put my arms around him. “You have nothing to be sorry for.” Then, knowing I have to say it: “But you have to be quiet.”
He buries his head against me, trying to muffle the sound of his tears. His hair, red like mine, falls across his face. I brush it back from his cheek.
He swallows down a sob as I murmur gently into his ear. “Please, Arien, you have to stop. She’ll hear you. Mother will hear you. Please—”
I cut off sharply as he grabs my hand, his fingers crushing mine. We both fall silent as footsteps echo from the hallway and our door is shoved open, so hard it bangs against the wall. Mother storms into the room.
Lit by the lantern flame, she’s fair and golden, skin dusted with pale freckles, hair that glints as it catches the light. But it’s a cut-glass prettiness, all hard edges. Whatever softness was in her when she first saw us—two lost children in the road—it’s long vanished. Ever since the shadows began.
She snatches Arien’s wrist, wrenches open his fingers. His hands are stained black. The shadows have clung to his skin, the way they always do. The marks are slow to fade, darkening again whenever he dreams. They can’t be scrubbed away, though Mother has made him try countless times.
“Arien.” With her other hand, she catches his chin, holds it tight until he looks into her eyes. There’s a flicker across her face that might be sadness; then the light shifts, and she’s cold. “Not again.”
He twists against her grasp as she drags him forward, out of the room. I rush after them. “Let him go! He can’t help it, you know he can’t!”
“Go back to bed, Violeta,” Mother snaps at me over her shoulder.
She tightens her grip on Arien’s arm, pulling him through the hall as he struggles against her. I’m right behind them. When we reach the kitchen, his eyes dart frantically between the cellar and the outside door. Last time this happened, she forced him down beneath the house. The time before, she locked him out and made him spend the whole night in the orchard.
She thinks if she keeps him in the dark, the shadows will go—as if one darkness will cancel the other. She’s tried so many ways to scour him clean, but none have ever worked. She’s convinced his shadows are evidence of dark alchemy.
But all I know of dark alchemy—that it’s dangerous and poisonous and wrong—doesn’t fit with Arien. He’s not the sinister gloom deep in the forest, or the creeping poison in a blighted field. He’s my brother, and I’ll go with Arien wherever she takes him. I’ll go into the dark with him beneath the house; I’ll go out to the moonlit orchard. I’ll stay with him and keep him safe.
But instead of reaching for the door or the cellar, Mother drags Arien over to the altar of the Lady. She twists his arm until he kneels, then sets a sparklight to the candles on the shelf. They flare bright, one by one.
The Lady made the world. She is the world. In all of Mother’s paintings, she looks the same: golden and brilliant, with bronze skin and long, flowing hair. This icon shows the Lady with her fingers pressed against the earth, dissolving into the light that flows through all existence. The scene is beautiful, but as Arien falls down beneath the icon, a shadow crosses the painting and for a moment, the Lady’s golden fingers seem like claws. The edges of her smile turn sharp.
Mother forces Arien’s stained fingers over the candles. I grab her arm, trying to pull her back. “Stop! You can’t do this!”
Everything happens fast, like a spark on a wick. She turns on me, her face tensed, and slaps me. The sound fractures the air, and the world turns white from sudden pain. I fall against the table, my hand pressed to my throbbing cheek.
As I try to shake the ringing from my ears, Mother shows me the blackened marks on Arien’s skin. “You know what this darkness is, Violeta. The Lord Under will claim him.”
“He won’t. He won’t.”
The candle flares. She shoves Arien forward. He bites back a cry as his fingertips glow bright, haloed by flames.
Mother thinks the darkness in him belongs to the Lord Under—the lord of the dead. That the shadows will call him to us the way he’d be drawn to a dying soul. But Arien is kind and good. The shadows are only dreams. He isn’t the same as the darkness of the Lord Under, or the magic in the world Below.
I grab her arm again. “He’s not some blighted field to be burned down!”
“Leta,” Arien whispers, quiet and desperate. “Leta, don’t.”
But I ignore him. Let Mother hurt me—I don’t care; at least then she’ll leave Arien alone. I brace myself, ready to be struck again, almost hoping for it, but instead she shakes me off and pushes Arien’s hands back over the flames. He scrunches his eyes closed, hisses a breath through his teeth. I stare at them, feeling so powerless, so angry.
I have to do something. She’s going to burn him until his hands are clean. She’ll keep hurting him, unless I make her stop.
On the table is a glass idol, a candle burning at the center. I snatch it up and throw it—hard—onto the floor. It shatters into a jagged star. The sound stills the air.
Mother goes pale and her mouth draws into a sharp, furious line. Incandescent anger sparks through her eyes as she steps over the glass and grabs my wrist. Her fingers bite into my arm, marking fresh bruises over ones left from the last time she hurt me. I let the pain wash over me, glad for it, glad that it’s me and not Arien.
She wrenches me toward the floor. “Kneel down.”
“What—?”
“Kneel. Down.”
I look at the jagged glass, the splattered wax, the smoke from the ruined candle. Arien shakes his head, his expression helpless and furious all at once. There are tears on his cheeks, and his burned fingers are tucked into a twist of his sleeve.
“Mother, stop!” He falters, eyeing the candles, steeling himself to reach back into the flames again. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it.”
How can Mother think that hurting him, hurting me, will keep us safe? At this moment, if there’s anything we need to be saved from it’s not the Lord Under. Not the dark. It’s her.
I feel as fractured and ruined as the shattered glass beneath our feet. But I keep my gaze fixed on Mother’s face. Before she can speak again, before Arien can move, I kneel down. One knee, then the other.
The first cut is a bright shock. I put my hands on the floor, trying not to make a sound as I hover above the shards.
I can’t do this.
I have to.
The glass pierces my knees with a hideous pain that stings all over: my fingertips, my scalp, the soles of my feet. I flinch, but some scrap of pride holds me still. Arien is safe—safe from the candles, from being locked in the dark, from everything. For now.
Mother’s hurt us before, but never like this.
She crouches down and cups her hand against my cheek, her palm incongruously gentle over the place where she hit me. “I’m trying to protect him, Violeta. I’m trying to protect you.”
Her expression and her voice are soft, as though she’s truly sorry to see me like this. And there’s a horrible, treacherous part of me that wants to lean against her hand, to let her comfort me. Tears prickle my eyes, but I blink them away. I stare at Mother, clench my teeth and let more of the glass cut deeper into my knees.
She watches me, unmoving, then she stands up and brushes her hands over her skirts. She crosses the kitchen, and her steps go hollowly along the hall, back to her room. The latch scrapes as she locks the door closed.
Once we’re alone, Arien extinguishes the altar candles with a swift breath. Smoke wisps the air. He helps me move away from the shards, and I curl up on the floor near the hearth with my back against the wall. The room smells bittersweet from the pot on the stove, full of the cherry preserves I’ve made. On the shelf above are empty jars, ready to be filled once the preserves cool, our contribution for the village tithe tomorrow.
Arien crouches beside me. He’s uncertain, like he wants to touch me but he’s afraid. The dark has faded from his eyes now. They’re the same silver gray as my own. “Leta, I’m sorry,” he says in a rush. “I should have stopped her. I should—”
I fold back the hem of my nightdress. “Can you get me a cloth?”
While he’s gone, I bend forward to see the cuts. I take a breath and begin to pick out the splinters embedded in my skin. I put the shards one by one onto the floor. Through the blood, the glass shines, a grim mirror to my collection of polished stones.
Arien brings me some scraps of linen. He takes the kettle from the back of the stove and fills a bowl with warm water and salt. He dampens a cloth and presses it to my knee. It quickly turns crimson and his forehead creases with a worried frown. He rinses the cloth, folds it over to cover the stain, and presses it down again.
I sit very still as he wipes away the blood. Outside the kitchen window, the leaves of the apple tree shift and shiver like splotches of paint against the gloomy night sky, black over black. I feel so cold, even though it’s hot beside the stove, with warmth radiating from the banked embers.
A thought tugs, unwelcome. I wish for something stronger than me, strong enough to take away all my fear and my hurt. Something immovable, like an enormous tree that will scratch my cheek with rough bark as I lean against its trunk.
I want my mother. I want my father.
I remember my father’s large hand, warm around mine. His fingers, careful, as they swept my hair back from my forehead. My mother humming to Arien as he slept in his cradle.
I miss them with a terrible ache.
But now there is only me, numb and sad and scoured clear, like the windswept mud after a storm. And if I’m not strong enough to protect Arien, then nobody will.
Arien starts to wrap two longer strips of cloth around my knees, bandaging the cuts.
“Don’t fight her again.” His voice is small in the quiet of the room. “It only makes things worse.”
I take his hand and gently inspect his fingers. They’re blistered with raised, pale welts. I blow a soft breath over his skin and he manages a faint smile. “I’ll not let her hurt you, Arien. Not like this. Not at all. It doesn’t matter what she does to me.”
“Please, Leta.”
I put my arms around him. “I’ll try.”
Copyright © 2021 by Lyndall Clipstone
