Trial by Fire

They stared at each other again with nothing to say. Lily edged past him and went outside.

The fire had burned itself out, but the mound of blackened bodies still smoked in the center of the clearing. Lily noticed that Rowan had dug a shallow ditch around it to contain any stray embers. She covered her mouth with her hand and stared at the jumble of mismatched body parts in the pile. She still had no idea how to classify the Woven in her head. Not one was exactly like another. Some were the size of a small dog, and others were twice the size of a man. Some stood upright, while others had no legs and had to slither. The majority of them resembled giant insects with claws and teeth, but there were some that seemed more mammalian or serpentine. It was the sheer wrongness of them that disturbed her the most.

“How many did we kill?’

“I don’t know. Thirty or forty.” Rowan threw the used water onto the smoldering remains, making them hiss. “Let’s go.”

He didn’t want to remain there a second longer than he had to. Lily didn’t blame him. She followed him to a water pump. He hung the bucket on the spout, adjusted his pack, and started into the woods without a backward glance.

They didn’t speak for a while, but Lily could feel Rowan stealing glances at her whenever she wasn’t doing the same to him. She kept imagining that there was a string connecting them—as if they’d been tethered together like two paper cups and something in each of them whispered to the other in the dark. The connection wasn’t clear, but she could still feel something inside Rowan speaking to something inside of her. She didn’t know how to initiate mindspeak yet, but she could tell there was something he needed to say.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“What happened between you and Tristan?” His voice was tight and his hands wrung the strap of his pack.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just, I know him really well. Tristan and I have been stone kin since we were kids.” Rowan watched Lily carefully, but she didn’t look up at him. “We share mindspeak. So I know a lot of girls have forgiven him when he’s—”

“Cheated,” Lily finished for him. “Which means he isn’t faithful in this universe either,” she said, more to herself than him.

She expected to be disappointed about that, but she wasn’t. Fair or not, she didn’t feel the same way about Tristan. Things he did that used to seem unbearably charming to her now seemed staged—phony even. Lily knew she shouldn’t judge the Tristan in this world by what her Tristan had done to her, but she couldn’t help it.

She remembered Rowan’s distrust of her when he first met her, and she wondered if he would always see Lillian when he looked at her. Something clenched inside of her at the thought. She wanted him to see her. She wanted—well, she didn’t know what she wanted, but she couldn’t bear the thought of going back to the time when he hated her. They’d shared too much.

“It’s not that,” Rowan said vehemently, bringing Lily out of herself and back to the conversation. “Tristan is the most faithful friend you could ever ask for.”

“He was a faithful friend to me for years,” Lily said, agreeing with Rowan.

Rowan was silent for a while. She could tell something was eating at him.

“What is it?” Lily asked.

“I was wondering if you’d forgiven your Tristan. That’s all.”

“No,” she admitted. “The next morning we had a terrible fight, and then I let Lillian take me.”

“Because of him?”