Liam reaches down to retrieve something at his feet. He straightens and drops a package on the carriage floor between us—and to my surprise, I see it’s a small but heavy purse of blood-iron. “You cannot stay at Everless,” he says.
“I know,” I spit. The beginnings of furious, confused tears brew in my throat. “But tell me. If you’ve got proof now that I broke into the vault, why not just have me bled? If you hate me so much, why get rid of me this way?”
This seems to take Liam aback, if only for a moment. He blinks, raises one hand to fiddle nervously with the clasp of his cloak.
“I don’t hate you, Jules,” he says, voice uneven. “But don’t you understand? You’re in danger.”
“Because of you!” I nearly scream. “You lied. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. If you’d told the truth about pushing Roan into the fire, we wouldn’t have had to run. You blamed my father and tormented us, even though he’d poured his health into serving your family. It was our home, and you banished us.” My voice is picking up strength as more and more words tumble out. “It’s your fault we ended up the way we did. Your fault he’s dead.”
Liam looks like he’s been slapped, but then something changes in his expression. “Jules,” he says, low and hard. And I think of his notebook, his records of my childhood stories.
“You know something about me, don’t you?” I say, before he can even speak. Even as I make the accusation, a realization starts to dawn, slowly and painfully, inside my heart.
The accident.
“You used to call me a witch,” I whisper, half to myself.
The flames had leaped from the open furnace, toward Roan. They were going to kill him.
Maybe I willed the fire to stop, just like the air in the garden when Roan kissed me. I had stopped time.
“You saw me stop time,” I whisper, needing to form the thought aloud for it to make sense.
It takes him a long time to speak. When he does, it’s soft. “No. More than that. I saw you turn it back. I pushed Roan, and the molten metal from the pot spilled over him—and you grabbed him and pulled him back. But he wasn’t burned.” He casts his eyes to the ground, as if embarrassed. “You saved him. I never meant to hurt him, I swear. But if you’d stayed, if someone else found out what you could do . . .”
My panic gradually ebbs away, leaving nothing but bitterness in my mouth. I should calm the anger in my heart and focus on the mystery of my father’s death, but what Liam’s saying—I stagger under the weight of it.
Papa’s hatred for Everless and the Gerlings ran deeper than sense. Unless he was exaggerating, trying to build a wall of silence between me and the dangerous truth.
Liam cuts into my thoughts. “Your father didn’t trust me. He knew you weren’t safe at Everless.” Liam smiles bitterly. “I can imagine what he told you about me, to keep you away. I saw it on your face when I met you outside the vault. I don’t blame him. I was terrible, then. I would have done anything to find out what I wanted to know. But that night changed me. You changed me.” He looks down. “I’m sorry, Jules. For every piece of suffering I’ve caused you. But I was trying to protect you.”
To protect me. Is it possible? In all the chaos of new information, I can’t say one way or another whether his words are yet another lie, or the purest form of truth I’ve ever known. There’s something in his hand, which he gingerly puts down on the ground between us. I hesitate, but when I realize it’s Papa’s wandering handwriting that covers the paper, I snatch it up. But the world around me seems to slow when I realize that it’s a letter for Liam.
“It’s true that I came looking for you”—he stops as I shoot him a dangerous look—“but only to help.” Liam’s voice is so quiet he seems to be speaking half to himself. He stares into my face, his jaw working. “After you left, I wrote to you to make sure you were safe, sending the courier to every village around, but I suspect you never got the letters. Finally, after my disastrous visit, that’s when he told me you were dead.” His smile and his voice is weak—tired. “I suppose he wanted me to stop looking. When you came to Everless again, I thought that the best way to keep you safe would be to get you to leave the estate—leave Everless forever—by making you miserable there.” His voice strengthens some. “I am not your enemy, Jules,” he says—slowly, choosing his words carefully. “But you do have enemies. Many.”
I desperately want to clap my hands over my ears and block out what he’s saying, but I can’t. I have the urge to strike him, but I don’t. Something deep in me knows that Liam is not lying now. Maybe it’s his face, wiped clean of its usual sneer, or his hands, hanging at his sides, his posture open and vulnerable.
“Roan didn’t remember what happened in Pehr’s workshop. Because of you, it didn’t even happen for him to remember,” he said. “But what you did today was different. My brother is foolish, not stupid. That’s one more person who will know.”
“Roan would never . . .” But I stop, thinking of the fear in his voice, the hollowness of his words.
“You were always like that—so trusting,” Liam says. He sits down on the lip of the carriage, swinging his legs up and leaning against the wall, so he’s sitting across the doorway. Some part of me registers that he is blocking the exit, but my urge to flee has dissipated. I feel rooted to the spot, starving for the truth.
I swallow. He kept me away on purpose. He knows who I am. What I am.
The dreams of the statue.
“Am I . . .” It doesn’t make any sense. It can’t. And yet I have no other way to see it. “You think I’m connected to the Sorceress somehow?” I ask him.
Liam doesn’t react for a moment. Then, to my shock, he grins, a wide, earnest smile breaking across his face like sun through storm clouds. It only lasts a moment, but smiling, he looks like Roan. No—he looks like someone all his own.
And then he is shaking his head. “Not exactly,” he says. “But maybe.”
Confusion and frustration war within me. “I don’t understand. You said—”
“When I went away to study,” he cuts in, “I couldn’t stop thinking about your stories of the snake and the fox, and of what I’d seen in the forge. The moment where you . . .” Turned back time. He doesn’t say it. Instead he just clears his throat. “It got me obsessed with the history of blood time. I spent several years studying the old myths,” he goes on. “Not just at the academy—I went all over Sempera, I found every book and scholar and ancient story I could, but eventually, I had to let it go. My teachers thought I was chasing fairy tales, wasting my talent. People started to talk.”
Even as the truth he’s sharing transfixes me, his lack of humility—and the rehearsed sound of his speech—still makes me want to roll my eyes. I suppress the urge.