Aurora turns around and makes out the figure emerging from the darkness. “Heath?” She sighs in relief. He’s just as breathless as she is. “How did you find me?”
“My notes were missing. It wasn’t hard to guess where you’d gone. I heard the waterfall. I feared . . .” He clears his throat. “I followed the river downstream and then I saw the trail. And that’s when I really got worried.”
“The trail?”
“Of scattered flowers. You met Marigold, didn’t you?”
She nods, swallowing hard. “She disappeared.”
“She only exists in daylight,” he explains, as if it were the most natural thing. “Lucky for you,” he adds, his expression clouding over. “What were you doing out here anyway? I told you not to come back to the Borderlands. You could have died. I’m surprised she didn’t try to drown you.”
Aurora shakes her head. “She was helpless. She’s just a little girl!”
“I have more than once come upon one of these lying on the ground near the cliffs’ edge,” he says, holding up the flower wreath, “only to discover the bloodied mess of some poor fellow smashed into the rocks below.”
A shiver runs up Aurora’s neck. But she will not be scolded, not for the bravest thing she has ever done: saving someone’s life. “Well, she didn’t hurt me. In fact, she may have helped me.” Her confidence begins to return. The cottage . . . the words in the wood . . . the clues. “Heath, I think I’ve learned something new about the queen—”
A powerful, angry crack ricochets around them, cutting her off.
“A storm is coming,” he says. “We need to get back to Blackthorn. Now.” He starts off, into a dense knot of trees and branches.
“Heath!” she says, surprised by how good it feels to shout, as though the thunder has crept inside her throat and become part of her.
He turns. “What?”
“We should go this way,” she says, and begins to run. Let him follow her this time.
The sky fractures as she enters a clearing, and rain gushes down, instantly drenching her. She blinks against the heavy rain, taking in the massive bruise of sky above, swollen and torn through with lightning. She tries to listen to her heart, to the rose lullaby that lives inside her, an internal compass. Heath catches up to her, and neither of them says anything. The sudden storm brews powerfully around them. When lightning flashes again, it lights up the entire woods, and Aurora gets a good look at Heath’s face. He’s staring at her in wonder. Gone are the concern, the skepticism, the sickening disappointment she swore she saw in his eyes during the past few days. He has not, she realizes quickly, underestimated her . . . but she has underestimated herself.
She breathes deeply—the musky wet forest smells of Sommeil lure her one way, but there’s a voice, an urge, lower, beneath that call, a message of truth cutting through the dreaminess of the storm. Once again, she knows which direction to go. She can feel the way back to the wall, back to Blackthorn, back to the queen.
The wind tears past Aurora, nearly knocking her over as she leads Heath through a thick cluster of trees. The rain pounds down on her face, blurring her vision as they push deeper into the aching, pulsing blackness of the forest. Thunder rages. The storm is moving swiftly. If it keeps heading this way, they could easily be struck.
The wall flashes before her; its gray stones shine in the lightning.
Then Aurora is lightning as she and Heath hurtle across the illusion. Pushing through the wall feels different this time. She doesn’t need to sing or even think the lullaby . . . she only needs to be, immutably, Aurora. Instead of trapped in the wall’s coldness, she feels only euphoria—a shot of pure joy—at her ability to fly to the other side unharmed.
The meadows of the Blackthorn estate open up before her, and she runs not from the storm and not to safety but for the easy pleasure of her body moving through space and time. A laugh bursts out of her chest, carrying Aurora’s new aliveness in its wild sound. She is powerful.
She is free.
At the next bang of thunder, Heath grabs her hand and they cover the rest of the distance to the castle together.
Inside, Heath lights a lantern and Aurora sees that they have come through a side entrance, into a gallery. The room is drafty, cool, and empty, the walls lined in paintings, with a few sculptures on pedestals scattered throughout the space. She has wandered through here before, but only in passing.
They stand facing each other, water droplets softly plinking to the floor. A raindrop runs down Aurora’s brow and cheek, trickling into the corner of her lips. Heath runs his hand through his hair, which is dark with rain. He seems at a loss for words, a half smile tugging at his mouth—caught, probably, between reprimanding her and something else. The electricity of the storm has followed them, and Aurora shivers, wanting to touch his dripping cloak, his collar, his chin—to let the lightning shock within her travel out. But she doesn’t.
“We should get you dried off,” he says. A puddle is rapidly forming around both their feet. “Storms are reckless creatures,” he adds. “We could have been killed.”
Aurora nods but remains wordless.
She steps away from Heath, trying to catch her breath, to remind herself of the important discoveries she made today at the cottage.
Rain beats against the shutters, and her eyes start to focus in the dim light. A giant painting looms before her. It’s a large portrait of a young man on a horse. The man is handsome, with wide shoulders and a straight back. His light brown hair is cropped at his shoulders, and a thin beard outlines his square jaw, more filled in than Heath’s faint stubble but not the full beard of an older man. He appears to be around their age, and on his head sits a very simple crown: an oddly familiar circlet of gold, worn low on the forehead, no jewels.
She hadn’t really noticed the painting before . . . but then again, she hadn’t been looking for signs of a thwarted romance until now. Her mind swirls with questions; something about the lush painting has captivated her attention.
“Charles Blackthorn.” She’s startled from her thoughts by Heath’s voice, warm and close to her neck. “People say he went mad over a woman.”
“Charles?”
Heath nods. “I didn’t want to tell you, but that’s why the tower room was empty before you came. People avoid it—they think it’s haunted. They say his ghost comes back, looking for his one true love.”
His one true love. And then she remembers: she saw the letters CB carved with a childlike scrawl among the other initials on the walls of the cottage in the Borderlands.
Could this be the love story she’s seeking, the reason for Belcoeur’s madness? Could Charles be the visitor Belcoeur believes she is waiting for? If so, and if he really did die many years ago, then the queen will be waiting forever . . . which means there’s a chance they really won’t ever escape Sommeil.