Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet (20 page)

Her face. I will not forget her face. None of the other faces are right. They’re all bad. I hate them, I hate them.

CHAPTER 23

Franc comes after the storm, having taken shelter in a nearby home. The blacksmith’s apprentice, who also survived the marauders, lets us load Allemas into his wagon and drive him to the house, where Franc and I haul him up the stairs and lay him in my bed. He hits the thin mattress hard, knocking something off of it. It hits the floor under the bed with a thud. I think it must be a book of mine or some other knickknack, but when I crouch to look in the darkness beneath the bed frame, I only see clumps of dust, a hairpin, and a piece of sketching charcoal.

I lift my head and lean on my good leg. “Allemas?” I ask. His eyes are closed, but his breathing is steady. I’ve never seen him sleep before. He looks almost . . . innocent. Almost.

“He’s done this before?” Franc asks.

I nod. “Not this bad, though.”

He huffs. “I’ll pull up the chair and keep an eye on him, case something happens. I don’t like leaving him unwatched besides.”

Arrice, from the doorway, says, “You can stay with me tonight.”

“Thank you. Just”—I pause—“come get me if he starts . . . leaking.”

Franc eyes me, a deep canyon forming in the skin between his eyebrows. I just offer him a shrug, grab a clean dress out of my dressing chest, as I don’t want to destroy any of my trousers to fit my boot, and slip into the refuge of Arrice’s room. I close the door and even shutter the windows, blacking out the gray light. I don’t even light a candle, just sit and wait. Wait for
him
.

I fall asleep listening to the memory of his voice.

I float in a space endlessly white.

I can’t help but notice my own weight against the earth. This solid, unyielding connection I have to Raea. Unsevered, save for when I jump, freeing myself from its pull for the space of a heartbeat, only to be tugged down again.

I’ve remembered so little compared to all that I have yet to remember. The black void inside my head seems to watch me, nodding. I can’t fathom why I would have touched down like Fyel did. Who was I looking for? What did I want? And why couldn’t Fyel tell me the truth?

I step back from the half-formed batter in the bowl before me. I should throw it out and start again. Who knows what I’ve inflicted into this mess that was intended to be petit fours. Uncertainty. Anguish. Fear.

I push the bowl aside and rest my elbows on the counter in the back of my bakeshop, setting my forehead into my palms. Taking a deep breath, I trace back over everything Fyel has ever said to me, for I remember all of it. I think very hard about steel. The void within me darkens in protest.

The door to the shop opens. I spring up, brushing my hair back and beating flour off my dress, leaving white clouds in my wake as I hurry out front. I half expect Franc to be there to tell me Allemas has either worsened or recovered, but it’s a man in his late thirties, a young boy at his side. The child fists part of his father’s pant leg in his hand and looks around with eyes full of wonder.

“I know you,” I say.

The man smiles, but the expression fades as he studies me. “I don’t . . . No, is it you? I know the baker who works here, but you . . .”

“I’m her cousin,” I say with a smile. “From Rust.”

He nods slowly, his smile returning, unsure. “I’ve never seen the likes of you, if you don’t mind my saying so. You’re certainly unique. What color are your eyes?”

“Oh,” I say, glancing away, “they change with the weather, really.”

Another hesitant nod, and he looks over the shelves. “No eggs today?”

I shake my head. “We’ve only just returned from a . . . long vacation. We’re getting things in order.” I wonder if he knows about the marauders. Surely he’s traveled through these parts since. Perhaps it’s merely decency that keeps him from mentioning it.

He gestured with his chin to the chocolate cake—a confection made with love—sliced and waiting on a shelf. “Then we’ll just take two pieces of that, one for me and one for my boy. Every time we pass through here we’ve got to stop. Your cousin is the best cook I know, though don’t tell the missus.”

I smile at the compliment and hurry to fill the order—my first paid request since our return. It makes me feel my place in this small village. Makes me feel myself.

“Heard there was a bandit problem around here,” the man continues, resting a hand atop his son’s head. “That why they’re building a wall?”

I nod and bring the cake to him, taking his coin without complaint. We need every cent. “Hopefully it’ll mean the roads are a little safer.”

The boy points to my boot and tugs on his father’s pant leg.

The man ruffles the boy’s hair. “Thank you,” he says, and guides the boy out of the shop.

I watch as they head down to the wall, and only then do I return to my baking. I dump the botched recipe in my bowl, scrub the dish clean, and start again, this time adding lavender. Today, I want to bake confections of hope.

I close shop a little early. I haven’t heard word from Franc and Arrice, and the last several months have made me prone to worry. I lock the door and set out for the three straight lines that will lead me home.

“You need to come home
.
”

I close my eyes for a moment, pondering the words, savoring his voice, but I stumble over my booted foot and come to again. I grasp the handle of my satchel in both hands as I walk, squeezing hard enough that my knuckles almost return to their old color.

I turn onto the second road, and Cleric Tuck calls my name. I look toward the shrine of Strellis, which was only ravaged on the inside, to see him approaching me, his gait somewhere between a hurried walk and a jaunt. His navy clothes—priestly garb—rustle around him as he nears, and I’m taken back to that evening before all of this, before Fyel and Allemas and the marauders. When I focus on Cleric Tuck, I can pretend none of it ever happened, that my cozy life had continued uninterrupted, that the black space in my brain was only ever a simple shadow and readily ignored.

There is brightness to Cleric Tuck’s eyes and a huff to his breaths. Yes, I am there again. I am back to the start.

But then I see the deep color of my hands and I realize it’s all a fancy. But no—
fancy
isn’t the right word.
Fancy
would denote something desired. Something that I want, and I do not want this.

I meet Cleric Tuck at the edge of the road. There’s a sort of eagerness in his mouth, and all at once my stomach clenches and the muscles in my shoulders tighten into boards. Once I would have craved to see Cleric Tuck look at me this way. Now my feet yearn to flee.

“Maire,” he says, but he says it wrong. Not the way Fyel says it—an accented,
right
way I can’t define, a way my Raean mouth can’t quite form. The way my name was meant to be said.

Cleric Tuck reaches out a hand to me, but my arms are heavy at my sides. I look at the path ahead and wonder, briefly, if Allemas has improved. He still slumbered, almost death-like, when I left the house this morning.

Cleric Tuck takes my left hand in his. My fingers are warmer than his own. “I’ve been wanting to speak with you.” He pulls me toward the shrine. My knees refuse to yield.

He smiles in a half-mirthful, half-patronizing kind of way. “Surely after all we’ve been through you’re not still squeamish about the shrine.”

All
we’ve
been through?
I think. In so many ways, Cleric Tuck is a stranger to me. He wasn’t there for most of my story. He was a wish in the beginning and a support at the end, but there is so much he doesn’t know, doesn’t understand.

But Cleric Tuck is insistent. He pulls me not to the shrine, but to the thin privacy of an outcropping of trees, branching off from the wall that separates the city from the farmland, their leaves turning amber with the changing season. It isn’t cold outside, but my skin prickles with a sudden chill.

“Maire,” he says in a husky tone and takes up my other hand as well. “I feel like a different person after this . . . adventure,” he says, tasting the word.

I swallow and reply, “I have a similar sentiment.” There’s a weight to my words, but I don’t think he feels it.

His thumbs rub the backs of my hands, but I find no pleasure in the touch. I look away from him, toward my shop, toward the grove where I first and last saw Fyel. My lahst. How can I explain without hurting him?

“After I saw you at the shrine in Ecru, I knew I had to find you,” Cleric Tuck continues. “I couldn’t stop thinking of it. I prayed for you night and day. When I heard you might be in Cerise, I was overjoyed, though I never expected . . .”

His lips twist ever so slightly as he stands back and looks me up and down. There’s no need for him to finish the sentence; he never expected me to look like
this
. Fyel rejoiced in the changes that brought me closer to my true self. Tuck preferred me as I was before.

He smiles again, soft and hopeful, and in my throat I taste lavender that has gone bitter after being left too long on the stem. “Tuck,” I say, but he shakes his head and talks over me.

“We’re back now,” he says. “It’s over, and I never wish to be separated again. Not from Carmine, and not from you.”

My body stiffens. No, this isn’t right.
This isn’t right.

He pulls on my hands, bringing us closer together. I feel a tingling in my chest—not one of excitement, but one of
him
, the prickling before he appears. I want to turn my head to look, but one of Cleric Tuck’s hands comes up and takes my chin, catching me off guard.

“I want to call you mine,” he murmurs, and those dark eyes blind me. His lips press against mine before I can turn away, but they’re different from how they felt before—too fervent, too salty, too moist—

I hear a guttural sort of roar behind me, as though the trees have grown mouths and are bellowing at us. I jerk back from Cleric Tuck just as the earth rises up between us, sweeping out and over him, knocking him away. I yelp and stumble back and can see Tuck landing hard on his shoulder several paces from where I stand.

“Fyel,” I breathe. I turn around, searching, and find him between the trees, hovering there with uneven flaps of his wings, his face contorted in a mixture of anger, pain, and confusion. He lifts his hands and stares at them as though seeing them for the first time.

Thunder booms overhead and clouds darken the sky. This storm looks and smells just like the one that brewed while Allemas wailed at the creek. No rain, only churning darkness and uneven thunder.

I look back at Fyel, who takes in the sudden storm and curses in a language that is not mine, but I understand the hardness of the word nevertheless. He vanishes in an instant.

“Fyel!” I cry, limping to the space where he had been, reaching for him, but there is nothing left of him. Rain falls from my eyes. “Fyel, please!”

Cleric Tuck groans behind me, holding his bruised shoulder. “What on Raea?” he asks, eyeing the upturned earth.

“Fyel,” I whisper, leaning on a tree. My leg is aching again. Cleric Tuck calls out to me, and I slowly pull my body toward him. I help him sit up and press my hands into his shoulders—he hisses as I touch his left—and over his collarbone. “Nothing seems to be broken,” I say, my words caught up on the wind. I look up. The clouds no longer churn, but they linger as thick as smoke, lurking, waiting.