“I’ll protect you, Caelia.” He didn’t look like a little boy in that moment. He looked like the man he would one day become. One who would protect their townspeople, down to the meanest, most pitiful of them.
She pulled him into her arms. “I know you will.” She kissed his messy hair and released him. “Go home. I’ll be along as soon as I say goodnight to Papa.”
He nodded and slipped away. She watched him go, hating that her sins had hurt him. But instead of going to their father, she slipped away from the safety of his influence. Pulling her cloak’s hood up, she stuck to the crowd’s edge. To the shadows.
The townsfolk drank and wept and ate from the communal table. Caelia could make out the nearly empty plate of rolls she and Joy had made together that afternoon.
She’d reached the far side of the fire when she caught sight of him. Mal had his arm around a farmer’s daughter—a lovely girl from the far side of the village. He reached down, whispering something into her ear. She tipped her head back and laughed, exposing the long lines of her throat. Mal eyed her skin like it was covered in honey.
He used to look at me like that.
Caelia hugged herself, shoulders high around her ears. Mal’s gaze flicked her way, his expression falling. Her father had told her that Mal had a new girl. But a part of her hadn’t believed. What a fool she was. She turned on her heel, fleeing the fire. Fleeing Mal.
Chapter Three
Forbidden
“Caelia,” Mal called after her.
She plunged into the darkness, leaving the path to weave through an orchard. The air smelled faintly of rotten apples.
A hand closed on her arm. “Caelia, wait.”
Protest hummed deep in her throat. She tried to jerk free, but he was too strong. “Let me go!”
He released her, hands lifted palms out, like she was one of his spooked horses he needed to calm. His features were lost to the shadows. All she could make out was his figure silhouetted against the firelight. She took a breath to say something, anything, but her mouth was as empty as her soul.
“I’ve missed you.”
All the breath left her. “The forest take you, Mal. You do not get to say that to me.” Ancestors, she hated him so much.
For two months, she’d laid in her bed, the fever so high she’d seen nightmare shadows oozing along the ceiling before darting toward her to gnaw on her bones.
It had been her father, brother, Joy, and Pennice whose faces had faded in and out of her consciousness. Her father had fed her and switched out the cool compress. Joy had bathed and changed her. Pennice had kept her alive. Her brother had read her every book they had. Twice.
Mal had only come once. She knew, because she had asked. Every day, she had asked. Her father’s answer had always been the same: a tight shake of his head.
“Why didn’t you come, Mal? I was dying . . .” She could still feel the looming hand of death. Feel it fisting around her body—an instinct she hadn’t known she possessed until then.
And while she’d lay dying, he’d been falling in love with someone else. While she didn’t dare go into the village for fear of ridicule, he lived among them—free while she bore the burden alone.
“What did you expect after your father turned me away?” Mal said bitterly.
Her father’s disapproval had never stopped Mal before. “Won’t that farmer’s daughter be jealous?” she bit out.
“We’re only friends.”
Caelia huffed. He was the same selfish, feckless boy, while for her, everything had changed. She had changed. Her father had been right about Mal all along.
“Caelia—” Mal made to draw her into his arms.
The empty place inside her overflowed with hate that vibrated into her hands. She shoved him hard in the chest. Her body wasn’t strong. Not like it used to be. But he took a step back. “Don’t you ever touch me again. Don’t even speak to me.” She called him the most insulting name she could think of.
She didn’t wait for his response. She marched out from under the orchard’s shadows toward home. Instead of a steady thrum, her heart beat heavy and ponderous in her chest, the weight of it stifling the breath from her.
The sorrow, the heaviness was back. She shifted, heading toward the river, stumbling across the furrows of her father’s and then Vyder’s fields.
With each step, her body sank heavier and heavier into her heels until it was an effort to take even one more step. Until she collapsed to her knees beneath the weeping willow. She leaned forward. Her palm rested on the bare patch of soil. A single, small river stone marked the place where her infant son lay.
She curled up beside him so the crook of her arm rested above him. She imagined him nestled against her. The wind teased her hair across her face, making her think of the yellow ribbon and the curse she’d written: let me keep him. She’d really meant for the forest to take her baby. Let her lose the thing that would ruin her life.
And she had. And in that losing, her life had been utterly destroyed. She sobbed silently. She would only ever be able to sob silently. No one could know. Not if she ever wanted any sort of life. So she held her pain close. Until it ate her from the inside out. How long until there was nothing left but bones and ashes?
“Do you really want to live as if it never happened?” Atara’s words echoed through her.
Caelia lay until the last of her tears had dried. Until she was chilled to the bone. But she couldn’t bear to leave him. Above her, the willow shifted. Out of sight, the river rushed, frogs called out to each other.
The night’s peace was interrupted by heated voices. Too far away to make out. She could not be caught here, lying beside a bare patch of earth after two months of convalescence.
She rose to her feet, her body stiff and aching. She brushed away the dirt and grass and smoothed back her hair. Even at this distance, the drums felt like a distant heartbeat. She sifted through the swaying branches. The bonfire still blazed in the distance—the townspeople would keep it going long into the night. It illuminated the forest, making her shiver.
Pulling her cloak close, she found the path that would take her home. The further she traveled, the louder the voices became. She took a step off the path, determined to go around them, when she recognized a voice. Joy.
Which made sense, as Caelia was on the woman’s land. But the man’s voice . . . He wasn’t her husband.
Worried now, Caelia moved toward the voices. Two dozen more steps, and she could see them—shadowy forms indistinguishable from one another in the distant firelight.
“You don’t understand,” the man said. “I don’t have the money.”
“That’s not true,” Joy said.
“Papa,” said a small voice, “let’s go home.”
Harben. And the child would be one of the man’s too-thin daughters—Larkin or Nesha.
A smack. “You shut your mouth, you little—”
“That is enough!” Joy said.
Had Harben hit his daughter? Joy? Caelia broke into a trot.
“Larkin, hurry home to your Mama now,” Joy said, her voice gentle.
One shadow detached from the others and bolted down the path.
“Don’t tell me how to deal with my child!” Harben snapped.