6
HARLOW
stumble into the sunroom, panic clenching in my chest and pain throbbingI in my head.
Gaven takes one look at me and reaches for the blade at his waist. “What did he do —”
“Nothing,” I rasp, a hand finally coming to my head. “It’s —”
“An attack,” he finishes, crossing the room to loop an arm around my waist. He hauls me down the hallway with surprising speed for someone his age.
I squint. Everything is lit with a bright halo that warps and bends as I move. It’s always the first sign of trouble, and the nausea and dizziness follow close behind. I only have a few minutes to find somewhere private to ride out the pain once the glowing starts. Because after fifteen minutes or so, the pain will grow from a hum to a roar.
I don’t know what causes the episodes, but stress certainly makes them worse, and the past day has been trying.
Servants scatter as we breeze down the corridor toward my rooms. The world starts to tilt and I stumble. Gaven drags me along faster, ignoring my grunted protest.
“How long ago did it start?” he asks as he climbs the stairs.
“Ten, fifteen minutes. I couldn’t just run off when I was expected to walk with Henry.” We pass the landing windows and pain lances my brain as I try to hide from the sunlight. “Hurry—I’m going to be sick.”
I want time to pick apart my first interaction with Henry, but my mind will not allow anything but the impending pain. It builds like a storm on the horizon, lightning strikes firing behind my eyes every time we pass the windows. A cold sweat rises on my neck and my stomach turns over.
Finally, we round the corner into the hallway that leads to my room.
Gaven drags me the last few feet and then shoves me through the ornate
bedroom door.
“Bed or washroom?” he asks.
“Washroom,” I groan.
He quickly crosses the bedroom and deposits me gently on the washroom floor. I press my cheek to the cool tile and moan.
“I’ll order ice.”
“Don’t forget—” My stomach heaves, and I sit up so quickly I almost fall over, making it to the toilet in time to hurl up my breakfast. I wipe my mouth and look up at Gaven. “Don’t forget to order something to drink with it. If we order ice without a drink —”
He sighs. “The staff will sense weakness. I know. Last time —”
“Last time you were lazy.” I don’t mean for it to sound so harsh, but I can’t stand for him to see me looking so weak. “You’re dismissed. Return with the ice and then keep everyone out of my rooms.”
He grunts his assent and leaves me alone with my agony.
I hear the echo of Aidia’s old whispers in my head. “You are bigger than this pain.”
But I’m not. I never have been. I have always been lost in the current of it, drowning in a violent, blinding hurt that comes and goes at random.
The pain is sharp and loud, and I am soft. It claws at everything, hollows out thought with a bright ache that demands stillness, razes all sense of self.
And all I can do is try to survive it.
One moment, one breath, one aching blink at a time.
Moments drag by until Gaven’s footsteps approach. He fills a towel with ice, and I lay it over my eyes and clammy forehead. I listen blindly to his retreat. He hesitates at the door.
“Leave,” I snap. The word pulses in my brain, but Gaven listens. A moment later, the bedroom door clicks closed behind him.
When I was younger, he sat with me when these spells came on whenever Aidia couldn’t be there, but he hasn’t done it in years. Until three months ago, when I woke from a spell thinking it was Aidia’s finger stroking my
hair, only to blink up at Gaven, and that made me feel so much worse. I hate the reminder of her absence. Imagining what’s happening to her on the other side of the city is almost worse than seeing the evidence of it.
I groan and press the ice against my eyes. It’s a waste of resources. It probably won’t even help me. Most of the time, I think it’s more of a distraction than a help, but when it hurts this much, I can’t care.
The pain is a liar. It whispers that I’m weak—that I will not make it through this next swell. It whispers that I will—that the pain will endlessly endure—and that’s almost worse. There is no beginning or end and time becomes a smudge of harsh golden sunlight and silver slanted moonlight until eventually the red riot in my head abates to brown and green, like the sky brightening as a storm subsides.
I set the mostly melted ice aside and turn to appraise myself in the full- length mirror across the washroom. My hair is a mess, half-unpinned and plastered to the side of my face. My eyes are glassy, and my skin is pale.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve looked in the mirror at my body, burning with fury. Be strong. Be stable. Be normal. But it refuses to bend to anything but these peculiar fits and starts of pain—head-splitting aches that feel like someone is cracking my skull open so violently there is nothing to do but curl up and vomit.
How can my face be so beautiful when my insides are so ugly? How can I look so normal when I’m nearly blinded with pain?
For all my attempts to block it out, my parents’ disapproval has bled into me. All of my older sisters mastered themselves. They didn’t commit the trespass of being weak—as if this was something I chose.
Just after the pain started when I was eleven, my parents brought me to an Elvodeen-blessed mender to assess the peculiar spells of agony that plagued me. “Women bear pain better. That’s why they bear the children. Women are made to endure it. You must simply try harder,” the man had said.
I saw it in my father’s eyes then that he agreed. The worst thing I could be was a woman ungovernable of both mind and body.
Other women seem at home in their skin, but mine is a prison—a dungeon full of torture that I can never escape.
Still, the pain I can remember has always been preferable to the pain I forget. It’s the strangest thing, the blank spots in my memory. My body can conjure the terror, feel it in the pounding of my heart and tension in my limbs, and yet I can only ever remember the aftermath.
I remember the tension in my jaw, the fatigue in my muscles from bracing for blows that seemed never-ending, and Aidia’s frenzied whispers hot in my ear.
“Low, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t do it. You know what he will do if I give him what he wants. You know what it will mean.”
Of course I did. That was why I took the punishment. Because I could take pain even better than she could. Because very early on, when my father understood he could not break Aidia with violence, he realized he could by hurting me.
“My heart,” she’d say, her voice still tight with panic.
I’d squeeze her hand, but that wouldn’t be enough to convince her until I answered, “My bones.”
“Our blood,” she’d say as she laid her cool palm against my clammy skin.
The memory jumps to my mother’s grim face, but I cut off that scene before it can start. I don’t need more agony right now.
I count backwards from one hundred, just to give me something to focus on other than pain. I keep losing track of what number I’m on, but after several more tries, I fall into a dull, restless sleep.
wake to loud birdsong swelling from the balcony. I slept too long and lostI another night of helping the women of Lunameade. All because my body is too weak.
My neck and back are stiff from the hard floor and my dress is damp from sweat and the fact that I’m lying in a puddle of melted ice. I carefully press up to a sitting position, blood rushing in my ears as I gain equilibrium. The pain has receded, leaving behind a sensation like a hangover—like someone has slid fogged glass over the world. My thoughts are muddled and I am so
unbearably tired.
“You’re up.”
My heart lodges in my throat as I turn and find Aidia sitting at my vanity.
“Bleeding woods! You scared me, Aidy.”
She grins. “You look terrible.”
“Good. Maybe it will scare off my new fiancé.” I stand, cross the room, and flop onto my bed. Aidia follows and lies down facing me. I could conjure
the gardenia scent of her perfume even if she weren’t in front of me. The scent of my sister is burned into my memory, like my soul has always known the smell of its other half.
She only comes home when she’s close to breaking, and her calm now makes me wild with fear. Now she seems a faint approximation of herself that leaves me feeling like I’m looking at her through distorted glass.
“What are you doing here?”
She shrugs. “I knew you’d need me.”
“What if Rafe —”
“Fuck Rafe.”
My sigh turns into a laugh. “Aidy, your last bruise isn’t fully healed yet.”
“I told him Mother sent for me to get you ready for your big night and he couldn’t argue, especially since—” She hesitates. “Especially since I can’t be there tonight.”
I sit up so fast I get a head rush. “He can’t keep you locked up in that grim little mansion whenever it suits him.”
“He can and he will,” she says. “For now, I choose my moments. Besides, you know I hate parties. I’d rather have you to myself. Now, lay down and tell me how you’re feeling.”
I slump back onto the bed. I want to fight with her, push her to fight for herself, but her replies are too calm, too stiff—practiced theater meant to convince other people she’s fine. I know she’s not.
The sharp edges of her are wearing away. I can see it in her smile that fades too quickly and the tired rasp of her usually smooth voice.
There’s a terrible clarity in seeing her like this. I loved her so much I ruined her, and then I ruined myself. Now I don’t know how to mend anything.
She traces the stitching in my bedspread. I wish she’d run her fingers through my hair like she used to when I had an episode, but she keeps her hands to herself.
Touch has always been harder for her. No matter how strong she seemed when she was standing on her own, when I hugged her, she’d fall apart. I wonder if she would now, but I’m too much of a coward to reach for her and find out.
What’s wrong, Aidy? I want to ask so badly.
I’ve never confronted her directly. Never asked her to transform the unspeakable violence into words. I know what it’s like to follow the blood
trail in your brain like a well-traveled path but still not know how to give voice to it. True intimacy would mean allowing someone to poke around in my chest and explain why I’m forever riddled with this senseless agony.
This is how we’ve always been, our broken parts mended, growing around each other in gnarled scars. No matter how hard I try to heal, I can’t stop pressing my fingers to the same half-mended fracture, giving myself a new reason to hurt.
Vaguely, I wonder what I’m trying to blot out with that ache. But I hurl the thought from my mind as soon as it rises.
Staring at Aidia now, I see all the ways we are similar and the few where we diverge. People have always said we could be twins, just born eleven months apart. Aidia has the same black hair and fair skin, but her eyes are a pale lilac that looks blue most of the time, while mine are a dark violet. My expressions are a mirror of hers, and she has the same silvery scar on her palm. And yet I have always looked to her and seen the ways I lack.
I’ve been reserved while she danced like a star through every party or challenged our parents with articulate fury.
Aidia had always seemed complete while I felt half-formed. Rebellion came so naturally to her. I would have never found my own path to it without her. She was so resolute in her convictions that they built the foundation for my own.
That’s what it is to have a sister—to love her, envy her, and also be in awe at how much better than you she is. Having a sister is pressing your heart up against another heart and seeing how your hurt and triumph mirror each other. It’s saying, “There’s no pain you carry that I don’t carry too. As long as I’m here, you’re never alone.”
I could never decide if I wanted to be her or run from her. Aidia was vital and flexible, while I lived at the mercy of the vicious swells of pain in my head.
I spent my youth navigating the mercurial weather between my sister and my father. I learned to be ready to take cover when a gale was amiss, and when to step in and pull her out of the rain. For all my efforts to emulate Aidia, I am nothing like the girl-shaped thunderstorm that is my sister.
At eight, you should not need to know how much your sister can take, but I did. Whatever intuitive, animal instinct that lived in me then rears up again now. I know the rhythms of my sister.
You have seen this before. The thought cleaves through my brain like a
lightning strike, but I shake the hurt away. I don’t want to think about all the past times when I could do nothing. I want to focus on a future where I have a chance to save her.
Surviving is just as much about knowing when to approach the wounded animal of my sister as it is about knowing how to size up an opponent.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
“Like I need to go to the well,” I say miserably.
She hops from the bed gracefully and gestures toward the door. “Up, up, then. Let’s go.”
I yank off my ruined dress and pull on my robe and slippers. When I push through the door with Aidia on my heels, Gaven greets me with a grim smile.
“Just going down to the well.”
He gives me a quick once-over and nods, but he still follows behind us as if I haven’t safely taken this path thousands of times before.
We follow the spiral staircase at the end of the family wing, down, and down, and down.
Gaven stops outside the door, striking a match to light a fresh torch and taking up his post to the left. I kiss the enchanted lock, feeling the tingle of poison in my lips. The lock is attuned to each Carrenwell’s magic because it doesn’t just lead to the well. The family vault of magical objects and the Cove—a place where prisoners are questioned—are located in the same section of the house.
The lock clicks and I pull the door open. Aidia winks at Gaven and darts inside. I grab the torch from Gaven and follow her into the dark.
The smell of moss and fresh water wafts up. The ceiling shimmers with the torchlight reflected as we descend further into the darkness. When we finally get to the bottom of the well, I walk along the edge of the shelf and light the additional torches, filling the space with an orange glow.
Aidia sits down on the ledge, dangling her legs into the water. I kick off my slippers and hang my robe on a hook. The slate floor is cold, but I know the water will be colder. I only allow myself one moment of hesitation before I rush down the steps into the water. My chest seizes, breath shuddering out of me in a wheeze from the arresting cold. The water ripples around my body, sending orange torchlight shimmering off the walls.
“What have you learned about your new beau?” Aidia asks, keeping her
voice low so it won’t echo.
I smirk. “He’s hard to kill.”
Aidia bursts out laughing, the sound of it ringing through my chest. I cannot remember the last time she sounded so genuinely happy.
I shake my head. “I don’t know why you’re laughing. It’s a truly terrible quality in a husband.”
Aidia laughs harder. “I’m sure many women would disagree with you, but I’ve never related to you more. How did you make that discovery?”
I look up at the ceiling. “I kissed him.”
Aidia stills, her lilac eyes burning into me. “On purpose.”
“I thought he was a mark.”
Aidia’s jaw drops. “Someone hired you to kill the heir of Fallen Hold.”
I shush her. “Keep your voice down. Gaven doesn’t know where I get off to at night and I don’t need him in my business right now.”
Aidia’s face softens, and I know she’s thinking of her own bodyguard, Arthur, whom Rafe fired the moment he married my sister. Arthur serves on the city watch with Kellan, but every time I see him, he asks if I’m missing her in such an earnest, fatherly way. I know he misses her just as much.
“But yes,” I whisper. “It does seem that someone tried to trick me into killing the heir of Mountain Haven, which is very bad because —”
“It means they know what your magic is and that you’ve been moonlighting as the Poison Vixen,” Aidia finishes.
“It means they knew who Henry was, too, even though he had a ring that hid his aura.”
Aidia traces the pattern in the tile along the cavern wall. “I was wondering how you didn’t know who he was.” She frowns. “So, who would
know who both of you were?”
“No one, as far as I can tell.”
“You know who it could be?”
“Don’t say it.”
“Rochelli.” She rasps it in the creepy voice she’s used every time he’s come up in conversation the past couple of years.
“He’s real,” I say.
“And yet no man or woman in the city has ever laid eyes on him?” She scoffs. “They all know someone who knows someone who did once. He’s a fairy tale.”
“Fine, he’s a network of people, but how is it possible that someone figured this out ahead of even our first meeting? Obviously, Henry didn’t know what my powers were or he wouldn’t have kissed me like that.”
Aidia’s head whips toward me. “How did he kiss you?”
Just thinking about Henry’s hands on me sends a flood of heat through my whole body.
“Oh, you don’t need to say anything. It’s written all over your face.” She says it in the irritating way that only a sister can.
No one anchors me like she does, or gets under my skin so easily, and no one else knows how to see in my eyes the words I cannot say.
“It was good, but it doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’ve just never been able to kiss anyone for more than a moment before, and I’ve certainly never kissed
anyone I was attracted to.”
She arches a brow. “So he’s handsome?”
I’ve made an error. It’s the pain hangover making me slow. She’ll never let it go now. “If you’re into that tall, charming-and-knows-it kind of thing.”
“What does he look like?”
I try to sound casual. “Tallish, with dark hair.”
Aidia sits up straighter and claps her hands. “Oh, he must be gorgeous.
Look at your face. Never thought I’d see the day someone had you all flustered like that.”
“I am not flustered. He’s just—different. Most men are so similar.”
Aidia is utterly delighted, swirling her feet in the water as she laughs. “I did not expect it to be a feral mountain man for you, but most men in this city are too weak for your intensity. I guess it makes sense.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “He’s not my real husband. He’s just a means to an end.”
“Famous last words. All bets are off if you don’t have an easy way to off him.” She brushes her hair back over her shoulders and smiles at me. “I think it could be good for you. Every girl needs a hobby, and you do love your murder games.”
I ignore the jab. “Aidy, what if I can’t do it? I’ve never had to be charming for more than a night.”
Her face softens. “What is the only thing stronger than the stone this
house was built on?”
“My will.”
She’s asked me that question so many times over the years. But my will never feels weaker than in the moments when I cling to this phrase. It took me years to understand that the strength isn’t in not wanting to give up, but in desperately wanting to and continuing to persevere.
“I’ve made a decision.”
“Oh?” Aidia asks.
“I’m not going to let our parents use me anymore. I’ll do my time at Mountain Haven, but you and I are leaving this city when I’m done.”
A crease forms in her brow, her expression morphing from humor to concern. “Low, you know we can’t do that.”
There’s so much conviction in her words, but I don’t want to hear it.
I want to rage at her for giving in. Her surrender to her circumstances feels like a betrayal. She’s always been too strong to break, and I can’t bear to live in a world where she’s irreparable.
A dull ache forms in my temples, and I lie back and stare up at the light reflection patterns on the stone ceiling to try and summon calm.
I’m tired of everyone acting as though this is a problem we can’t solve. I don’t care about peace for the city if it means chaos for my sister. I don’t care if that makes me a bad person. Maybe it means I’m unworthy and ungrateful for my magic, but I’d give up both my social and literal power if it means bringing Aidia home not just to us, but to her old self.
