“Not bonding you would’ve been the sacrifice!” The room trembled, his emotions seeking an outlet in his magic. “You think that I was selfless to bond you, but it was selfishness. All I wanted was to be with you, to live my life with you, and so don’t for one heartbeat believe that I did it solely to save your life. I did it for myself. Because I love you. Because I need you. And because of that, you’re lying here dying.”
All the hate for my father and what he’d done abruptly rushed from my heart, and it felt to me like the greatest of burdens had been lifted from my shoulders. “You’re right,” I said. “If not for you, I wouldn’t be here at all. Perhaps I’d be dead by my father’s hand. Or more likely, living in fear in my family’s home, suffering his abuse while all hope of a better future was stripped away from me.”
“But at least you’d have a future.”
“A future of misery!” The outburst left me gasping for breath. “I’ve been happier in my time with you than in all my life. Because of you, so much of what I dreamed of and hoped for became my reality, and I refuse to regret that. I believe that a short life lived is better than endless years of merely enduring, and given the same circumstances, the same choice, I’d choose you and life and love all over again.”
Exhaustion fell over me, my magic struggling to repair my broken body, but faltering and failing like fingers that couldn’t quite grasp an elusive bit of sand. My heart fluttered, and it hurt enough that tears flooded my eyes.
“Pénélope, please don’t leave me.” His voice was strangled and desperate, and his arms wrapped around me, pulling my body against his. I clung to him with what strength I had, my fingers curving around the back of his head as he kissed me, tasting the salt of his tears. Then he pressed his cheek against mine and said, “All my life I’ve loved you. You’re the only one who made me believe that I was good enough as I am. That I was worth wanting. That I wasn’t just a broken thing better off in the shadows. What will I be without you?”
“Yourself.” It hurt, it hurt. “A man more good and kind and loyal than any I’ve known.”
“I need you.”
Maybe he did. But Trollus needed him more. “You have to keep fighting. You cannot let him win.”
“He already has.”
His hands shook where they gripped me, and I thought of Guerre, the game of strategy that everyone around me played so masterfully, and in which I’d always been a pawn. But I’d be a pawn no more. “Only the battle,” I whispered, turning my head to look in Tristan’s direction. “The war is yet to come.”
My vision was filling with blackness, the world falling away, and I wasn’t ready. Wasn’t ready for it to be over. Wasn’t ready to be parted from him. “I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be afraid,” he said, kissing me gently on the lips. And though I could still feel him, still hear him, the thread binding us together was fraying. Diminishing. “Pénélope, if there’s a place we go in death, I’ll follow you there.” He sounded so distant. So far away. “I’ll find you.”
Not yet. Not yet.
“Pénélope, please.”
“I love you.” I needed him to know that, even as I was falling. Even as the world was fading. I needed that to be my legacy, the one thing he remembered above all else. “I love you. I love you. I
Epilogue
Tristan
Marc screamed.
In my life, I’d seen men injured. Tortured. Killed.
This was something different.
This was something worse.
Grief, in its purest form. The sort that carved into a soul, ruthlessly destroying everything good: love, hope, passion, devotion. Leaving behind only the blackest of emotions to drag one down and down until the slice of a knife, the twist of a neck, or a bullet in the skull seemed like a blessed relief. A mercy.
I hadn’t known there could be grief like that.
For all my preparation, it froze me in place in the corner where I lurked.
He screamed again, her name this time. Dragged her up into his arms. Pénélope’s head lolled back, silver eyes dull and sightless. Even in death, she was lovely. But lovely like an object. A thing. It was an echo of the beauty she’d once possessed, because what had made her her was gone. And even though I had not loved her – had, perhaps, even hated her in the end – the absence of that radiance hurt.
Marc sobbed into her hair, the sound ragged. His lips were pressed against her ear, and though I couldn’t hear what he said, the intention in them would have been clear even without his hand reaching for the knife concealed in his boot.
I moved.
My magic lashed around him, binding his limbs, prying his fingers from Pénélope, the sound of bones snapping and popping out of joint making my stomach twist. Marc didn’t even feel the pain, shrieking only in anguish as Pénélope’s body fell to the floor.
“Stop,” I said. “Marc, you need to stop this.”
His face twisted toward me, eyes bloody from capillaries bursting and reforming, his fractured features full of manic hate. “Let me go.”
“No.”
He howled, magic rising against mine with a strength I hadn’t known he possessed. Too much, enough that he’d burn out his life, and so I clamped down on it, contained it. Fury spewed from his mouth, a tide of hate. Things I’d thought of myself but never once believed he thought of me. And though I knew it was motivated by her loss, that did not make them less true. “Stop.”
“Why must it always be your way?” he screamed. “Let me go!”
“No.”
Ana?s shouldered past me, falling to her knees and pulling her sister into her arms. “Penny, Penny, no!” She was shaking, face coated with tears. Lifting her face, her gaze latched on mine. “Tristan…”
A broken plea for me to help her. To make this right.
But I couldn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I said, then backed away, dragging Marc with me. Jamming magic into his mouth to silence him, because I was too much of a coward to hear anything more. The twins stood at the doorway, shoulders sagging. “Help her.”
The corridor was a blur of papered walls and carpet. Of servants staring wide-eyed as I dragged their master down the hall and into what had been his father’s rooms. My hands were shaking and icy, but I tied him to the bed. “I’m not letting you die.”
He answered me with a gaze full of hate.
The tool Pénélope had given me lurked in the back of my thoughts, but I was afraid to use it. Afraid of how such power would change our friendship. Whether it would even exist if I did.
And so my vigil began.
* * *
Days passed. Then weeks. Exhaustion like nothing I’d ever known gripped me, the few moments when the twins watched over Marc, or helped force food down his throat, not enough to compensate for the drain of watching his fury fade, his grief return, and then even that disappear along with his will to live.
My father came once.
I felt his presence behind me, and if he had told me that I was wasting my time, that my energy was better dedicated to the tree or other ventures, I think I might have tried to kill him where he stood.
“He has to find within himself the will to live,” he said. “To make him otherwise endure will only have consequences.”
“I know.”
“Not everything in this world is within your power to control.”
I turned to meet his gaze. “Nor yours.”
His eyes dug into me for a long time, then he nodded and silently left the room.
My vigil continued.
* * *