Witch's Pyre (Worldwalker #3)(9)
He didn’t want you to turn into me, Lillian replied. After what I did to him, can you blame him?
Lillian shared a memory of her own . . .
. . . I can hear Rowan coming down the hallway. Gavin is trying to stop him, but it’s like a sparrow trying to distract a bull. I’m aching to see him, and I dread it. All I want is to be held and comforted, healed and cared for by Rowan. But he can never touch me again or he’ll see. He already knows something’s wrong because he keeps reaching out to me and I won’t let him in my mind. If I let him touch me, he’ll see the illness I brought back from the cinder world, and there’s no way I’ll be able to keep the whole story from him. No way I’ll be able to hide what happened in the barn.
He bursts through the door, his riding clothes still travel stained from the Outlands. He’s been looking for me since I disappeared three weeks ago and his eyes are tired and his skin is pale with worry. He’s gorgeous. My throat closes and I swallow the urge to say his name. I want to beg for him to come to me and make it all better, but I’m not a little girl anymore, and no one can make it all better ever again.
The only thing I can do is take steps to make sure that my world doesn’t become one of the millions of cinder worlds I see closing in around us. I’ve seen that the number of cinder worlds is growing as versions of Alaric detonate their thirteen bombs inside the Thirteen Cities. It’s only a matter of time before that happens here. Unless I am ruthless.
“Where have you been?” Rowan asks. His voice is shaking. He knows something is terribly wrong. He knows that we, and everything we ever were to each other, are over. He just doesn’t know he knows it yet.
“I can’t tell you,” I reply.
He laughs, like the thought of one of us not being able to tell the other anything is ridiculous. I stare at him until his face changes. “You’re serious,” he says, still not really believing it.
He enters the room and tries to come to me. I do something I haven’t done since I was eight and he was ten. I possess his body and stop him in his tracks.
“That’s far enough,” I whisper. When I let him go he draws a panicked breath, not because he’s winded, but to reassure himself that he can breathe again on his own.
“What’s going on?” He’s terrified. Now he knows. I’m going to break his heart, and he has no idea why. It’s like watching someone fall—his panicked face slipping farther and farther away as he tries to hold on to nothing. I’m thin air, less than smoke, and he slides right through me.
If I love him more than I love myself, he’ll never know. Not even when he finds out that I’ve arrested his father and sent the order to hang him at dawn . . .
That’s enough, Lily said, ending the memory. I don’t want to think about him. She pushed the image of Rowan’s face forcibly out of her mind.
You never want to think about him anymore.
No. I don’t.
Lily had shelved all thought of him since he betrayed her. The entire trip cross-country she’d skirted around the mountain of emotion any thought of Rowan entailed, and she still didn’t have the strength to climb.
Lily got out of her bath and wrapped a thick towel around her. She opened the closet and found three light kimono-style dresses for her to choose from. As she slid her fingers across the buff-colored silk of one of them she imagined how perfectly this particular shade suited her redheaded complexion. A sapphire-blue kimono, and one more in jade green, hung next to it. She took the green one off the hanger, slipped in on, and stood in front of the mirror to tie the darker emerald obi around her waist. It matched her eyes perfectly.
She rubbed some conditioning cream into her curls and wound them up into a twist. She stabbed the twist with one of the many ornate pins, combs, and clips that were in a tray by the sink. A strange thing to offer, she thought. Unless you knew your guest had a lot of unruly hair.
Lily took one last look at herself, resisting the urge to sneer at the pampered woman reflected back at her. The way she looked couldn’t have been more at odds with what she felt, and the disconnect disgusted her. She wanted to look as warped as she felt.
Hide two of your willstones, Lillian reminded her.
Lily tucked her pink and golden stones into a fold of her obi and adjusted her smoke stone so it lay prominently on her breastbone.
On her way out of her room, Lily passed by the bed with its crisp linen sheets and wondered why she wasn’t tired. Instead of resting, she went back out to the sitting area and found her coven fed, bathed, and dressed in their hosts’ colorful clothes. Toshi had rejoined them, and he must have just said something funny because everyone was laughing. Even Tristan, she noticed. Laughter didn’t feel right, and Lily stepped into the room irritated by the sound.
“Lily,” Toshi said. He stood and smiled, his eyes washing up and down her. “That color looks lovely on you.”
“I was just thinking that it’s a tricky color, jade green. You almost have to be a redhead to pull it off.” She watched Toshi carefully. “Are there many redheads in Bower City?”
“No,” he said. “There are some fairer people of Russian descent, but mostly we have darker complexions.”
“What an amazing coincidence, then,” Lily remarked.
“I guess so,” he replied. There wasn’t even a flicker of discomfort in him and Lily wondered if maybe that’s all it was. Coincidence. “I was just telling your coven that I’d be happy to show you some of the city,” Toshi continued when it became clear that Lily was not going to comment further. “You seemed interested in the docks.”