Chapter 52

CHAPTER 52

WREN

It wasn’t like sleep.

Wren was lost, helpless, trapped in an empty, brutal place. She was cold and hollow inside, like something had scoured out all that made her whole. And all she wanted to do was lie there, alone, at peace. It might hurt, but that was nothing to what she had felt, the agonies that awaited her if she woke. Better to be here. Better to remain lost.

There was no light in the beyond but no darkness either. If this was where the Nox had been trapped for twenty years no wonder it was insane.

‘You must wake up,’ said a small, solemn voice, so very gentle. She remembered it vaguely from somewhere. It sounded like the voice of a young boy, or maybe a girl, or maybe both.

‘Why?’ she whispered, and her voice rasped against a throat which felt like she had spent days just screaming. ‘Haven’t I done enough?’

There was laughter then. Not cruel, or mocking, but light, a sound of joy, like birdsong. Wren used to make a sound like that herself once, long ago, when she would run through the forest and she would hear it echoing back at her from the trees. It wasn’t a sound of shadows or darkness. It had nothing to do with their whispers.

But she remembered it now. And it was the sound of magic.

‘None of us can ever do enough, sister.’ A small hand touched her face, wiping away tears she didn’t know she was still crying.

Wren opened her eyes to see two children, a boy and a girl, with bright green eyes.

‘You?’ She knew them, somehow, perhaps from a dream or a distant memory. Something from when she was still so small, when Elodie had wrapped her up in her cloak and brought her to Cellandre, when they had first come to the tower in the forest, after that first night when the shadow kin had tried to take her away.

Elodie had gone to the trees and the forest itself and made a promise, an offering. And something had answered. She had made a bargain, but not with the darkwood. With something else.

‘It’s time to come home, little sister,’ said Robin, his eyes so solemn. ‘There’s still work to do.’

‘Finn needs you. Elodie needs you. And Roland…’ Lark smiled brightly.

Robin and Lark…those weren’t their names, she thought. Not really. But they were the names they had chosen here and now, in this place. The names they had given themselves.

‘You know Roland?’ Wren asked, bewildered. She didn’t even know how she knew their names, but she did, as if they had always been there buried at the back of her memories, faces and voices that had slipped through the cracks and hidden there, lost to her until now, but so familiar, part of her.

Sister, they called her.

‘He’s a good man,’ said Robin. ‘A good father. We like him. You chose well.’

‘I didn’t choose…’

Lark tugged at her hand, trying to drag her somewhere. ‘Of course you did. And we did. And Elodie did. Life is all about choices. You can’t do that here. Now hurry, or we’ll lose everything. The raw power unleashed will rip apart the fabric of the world. Lynette doesn’t realise what she’s doing. She thinks she’s helping witchkind, but she isn’t. She’s going to destroy them all. Her heart is broken. So, I fear, is her mind.’

‘Lynette,’ Wren murmured, remembering. Her friend, she had thought, the woman who had helped her and cared for her but had been working against them all for her own ends. What had happened?

‘She followed the wrong path,’ Lark said. ‘Trailing after her sisters, unthinking. We tried to guide her, to help her. We tried to help all of them but they wouldn’t listen. We sent her Yvain, but even though she loved him as dearly as you love Finn, she used him and lost him in the using. She meant well but she is so very broken. And intentions do not excuse her actions.’

‘She has the sword and the crown,’ said Robin. ‘No one else can stop her. She’ll kill Finn.’

Finn…Wren recalled the murderous look in his eyes and her heart stuttered in her chest. But he was her lover as well, sweet and gentle, strong when she needed him to be strong, and so caring. He was everything.

She couldn’t let anything else happen to Finn. She had caused him too much pain already. Even if it meant giving up any chance of a future, she would protect him. She had to.

‘Take me back,’ she told the twins.

A great rushing sound, like the tide turning in the midst of a tempest, or a forest caught in a hurricane, roared around her, a song of old magic and ancient powers, and Wren gave herself up to it.