Page 41 of Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely
Blood splatters across Sila’s face. There is a hot line across the skin of my throat. My blood.
Sila’s eyes turn pitch black. She screams, and everything goes dark.
Chapter 24
Lorel
The air is cold.Or I am burning up. It’s hard to tell, anymore. When I open my eyes, I am lying in a box. Shadow presses in and writhes against it. There’s a low light from underneath me that reflects off the glass walls of the box. No, not a box. A coffin. The kind they use to hold your body before they inter it in the catacombs.
Am I dead, then? I relinquish the book I am holding and reach up. I expect a wound or a gash, but there is nothing. Just the smooth fall of my throat. Dried blood flakes away against my fingers, but it isn’t wet. It isn’t bleeding. There is nothing else to suggest the blade had ever bitten into my skin at all. It’s even difficult to tell if the blood drying into the fabric of my dress is my own, or soaked up from the chapel floor.
I rest my hand back on my stomach and find soft, time-worn leather there instead. The book. There’s enough room to bring it up to my face. Red leather, no title, dry and as brittle as the last time I saw it. Leather and paper flaking like the blood from my skin. It is the book from my memories. The thing we had come here to find. I grow uneasy looking at it. I have turned it over andover so many times in my mind that I had stopped believing it to truly be real.
I had picked up this book, and then I had run terrified to my room. I had silenced myself brutally and kept the curse it had given me inside me. Crushed myself in the process. For the first time, the curse sits quietly in my chest, not even stirring as my thoughts brush against it.
Perhaps that meant I had done it, then. The Heart had taken me instead of Sila. She is free of me now. My heart aches with the thought of it and so I turn my attention to the Heart of the Library.
Is this where you’re going to keep me?
The Heart’s attention shifts, brushing up against my consciousness.
Perhaps. You’ll be safe here, little vessel. Even Sila knows that, much as she fights it.
Sila.Has she not gone?
Can’t you hear her?
The sound is muffled by the glass, and then it clears, as if the Heart has let it in. Sila’s voice, furious and defiant. “You will give her back, or I will tear you down myself.”
The Heart sounds amused as its attention turns back to Sila.
Is that so? Even your own bargain is telling you that’s a bad idea. You know I can keep her safe here.
Sila lets out a sound of pure frustration.
Do you really thinkyoucan keep her safe?
The silence is as thick as the swirling shadow, trying to find purchase on the glass. Sila’s shadows, trying to find a way through.
I reach my thoughts out to the Heart, turning its attention back to me.
Why do you want me?
Because I have given you a gift, and it was a gift not easily earned. I need you to speak it and mark the traitors' downfall.
But I can’t speak.
There is a feeling of the air sucking in and rushing out. The Heart sighing.
No, you cannot. It will take time to break the silencing, but I will do it and I will hold you until it is done. None will touch you here.
“Please,” Sila says. “Let me take her place as I had intended. Let her go.” She cannot hear what the Heart speaks to me. She is pure, abject sorrow. As if she has become a melancholy wraith from an old faetale, wandering dark halls searching for a lost love. The Heart turns away from me again.
Without you, she is unprotected. Unsafe. They have come for her blood already. Who will protect her when they come again?
Long dark fingers press through the shadow against the glass. They scrape along it, a wretched sound. Sila.
“I will,” she whispers. Blood drips onto the coffin. Thick dark red, almost black spots settling against the glass. I press my fingers to where hers had been a moment before. I scratch my broken nails against the glass, seeking purchase. I need to be with her.
