Page 45 of Grave Flowers
I closed one hand atop the other on the handle. My palms were moist, and the handle was dry. Or maybe it was the other way around. I couldn’t tell, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
My arms raised the dagger over my head. I turned my head away.
“No!” Father yelled.
I didn’t strike the open soft spot of the neck. The dagger bit into the rebel’s shoulder, cutting through his shirt and slickly into his skin. But no farther.
Uselessly, the dagger dropped onto the soil.
The rebel grabbed it.
Lifted it.
Just as he did, Mother’s hand flashed up.
It was too late.
She managed to prick him with her poison ring, but he stabbed her in the chest, as though death were a gift they handed to each other. He choked on air as she choked on blood. There was a high-pitched scream, but I didn’t know if it was from me or Inessa. Mother’s hands fluttered at her neck like dying butterflies. In a gasping voice, she said, “Left, right, up or down, let me use…” It was a grave flower invocation, I realized, but one I’d never heard before.
Shouts rang out from the palace door leading into the garden. The rebels were coming.
“Hide, Madalina,” Father yelled from behind the gate. Never had his voice sounded so thin. Numbly, I looked at him. The light from a moonmirror blanched his face white—or maybe it really was that white, as drained of blood as Mother. He’d grabbed Inessa’s hand and dragged her away into the night as the rebels poured out of the palace, and I’d run to hide behind the Daughter.
I blinked furiously, once again forcing the memory away. But it had undone me. Why did I have the audacity to think I could be different than what I’d become that night—the weak one, the guilty one, the lost one? If I couldn’t kill to save Mother, how would I kill to avenge Inessa? I was choking, my own shame and fear strangling me. I thought I might crumple to the ground, but then I remembered it.
Father’s voice, saying just what he had the night I’d failed.
Take it. Now. Place the point against the back of his neck, just below the skull. Drive it in. Take it. Now. Place the point against the back of his neck, just below the skull. Drive it in.
I forced myself to focus on the chant and nothing else. I heard it forward and backward in my mind, the words overlapping and blurring together.
Father terrified me.
But I always listened to him.
I was reduced to the sharp parts of myself. My teeth clenched, and down by my sides, my hands tensed into claws. My arms were bony hinges of elbow preparing to thrust into Luthien’s nose or stomach. I balanced on the balls of my feet so I might twist quickly or duck away, gifts from Rigby’s training. I needed everything from the people I feared tonight: Father. Rigby. Inessa.
A twig cracked.
Luthien.
He was here.
I spun around to see a figure duck low between the starvelings and a marble edifice. I ran to plant myself before him. There were only two choices for Luthien. Through the starvelings—or around me. Luthien rose to his feet. His face, its ridges painted in light and its gulleys shadowed in darkness, looked like a stained-glass window, smaller pieces fitting together to make a bigger image.
“Us alone,” he snarled. “Radix alone, always.”
We stared at each other again, only this time there were no secrets between us. Both of us knew exactly who the other was and what they wanted. The whites of Luthien’s eyes flashed like a sword’s edge catching light. My own glinting ring pierced the milkiness. With a single step, Luthien moved toward me, a knife suddenly in his hand. I ducked, flicked open my ring, and barely managed to press it against the underside of his arm.
Luthien dropped forward. The knife tumbled away. He caught me as he fell, dragging me to the ground. I twisted beneath him and kicked free, my skirt trapped beneath his bulk. His fingers grappled at the fabric as though he wished to find something that might hold him to this world for just a second longer. Then he was still. Crescents rose on his fingernails, the only evidence of the poison.
Yorick ran to me and helped me to my feet. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”
“I’m fine. We need to hurry. Can you help me?”
“Help you what?”
“Get the body to the starvelings. And the knife too.”
