Trial by Fire (21 page)

They’re all dead, Lily. Now we have to burn them.

I’m so tired.

We must. Or more are sure to come.

Still using the strength Lily was struggling to pour into him, Rowan pushed all the carcasses on top of the pile in the clearing and then set it alight. As the bonfire began to rise and Rowan’s need for super-human strength ended, Lily allowed herself to sever the loop of power she was channeling. The uneven witch wind stopped blowing, and Lily fell out of the air in a heap. A fatigue she’d never felt before hollowed her out from head to toe, leaving her motionless on the cabin floor.

She saw Rowan’s boots coming toward her and thought about how she’d seen them up close like this before—when he had found her in the grate after chasing her through the streets of this other Salem. She wasn’t in any better condition now than she’d been then, and the similarity made Lily chuckle.

“Shh, it’s okay,” Rowan said gently. “Don’t cry.”

Lily wanted to tell him that she wasn’t crying, but her throat had closed off and her eyes were blurry with tears. He picked her up. His skin was wet and cool. He carried her to a cot and propped her against the wall, his fingers stopping to press several points on her body like he was reading something written in Braille under her skin. His hair was wet—all of him was wet, she realized. Lily ran her hand up his arm and over his bare shoulder, smoothing the beads of water away.

“Did you bathe because you were covered in blood?” she asked. Rowan nodded grimly and met her eyes. She had to look away, down at his chest where her hand had come to rest over his heart. “You’re all scratched and bruised.”

“I’ll be fine. But you’re exhausted and you need energy.” Rowan stood and went to the pantry, returning with the jar of blueberry preserves. “Told you it was a good idea to save the jam,” he said, a smile creeping onto his face.

“Jam,” Lily repeated, the word flying out of her, halfway between a laugh and a sob.

Lily dreamed she was a man.

Her dreaming self didn’t think it was strange at all to look down and see a flat, firm chest. Her hands were large, and she could feel the difference in their heft as she walked down the hallway of Salem High. She was tall, and her center of balance was higher to compensate for her thick shoulders and her narrower hips. She felt strong and healthy. She liked this body. It had smooth, caramel-colored skin that she wanted to explore.

Lily woke alone.

“Rowan?” she called out into the cold light of early morning. The smoky air smelled like burned hair and sizzling grease. She swallowed down a wave of nausea at the thought of all the burning bodies outside and got out of bed.

The cabin was too small to require a search. As soon as her eyes opened, she knew he wasn’t there. At some point, he’d replaced the knocked-down door with a flap made of the same material as the rebel tents, but it didn’t do much to keep the cold out. Lily stood in the middle of the frigid cabin, feeling raw and damaged. She really wanted her sister, but she didn’t dare try to reach her with mindspeak. The last time she did that, she’d put Juliet in danger.

“Rowan?” she called again shakily.

She heard a noise outside and the flap raised. Rowan ducked under it quickly and placed a rock on top of the bottom edge to keep out the smoke as best as he could. He was wearing a piece of cloth tied around his nose and mouth and carried a large bucket of water. His jacket was dusted with ash. Watching his wide shoulders tip around the flap as he entered the room, Lily was taken by the sudden urge to run to him, but when he looked up at her, she couldn’t meet his gaze. She felt strange and empty inside. Like she’d given him too much of herself the night before and didn’t have enough self left over for her.

Rowan put the bucket near the fire and pulled his mask down until it rested under his chin. His dark eyes darted around. Lily realized that he was having as much trouble looking at her as she was having looking at him. He motioned to the water with one hand and rubbed the back of his neck absently with the other.

“So you can wash up. Are you hungry?” he asked. Lily shook her head. “We can’t stay here. The smoke out there can be seen for miles around. And you used up a lot of salt last night.”

Lily nodded, aware that she was craving salt like crazy. “Are we going back to Salem?”

“We have to.”

“Do you think it’ll be safe?”

“It’s been a few days since the raid. And your hair is so different.” He looked away. “I think I can sneak you in after dark.”

“Okay.”

Rowan turned to leave but stopped by the entrance. “Listen. I know you weren’t ready for that. I wasn’t either. I never meant to do that with you.” He glanced at her, his eyes wide and uncertain. He shrugged, running out of words.

“Thanks for the water,” she replied, shrugging back at him. She didn’t know what to say either. What had happened between them was done, and it couldn’t be undone. He put his hand on the flap, but suddenly Lily didn’t want him to leave. “Is it always like that?” she blurted out, stopping him. “Is it always so…” she couldn’t find a way to describe it. Earth-shattering? Humiliating? Amazing? They hadn’t even touched, but it had been the most intimate thing Lily had ever experienced.

“No. Non-magical people aren’t as connected to their willstones as we are. They just feel a presence in their minds when they touch each other’s stones. Sometimes they can share thoughts and memories if they are emotionally close, and physical sensation if they are attracted to each other,” he said quietly. “But they don’t feel anywhere near what we do. They aren’t as vulnerable as we are.”

“And what about between magical people? Is it always that intense?”

Rowan smiled and shook his head. “Mechanics can bond with each other, but that’s different from being claimed by a witch. We call it stone kin—like Tristan, Caleb, and I. The bond is for life, but it’s not nearly as overwhelming as a claiming with a witch. The rule of thumb is the stronger the witch and mechanic are magically, the stronger the shared experience.” Rowan broke off suddenly, carefully considering his wording. “You and I are uncommon, Lily. The next time you claim someone, even if it is another mechanic, it won’t feel like that. I don’t want you to be afraid of it, okay?”

Lily nodded, frowning, and looked away. Her emotions had inexplicably flipped again, and she didn’t want to talk anymore. She wanted to be alone. Rowan sensed that Lily had mentally checked out of the conversation and secured his mask over his nose. “I’ll be right outside,” he said reassuringly, and left.

She stripped down and stood in the bucket of icy water. It chilled her to the bone, but she didn’t care. She washed herself from head to toe, marveling at how tender she was. How soft and small her body felt in comparison to Rowan’s. She splashed water on her face repeatedly, trying to rinse away the memory of sharing his skin. She shouldn’t want to wear Rowan like a pair of pants, or swallow him like mouthful of chocolate. It just wasn’t right.

She brushed off her wearhyde clothes and boots as best she could, giving them a good shake. Luckily, wearhyde seemed to be not only durable but also capable of staying fresh even after several days of hard use. Her linen shirt was limp and stained, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. She finished dressing and tidied up the cabin while she let her hair dry. It still seemed strange to feel the ends of her hair touching the top of her neck and brushing against her jawbone, but she tried not to think too much about how it looked or lament its loss. Instead, she concentrated on folding and putting things away.

“Lily? Are you okay?” Rowan called from outside.

“Yeah,” she replied. “You can come in.”

He ducked under the flap and pulled his mask down, looking around. Lily had pretty much everything packed up and ready for them to go.

“Oh. You cleaned up,” he said, surprised. Lily smiled at him, and looked away quickly. Everything he did seemed to make her blush. She felt ridiculous.

“I didn’t know what to do with the empty jars of preserves and pickles so I washed them and left them to soak in the bucket of water you brought me.”

Rowan pulled the jars out and left them on a windowsill to dry, then went to the chest, closed it, and sealed it with a shimmer from his willstone.

“I’ll empty this and we can go.” He picked up the bucket and gave Lily a puzzled look. “Thank you.”

She nodded and shifted on her feet. “Well, I can’t let you do everything for me. Even though it is tempting.” He stared at her for a moment longer than usual. “What?” she asked when the moment dragged past the comfort point.

“Most witches expect their mechanics to do everything for them. They don’t even think twice about it.”

“I guess I’m not like most witches, then.”

They stared at each other again with nothing to say. Lily edged past him and went outside.

The fire had burned itself out, but the mound of blackened bodies still smoked in the center of the clearing. Lily noticed that Rowan had dug a shallow ditch around it to contain any stray embers. She covered her mouth with her hand and stared at the jumble of mismatched body parts in the pile. She still had no idea how to classify the Woven in her head. Not one was exactly like another. Some were the size of a small dog, and others were twice the size of a man. Some stood upright, while others had no legs and had to slither. The majority of them resembled giant insects with claws and teeth, but there were some that seemed more mammalian or serpentine. It was the sheer wrongness of them that disturbed her the most.

“How many did we kill?’

“I don’t know. Thirty or forty.” Rowan threw the used water onto the smoldering remains, making them hiss. “Let’s go.”

He didn’t want to remain there a second longer than he had to. Lily didn’t blame him. She followed him to a water pump. He hung the bucket on the spout, adjusted his pack, and started into the woods without a backward glance.

They didn’t speak for a while, but Lily could feel Rowan stealing glances at her whenever she wasn’t doing the same to him. She kept imagining that there was a string connecting them—as if they’d been tethered together like two paper cups and something in each of them whispered to the other in the dark. The connection wasn’t clear, but she could still feel something inside Rowan speaking to something inside of her. She didn’t know how to initiate mindspeak yet, but she could tell there was something he needed to say.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“What happened between you and Tristan?” His voice was tight and his hands wrung the strap of his pack.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just, I know him really well. Tristan and I have been stone kin since we were kids.” Rowan watched Lily carefully, but she didn’t look up at him. “We share mindspeak. So I know a lot of girls have forgiven him when he’s—”

“Cheated,” Lily finished for him. “Which means he isn’t faithful in this universe either,” she said, more to herself than him.

She expected to be disappointed about that, but she wasn’t. Fair or not, she didn’t feel the same way about Tristan. Things he did that used to seem unbearably charming to her now seemed staged—phony even. Lily knew she shouldn’t judge the Tristan in this world by what her Tristan had done to her, but she couldn’t help it.

She remembered Rowan’s distrust of her when he first met her, and she wondered if he would always see Lillian when he looked at her. Something clenched inside of her at the thought. She wanted him to see
her
. She wanted—well, she didn’t know what she wanted, but she couldn’t bear the thought of going back to the time when he hated her. They’d shared too much.

“It’s not that,” Rowan said vehemently, bringing Lily out of herself and back to the conversation. “Tristan is the most faithful friend you could ever ask for.”

“He was a faithful friend to me for years,” Lily said, agreeing with Rowan.

Rowan was silent for a while. She could tell something was eating at him.

“What is it?” Lily asked.

“I was wondering if you’d forgiven your Tristan. That’s all.”

“No,” she admitted. “The next morning we had a terrible fight, and then I let Lillian take me.”

“Because of him?”

“Because of a lot of things.” She glanced over and saw a muscle jump in Rowan’s jaw. She was torn between being ashamed about what had happened to her and grateful that someone knew exactly how she’d felt. Rowan hadn’t been just a spectator to Tristan’s infidelity, and his anger wasn’t just for Lily’s sake. They’d shared more than memories the night before. What they’d experienced was a communion. For a few brief moments they’d literally become one. He’d felt just as hurt as she had in that moment.

But communion worked both ways. Lily had felt skin under her hand when they’d touched Lillian. And she’d felt their shared body swell when they’d climbed on top of her. Lily didn’t know how to deal with that just yet.

“You showed me a gallows,” she said quietly. “What happened?”

Rowan’s face turned slightly away from hers. She hated not being able to see his expression, but she didn’t push. Eventually, he changed the subject. “When you enter a mechanic, you don’t have to give back, you know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t have to delve so deeply into him, or share anything of yourself if you don’t want to. You’re the witch. You’re in charge. It doesn’t have to be that intimate. You can keep your experiences to yourself.”

“And what about the mechanic?”

“It depends on how strong he is and how strong the witch is. Sometimes, he can fight her off if she tries to view things he’d rather keep to himself.”

Lily stopped walking and stared at Rowan.
“Fight
her off? That’s awful, Rowan.”

“None of this happens without the mechanic’s consent. He has to let her in first.” Rowan’s lips twitched with the hint of a smile. “And a kind witch controls herself when she’s in there.”

“Like I didn’t?” Her voice grated with guilt.

Rowan put his hand on her elbow, tilting his head down closer to hers. “You had no warning about how it would make you feel. It was your first time.” He dropped his hand a little too quickly, and eased away from her. “I’m lucky you didn’t eat me alive,” he joked.