Fates

21

The blackness in her mind, the fog, began to break apart when Corinthe heard the soft strains of music again. The familiar melody calmed her. A gentle current lifted her body. When her head broke the surface, she inhaled deeply. The air was fresh and carried with it the scent of flowers.

The scent of home.

Her mind felt clear, unclouded. Refreshed. When you truly believed in what you were doing, it came naturally. The burning sensation in her limbs receded slightly. She sank her hands into the soft sand of the river’s bottom and slowly dragged herself to shore.

At the edge of the water, she paused and looked down at her reflection. Her head was haloed with soft purple light from the sky above her, and her skin practically glowed.

Her breath hitched in her throat.

Home.

The word whispered across her mind, enveloping her in warmth.

She almost couldn’t believe it—she hadn’t fulfilled the final act, and yet she was here. Not transformed, though—she was still in her semihuman form. But already, the healing winds of Pyralis were working. They sang through her blood, a decade full of pain, an ache that had lodged itself in her bones, in her teeth, behind her eyes. It was so close, so close … If she did what was expected of her, she’d be a Fate again, so soon she could taste it. That was what Miranda had promised, what the marble had indicated: her own knife. The rising sun in the background as the knife flashed in the air before coming down. One life lost, one fate fulfilled. And yet …

She gasped. It felt as if she had been holding her breath forever; only now was the weight in her chest truly eased. The sense of relief, the release from pain, was like joy. The scrape on her cheek had faded, and her tangled hair softened when a light breeze teased it into a loose braid. She looked younger, healthier again. She could feel the hornets’ poison loosening its grip on her. … She would soon be strong again. Capable of fulfilling her task once and for all, restoring the balance of things, regaining her proper place. She looked almost like a child. Innocent.

But she wasn’t innocent anymore.

Something had changed inside her.

She glanced at the unnatural hue of the sky. It was too light. The vast purple sky was webbed with red, as if dawn were breaking.

Corinthe felt fear lodge in her chest. She had not yet fulfilled her task. She had altered the flow of the universe.

She had already altered the fate of one boy.

The universe, she had learned, contained ripples and grains of doubt. Just like the marbles, destiny wasn’t flat and one-directional. It was round and could be seen from infinite different angles, full of shifting, swirling gradations. Every rule seemed to have its exceptions.

And this was one of them.

Because she had made her choice.

Beyond the stone walls that surrounded the Great Gardens was the flower that could save a life, though it would kill whoever plucked it.

Corinthe no longer had any regret or doubt. Just a sadness swelling inside her, making her feel lightheaded, weightless, as though she were disappearing. The decision felt as intimate and essential as her own name.

The balance of the universe still had to be set right—which meant someone had to die.

She turned away from the river, pulled by an invisible force inside her. A force that had nothing to do with the power of this place; a force that was all her own. It amazed her how simple it all was, really.

Pyralis was filled with endless walks of flowers—great, tangled stretches of vivid green fields, bursts of wildflowers, forests dappled in twilight. This world was an island surrounded on all sides by the river, and the Great Gardens were at its center, walled off, forbidden. There was a spot, though, a gap in one portion of the wall, where a Fate might just wiggle through. Alessandra, one of Corinthe’s sister-Fates, had found it one day and showed Corinthe. Together, they had slipped beneath the wall, but Alessandra had grown scared when they came face to face with the giant statues in the Gardens, and Corinthe had had to lead her back out.

It was said that the statues, the Seven Sisters, had once been real beings who had displeased the Unseen Ones in some way. Corinthe had never given it a thought until now. For the first time, she wondered what their great sin had been. What had they done to deserve being locked in that stony, monstrous state?

Maybe they simply wanted something they couldn’t have. Something not destined but found. Like Luc. Luc, who had risked everything to find a flower that would save his sister.

Risked everything for love.

As she made her way to the Gardens, through a field spotted with flowers in colors she had not seen, except in her imagination, for ten years, she found it difficult to breathe through the thickness in her throat. How she had missed all this. Everything was so familiar, and also so strange. The air was quiet, buzzing only with the soft hum of the fireflies and the sighing of the wind. No laughter, no voices, no car horns and screeching wheels and doors slamming and …

Life. No life.

Not a single animal rustled the grass; no Fates, either. They must have been farther down the river, bent over their tasks, perhaps trying to correct the balance she had disrupted.

Even now, she could see that the sky above her was lightening quickly. The violet had faded to a dull gray. There was a fine line of gold at the horizon, and Corinthe suddenly remembered her first sunrise: crouching on the roof, watching the explosion of light and the noise that seemed to come with it as Humana shook itself awake.

She thought of Luc. She wondered what it would have been like to watch a sunrise next to him. To wind her fingers with his and walk down Marina Boulevard together. But there were some things that just couldn’t be, no matter how you looked at them.

The chaos had started to invade Pyralis. Day was coming, bringing not just the heat and the light but the passage of time. And in a place of timelessness, a place of eternity, time was a cancer. It would eat away at the edges of this world until the Gardens wilted and died. Until Pyralis disappeared completely.

Tall grasses whispered against her skin, sending shocks of life through her, a constant, pulsing reminder that everything was connected, that everyone had a place, that nothing ever truly ended. Here, she didn’t even have to stitch; the life flowed through her and she swam inside it, as though moving through the river.

She made her way deeper into the island, into the lushness, following a well-worn path that led straight to the main entrance of the Great Gardens. Straight to the soul of Pyralis. She felt buoyed by certainty, almost floating.

She passed the stone maps of the universe, ever shifting, and treaded lightly across the plains of white tea flowers she and Alessandra used to play in. Corinthe stopped for a minute, almost certain that she heard Alessandra calling her name. She spun around. No one was there.

The path left the tea field behind, and she passed through a thicket of overgrowth. She could feel that she was getting close. And then the path arrived at a towering iron gate, permanently locked. It connected the walls of the garden. Impenetrable. Here she could feel the pulse of the place surging through her veins, making her almost delirious. She ran her fingers over the lacy ferns that crowded the perimeter of the main gate. Then she found the place where a fiery red patch of grass grew among the ferns. She followed a path of stones that led into thick growth, going by a hundred-year-old memory, an intuitive language that allowed her to feel her way, always and forever, through Pyralis, like a bird wheeling south in winter.

The ground seemed to rise up beneath her feet and lead her deeper into the ever-thickening foliage around the edges of the stone wall, and she became so entranced by the healing, seductive energy that flowed through her here that she almost didn’t see it at first: the gap.

She felt a pang in her throat. This was it: the secret entrance Alessandra had discovered all those years ago. The stone wall was overgrown with vines and tall grass, but this tiny portion had been somehow disrupted, dug up. Crumbs of stone and dust lay mingled with the verdant mud at the base of the wall.

A strange feeling came over Corinthe. Why hadn’t any of the other Fates ever discovered this break in the wall? Why did the break exist at all? Could it be that the Unseen Ones had known of it forever … that its presence was a temptation, a test of faith to see who would obey the rules and who would break them?

Or was it possible that this, like so many other things Corinthe had encountered in the last few days, was an anomaly, an accident? Like the faulty marbles, like ripples in the river. Perhaps the great plan was made of water and not stone: it changed, flowed, and adjusted.

Corinthe touched the broken section of the wall—she knew which stones were loosest, and began to move them aside. Then she crouched down to crawl through the narrow hole.

The Gardens contained every flower, every known plant in the universe, and for a moment Corinthe was almost overwhelmed by the smell on the other side of the wall: a hot, heady, intoxicating scent of growth crowded on endless growth. A narrow rock path spiraled through the garden, down to its very center, and Corinthe followed it, her heart beating fast. She almost feared that each footstep, however quiet, might waken the Seven Sisters, send them running after her.

At last the path ended, and Corinthe found herself standing at the edge of a great grass amphitheater. At its very center grew a single purple bloom.

The Flower of Life.

The petals, exactly eight, were each as long as her forearm, extending from a pure white center. For a second, she couldn’t move. She almost felt as if she could cry again. She was here, at last, after all of her years of exile, all of her tasks, all of her trouble. This flower would save her, in its own way.

Again, the simplicity of it all struck her as somehow funny. Easy. Painless.

With the pain in her legs gone, all she could feel was the beating of her own heart. She was kneeling in front of the flower before she could register that she had moved. She was filled with a feeling bigger than joy or sorrow—an emotion so strong it renewed her strength and purpose.

She reached out and wrapped her fingers around the stem, right below the petals: the only flower that would ever grow, the only thing that could save her, here, underneath her fingers. She gasped. The flower’s pulse was so strong it almost knocked her over. She could feel her hand burning.

She would die, but it would be worth it. Because Luc would save his sister. It would be Corinthe’s gift, to thank him for what he had given her.

She had finally found something more than fate to believe in.