ARWEN
Thirteen Years Ago
I“ ’M NOT GOING IN THERE.”
I willed the words into reality by digging my heel into a
balding patch of grass beneath my feet.
Bad things happened in Powell’s work shed. Things that hurt my back and made me cry.
“Fine,” Ryder allowed, releasing my hand to cross his arms. “Suit yourself.”
Whatever “suit yourself” meant did not sound promising.
My brother didn’t wait for my response. He raced into the brisk night after Halden and the two of them picked the shed’s rusty lock with ease before slipping inside the thatched structure.
All the while, cold air licked at my face and shins. I shivered violently in place. My favorite nightdress was rife with holes and worn cotton. Too tattered to protect me from the night’s chill. I needed a coat. Or to go back inside. But if I ran home, Halden and Ryder would think I was scared.
Which I was, but…
They didn’t have to know that. My brother and his best friend were never scared. Not when they got into trouble arriving late for classes, nor when lightning struck so loud it sounded like the crack of a belt. Not when they snuck out on dark, windy nights like these.
Brave, strong, confident boys, my mother always cooed. And…me. Chasing after them. The runt of the litter.
Why couldn’t they have just invited me to join them? When I’d heard their hushed laughter and tiptoed from my room to ask them what all the fuss was about. If they’d just invited me then, I could have uttered a polite Oh, no thank you and gone back to bed armed with the knowledge that I hadn’t been excluded.
A wolf somewhere in the distant woods howled at the huge white moon above, and I ground my teeth together. I wanted to go back to bed. It was probably still warm. I could stay there, under my quilt, until the darkness was gone and it was sunny and morning and Mother was awake.
I spun on my heel, crunching a dry leaf under my slipper to do just that. They could mock me tomorrow, call me a coward—I’d let them. Or maybe the shed would swallow them whole and they wouldn’t make it home at all.
I’d only made one stride toward our cottage when a loud clatter and a yowl of pain warbled out into the night.
Owls hooted. Leaves rustled. My blood froze inside my body. Another agonized shriek—
And I sprinted without thinking.
Not for my rumpled bed, but for that looming work shed. Like a little goblin’s house, stark and solitary in the starless night.
“What happened?” I breathed, slamming the door open. “Wolves?”
Sawdust and varnish filled my nose and my back hurt in phantom memory.
“It’s Halden…” Ryder’s voice wobbled. “We were playing soldiers.
Halden grabbed the saw. His hand, it’s…”
I squinted in the darkness at the pool of blood. Slick, like oil. And above it…Halden—the boy that was always smiling—drenched in tears.
I’d never seen anyone cry like that.
“It’s all right,” I whispered, though I didn’t know why I’d said it. His hand didn’t look all right one bit. “I’m going to get Mother.”
“Are you stupid?” Ryder snapped, yanking me back by the sleeve. “She’ll wake Father, and we’ll all be punished. Just stay put while I think of
something.”
Ryder’s eyes, illuminated in a shaft of moonlight, cut sidelong to Halden. Ire flickered off him like candlelight, and I thought he looked a lot like Powell when he wore that expression.
It turned my stomach into tangles.
Halden had cradled his injured hand up to his chest, thick tears and snot bursting forth from his face. “This is your fault,” he wailed at my brother. “I told you we shouldn’t have come in here.”
And Halden was right. The shed was horrible. So rickety and small. Always locked. I was only ever brought in here to be punished. My heart was already beating too fast just standing inside its four dusty walls. My lungs felt tight, like I’d forgotten how to breathe.
In, out. In, out.
I wanted to run. As far from here as I could get in these muddied slippers.
But my brother always landed on his feet. He always knew what to do. And Halden was sobbing like an animal, and…my fingers hurt.
No, not quite hurt. They tingled. Like I’d spent an afternoon lying on them wrong, and now they were filled with sparkling needles.
“Can I see it?” I asked my brother.
Ryder contemplated my question. Halden held his tongue for a long, tear-drenched minute before Ryder nodded once.
“Come here,” I said to Halden.
He didn’t argue. Under the bleary moonlight I inspected the gash down the center of his palm, jagged and torn like fabric. The needles in my fingers intensified. My heart was beginning to pound too hard, like a bird was trapped inside my chest.
“I think I hear something,” Ryder said. “You both stay here, let me go see…” He maneuvered around Powell’s craft table in a rush, sending screws and bolts toppling onto the floor.
My chest seized even tighter. Powell wouldn’t like that. Those screws were ordered by size. The bolts in a line to match.
“Well?” Halden sniffed. “What does it look like?”
“I’ve done this for Mother,” I told Halden, stretching on my tiptoes for the rickety shelf just out of reach and dragging him with me. “Sometimes her legs don’t work so well. She gets a lot of cuts and scrapes.”
My hand found the rag I’d been aiming for, and I pressed the soft cloth into his wound and held it there.
Halden’s sobs guttered into sniffles. That wolf howled once more beneath the blanket of night outside. “He’s not coming back, you know.”
Ryder? Sure he would. I opened my mouth to tell Halden so, but those needles in my fingers had become so frenzied I couldn’t think. They stung and fizzed. Even though I didn’t particularly want to see the gore again, I found myself asking, “Can I look once more?”
Halden nodded but turned his head as far as he could angle, back toward the dirt-flecked windowpanes that nearly blotted out the moon. Then he screwed his eyes shut for good measure.
The cloth had slowed the bleeding some, but…then it was back, spilling forth in rivulets and onto the floor. The cut was deep. I could see stiff white peeking out from underneath his skin. Bone, and layers of muscle. I touched the serrated edges gingerly, and a dawn-pale glow emanated from my fingers and into his hand.
Shock stilled my heart. I yanked my fingers back.
Halden’s skin began to stitch itself together before my eyes. I blinked them closed. Once, twice—
But there it was. A wound, closing on its own.
And that curious, panicky feeling in my chest, the one where I forgot how to breathe right—it was gone, along with the pesky needles. I pressed my fingertips against my palm, searching for that absent tingle.
“Are you done?” Halden’s eyes were still closed.
“Almost.” I touched the wound again, and this time my glow was smaller, less like a star and more like a matchstick. But after a minute his palm held only fresh pink flesh.
Was I a witch? Would Halden think so? Would he tell Mother and Powell?
Oh, Stones.
I cringed. We weren’t supposed to curse. I was doing everything wrong tonight.
“Don’t look yet,” I said to him, suddenly very tired. I wrapped his hand in the cloth once more, tying it in a knot to hide the evidence. “I think it’ll be better by morning.”
“Thanks, Arwen.” Halden wiped the tears from his cheeks with the back of his good hand. “You didn’t have to do that.”
Did he know what my fingers had done? Did he know that whatever it was had made my whole body feel calm and on fire at the same time? I swallowed hard. “Do what?”
“Stay. Help me. You could have run off like Ryder did.”
I wiped down the saw the boys had been playing with, sliding its bloodied edge along the hem of my nightgown. Then I placed it back on its nail, and knelt to pick up each screw and bolt Ryder had knocked to the floor. It would take me an hour at least to put them all back in their right order.
“You were hurt,” I said around a yawn. “I couldn’t leave you.”
“Yeah,” Halden said, though he was already moving past me for the door. “You could’ve.”
