Chapter 25

"Neus please don't –" but the girl whose name was Neus could not turn back and hear the final words to the plea thrown at her shoulder. She could not look back; she could not spare another thought towards the past. The future was already pressing on her heels (and curling bile up her throat and pulling down her bones with a weight of exhaustion that threatened to make her implode). She could not keep up as it was.

She had tried to plan the future and the future had laughed in her face, and crumbled to dust, sinking into the cracks and crevices of the similarly crumbling castle around her. Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. A life gone, and a new one rising in its place. She was in the thick of it now – fighting up against the ash choking her throat and blocking up her lungs. She was pulling the new life out of thin air with each shaking, desperate breath.

Neus wove expertly across the labyrinth of hallways, trusting her feet to find the way she had taken so many times before. But she had never come this way before – never started running from the place she had just escaped. She turned a corner, and her toe caught an edge. She skittered and tottered and fell. There was blood on the floor, on her hands, on her knees. From me or to me, which way does it seep? There was no time to answer, no time to think.

Neus ran on.

It took her a moment, of the precious few she had, to realize she was lost. Each corridor gaped and sighed in the same dilapidated way. Each door was cracked and groaning under the same pressure of time. And she had been allowed too few corners of the castle to roam. She had been watched so obsessively – and as soon as she had found an escape, she had never wandered inside at night again. A caged bird always chooses open air.

There was no time – she knew that she had already been missed. The pressure finally grew too much. She vomited. It was a penance – kneeling on the stone floor, flecks of rock and gritty dust grinding on her torn open knees, heaving out the big secret. She had had many secrets over the years, so many small rebellions. But this was the only secret worth keeping. And she vomited it on the floor.

And then she saw the light. It was a thin golden beam, hovering an inch off the stone. The dust of the castle glittered like diamonds in its path. Chestnut. It had to be. The others who looked for her, they would not send something so pretty her way. They were not capable of such beauty. Neus found the strength to run on.

The twists and turns were unfamiliar, but Neus had blind trust – she had to. She had no choice. She was used to having no choice. She was not used to having trust. A future seemed to be glimmering in the air, just out of her reach. She was getting closer.

A final turn, a final bend in the light, and Neus was in a corridor she knew. One, two, three steps and she was there. She had found the room. The air was pitch black, but somehow, she still felt that glimmer, hovering just at the end of her breath.

"HUH" was the sound of her breath as it forcefully left her throat. For a very long time, she had struggled to make it through the servant's door. It was no higher than her knee, no wider than her hips – almost a perfect fit. And now she was stuck. The change was imperceptible, a tiny thickening of her waist in its widest place. But it was enough to suck the air out of her lungs, enough to extinguish the glimmer of hope she had been trying so desperately to draw into her chest.

It was mud that saved her, in the end. Where she was, halfway out the door, she could not reach the wand in her boot. But it was raining. For the first time, the girl felt rain on her skin. For the first time, the girl felt mud between her fingers, between her teeth. Mud was slippery.

Chestnut had told her once, when she had asked him about what it was like to be outside in a storm, that rain and worm hunting had been so synonymous to him in his youth that he had confused the smell of wet earth for the smell of the wriggling pink creatures. "Even to this day, when I walk outside and it's wet, I think I'm smelling worms. It's illogical. But sometimes, the first associations you make, even if they're wrong, are the hardest to get rid of." Neus had thought him foolish then. But after this night, she always thought that rain smelled of freedom. And death.

With a shuddering gasp, she finally slipped free. Her wand was in her hand now. And the real race was on. The hunt. The main doors were open. The torches were lit. He was out here looking for her. He was hunting for her.

Neus did not bother with a disillusionment charm once she reached the edge of the forest. She knew that if it came down to it, the charm would be nothing but an annoyance. It would not be a true hinderance. And she wanted Chestnut to see her. If he was still here. Neus knew it was best if he hadn't stuck around. She also desperately hoped that he had stayed, though it was well past their arranged meeting time.

Neus' wild black hair flew through the low hanging leaves of the early august trees. The effect was almost the opposite of dappling sunlight – it was a patterned shadow that flitted through with speed. Twigs crunched underfoot. The haunting echo of a dozen owls ricocheted around her. Neus felt as if unseen eyes were watching all around her. There was no glimmer in the air now. There was only the constant ache for breath, the hammering call of her heart in her chest, and the primal fear that coloured her eyes to dark pools of black.

In all the years that Neus had spent at the castle, in a captivity that had masqueraded as a betrothal, she had been told that the borders of the land had been strengthened with magic. They had taken great pains to stress that she was 'safe', and that she could not accidentally wander into nasty muggle territory, but the message had been clear – you will never escape.

It had taken Chestnut only three days to break those invisible chains.

It took Neus a moment to realize that she had crossed the barrier. Years later, she would liken the experience to driving under an overpass in a rainstorm. It was a sudden lack of the sound that had once been so omnipresent. A shock that left your ears searching. The changes between this forest and the one she had been in a moment before were subtle – the cooing of owls ceased abruptly. And the smell had changed – there was no more dankness, no more misery, no more decay. It was still raining. It smelled like freedom.

Slowly, the changes started moving from the removal of stimuli to the addition – Neus' foot almost slipped on a discarded beer can, the trees started to thin, and, distantly, there was a humming she had never heard before – the motors of cars. She was nearing the meeting spot Chestnut had so carefully selected. She felt so tired that she was scared her legs might give out. But she was nearly there…

And then she saw him. He turned in response to the sound of her running. Chestnut. Her Chestnut. The smile that lit up his face, the same face that was half lit up by moonlight, that was how she liked best to remember him. It was their only moment of shared freedom, and it was a moment of pure joy. She never got close enough to touch him, but she got close enough that she liked to think they shared a breath, and that that breath had been alive with light and hope.

Suddenly, flashes of bright light streaked past her shoulder, and then she was falling and rolling, and she again could not catch her breath. There was shouting, and spells, and confusion. She saw the wand fly out of Chestnut's hand and roll onto the soft, rotten earth beside her. Before she could react, she was hit full force in the chest with a spell that made her brain flood with thick fog.

Neus turned dumbly to look at her attacker. Of course, it was the prince. He looked at her with his cruel, sharp eyes. The rain rolled off his cheekbones in fat streams, almost pooling in his sunken cheeks. His thin blonde hair was pasted to his skull by the rain. He held Chestnut against his chest, his wand pointed to the bobbing adams apple of his throat.

All of this, Neus observed from what felt like very far away. Her head was full of clouds, and really, nothing seemed to matter at all. The prince was not one for speeches. He did not gloat or question her on why she ran away. A high, cruel voice in her head simply instructed her to break her wand in two. The voice was very convincing, and Neus felt as if it was the most reasonable thing in the world to do as it said.

Her wand broke over her knee with a sickening snap. Thin gossamer threads of the purest white tangled in her fingers as the core of her wand gave way to the force of her hands. There was a voice, a voice that sounds oddly like her own voice, calling out somewhere from the fog, but she could not make out what it was saying. Neus frowned. It was no matter, the other voice, the loud, clear voice, was telling her to do something else.

Neus picked up the discarded wand from the earth beside her. Her fingers came back wet with mud. That reminded her of something, something she couldn't quite put her finger on. A voice was calling out again, but this time it was not from inside her head. Neus raised her eyes from her muddy hands.

"NEUS" the man was screaming. He had such kind eyes. She knew this boy, but how? The fog in her brain was so annoying. She shook her head to try and clear it, and it thinned a little. The other man was saying something too, and she could hear it being repeated by the loud voice in her head, but she ignored it. She wanted to know what the boy with the kind eyes was saying. She was watching as the adams apple rose and fell over the tip of the wand that pressed directly into the soft flesh of his throat.

"A life for a life. A life for love, GO." With the last word, the fog in Neus' mind cleared completely. She only had time to blink once, the reality of what had just happened crashing around her so quickly that she did not have time to process it into thoughts. She reacted on pure instinct and turned on her heels. The flash of green that followed her came so close to her that it ran right through her hair. Three black curls fell to the ground and stayed in the forest. Later, she would think it was fitting, that a physical part of her died in that forest that night. It felt true.

The hours and hours of practice that Chestnut had coached her through paid off. It was the only part of their perfectly laid plan that had actually worked. She pictured the little field they had chosen clearly in her mind, and it was onto the soft grass of that field that her knees found earth to sink into.

She did not know how long she screamed. All she knew is that the note that pierced the air hung around her for far longer than she thought possible. It seemed centuries passed before she took her first new breath.

And then she took another. And somehow, from it, she drew a future.