if he's a serial killer, then what's the worst
that could happen to a girl that's already hurt?
✧
T
o cure Rook, I will have to go to Delumine. I still remember the stories he'd told me about his court. About the boys and girls who grew up reading so many books that they became scholars, men and women who dedicated their entire lives to books, to reading and writing and praying to Oriens for more when they ran out of them. (I'd asked him if he was one, to which he'd grinned with all his teeth and said, proudly, that he was on his way to becoming one.)
In particular, though, I remember the Library. (Capitalised—when I had drawn it out on the sand with a stick he'd reached over and added one more line to the l, before plucking a flower from my braid and dotting the i with a petal.) He'd regaled me of the Library's wonders—how it was the best one there was, how it attracted scholars from all over, how it was grown out of a forest of trees and was always expanding because of it. How once he'd entered it as a child barely taller than his diplomat father's knees, he'd never wanted to leave.
I remember furrowing my brow and asking him why, then, was he here with me, deep in the swamps, if he loved this Library of his so much.
I remember blinking too fast when he'd looked at me through his lashes, smiled like a cat, and drew his shoulders up in a shrug both elegant and coy.
Rook looks at me now, his eyes milky with malice, and drags his antlers down the bumps of my spine.
You should guard your thoughts better, Daisybird. They always leak through to me. I level a tired glare towards him and flip my mask all the way over my head. Do you miss me as I was? he asks, his laugh dark and airless in my head.
I don't. I think, Maybird Maybird, that I'm so much better this way.
I feel his eyes in my back like two bright thorns as I push him aside and walk forwards, into a copse of white birch. "Isn't it great," I say, loud enough that a flock of starlings burst out of the viney undergrowth, "that I don't care what you think?"
Through my mask, the world is all shadows.
