They all turn and ride back up the road. I stand still until they are out of sight, and I can no longer hear their witless banter. My heart crashes wildly in my chest as I walk toward the embankment. Something deep inside compels me to look.

The steep slope leads down into a ditch where a few inches of water have gathered. Lying there is a person. My breath catches. I recognize her dress. Eyes that once sparkled with laughter and a mouth that once whispered silly jokes are open wide, caught in a scream. I cup my hand over my mouth to stifle the nausea. My dear Liv.

I have never seen a dead body. I don’t know what it should look like, but what I see seems foreign. Liv’s hair, once brown, is now white as snow. Her skin is shriveled and ashen gray. Her arms are drawn up in front of her, her hands rigid, fingers curled into claws.

I stagger back, and my stomach turns over. Collapsing on the road, I feel the muscles under my tongue seize as I vomit. Nothing but a foul-smelling liquid comes up. I refuse to believe it. She can’t be dead. Not my Liv.

Men’s voices sound again in the distance, and I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, stumbling into the trees, where I slide down onto the ground and cry. Noiseless and aching, I double over and clutch my cloak, pressing my face into it as the rumbling of wheels sounds on the road behind me.

I watch as the guards return on foot, pulling a small wagon with an open top. They situate themselves along the road, and together, they pull Liv’s body up the embankment, placing her atop the wagon’s bed. I am going to vomit again.

“Do we have a blanket?” one of them asks.

“Oh, you’re worried about her decency?” another asks.

“No, I just don’t want to see her ugly face. It’s terrifying.” He pretends to shake with fright, and they all laugh. “I’d have offed myself, too, with a face like that.”

One of the guards, an older man, steps forward. “Cover her and shut your mouth. This is someone’s child.”

The younger guard doesn’t look moved, but he quiets himself and covers Liv’s body with a blanket. They pull away and head back toward town.

I sit in the shadowy grove of oak trees, put my head in my hands, and weep. I can’t see through the torrent of tears. I gasp for air and cry out. Lying down in the dirt, I press my face against the ground. I want to crawl into the earth, to disappear, anything that will make me forget about what I’ve seen.

14

The sharp refraction of the sun through the branches above me stings my blinking eyes. I’d fallen asleep as visions of Liv tumbled through my head. The cold wetness of the ground soaked into my clothes, chilling me to the bone. The tears rise again, and I angrily push them away. My body aches as a heaviness settles in my chest. I stumble out of the trees, my legs like lead working against me.

The sun is low in the sky, and darkness is descending. I’m not even halfway to the place where Constance said I should meet her. I hope she will still be there. I hope it’s not too late to find her, now that there is nowhere else I can go. I push forward in a daze. Over my shoulder, the sound of horses and people talking startles me. I scurry down the embankment and press myself into the dirt to avoid being seen when the carts come barreling past. When the sound moves off, I carefully stand and look down the road. A cart full of heavily armed palace guards disappears in the distance.

Liv’s face stays in my mind as I walk. I can’t help but feel as if I’ve failed her. When Luke told me he would claim me to give us a way out, I thought I could bring Liv and Erin along. I thought we could save each other. Her absence resounds in every breath I take. The weight of her loss crushes me.

Her parents must be in agony. The thought brings a new kind of sorrow.

As the sun sinks lower and lower, I’m exhausted and unable to keep track of the minutes as they tick by; the distant bell tolling is my only clue as to how much time has passed. The road from town is paved with stones for much of the way before it turns to dirt. The farther I walk, the less there is to see. Trees sprawl out in every direction, their leaves yellowing. Even they know winter is coming.

As the sun dips below the horizon, I come to a place where the road splits off into two distinct forks. The left path is covered by dirt and gravel, pressed flat by carriage traffic. The right path looks as if it hasn’t been traveled on in years. Overgrown weeds push in from all sides, and the ground is littered with large stones nearly as high as my waist.

“Decisions, decisions,” says a voice.

I stagger back, tripping over my own feet and falling hard onto my side. From the embankment on the opposite side of the road emerges a familiar face.

Constance.

“You scared the hell out of me!” I scream, stumbling to my feet and trying to keep my heart from pounding out of my chest. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you,” she says, smiling.

“How did you know I’d come?”

“I didn’t. But I hoped you would.” Her red hair, which she wears in a long braid down her back, looks like twisted flames in the orange haze of the setting sun. Walking closer, I see a constellation of freckles across the bridge of her nose and planes of her cheeks that I hadn’t noticed before. Her smile quickly fades as she looks me over. “Are you all right?”

I fumble with my words while recounting the horror of that morning’s events. I can barely bring myself to speak Liv’s name aloud.

Constance sighs, and her shoulders slump down. “I’m so sorry. Truly I am.” She walks over to me and slips her arm around my waist, propping me up as my legs threaten to give way.

“The way she looked,” I say, wiping away the tears. “Something was wrong.”

Constance’s body stiffens. “The way she looked?”

I struggle to find the words to describe what I saw. “Her hair was white, like snow, where it had been brown before. All her color drained away, and her skin was wrinkled and gray.”

“Come with me,” she says.

I look around. The road is empty. No houses, no buildings. The watchtowers loom in the distance, and beyond them, the great expanse of forest known as the White Wood. “Come with you where?”

“Are you always so suspicious?” she asks.

“Are you always so vague and mysterious?” I ask in return.

“I try to be,” she says, smiling gently. I allow her to lead me toward the head of the path that is completely overrun. We make our way through the trees and underbrush, before we come to a towering wrought-iron gate. Its ten-foot bars are festooned with vines and bougainvillea, whose incandescent pink blooms are shriveled and falling to pieces in the late-autumn air.

We go through the gate and up a long twisting drive lined with ancient overgrown oak trees, each of their branches draped with curtains of moss, their knotty trunks as wide across as the broad side of a carriage. The setting sun illuminates the hazy outlines of the velvety red and orange petals of the poppies that grow wild and abundant, their black seedy centers dotting the landscape like a million pinpricks.

“Shouldn’t they be dead by now?” I ask, looking out over the flowers that color the otherwise brown and dying landscape.

Constance gazes at the poppies. “I hadn’t really thought of that, but I think you’re right.”