Page 48 of The Shadowbound and the False God

And something was writhing within her wide open mouth.

Laure’s vines curled from her lips, snaking out in brittle, withered strands and reaching for Aisling with deliberatehunger. They pulsed and twisted, alive in a way that turned her mother into something hollow and possessed.

Revulsion climbed Aisling’s throat. She tried to look away, but the image rooted her there: Maeve’s face split open, overtaken by Laure’s once-beautiful magic. The vine around Aisling’s waist tightened further still, but the ensuing burst of panic was enough to free her frozen limbs.

She’d grown so used to the weight of Kael’s dagger at her hip that she’d nearly forgotten it until now. Her fingers scrambled for the hilt, hands shaking as she wrenched it free.

And then she began to hack.

The vine screamed when the blade sliced into its stalk and bled a milky white sap that reeked like overripe fruit. Another shot up from below and tightened on her thigh, then yet a third joined the fray to snake up her arm. Aisling slashed at the vines wildly, hardly caring how many times the knife’s edge bit into her own flesh as she fought back.

With their ends half-severed, the plant began to retreat. Slowly, shakily, the vines coiled back into Maeve’s mouth. They slithered over her chin and jaw, and her neck bulged grotesquely as though she was swallowing the tangled mass bit by bit. Still, her expression didn’t change. Those pale, unseeing eyes remained fixed, that silent scream carved into her face like a mask.

Aisling stood ready, grip tight on the dagger, poised for another attack. But the hissing died abruptly and was replaced by a different sound, one so out of place there it took her a moment to make sense of it.

Flowing water.

She looked up. Water had begun rushing from the top of the hedgerow, cascading through its leaves and branches heavy and swift as a waterfall. It poured over Maeve’s head, swallowing her phantom form beneath the surge.

Had she been any less certain that the puppet was not truly some incarnation of her mother, Aisling might have chased it into the flood. Instead, she turned her back on it and fled toward the main path. The water was coming down all around her. It soaked her boots, chilled her ankles. The damp soil became oversaturated quickly; soon, the water had risen to her shins. She plowed through it wildly, running into dead end after dead end as it continued to deepen.

Everything looked the same: every turn and junction and passage. There were no landmarks, nothing to orient herself by. Desperation clawed at Aisling from the inside, a trapped animal fighting wildly to escape from its cage. The water continued to rise, hitting her knees. Then her thighs. It was too much: too much panic, too much sensation. All capacity for logical, rational thought had disappeared beneath the water with the earth.

Finally, finally—and only by sheer luck—she came upon something she recognized: a small copse of night-blooming jasmine, likely only minutes away from being swallowed by the torrent. It sprouted from the base of a small mound in the center of a junction. In the real night garden, the jasmine grew not far from the center, just paces from the angel’s trumpet she was always so entranced by.

Aisling tripped over something unseen beneath the water and she made no attempt to stop herself tumbling heavily onto the wet grass. There, on ground just slightly higher than the surrounding terrain, the rushing water hadn’t yet risen enough to consume the earth. Aisling laid down, panting, chest heaving as she tried and failed to catch her breath. A sharp pain in her side throbbed with every violent heartbeat. She pressed her cheek into the grass, so cool against her hot skin. Droplets of water coated every verdant blade, the largest throwing back her ruddy cheeks and teary eyes. Hundreds of splintered Aislingsquivered in the breeze of her exhales. Her eyes were wide, scared, and there were too many of them.

And then she knew—with as much certainty as she knew the sun would rise every morning and set every evening—the answer to Yalde’s riddle.

It was staring straight back at her.

Aisling scrambled to her feet and plunged back into the flood. The water reached as high as her chest now, and a swift current beneath its surface tugged at her legs. The ground beneath had turned into deep, sucking mud. She clenched her toes to prevent her boots from being torn off and aimed for the passage straight ahead. For a moment, she struggled to keep her head from dipping below the flood. But this path had a slight incline to it, only noticeable by the way the water shoaled as she went. By the time she reached its apex, she’d left the flood behind.

At the center of that drowning labyrinth was Wyldraíocht’s night garden. Kael’s night garden. She pushed away the vision of him snapping her neck that Elowas had planted in her mind and thought only of their more pleasant walks there. The angel’s trumpet blooms hung heavy from drooping branches, glowing turquoise just as they had each time she’d visited. The ground was damp, but not wet. Here, only tiny rivulets of water flowed from the hedges. Aisling had no doubt the trickles would soon become waterfalls, as they had everyplace else. But for now, it was peaceful.

The Luna moth was already there, perched on a stone beside the small pond. Waiting for her.

Aisling dropped to her knees at the water’s edge. It looked the same as it had in that horrid vision: glass-still, pure black, and absorbing every bit of starlight the sky had to give. And just like the mirror on Kael’s dresser in the backwards Undercastle, the only thing it gave back when Aisling peered into its depths was her own image.

She looked at her face there on the water’s surface, undisturbed by ripples or movement. Hair disheveled, streaks of soot and dried blood across her cheeks and mud caked on her torn sweater. She hardly recognized herself.

The cackling manticore was right: she was stupid. So, so stupid. The answer was obvious. There had been hints all along, and she’d missed every single one of them.

“Reflections,” she said quietly to herself. To the Luna moth. “The answer to the riddle is reflections.”

Aisling closed her eyes and drew in a breath so deep her lungs screamed and held it. With her fingertips dug into the grass, she bent forward at the waist until her face hovered just above the water’s surface.

Then she let go, and let herself fall in.

“Welcome back, sweetling.”

Aisling thought at first that Yalde was inside her mind again, but when she opened her eyes she found herself seated at his empty banquet table beneath the cathedral-like canopy of trees. Kael hadn’t moved, as much of a statue as the shrouded figures that sat around the table with them. Like waking from a heavy sleep, Aisling slowly came back into herself. She wiggled her toes, clenched and unclenched her fists. Shifted carefully in the chair. Her body ached fiercely, but it seemed that any injuries she had sustained during Yalde’s challenges had been illusions, too.

“I must say, I expected far better from you. Your logic was marginally impressive, but your inability to solve my riddle very nearly cost you your life.” He grinned wickedly and clicked his tongue. “Shadows. A reasonable guess, though.”

The first time she tried to speak, Aisling’s throat was too dry to produce any sound at all. She had to cough and swallowseveral times before she could manage it. “But I did solve it. Reflections.”

“Indeed, you did. Do you care to know how you might have escaped my arenas, had you realized that sooner?” He was teasing her now.

---