Page 159 of Dare
All the same, he deserved for the beach to give him a scolding first. He pleaded that he was sorry and to please help him. Desperate, he swore to give my shell back.
Since I had already been fixing to save him, I stretched out my hand. The noble had lunged for it, and our fingers grazed when a pair of gloved fingers hauled me upright. Knights swarmed us in a commotion of steel and shouts, with the other children on their heels. Then the boy was being rescued, his mouth bleeding from where I’d attacked him. Crimson oozed from his hip as well, because the seashell had shattered in his pocket, crushed to pieces when I’d tackled him.
I mourned those shards. I hadn’t kept my promise to Mama and Papa like I was supposed to, and now a treasure was destroyed, and the boy’s lips gushed from a split. I hadn’t meant to do wrong, but it was an accident, and everything was all right now.
Yet the children shrieked that I’d come out of nowhere and pounced on their friend. All the while, the boy said nothing about it. Not about taking my shell or baiting me, because he was too busy coughing up grains. His clique accused me of booting him into the quicksand, that I’d been pushing him into it and going down with him like a mad girl.
“Like a mad girl,” they cried. “A mad girl, a mad girl!”
I rushed at them, screaming that it was a lie. Appalled, the Summer knights yanked me back, and I heard the boy tell them in a small, shaken voice that I’d been about to let him drown. Over and over, he repeated that I meant to let him drown, sounding like he really believed it.
I wouldn’t have. I’d have given him a beating, and I might have chipped a tooth, but I wouldn’t have done worse. I had just wanted my shell back.
The knights dragged me across the shore. The more I hollered—“I’m not mad! I’m not mad! Mama! Papa! I’m not maaaaaad!”—the tighter their hold on me became.
As the knights stole me away, the last sight I took with me was of the beach—of my footprints in the sand.
Later, Pyre gloated and told me they’d caught my parents too. Mama and Papa had been tossed into a dungeon for concealing me from the Crown, while I was sent to a different cell.
And maybe Summer was right. Maybe I was mad, because why had I gotten so angry and attacked that boy over a seashell? Why else would Mama and Papa have kept me away from the markets so often?
Over time, I started to believe what everyone said about me. I was dangerous. Not to kind people but surely to evil or harmful beings, especially if they threatened what I cared about.
Only the rainforest had seen something good in me, something worth summoning. And that became my only light in the darkness.
Fury contorted Jeryn’s features as I finished the tale. “Anyone who ever hurt you. I will massacre them when I return to Winter. Let that be my first task.” He seized my cheeks, thumbs stroking my skin. “You’re safe now. You’re free.”
A lump clotted my throat. “Don’t hurt anyone for me. Violence is the reason I got myself locked up in the first place. I want no more of it.”
In place of rage, a haunted look strained his face. I wondered if the quicksand story reminded him of the whirlpool, until he uttered as if to confirm, “The boy had a split lip.”
I flinched. “I didn’t mean it.”
“And bloody pants.”
“From the seashell.”
Jeryn grimaced as if he’d anticipated this answer. He scraped his fingers through his hair, his next words sounding like a confession. “I was there.”
I couldn’t have heard him right. But when I said nothing, his eyes lifted to mine, and he repeated in a strained tone, “I was there.”
“No,” I balked. “I would have remembered a young man with blue hair.”
“I was close by. On the same beach. It was the day of the siren shark.”
Oh. Oh.
Yes, that day. He and his grandaunts had been touring the coastline with the Summer Crowns, and there had been knights escorting the Royals, and because those Royals wanted to be private, a group of children had been forced to migrate elsewhere.
Jeryn reminded me, “The boy with the split lip. I saw him earlier that day, on the beach with the other children.” The distant memory played before his eyes, his voice narrowing to a knife’s edge. “At one point during the stroll, I succumbed to curiosity. While my grandaunts were indisposed, I slipped from my security detail and followed the children to a neighboring shore. I arrived as the soldiers were dragging you away.”
The muscles of his throat bobbed. “I saw the guards hurting you. I saw the look on your face.” His eyelids clenched shut. “I have seen that moment ever since. You were a vision so unfamiliar to me. Wild. Golden. Ethereal. You were the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. The urgency to save you had gripped me, yet I was a mere boy, unsure of what to do. Before I could race to your aid, the guards had clamped you in irons, and the noble youths were screaming about madness.
“The term stalled my tracks and scared me. I started to question if you were safe or deadly, because I hadn’t known better. Instead, I returned in a daze to my side of the beach, my mind overpowered by you. I fought to distract myself by stumbling into the water, thinking to collect a sample for my vial, and hadn’t noticed the shark’s approach.”
In a timbre scraped raw, Jeryn admitted the rest. When his grandaunts took him to the infirmary after the shark attack, the noble boy was admitted soon after. The physicians had whispered that he’d been assailed by a mad girl near the ocean.
The same day. The same hour.