Curses and Will Chapter 9: Chapter 3: The Choice to Stay

Read chapter 9 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I woke for the third time in that room, and this time the waking felt different. Less like surfacing from drowning, more like simply opening my eyes. The window stood open. Morning light came in clean and cold, carrying the smell of frost and something green underneath it, like the garden outside had decided overnight to start the slow work of thawing. The ceiling was the same pale blue and white. The bed was the same polished oak. But something in the air of the room had shifted, the way a house feels different once you've cried in it for the first time. A knock sounded, brief, and Jonathan stepped in before I'd fully sat up. Same tray. Same precise economy of movement. He set it on the table without ceremony. "You should eat," he said. "Your body is still recovering." I looked at the bread without much interest. My mind was still somewhere back in the previous night, in the moment Annya had faltered and gone down like something had cut her strings, in the way Jonathan's hand had glowed soft blue as he murmured something I couldn't follow, in the curse flaring tenfold before settling back into its usual restless stillness. "Is she alright?" I asked. "The princess." Jonathan paused for exactly long enough that I noticed it. A small crack, gone almost as soon as it appeared. "She will be," he said. "She always is." I looked down at my own hands, still faintly trembling from something that had nothing to do with the cold. "That thing isn't just following her," I said. "It's attached to her. Like a shadow that grew teeth." "Yes." I sat with that a moment, then found myself talking before I'd decided to. "I saw my first yokai the day I lost everything," I said. "Our house caught fire. My parents were inside." My voice came out steadier than I expected, though something underneath it wasn't steady at all. "I remember it sitting in the flames, like it belonged there. Hollow eyes. A grin that wasn't really a grin." Jonathan didn't say anything. He simply listened, which I was beginning to understand was its own kind of answer with him. "I ran," I said. "That's the only thing I remember doing clearly. I ran, and I survived, and everyone in that town decided that surviving was the same thing as guilt." He moved to the window, his back to me, hands folded behind him. "You survived," he said. "That isn't weakness. That's proof." "Proof of what?" "That you're someone who can still walk forward, even carrying what you're carrying." I didn't have an answer for that, so I asked the question that had been sitting underneath everything since I'd opened my eyes the first time. "Why am I here? Not in this room. Here. This place." He turned from the window, and something in his gaze sharpened, like a man deciding to finally stop circling a subject. "That night, you crossed a boundary," he said. "The river you went into wasn't only a river. It was a gate." "A gate to what?" "To a place between your world and this one. Few people find it. Fewer survive the crossing." I thought of the cold water closing over my head, the warmth that had pulled me back to the surface, except that warmth had been Tsukiakari, in a world I now understood was not this one. "You're telling me this palace isn't real," I said. "No," Jonathan said. "I'm telling you it's more real than almost anything you've known. Here, the things you've spent your life pretending not to see don't have to hide. You don't have to pretend either." He crossed to a shelf along the far wall and drew down a book bound in dark leather, runes worked into the cover in a faint blue that seemed to shift slightly when the light moved across it. "You've seen them your whole life, haven't you," he said. It wasn't really a question. "Yokai. Curses. Things that exist just outside what most people are willing to acknowledge." "Yes." "Then you have two paths in front of you," he said, setting the book in my lap. The leather was warm, unnaturally so, like it had been sitting in sunlight that wasn't in this roo