Star's Crossing

37: Hers

Good. Let them get lost looking.

As Mare stomped through the overgrowth, branches lashing forth and snapping against her face and hands, a fell wind blew. It'd been a muggy morning, and as the wind lifted, a slate sheen of clouds swept in off the sea and settled low among the trees.

Now it was to rain? Mare's luck had persisted, then. She had one priority—hide herself far enough away she would not be found. By anyone. The rain was to be her conspirator, then, as it had been in the past.

The sky opened up and it began to pour just as Mare cut across her familiar path near town and sprinted into the woods. Her stoic bur loomed in the heart of the forest, and she fell upon his twisted trunk, gasping from the exercise. Tears threatened, choking her as a great hand pressed hard and unyielding against her chest. She'd not give anyone the satisfaction.

Again her world felt as though it pressed in from every side. She had not the comfort of Alison or Lilith, or her father, or her books, or his words, traitorous now as they felt. In fact, for the first time in these last five years, Mare felt they'd lend no comfort. She did not want to think of Camden.

He's going to ruin that girl.

Was he? Was this his aim? Again Mare felt the dark, stabbing fear of a game afoot, she a player with no inclination how to play.

Show me those teeth.

Thunder growled and lightning snapped nearby, ushering a lashing torrent of rain from the clouds. Even beneath the leafy canopy of the bur, Mare was soaked in moments. She pulled the pins from her hair and let it fall loose over her shoulders, recalling that first day in the rain, Camden's letter in her sleeve and his words in her heart. All the world ahead a possibility; no games at play, no traps set for foolish, unsuspecting prey.

Her mother would loath her for this. Let her. Mare hated her mother. She hated Camden, too, and his father and his uncles. She hated Star's Crossing and The Gazette, her letters spread bare for all of the world to see. Nothing belonged to her anymore. Not her words or her future or her life or even her heart.

She unlaced and tore off her boots, casting them aside and rising to her feet. The hem of her dress was soaked to her knees, and she gathered her skirts in her fists and sank her bare feet in the mud, savoring not only the wild sensation but the notion of her mother's inevitable rage.

It filled Mare with a strange, savory kind of glee, and in a flash of lightning and a percussion of thunder she threw back her wet hair and cast her arms out wide and laughed. For a brief and frightening moment Mare wished herself a nymph, lustily naked beneath the rain, a witch with nettles for hair and seawater for blood. A wild thing, cast far from the reach of rule or propriety.

But the wildness fell to quiet and the world returned, and Mare realized she was not alone.

She turned slowly, heart still raging at the glee of liberation, fleeting though it was. Her tongue moved quicker than her mind. "Pretend you haven't found me."

Teddy stood some feet away, hat clutched in his hands. His hair was soaked against his forehead, and his nostrils flared, jaw tight, as though his rage had not lessened in the hour that had passed since their unfortunate meeting in the wood.

Mare bristled. She was a sight, she knew: crazed, mad, a wildling. He ought to condemn her. He ought to flee.

And yet.

Mare turned and faced him squarely, savoring the fear than ran through her, and was yet eclipsed by bravado or anger or indignation or desire. "Go, Teddy," she said sharply. "Leave me to my own ruin."