Time is an illusion in a world without windows. Darkness has become my blanket. I’ve cried so long the ache of sorrow wrings dry as bone. At a certain point, the desire to cry was lost, buried by the desire to feel nothing at all. To be nothing at all.
Meals have come, but I’ve refused them all. I won’t take anything else from her hands.
Anger simmers through me the more I stew, exhausting and consuming. Sleep is how I quiet it. But my mind is awake now in the dark with no respite in sight. I rise from the covers I’ve tossed and turned in and switch on a lamp. The room Grandmom locked me in used to be a bedroom of some sort. It’s sparse, with tiny indentations of furniture that used to live here imprinted on the carpet like ghost footprints. Why she has a bedroom off her bedroom, I don’t understand.
I run my fingers over the carved edges of a stately dresser, lamenting the choices she has set before me. I call to my toushana, just to feel something powerful. Jordan’s face flits through my memory and my toushana groans to be quenched. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to the forest. What I wouldn’t give to go there now, even if it wasn’t in secret.
I hate Grandmom for doing this to me. For personally knowing what it’s like and still forcing me into this. And Jordan. I see his face, and I ache deeper somehow. I don’t have words for what I feel for him. The wound is too raw. The hurt is too fresh.
I pull open one of the drawers on Grandmom’s fine furniture and slam it shut. The clatter of the wood against itself satisfies. My toushana nudges me, pleading to be free, and I let it. I trace my fingers along Grandmom’s antique cabinet, leaving a trail of blackened wood in their wake. Once the wood top is seared like it’s been caught in a swarm of flames, I let my toushana loose on its legs. It buckles under the weight of itself and crashes to the floor. I have no idea what this means to her. How long it’s been here. How special it is. But I savor the broken wood at my feet.
I look for something else. Locked behind these bars of rage, my toushana’s appetite grows. The mantel on the fireplace is ornately carved. I pull it down, decaying it until it’s mangled and unrecognizable. The chair and desk are short work. The carpet, a bookshelf, a rocking chair, a porcelain statue. I even try the walls. I would burn this whole place into a heap of ash in this moment if I was outside this room. A scream rips from my throat, and I claw at the wall that should be a door.
“Let me out!” I bang and bang, but there’s no use. My chest heaves. Ash from my destructive handiwork swarms in the air, and my heart delights in it like freshly fallen snow. My toushana flutters in me with satisfaction, and an odd sensation tugs at me as I realize something.
“You’ve never let me down,” I say to my toushana, and she answers in a wave of chill.
My first memory of meeting her is when I was eight. I was about to cross the street as a car was speeding past. My toushana unfurled in my bones so sharply I had to stop from the pain. The car rushed past, just missing me. I was in such a panic I hid behind another parked vehicle, trying to catch my breath. I was so wound up, just sitting there trying to calm down, I destroyed half of that sedan. Though we said goodbye to that city, that school, in that moment my toushana kept me safe.
She’s never lashed out at me. She was calm when I emerged. Helpful when I stole the bauble for Octos to make my diadem look acceptable. She was wary of my dagger as I worked toward honing because she could sense I was intending to use it destructively. But my toushana has never hurt or lied to me. She is the only thing that’s been true to me.
She is fury and determination, insatiable at times, and intensely powerful.
She is also destruction.
But some things deserve to be destroyed.
I hide her because I have to. But now that I understand her, she isn’t out of control. In some ways she’s the only thing I do have control of in my entire life. I flicker with her chill, and it’s endearing.
She burns colder and I give in to her call, and it fills me in a way only she can. I stare at my hands in delight that I feel something. Can do something. And it hits me. I think I know what I have to do.
I will not be relegated to the whims of my grandmother. I will not be chained to her—or anyone’s—version of my fate. Going through with Cotillion to bind with my proper magic would tether me to Grandmom, to this House in servitude forever, stepping from one cage into another. Destroying my toushana means destroying a part of myself. A part of myself that’s powerful. Perhaps I’ve been coming at it all wrong. Perhaps I should have been chasing courage instead.
Perhaps the only way to truly be free . . .
Is to stop fighting against who I really am.
The truth makes me steady myself on the wall. I brace myself against it and try to piece together what I think I’m saying. What I think I’ve decided. I knock on the wall.
“I’ve reached my decision, Grandmom, please.”
I will go through with Third Rite.
And play along with Grandmom’s wishes.
But on that stage, I will bind with my toushana.
With her, I am free.
