Paper Confines

xi. The Snake and the Eagle

PAPER CONFINES.
11. / The Snake and the Eagle

✶

In her seventeen years, there were two things Amoret didn't understand: her mother's impending death, and the power that had surged between her and Tom Riddle on a dull night in mid-October. The world that had opened up in a beam of white light. Air that was neither hot nor cold, but instead felt... grey, like it might steal her colours if she stayed too long. Lightning striking like redcap claws, sporadic and spindly in the black velvet sky. A universe within the universe.

Amoret ran.

She hit Tom with a Confundus charm and sprinted for the trees, but they formed branches around her torso and stole her back. Twig limbs gnawed and fettered, prickling the goosebumps on her skin. Amoret thrashed, clawing through the branches, ripping splinters from the wood with her torn fingernails. It was some survival instinct she hadn't ever needed to use, but the desperation was familiar, the same as leaning over River Eye and waiting to be pulled under.

She could almost hear Reid calling out to her from Koldovstoretz; I'll come for you, Bitsy, two loops and you'll hear my boots in the leaves. It was the sort of promise only a sister could keep. But Amoret's chest heaved under the confines because Reid couldn't save her anymore. In whatever dark bramble of Tom Riddle's psyche she was trapped in, the only footsteps approaching were his, carried by the swish of virgin serge: a slow, sure pace, a power thrumming with it. If this was Tom's soul, Amoret didn't want to begin to wonder what he might do with it. She wasn't sure what her magic was worth against his.

Run, her sister said, run like we did when we were children on Becky Hill. Far and fast, until the monsters get stuck in the tilth.

Tom came nearer.

Amoret forced her frantic eyes shut and stared into the empty depths. There was the smell of blackcurrant plucked from summer-dry shrubs, the wine-dark stain on her fingers and berries smudged on her sister's laughing mouth. Wicker baskets and Bibi stood over the cooktop boiling jam while Dad whistled softly and passed her a spoon. They don't know the land like us, Bitsy. They don't know the weeds from the flowers or the church bells from the choir. Amoret wrenched herself free from the bramble, and didn't have time to pluck the thorns in her side, the lashes of trees peeling big wounds out of small ones. She just ran.

The forest chased. It whipped blades of wind branches at her. It cried and pulled her back, and fought to keep her.

Amoret could fight harder.

"Do you think you can run from me here?" Tom asked, and he was everywhere and everything. His voice was in the clouds, in the dewdrop grass, in her head and the soles of her feet. Amoret wanted to scream to get rid of the sound.

The woodland was a black fog encircling her. It had gone darker, constricting like a tapered corridor at her sides. Amoret hissed. Thorns punctured already wounded skin from every direction, and Amoret shuffled sideways, the space so tight she had to hold her breath. She couldn't even lift her wand. All she could manage were short, stuttered breaths, and even those hurt.

Tom's footsteps were still behind her, and the storm raged on. He was controlling it, she remembered, the epiphany of such magic almost impossible to conceive. There was no urgency or anger in his approach; he followed her trail like a huntsman with a hundred pelts on his back, and Amoret was only another body of skin to be strewn across the rest.

So, the storm wasn't an emotional response then. He was showing off. Tom Riddle might have been a liar and a murderer, but he was every bit an egotist as she'd always expected him to be.