CHAPTERONE
The Lawof Greeting bound me to him. The Law of Unravelling stole me away. But it was the Law of my own heart that set me now on this careening course toward fate and death and the barest glimmer of hope.
When I was a little girl my mother would cuddle me and my two brothers on her lap before the fire and tell us Wittentales — tales too fantastic and grisly for the mortal world. Tales of creatures who chewed children’s bones to dust and belched out nightmares. Tales of oaths pledged that ruined lives and of bargains made which brought fortune beyond imagining and of lovers and fathers and kings who knew not which they were making before fate forced them to dance to the terms set until their feet were bloody. She told tales of trickery so twisty and horrible that it spun the threads of man and changed the entire tapestry, nation falling upon nation, whole kingdoms swallowed in madness or sickness or storm.
When I became a woman, I no longer needed such stories, for despite all my attempts at practicality, I myself, became ensnared within such a tale. And as the weaver of the warp and weft of history brought together the tangled threads of this saga, she wove it with me at the core. Try as I might to buck the pattern, she had only woven my thread back in, and back in, and back in again until there was no untangling it from the course of fate.
I fled through the Wittenhame with my husband clutched to my chest and my heart in my throat. He was no lighter in my arms than a feather, though he was a full-grown man. I held him clutched to my chest, for he made an awkward burden despite his light weight, and even with Wittentree’s magic binding us, I was terrified of losing my grip on him.
Ashes fell around us like rain.
At first, I thought they were my imagination, but soon they floated down as thick as leaves falling from the trees in autumn, great black, fluttery ashes with soft filmy edges. And they coated my hair and my tongue and filled the air with the scent of smoke.
“Cataclysm,” Grosbeak muttered from where his severed head was tied at my belt, and it sounded as if he were arguing with himself. “But no, it cannot be. T’was to be succession, not the end of all things.”
I paused in a sudden clearing on the edge of the tor, my breath sawing through my lungs, my legs trembling as I turned first one way and then another, my long hair whipping into my face and obscuring my vision as I searched for pursuit. They would be just behind me. They would be on my heels.
I was breathless, heart racing, mind hot with fear. If only I could have just one sip of water to cool me. But though I searched the shadows, there was none following. The clearing was empty.
Though I had run for only minutes — fleeing the celebration of Coppertomb’s coronation, the festivities and drinking, the dancing and merry-making — there was no sound behind me. The faint screams and distant laughter had melted away, leaving nothing but the chirping of insects, and the soft fall of ash, and a loud ringing in my ears that was, perhaps, my own fear echoing back to me. It blurred and blinded my senses to such a degree that a figure rode out almost upon me before I saw him there.
He was a pale, pale Wittenbrand in a flowing white robe that folded in a fan across his torso. His white hair reached his waist and then fell further still, dry and hoary as it fluttered in the wind. It blew in a different direction than the ash fell, as if he were not subject to the laws of moving air or gravity, though it was peppered in grey and black and melting white from the blowing ashes.
He rode upon a bone horse so pale that it occasionally disappeared altogether and his hands were skeletal bones just as one of mine was. As I watched he flicked his white sword and a pale flame white ran up and down the edge of the blade.
I swallowed, looking up to his face. His cheeks were sunken and his eyes ghastly white pearls. They rolled as he regarded me, his mouth falling open and his tongue quivering there like a living slug.
There was a long moment of silence as we looked at each other and then Grosbeak screamed, terrible and ear-piercing.
I watched myself freeze as if I were watching someone else, as the figure reached to point a single digit toward me, and just as I was about to scream, too, I remembered something — Bluebeard, whispering poetry to me as he faded, his heart snatched away, his words only for me. I clung tightly to the memory and to the cry that wanted to escape me. He would take neither from me.
I closed my eyes and held my husband’s corpse tightly to my chest and thought about that moment and my roaring love for him.
I took a shuddering breath and then opened my eyes.
The white Wittenbrand was gone, and we had been transported to the doorstep of Bluebeard’s home. It stood there, bent and odd, squatting on grouse feet in amongst a group of other Wittenhame homes. Here, too, everything was abandoned, ashes falling so fast and silent that they created a blanket of white and grey and black.
Grosbeak’s scream cut off and I heard him gasp, panting with exertion.
“Death. Death has come for us. But how did we escape? What manner of monstrosity are you, Izolda, that you can turn back the avatar of death?”
“That couldn’t have been death,” I said, swallowing down the emotions churning within me. I felt oddly disturbed by the sight of that terrible Wittenbrand. I could not quite name the emotion seizing me and making my hands shake like leaves in the high wind. It was something that combined fear and horror, something that rolled despair and dread all into the mix leaving me sizzling and snapping like fat thrown into the fire. “Were it he, we would not still be here.”
In the distance, a horn sounded, biting into my ears and mind. I jumped. The sound seemed to come from every direction at once. It was long and soulful, eerie and spine-tingling, like the cry of an elk in the forest. It made my mouth dry with renewed fear, as if the sound alone had found and tapped a spring within me. My heart sped, blood pulsing in my ears.
Grosbeak responded with a moan of despair as I reached for Bluebeard’s door.
“The Wild Hunt, the Wild Hunt! Our doom falls upon us!”
“That’s very dramatic of you,” I said grimly as I tried to shuffle Bluebeard in my arms so I could open the door of his home. I’d forgotten about the magic that took you to the door of someone in the Wittenhame if you thought hard about what you loved about them. It had certainly been a boon to us. Bluebeard’s head lolled on my shoulder, both precious and terribly tragic. I pillowed it with one hand as one does with a newborn infant.
A good widow would bury her dead husband. I was not good, for I planned to carry him with me.
“Dramatic? I state only the truth, fool mortal girl, so plain as to be nearly gauche. The end has come. Our doom has come upon us. Saw you not the ashes of the sky burning up? Heard you not the horns of heaven?”
“I doubt that was the sky. There’s likely a forest fire nearby,” I said calmly. “And by the time it reaches us, we’ll be elsewhere.”
“Indeed,” he said with a bite, “For if you have any sense you’ll run. We’re about to be hunted by the Hounds of Heaven.”
