From grip of death, vict’ry seize,
Silent brides of silent lord,
Unravel back Time’s cord,
Bought by blood and claimed by oath,
Only one holds bitter troth,
One hand living, one hand dead,
She finds the place where hope has fled
Now let her choose what comes last,
Freedom now or holding fast.”
And as the last words escaped his mouth something in his eyes turned back on. Released from the geas, he charged at me, his bright, feral gaze locked on mine, teeth in a harsh rictus.
I stumbled backward as his snarl echoed through his body as if this one theft of his will for a few seconds offended him to the very bones, never mind the years and lives and hearts he’d stolen from mortal girls along the way.
The book fell from my hands, tumbling into the glass dome that had guarded both it and rose before I removed them from the pedestal. Dome and book crashed to the ground with a loud crunch as Antlerdale’s foot came down on the glass.
“Your mortal life is mine now, child of dust,” he said, mouth twisting. “But since you’re in my home, let’s have a little fun first. I’ve done some truly villainous deeds within the walls of this castle. I wager a pretty little thing like you comes with an imagination.” His smile was terrifyingly lascivious. “Let’s play a game. I call it ‘Guess the Villainy.’ We go to each room of the castle. If you can accurately pinpoint the cruelty I inflicted there, you will be spared experiencing the same, but miss your guess and I’ll enact that memory upon your flesh, and drag you by the ear to the next room and the next until you’re nothing but a tattered rag that my invisible servants must dispose of in the waste pile. Deal?”
“Grosbeak,” my husband’s whisper in my ear barely registered and I did not know if it were a plea to my bodiless friend or a command to me.
I cowered back from Antlerdale, a step, two steps, fumbling for my belt knife while I held the two heads angled away from me as if they could save me from his plans to torture me to death. They hovered over the broken glass as I slid back a third step, hands trembling, heart in my throat.
I couldn’t outrun the Wittenbrand. I was not fool enough to think I could. And I couldn’t outfight him. But I hadn’t forgotten the key. Maybe a leap between worlds would be fast enough. I fumbled for it in my neckline.
“Just a little to the right, Izolda,” Grosbeak hissed, and he did not sound afraid, not even as Antlerdale backhanded Sparrow, sending her crashing into Grosbeak with a cry, which in turn tumbled him to the right just as he’d asked me to place him.
Elegantly, as if he’d practiced the move a dozen times, he dove with the momentum, and caught the empty rose stem — still hovering there over the pedestal — in his mouth, chomped down hard on it, and sucked it into his mouth with a thick, black tongue.
“No!” Antlerdale shouted, swiveling from me to Grosbeak, hand outstretched, mouth twisting in agony. He froze in midair.
I leapt backward just in time to pull my two advisors out of harm’s way as the great Wittenbrand crashed, his heavy shoulders and chest toppling the pillar. He curled in on himself, twitching and shuddering as Grosbeak chewed noisily. And I watched in horror as his ageless face and immaculate body suddenly aged, passing through middle age, and then old age, and then into something ancient and shriveled and not at all human. With a last scream of anguish, he exploded into a burst of ashes.
I gasped.
“I think I could do with fewer people dissolving into the air,” I said firmly, trying to get a grip on my sawing breath and jellified knees.
Grosbeak belched loudly and then made a considering face. “Tastes like … misery.”
“I would have thought he’d taste like roses,” Sparrow commented, unruffled by the violence and magic swirling all around her.
“No, it’s definitely misery. I’ve tasted it before.”
“What does misery taste like?” I asked, but I didn’t get a response. A loud howling filled the air, reverberating the library with such force that books fell from the shelves in a rain of pages and then a great head stuck its nose through the door, snuffling.
CHAPTERSIX
“Shhhh,”Grosbeak murmured. “Shhhh.”
I slid slowly backward through the other door, hoping the Hound did not enter the library before I had disappeared out the other side. I misliked being hunted like prey. Terror aside, it was slowing me, keeping me from running directly toward my goals. With trembling hands, I fumbled for the key around my neck, ready to flee into the half-world between the Wittenhame and the mortal world.
“I wouldn’t,” Sparrow whispered. “You don’t have finesse with that. You might miss the inbetween and land us in the mortal world and who knows what might happen then. The Arrow might not have enough magic left to carry you out. Hide, instead.”
