The Hound snuffled again and snorted. My heart skipped a beat, freezing within my chest. Don’t lose your head, Izolda. Don’t.
Sparrow made a good point. Whatever was going to save my Bluebeard wouldn’t be found in the lands of my people — or at least I didn’t think so.
“Wives,” Bluebeard murmured in my ear, following the same train of thought I was, or at least, I thought he was. “Wives, my mad folly.”
I fumbled in my dress for the other key — the little golden one Bluebeard had given me as wedding present. I turned it in the air just as the dog leapt into the room, landing on Antlerdale’s ashes, barking madly with two heads while the third sniffed the air.
I leapt, too, straight into the open door of the Room of Wives, turning the key desperately in the lock behind me. The rip in the air began to close, but the Hound was fast, leaping for the gap, mouths open and slathering. One jaw managed a bite inside the door, snapping shut inches from Grosbeak’s face.
Grosbeak screamed and Sparrow cursed as I stumbled backward and the door shut on the Hound, closing him off from us, and leaving us alone with a pile of cackling dead advisors and a ring of sleeping wives looking on.
“Well,” I said. “That could have gone better.”
“Could it, though?” Sparrow asked. “From where I’m sitting, it went the very best way it possibly could. Grosbeak rather valiantly saved your life and you left with the poem. She repeated it as if to help me remember. And as she spoke the words, I looked around the room at the occupants waiting for us.
“Sixteen locks with sixteen keys.”
There they were, fifteen dead wives … and me. Sixteen keys. But where were the locks they fit into? Hadn’t Vireo called me a key once? And hadn’t Bluebeard called me his last wife long before he ever fell in love with me? Did he know about this poem? This prophecy or riddle or whatever it was? Had he known it before the Bramble King locked it inside Antlerdale’s head to be revealed when the right phrase was read to him?
“From grip of death, vict’ry seize.”
I felt cold at that line and I licked my lips because it was exactly, precisely what I wanted.
I have not yet lost,Bluebeard whispered in my mind, suddenly. Surprised, I turned to him but his eyes were closed, his lips forming little almost-kisses when they touched my shoulder like a newborn baby dreaming.I have won but not won. Victorious but still fighting.
“What could he mean,” I ask, “If he says he’s won but not won?”
“Don’t ask me,” Grosbeak sniffed. “I only live in this world.”
“Silent brides of silent lord,”Sparrow went on.
And that had been his one demand of me — that we remain in silence, him in the day and me in the night. So small a thing. And yet, if it were part of the key to return him to me, if he had known all along … I shivered.
“Unravel back Time’s cord,”Sparrow whispered. She was really getting into this now.
I had no idea what that line meant.
“Bought by blood and claimed by oath,
Only one holds bitter troth,
One hand living, one hand dead,”
Clearly, this was me. Unless there was someone else wandering around with a dead hand.
She finds the place where hope has fled
Now let her choose what comes last,
Freedom now or holding fast.”
Well, that seemed simple enough. There would be a choice eventually and anyone with sense would choose freedom. No one wanted to be locked up, enslaved, or tied to a failing cause.
But these things were never so simple.
“I need a moment,” I said a little breathlessly. “A chance to catch up to all my thoughts.”
“And to solve this riddle,” Sparrow said dryly. “In case you’ve forgotten that the world is ending.”
