I had not wagered that I would love.He sounded like he was drifting again. I sought a true bride and married her in our way and I knew this would be best, but I did not wager for these tangles around my heart. I can explain them if I must by speaking of your love of your people and your monstrous way of looking at all things in light of their utility, but I fear my precious bride that words cannot contain the whole of it for I love you in a way that mocks the love of all others, dwarfs their empty promises of commitment and hollows the storehouses of affection they claim to possess, for I love you with a fullness, a depth, a circumference that is too great for mortal mind to comprehend.
I wasn’t going to get a clear answer. He’d fallen off into dreams and rambling.
Then I won’t try to comprehend it,I returned dryly.I’ll simply get to work.
One last boon.
I felt my heart melt at his plea.Whatever you wish, my Lord of the Wittenhame.
A single kiss.
I leaned forward so that now my body was flush with his, my heart beating where his ruined chest held no match, and I pressed my lips to his and then parted them, deepening our kiss, and he hummed with pleasure in my mouth and roared with it in my mind. My husband. My precious, dying husband. I did not dare rest much longer. I had to get up and find what he needed so we could bring him back to fullness.
Our kiss took the last of his strength and his eyes fluttered shut, and his breathing grew long and even.
Well, then. I supposed I had a task to perform immediately.
I helped him stumble to his feet and lean on me before binding both of our left wrists together. That way I could still hold the lantern pole in one hand while the other arm supported him. He swayed in my support, but he did not fall, and he did not speak again or open his eyes.
I missed my Bluebeard’s wild competence. His flashes of genius and surprise. I swallowed down a wave of hopelessness. I did not dare give in to that. I’d read many Whittentales in my day and how many times had I marveled, awestruck by the bravery of the mortals in the tales who were doomed to perform great tasks for love and home? And we’d all claimed that we, too, would act with such courage if our time came. So why did I now, when I found myself in one, seem so reluctant to rise to the challenge?
Stories are different when they are your life. They sting and press and the discomforts that seem small in a story loom great in life. It took all my courage to stride across the room and approach my bodiless advisors.
“If you were looking for the blood of nations, where would you go,” I asked.
“If we’re going to leave here, then you’d better disguise the Arrow,” Sparrow warned me. “No one likes to see a defeated enemy still walking around.”
“Enemy?” I asked aghast.
“He was Coppertomb’s enemy,” she said and if she still had shoulders I would have guessed that she would shrug. “And now Coppertombisthe Wittenhame because he is its king. So yes, the Arrow is their enemy.”
I guided my shuffling husband to one of his wives who wore a thick scarlet cloak, loosened the tie around her shoulders, and brought it down one-handed to drape over his shoulders and head. I tied it in place, though the cloak only went to his knees.
“Happy?” I huffed.
“You will be,” Sparrow said with a side-long glance.
“And can someone tell me where to find the blood of nations now?”
“Do not taunt us with such simple queries, Izolda,” Grosbeak drawled. “Where else but the place you left your mortal nephew? The field of the last battle? For if there the nations battle, then there their blood will be spilled.”
And it seemed so obvious when he said it that I gathered up his pole and pulled out the key and before he or Sparrow could even protest, I was opening the door back out into the Wittenhame.
CHAPTERSEVEN
The Wittenhame hada way of making the everyday seem impossible and the impossible seem everyday. Just when you believed you understood the rules by which it operated it swiveled and spun out new rules and laws. Perhaps there had been no Law of Greeting before Bluebeard needed to acquire sixteen wives in a hurry — well, a Wittenbrand hurry which can be five years or five hundred.
For the first time, a hand reached through the still-widening door, fisted into my hair, and ripped me through the door.
I gasped. I had thought that impossible, but the hand had me now and it drew me inexorably out through the door and into the open.
I was yanked, not into Antlerdale’s library, but — to my utter surprise — into the heart of the Wittenhame where the ice and mushroom palace had stood.
I gazed in horror at the dripping icon. It had been reduced already by at least half, water pouring down the sides and flooding out from it to saturate the ground and create standing pools. And where there had once been creatures — human, Wittenbrand, and otherwise, frozen into the glass-like surface, there was now a stinking heap of corpses jutting out from the ice.
Before I could even grasp what I was seeing, an iron fist forced me to my knees, and I lost my grip on the lantern pole as it pressed me downward into a bow. I didnotlose my grip on Bluebeard’s hand, though he fell heavily to his knees beside me into the tainted water at our feet that now soaked through our clothing. His cloaked head leaned heavily against me and I was glad he had not fallen face-first.
I looked up to the hand holding my hair, stomach lurching in horror as around me little scraps of midnight floated down, speckled with bright white lights the size of berries.
