“Indeed, it is, for I have none to spare, nor would I be of a mind to offer it to you. You bargained very badly just now and you are without beauty or living hand,” he said nastily as I gripped the needle between my thin skeletal fingers and carefully set it through my husband’s cooling flesh.
I watched his slitted eyes as I stitched, pulling flesh to flesh with each draw of my needle, bringing back together what was torn apart just as he had done for my back so long ago. I felt those scars from time to time when I bent or stretched. Bluebeard’s face, ever lovely, had taken on a bluish cast, the sacred color of the Wittenbrand, and I felt my chest seize as I watched him, the breath freezing within and becoming awkward and tight.
“I fear you fail to realize your predicament,” Grosbeak said and I could tell he was loving this, even with his face pressed into the hem of my skirt. “Let me reveal it to you. You are cast from the Court of the Wittenhame and into this dying house with your almost-corpse husband. He is spending your remaining days on this half-life of his with reckless abandon. The result of which will cost you dear and deny benefit to him. Unless you abandon him, you must drag him with you wherever you go for no gain but the possibility that he may someday serve a purpose once more.”
“I find I am very skilled in carrying about dead weight,” I murmured as I set the last stitch and tied a careful knot. The wound was bleeding still around the edges. That was not something that the truly dead did. “I have been practicing and practicing with you.”
I cut the thread with deft hands — even if one was entirely skeletal — and then lifted my husband up and into my arms again, gathering up the candle, and marching to the nightingale stairs. They did not sing as I ascended. The house was truly dying with its lord.
If only that were enough to fulfill prophecy and snatch victory from Coppertomb’s hand. I huffed an ironic laugh but it was hollow and grim.
I was numb, I thought, above that mystery swell within. Numb to pain, numb to feeling, numb to thought. I stumbled along as if in a dream, hardly caring that I had seen Death face to face, or that some terrible horn had been sounded, or that the sky might be falling, or burning, or something about a cataclysm. I had set my feet and hands to a task and they carried me capably even as my heart and mind were locked to greater thought or feeling. They felt as inaccessible as my husband and just as lost to me as he was.
I had a list. I would follow it. That would have to be enough.
First, see to my husband’s care.
Second, gather help.
Third, form a plan to bring him back. I had all of him except his heart. In the Wittenbrand, in this wide land of magic and mystery where bodiless heads prattled on and on, and specters sat for years on your shoulder, neither eating nor drinking, couldn’t I find some way to restore my beloved missing only a single heart?
When I reached our bedroom at the top of the stairs, the bed had crumbled to dust, and the flowering vines desiccated. The window to another world was simply gone. In its place was nothing but tumbled stone in a heap. The spring and the warm bath were dry and cracked, the books on the shelves nothing but dust.
This time, I couldn’t escape the gasp that dashed from my lips.
“You’ll find no succor here!” Grosbeak said, delighted by my misery.
I swallowed, trying to work moisture back into my dry lips. Where could I go now? Even the few resources left to me were crumbling. How could I fight against Death himself and the new king of the the Wittenhame when I had not even that?
I set my jaw firmly. I was being impractical. I still had my husband — as much of him as there was. I still had my health and my mind. I could figure this out.
“Is this destruction only happening to us or to all the Wittenhame?” I asked my Wittenhame guide.
“That, my darling keeper, is the million crown question,” Grosbeak said gleefully. “For if it is only you, then you are on a clock, are you not? Mere hours perhaps before you lose any chance of defeating Death and somehow wresting your beloved prince from the grasp of hell. Already his magic crumbles around you, his personality — upon which both house and fire were built — fades and molders in a way that even the sea could not achieve when he languished in her embrace. But if … and wouldn’t this be golden? Or perhaps diamond? What is more valuable in this age?”
“Get to the point,” I hissed.
“If all of the Wittenhame is falling, then Coppertomb has lost with his win, and you have won with his loss, tearing down the roof of heaven with your ruination, and collapsing this world and everything in it with your downfall. It is a sleek blow to take your enemy down with you. I did not take you for the type to charge honorably to your own death, but I find it favors you. Perhaps, we can line you and Coppertomb up and let the masses cheer for which of you wears it better.”
“It was not I who wrought this, but my husband,” I said and my voice was strained with emotion, which was strange since I felt nothing but emptiness.
“Even so, to drag your enemies with you into death is a masterful move. Worthy of the greatest of princes.”
“Do you call him such when your camaraderie has faded into animosity?” I asked
“Burdened though I am with a bitterness heaped on me by the likes of your prince, still I am servant of the truth and bearer of the obvious,” he said sorrowfully.
“As am I,” a thready voice agreed, and I gasped in relief as the gargoyle on top of the mirror stirred himself.
“Can you help me, mirror?” I begged as it pulled a horrific face at me. “I need fresh clothing for both myself and the Arrow —useful, hard-wearing clothing for our journey — and a sling with which I might carry him skin to skin against me.”
The mirror coughed. “Skin to skin is it? How scandalous! I love it!”
“Please,” I begged, worried he’d give me nothing useful now. “We must chase after death and go down into the grave.”
The mirror laughed. “Usually, I would spit your wardrobe at you, but my power is weakening. Step through me and I will dress you, but come to me naked, for I have only one last gasp of magic within.”
Grosbeak laughed, a horrible, cackling laugh. “Yes, put on a show for the gargoyle, Izolda. It’s not like you have anything better to do.”
