My clever, sweet love, my one true wife,he murmured in his mind as his free hand found my waist and clung to me.
I held him close, my mind racing, my heart all in tangles.
What will happen to us?I asked him plaintively.Are we to be sacrifices to the earth?
Never. It was always my plan that my fifteen wives be restored to their time and place.
Fifteen ribs from all different lands.I paused.The blood of nations, am I right? These wives of yours are the blood of nations.
I wanted to ask “but what about me?” But I was too afraid to think the words. Because what if I was to be the sacrifice? What if I were to somehow take the place of that final rib?
The poem had left a choice to the last wife. A choice of freedom or … something else. Maybe I was supposed to choose that something else.
Worse yet, what if he meant to dial back time and returnmeto my original time and place? Would I marry Lord Danske and care for horses? Would I be happy in that simpler, firmer, happier life? Or would part of me always remember this wild nightmare that had become a dream, that had become my home?
I was just like my father. I loved wild things. I loved them too much. I loved them so much I was spending my life away for glimmers of them.
“I choose you,” I whispered to Bluebeard. “If there’s a choice, then you are my choice.”
I was your stolen true bride,I whisper in his mind.But I mean all the vows. I find I cannot be Izolda without her Bluebeard. I cannot thrive while you languish. I cannot be hale while you are apart from me. Does it diminish me that I am only whole when you hold my heart? Then I will be diminished. Does it pauper me to give my whole heart to you, dead though you are? Then make me a pauper, spend every waver of my fool heart. For I am ever yours and I refuse any choice that does not have you at the end of it.
He shuddered, an intense, powerful shudder, and then with an act that seemed to take all his strength and will, with jaw clenched and teeth gritted, he pulled himself up onto his knees, and his wild cat’s eyes opened and his gaze met mine as he murmured in my mind.
Never have I loved until I loved you. I have sought you through lands and worlds, looked for you through the rush of time, bought you with my blood, delivered you with my pain, and I will put my mark on you, and claim you forever. There is no time to come where I am not Izolda’s, or where she is not mine, and I say it by the power of my true name.
And then he whispered his name in my mind and I gasped at the gift of such an intimacy. I would tell it to no other. I would keep it forever as my most precious secret held tight to my heart. And in the moment of my gasp, he leaned forward, and his soft lips fluttered against mine for just a moment.
Hold fast, my clever wife. This is your battle to be braved.
And then he slumped once more to my lap, falling like a tree cut by an axe, and left me sighing and hungry for more as I broke his fall.
Well then.
There was only one thing to do. I must bring all his wives out and together we must find the source of the rib, unlock the sixteen locks, and free my Bluebeard from death.
CHAPTERTWELVE
I urgedmy beloved back onto his feet before I could change my mind. His dark eyes shuttered closed, but his muscles flexed as I drew him up. I twined my bone hand through his hair, as I positioned him against my back again.
Stay strong, my husband,I whispered to him in my mind.I will not abandon you. Do not abandon me.
I opened the door to the Room of Wives before I could talk myself out of it — Coppertomb could not snatch this key. I felt certain that was true. Had he the ability to take it, he would have stripped me of it, too.
I stepped inside even as I heard Grosbeak calling out, “You’d better not be going where I think you are! You’d better not be leaving me here!”
With a sigh, I went back for him. “If you insist on coming along, you’d best be helpful.”
He sounded appalled. “Name for me, oh mortal soul, whence I have been anything but helpful.”
I marched into the Room of Wives and past the heads I left in a circle, ignoring them and their curses and snarls. Some of them had rolled over and I wondered if that was intentional or if I had somehow damaged them.
Grosbeak stuck out a tongue at one of them and I shook my head. I should have left him.
“Cursed mortal, return us to our last resting place!” the one with the silver coronet said. “You have no right to own us or make us your slaves.”
“I have the right of marriage,” I disagreed. I held my head high with determination. It would take more than the objections of a few corpses to stop me now.
“Do not think you can treat us thusly and yet still our council keep!” another cried.
