“Then to whom else would you pour all your acid words?” I shot back. I was used to talking heads spouting lies. I carried one around with me daily.
I thought I might need them, and despite their barbed words, I thought that they might need me, too. Bluebeard kept them for a reason. If the wives were the blood of mortal nations, could these advisors be the blood of the Wittenbrand, too? I did not know, but even if I hadn’t yet worked out the reason for keeping them, that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.
There were exactly thirty heads there by my count. That was two for every wife but me. I had two, but only one of mine yet survived.
With my jaw gritted determinedly, I made my way to the hourglass at the end of the room and reached inside for a fist of garnets. It was hard to take them with my bone hand, though, and in the end, I was forced to pluck them one by one, and hold them in my jacket pocket. Thirty. Two for each wife. If we didn’t succeed in two days, we wouldn’t succeed at all. Strange to think that I held a month of my life in my pocket.
Strange, but not worth wasting time to consider. I marched to the first of Bluebeard’s wives. Margaretta.
Because we had worked as partners before, I chose her first. I wanted someone who wasn’t crazy and who probably wouldn’t try to kill me. I needed her to be on my side before the others awoke.
“Oh! Oh, dear! It’s you!” she squeaked when the two garnets were in her mouth. “So. you survived!”
“I’m good at that. To date, it’s my only specialty,” I replied. “I need your help.”
“We’re not opening another door, are we?” she asked me primly. “Oh dear!” She suddenly seemed to notice our mutual husband draped across my back. His scarlet hood was down and his beautiful face easy to see, though his eyes were closed in restless sleep. “That’s not … ? Oh dear. It’s the very Lord of the Wittenhame who stole me away as his bride!”
“Yes, thank you for recounting that,” I said dryly.
“Well, what is he doing here?”
“He needs our help,” I said simply and I let her look for a long moment into my eyes before she grudgingly screwed up her face into a determined scrunch.
“I don’t think the others will like it much. Their journals were not happy ones. You’re waking them, right? I see you have more garnets between your fingers.”
“I was hoping you could help me explain this to them,” I told her, licking my lips nervously. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’m not really a people person. Most of the people I knew in life are dead now. And my only remaining friend is hideous.”
I shook Grosbeak’s pole.
“Excuse me? Hideous? That is not how you speak to one you call friend.”
“See?” I said.
“All of my friends are dead now, too,” Margaretta said sadly.
“And yet you remain enormously likable,” I said dryly. “Come, let’s wake this next bride.”
“I don’t know about likable,” Grosbeak groused. “Edible, perhaps. She’s very edible looking.”
The next bride was Tigraine. I stood well back. If she was going to slap someone in the face I wanted it to be Margaretta and not me. I’d already received my slap last time I woke a bride. But to my surprise, when Tigraine woke, her eyes snapped open but then quickly narrowed and she looked carefully around the room without so much as moving.
“Now that is the face of a mortal queen,” Grosbeak said delightedly.
“Princess Tigraine,” Margaretta began, a little breathless but Tigraine held up a single finger, still assessing until her eyes met mine and she nodded in understanding.
She pointed at me.
“You’re the current bride.”
“I prefer true bride,” I said calmly.
“Apt.” She tilted her head to one side. “I always wondered what manner of woman he might choose were he choosing simply for himself. I did not anticipate you.”
I clenched my jaw. No one did. They saw only what they wanted to see. The exterior.
“Nor did I,” Grosbeak confided. “I would have expected someone more likeyou.”
“That’s why you’re dead,” Tigraine said scathingly. “Clearly, you were not one of nature’s thinkers.”
