Wrong song, perhaps?
But what song should I sing?
So I tried singing the song I had grown to loathe, and as the first words fell from my lips,
“Fly with the arrow,” the flowers backed up, and by the second line they cleared a path for us. I was already walking by the third line as — to my shock — the flowers joined in. Tinkling, whistling, shivering, they sang with us in pristine voices as if glass itself had been given a voice. The singing flowers were joined by my followers, and by the fourth line, I heard the entire chorus joining in the song.
Grosbeak’s clearly reluctant baritone was quickly joined by Vireo’s unwilling tenor and Margaretta’s soprano and then we were singing in a powerful chorus and the flowers relented, allowing us through. I could tell by the expressions of those around me that the song was pulled unwillingly from them, as unwanted as the forced silence had been, but there was nothing I could do to ease their frustration. We had to walk this path. All of it.
It felt as though we traveled for hours. My legs grew so tired that I often tripped. My throat was dry and parched and my tongue stumbled over the repeated words, etched so deeply now into my brain that nothing would ever remove them.
And as we walked, the ground beneath us began to melt, to drip like wax from a spent candle, but our feet trod on air as the ground dripped away, leaving nothing but the black broken heavens above with their dissipated sun, and the black void of the missing ground below.
My stomach dropped with them and my hope melted. Surely, I had finally gone insane, lost to this world. Lost to all sanity. I tried to look over my shoulder at my beloved, tried to find solace in his presence but his head lolled lifelessly on my shoulder and his mouth had fallen open, his eyes no longer closed but open in a slit and what I saw of them was insensate. Within me, my heart sunk.
I’d taken too long. I had not made enough haste. My husband’s breath no longer shook the earth. He no longer breathed at all.
And then all light winked out and I was left in utter darkness.
CHAPTERSEVENTEEN
When I blinked again,there was Death. And there was light once more from a huge white moon.
We were no longer in the Wittenhame. Or at least, I did not think we were. The smells around me were faint and tepid, the wind did not bite as strongly nor the moon shine as brightly as it did in the Wittenhame, and when I shifted, a coney shot out from the underbrush, running in a wild back-and-forth pattern, and then disappearing into rustling bushes. Since none of them came alive and ate him, or turned to glass and sang, this could only be the mortal world.
I swallowed, nervous now because time passed differently here. That single rabbit escape might have used up the last of my time. And as if to agree with that, my body lurched, the numbness I’d felt in my fingers now running up my arms and legs so that using them felt strange and foreign, as if they were not my limbs at all. My mouth tasted of acid and my belly flared with pain.
I was — most certainly — dying.
It was hard not to panic at the thought. For some reason, memories of my mother and father swam to the surface of my mind as I fought down blind fear. My mother murmuring over me when I was ill as a child. My father’s strong hands steadying me on a horse. Had they been fearful when they had died? Had they wondered about me then? Their missing child, snatched away forever by a stranger from another world?
“I hate the stench of mortals,” Grosbeak said in a voice that seemed to creak from overuse. “Lead on, Master Death. I have no desire to linger here.”
But Death was in no hurry, his eyes flicked from face to face as if counting us, and then he raised a hand.
“Ask your friends to form a circle with us,” the head wearing the coronet said gruffly. Her voice also sounded worn and rough.
“Form a circle,” I said, and yes, my own voice cut out on some words and burred on others. How long had we sung, that we struggled now to speak?
My fellow brides stumbled into the circle, eyes dull, feet heavy, hands barely holding onto their burdens as they hung at their sides. We were a ghastly group worthy of nightmares. Likely, Death would reap a great harvest if we stumbled into a mortal community. Folk would die of shock and horror at the mere sight of my band of tattered brides and me— at their head — the worst horror of all.
I looked down at my living hand, only to see it was black from the poison and that blackness trailed right up my arm to my elbow. I sucked in a wavering breath and glanced backward at my husband. He hadn’t so much as flinched in hours. He was cold as night to the touch. Was I already too late?
“Thirty makes a quorum,” Vireo said sourly. “He planned this well. Are you calling on us for our vote, Death?”
At the nod of our spectral guide, Vireo laughed long and bitter.
“He pickedus?” the mermaid asked, her gaze flicking toward my dead husband.
His ruined hands were blackened, too, I realized. Again, I clung to thoughts of my parents to keep panic at bay. My mother sewing in her chair and laughing over a story she was telling my father as he ate his breakfast.
“What manner of madman picks his enemies to judge in the end?” Vireo asked acidly.
Grosbeak’s laugh was familiar. I knew this one. It was the one he used when someone was in deep trouble and he was entertained by their possible grim death.
It was the coronet head that spoke, her voice firm and even. “One who must have been very certain that he would win so thoroughly that even his enemies must judge it so.”
They were silent then for a long beat and I was so tired, so very tired. I wanted to sit down and sleep on the ground right here. I did not dare. I was running out of time.
