The ground, in every direction, was littered with the dead, displayed as though they had been brought directly here from their resting place. They were not laid out respectfully, but rather one still figure was curled over herself as if she had retched to death, and another, half tangled over her, had been disemboweled. His foot was thrown haphazardly over a man missing a head and a hand, and he, in turn, was draped over a woman still clutching the snake wrapped ‘round her bulging throat.
They were all white as Death as if their passing had leeched all color from them. White and cold and frozen in agony.
I retched, gagged, and retched again, trying with great difficulty to follow the path without stepping on limbs or hands or — sweet mother of mine — someone’s eye.
“No one said the path into the barrow would be an easy one,” Grosbeak growled.
My lips were numb — whether from horror or the poison killing me — and my voice came out high-pitched with despair, “But how will I find him here?”
Jumbled as the dead were, their state was made worse by infestation. Colorless beetles scuttled between them, cobwebs draped wildly from one to another, as if some mad spider were intent on working a last masterpiece. Pale squirrels chittered and scrambled round and round one leg, and then a face, and then darted into a nest somewhere below. I did not wish to notice the flies, but it could not be helped for the milky infestation of them crawled on everything as if an army seeking to devour the world.
“Death set us on this path,” I said and my words were clouded by the thickness of my numb lips. “It must take us there.”
Behind me, the other brides murmured or sobbed or hiccuped their distress and in their hands, their heads advised them likewise.
“Stay on the path.”
“Do not tarry.”
I swallowed and forced myself onward through the hills, which I now realized were uneven heaps of the dead.
“No wonder you prefer an afterlife with me, Grosbeak.” My voice was faint even to my own ears. “I half wonder that all of the Wittenbrand do not beg for such a half-life if it would avoid this place.”
Grosbeak laughed boorishly. “This is not the afterlife, Izolda. This is merely a waiting place. When the age turns, all these will pass on to what is to come.”
“I thought the age turned with the change of the Bramble King and the end of the Game,” I said and it was getting hard to speak. My lips and tongue were too numb. I stumbled, not even feeling when my ankle rolled under me until I looked down and saw myself standing on ankle rather than foot.
“It lends credence to your blind hope that you carry the Bramble King with you even now, does it not?” Grosbeak said lightly. “But I fear you will never make it. Already you stumble and trip. And you have all this vast land to search.” He made a happy sound in the back of his throat. “Ahh, but I love a fated hero. Doomed to die. Destined to perish. Yet forging forward, writing her own damnation with every decision she makes.”
His eyelids fluttered with pleasure.
“Curse you, Grosbeak,” I murmured. “Curse you for not helping. Were you not son and husband once to those who will be found somewhere in these heaps?”
He spat, and think if there were colors remaining, he might have been flushed. “How do you know about my wife?”
“It was spoken at your funeral.”
“What else was said at that funeral?”
“It was mentioned that you were tall.”
“Ha!”
“And that you had a herd of Clay Horses.”
He grew silent at that, and we were nearly to the next hill when he finally said, “I had forgotten that. Lend me your fingers, Izolda.”
“I do not care what you’re planning,” I said coldly. “I absolutely won’t agree tothat.Is it not enough that I have bargained away my hand again and again?”
He scoffed. “No, it’s not. Here at the very end, the least you can do is lend me what I ask for. I saidlendnotgive.”
“In exchange for what?”
“You’re too Wittenbrand for your own good, fool of an Arrow’s wife! In exchange for my help, is that not good enough? Lend me your fingers and I will lend you my help.”
Behind me, I heard murmurs of interest from the heads. But I cared not. I had but hours left, if that. Why not take any gift offered me?
“Fine. What do I do with my fingers?”
