We would spend the last of my days together, shared. Halved. And yet somehow multiplied.
My body I dedicate to none other. The bounty of my wealth is yours. If ever it be otherwise, may I waste away with sickness and may famine eat my strength, and may my enemies overtake me, and siphon from me the blood of my life.
Well. They could get in line.
We were riding up a hill — an actual hill still strewn with the dead in their age-long sleep, not a heap of the dead.
“You will owe me a thousand thanks, Izolda Savataz,” Grosbeak said happily. “For look what I have found? Is that not your husband, the Bramble King, seated on his broken throne and dead as dead can be?”
I leaned forward, twisting to see around his clay torso, and gasped for he was right.
At the top of the great tor — so massive in size that it dwarfed all else — was a throne made of a Wittenbrand rib cage half submerged in the earth. The broken-ended ribs grasped upward toward the sky —fifteen of them and one broken off to a bare stump. Fat chains wrapped in brambles ran from each rib to snake around a pale throne and trussed there on the throne — bound so thoroughly that limbs and torso were lost in the jumble of chain on chain — was the form of my husband, his dead eyes open but unseeing, one dead hand reaching out, grasping, the broken rib crown displayed on his head.
I looked back and forth for a moment from the dead man on the throne to the dead man in my arms and back. Two halves of a whole? Two representations of the same man? Or something more? I did not know. This land of Death bent the mind to uncertainty.
I was leaping from Grosbeak’s back before he’d stopped moving.
“Sixrteen locks with sixteen keys,” I murmured, following each chain back to the rib and seeing on each rib a complicated lock-like shape where a depression had been carved into the ivory rib — a depression just like a seat. “I wonder if it matters how they are arranged.”
“I rather think so,” Grosbeak said, seeming as absorbed in the puzzle as I was. “He always did seem very precise in how he placed them on those pedestals.”
At the base of each rib were two impressions like shelves. For the heads, I realized.
But who could be such a seer as to have seen this coming in every detail? Who could have planned it all and yet trusted that one mortal woman would have gathered up these all …
“The blood of nations,” I murmured. “All the prophecies come true here.”
“All what prophecies come true?” Tigraine asked from just behind my shoulder. “Margaretta would you stop petting him? He was a bodiless head just a moment ago!”
“I bid you pay mind to your own business,” Grosbeak snarled.
I did not turn. Whatever nonsense he was getting up to was no longer of concern to me. Before me, lay the last puzzle.
Here lay Wittentree’s riddle and I said it aloud as my eyes ran over the ribs. They couldn’t betheribs, and yet here they were. Perhaps they were a representation of them, just as I carried one husband while watching the other chained there, just as the world could not fit entirely in the chest of my dead husband, Bramble King though he may be.
“What once stood in a line, now missing a brother. What was taken for wealth and refined by another. What holds life or death in the gap left behind. What holds endless damnation in similar kind.”
There was still something missing. I chewed my lip for I could not tell what it was.
“I suppose we find our places in the seats?” Tigraine asked, looking at me.
“Wait.” The word ripped from my tense lips. “Wait only a moment.”
“Ah, she’s remembered then,” Grosbeak said, amused. “It won’t be endless damnation, then?”
The blood. The blood of nations.
“Each of you come to me here,” I said, a little breathlessly. And with a kiss of apology, I slid my husband’s dagger from his belt and as each stepped forward I made his mark down her cheek. Bold Tigraine — first of course, right through to trembling Corinnian and Margaretta who was stealing little flirtatious glances at centaur Grosbeak — I wanted to roll my eyes at that, but this was no time for distractions. Last of all, Ki’e’iren received her mark.
“I hope you do not damn us still, last bride,” she breathed. “You have little time to get this right.”
“Thanks to you,” I returned coldly.
“Give me neither your disdain nor your condemnation. They are not my just dessert. Suffering belongs to us in a way that it belongs to none other, for it was given to us as a gift from our husband. I merely deepened yours.”
“I do not think he will see it that way.”
“Will he see anything again? That, last wife, is the question.”
