I cleared my throat. I was having trouble bringing breath into my lungs, my eyes watering constantly now that blinking was an effort.
“Find your places, but do not yet sit,” I said thickly and my sister brides arranged themselves as they had been in the Room of Wives, setting the heads they carried in the nooks made for them.
I carried my dead husband across the last steps, heart in my throat, as I brought body to spirit and I had not the time to so much as kiss him goodbye because the moment my fumbling foot connected with the pale frozen man on the throne, the one in my arms vanished and the one wrapped in deep chains flushed with color — color, in this world of white on white on white.
With a dry throat and a thick tongue I spoke the last riddle.
“Sixteen locks with sixteen keys. From grip of death, the vict’ry seize, Silent brides for silent lord, unravel back time’s cord. Bought by blood and claimed in oath, only one holds bitter troth. One hand living, one hand dead, she finds the place where hope has fled. Now let her choose what comes last. Freedom now or holding fast.”
I swallowed and spoke again.
“I think you sit. And when you do, I think it is goodbye.” I looked up and met their eyes one by one. “Either we have succeeded or we are doomed.”
“You most certainly are. Your lips are black,” Ki'e'iren pointed out.”
“Yes, thank you,” I said repressively, but then my expression softened as I looked around at them. “Thank you all for achieving this with me.”
My throat was thick. I didn’t know what else to say. But it did not matter. Ki'e'iren sat before anyone could say anything and the moment her seat touched the carved slot in the rib, she vanished in a flash along with the heads at her feet, and the chain that led from her to Bluebeard’s throne uncurled from around him, and snaked back into the rib on which she had sat.
“I was glad to fight with you,” Tigraine said boldly.
And then, as if by mutual accord, the others sat, almost as one, and they vanished in sudden flashes of light and gasps of surprise and little scream from Margaretta and as they sat all the chains retracted with them leaving me alone holding the hand of a dead man — unchained now, but still lifeless.
“Oh,” I said aloud. “I thought that would work.”
“I think it did work,” Grosbeak said, stomping a horsey foot. His tone was hushed. “It’s just not complete.”
All the chains were gone. My beautiful Arrow lay there still, motionless, color in a world of monochrome, but he spoke neither in my mind nor with his newly freed lips, merely lay there, still sleeping in the barrow, still waiting to be brought back somehow.
I looked to the last rib where it was broken and cracked. And when I looked back at my Bluebeard, Death was there, standing beside him.
“Nrrgh, that one gives me the creeps,” Grosbeak said, taking a step forward and flicking his clay tail with a pottery clatter. He sounded delighted as he spoke in hushed wonder. “But of course he’s back. Because it’s decision time, isn’t it Izolda? And how excellent is this? We stand now, on the brink of a new age, the old age and old world are melting away, but who will reign in this new era and how? A mortal will decide. A mortal who we have mocked and made merry with. A mortal stolen from her home. I could never have predicted this.”
“What do you mean that it’s for me to decide?” I asked, barely managing the words through my thick lips. “I see no choice here. There is simply a broken rib and a king who will not wake.”
“The riddle was clear,” Grosbeak objected. “Freedom now or holding fast. It speaks to a decision.”
“But what is the decision?” I wailed. “Why can these things never be clear? How am I supposed to decide blindly?”
“Where did the brides go?” He pushed.
“Bluebeard said they were meant to go back to their own times and places.”
He smiled beatifically, “Then I think that is the freedom you could choose, is it not, Lord Death?”
We both looked to the pasty specter and he inclined his head in assent.
“Or?” I asked.
“Or you die, I think,” Grosbeak said. “You hold fast to his damn fool dream and you die here with him just like the song we sing and I think that might be enough magic to repair the rib. If greed broke it, then perhaps generosity will repair it.”
“Perhaps? You think?” I asked, aghast.
“Well, I’m hardly the expert here,” Grosbeak huffed. “And I don’t think Death is going to give us any answers.”
The world was spinning. I had to reach out and catch myself on Bluebeard’s dead shoulder to keep from collapsing.
“I mean it makes sense with what we know, right?” Grosbeak said. “We know it’s a choice of freedom or stubborness. We know the rib needs repairing with something that counters greed. We know that to finish fulfilling the song you’ll have to die. So it doesn’t seem too big a leap to say that you have about four or five more breaths to pick one or the other and get on with it.”
