“But I’ll be dead!” I objected. “I won’t know how the story ends!”
“Well,” Grosbeak considered, sounding cold when he finally spoke, “I will, and that’s who counts.”
I couldn’t make out his face anymore. My vision had darkened too much. But I could easily guess he was grinning. He’d wanted to see me die, after all.
“Hop to it, mortal girl. You’re just about dead already. Go sit on the seat in the base of that rib and unlock your chance to go back in time and marry that fat horse lord and have his babies and never know a moment of any of this … or lie down on your dead husband’s chest and die with him. But choose quickly, because I see your spirit becoming unmoored, your body quaking. You have not a day left to spare, I fear.”
His voice felt like it was coming from far away. But it had never been a choice, had it? Not really. Not from the moment I realized that I loved Bluebeard and that I’d do anything for him.
“Not an hour,” Grosbeak’s voice came from a long way off.
Well. I was a sensible girl. I could accept death just like everything else. I reached blindly to his side, wounded here just as it was everywhere else, dipped my finger in his blood, and smeared it over my cheek in his sign. The line I drew was nothing more than a smear, my hands no longer worked.
I could only hope it had just enough magic left in it.
“Not a minute.”
I tried to lean forward to kiss him one last time, dead though he was, but I had not the control to manage it. I fell, sprawling over his chest, my heartbeat erratic, my breath caught somewhere in my throat.
My lungs would not expand. My poor eyes would not close. I was staring at the blue of my husband’s beard.
Blue.
Not white anymore but blue.
“Not a heartbeat.”
I felt the last thump and tried to reach for it, but it shivered away.
“Well, I suppose that’s her choice then, don’t you think? I would have bet on her choosing the other way but I’ve never been a good judge of what fool mortals might do with their mayfly lives. At least I got to see the end. I do hate it when a story is unfinished.”
A white hand pressed over my mouth, my nose, my eyes as Death stole what was left of me, unwilling though I was to leave those I loved. Just as once, long ago, my husband had plucked me from a mortal life, so I was plucked now from a Wittenbrand one. Just one more head of grain harvested by the Great Reaper.
CHAPTERNINETEEN
The Wittentalesmy mother told were always full of strange magic and stranger magicians and those poor mortals found within those stories were never more than leaves swept by on a current or coins tossed into a fountain. Happy fortunes and living forever after were never theirs to claim. Only the Wittenbrand ever found justice for ills done to them or reward for their great deeds. For mortals, the best that could be hoped for was to be entirely forgotten.
I woke, forgotten.
My eyes blinked awake slowly. A small bird sang in the tree, a simple trill followed by the response — and I did not know why that made my heart ache cruelly, or why I clutched at my chest and shook with silent sobs. I felt as though I had lost something I never knew.
I rose from my bed in my father’s house in Northpeak and I readied myself for a day in my third best dress — noting that the stitching needed repair around one of the cuffs. I dressed my hair and then I sat on the edge of my bed and I listened to the bird again.
My room with its simple wood furniture and carved lintel felt odd. Unreal. As if I had not been living within it for the past nineteen years.
I couldn’t quite remember …
I shook my head. I did not know what I had forgotten, only that it was terribly important. The broken memory ripped at me and tore at the seeming tranquility of the morning, as if my heart could hear a trumpet blast of warning that bypassed my ears entirely.
I made my way down to the Common Room, nodding idly to Raisa, one of the maids who I’d known all my life. Seeing her face made me feel surprise, but why would I be surprised when surely I had seen her only yesterday?
In the Common Room, my father spoke quietly but firmly with my brother Rolgrin over something regarding the rotation of grazing land on northern fields. My mother sat with them but her gaze was dreamy as she looked out the window. I paused in the doorway of the room, uncertain why I was blinking back tears or why the mere sight of them caught at my chest.
Svetgin ran in, bumping into me on the way past. It broke the moment. I stepped forward and moved to kiss my mother’s brow.
“Izolda, my sweet girl,” she said with a smile.
And the pain in my chest moved me around the table to kiss my father’s brow, too. He paused long enough to look up at me with a warm smile before returning to his instruction. My brothers, I did not kiss, though Svetgin winked at me from across the table and Rolgrin caught my eye and offered a tight smile of greeting. And then I was breakfasting with my family, smiling as the wash of their conversation calmed me, and the busy mundane seized both time and energy.
