I read through the books and he watched me read, and I was pleased to see his foxy first wife find a brutish-looking husband who treated her kindly and gave her fifteen sons. Happier still to watch Tigraine become a mighty warrior queen. She did not marry at all, but ruled until she died in battle when her hair was white and her strength faded. Each wife lived a life full and long — even Ki'e'iren whose life I did not wish to honor seemed settled in a palace and if she looked somewhat distracted and seemed to peer into shadows that were not there, that might only be her suspicious temperament at work. When the last book was shut and winked out, I looked at my smug husband.
“And so you kept these promises, too. For all sixteen of your wives.”
He held up a single finger.
“Speak to this riddle wife. If a man has sixteen coins but has never had fifteen of them, how many does he have.”
I rolled my eyes. “You can hardly pretend you were not married to all these other women.”
He shook his single finger at me, a look of repressed mirth in his eyes. “Have you no answer to the riddle, then?”
“One,” I said dryly. “He has one coin.”
“And I have one wife,” Bluebeard said, grinning in triumph, and then to my shock he sprang forward and flung me over his shoulder, laughing as he bounded from the room in one leap and tossed the key over his shoulder.
The room closed behind us, and it took its secrets with it. Though I lived a very long time — forever by the reckoning of mortals — I never again saw the room nor the wives who had helped me fight for the life of our husband, but that did not stop me from teasing the man relentlessly about them for what else was there to do?
CHAPTERTWENTY-THREE
He broughtme out to the misty clearing between the dark trees and I revised my opinion of this place. It might not be the mortal world at all. I stood in one place and turned, frowning, as he lounged against a tree. He was letting a small bird dress his hair for him as he studied his fingernails.
Around us, pollen thick as snow drifted through the faint breeze. As the mists lifted, the pollen grew thicker and I felt some grand shift in the land — the passing of one into the other. Night was falling, soft, orchid-toned, and billowy.
I yawned and Bluebeard made a rumbling sound much like a growl.
“Where are we now, Bramble King?” I asked him, feeling a little wistful. I was a queen without a castle or so much as a loft to call my own, and I was very tired.
“The Wittenhame burned and melted and collapsed into the mortal world,” Bluebeard said, lifting his chin and preening a little as the small nuthatch put finishing touches on his grooming. “This spot is one of those where they melted together.”
“So it is both mortal and Wittenhame,” I said, studying it. The tiny clearing was hardly bigger than a space where a pair of deer might bed down, but it was soft with moss and drifts of pollen. I could not see the Wittenhame here at all.
“A fitting place to spend our first night after we have walked death’s land, don’t you think?” he asked me with a slight smile and his own wistful look in his eye.
“A bed and a warm fire would not go amiss,” I suggested a little daunted by the idea of camping in this glen with no tinderbox or blanket, wearing a cold hard dress of knives. And how would he stay warm clothed in spiderweb and insect wings?
He swallowed in a way that suggested to me that pollen and nuthatches were all he had to offer me tonight.
“I shall keep you warm and pillow your head on my chest — if you will consent to spend this night here with me.”
His eyes were shadowed as he spoke and they seemed to darken with his words, catching my breath a little as if it were fabric sliding along a rough fence post. I had to swallow to find my voice.
“If this is your home, then it is mine, lord of the Wittenhame,” I said, a little breathless.
He made no move toward me, regarding me from his place against the tree. The little nuthatch leapt from his shoulder and away and he pulled the crown of brambles from his head like a girl might drag down a drooping daisy chain. He toyed with it in his hands as it rustled and shifted and then he looked up at me with blazing eyes, and behind them, I saw not a great king of power who had defeated death but a nervous bridegroom approaching his new bride. He bit his lip, catching it between his teeth, and drew in a long breath.
I waited. His thoughts were opaque to me.
“Something troubles you, husband?” I said carefully. “You, who have flown on the backs of birds and broken the neck of Death?”
His chuckle was grim. “Here I stand before you and I find I must clutch at courage to take another step.” He paused and swallowed, hanging his crown on a broken stub of a branch sticking out from one of the trees encircling our hollow. “Can you accept me as bridegroom, Izolda? Can you embrace me knowing I am this man but also this hollow in which we stand? That I am the river you hear bubbling, and the moon that rises to limn your lovely skin, and the nuthatch who flew away just now?”
“You are all that?” I asked, teasingly. “How shall it all fit in this hollow, then?”
But he was not wrong to ask, for how could a mortal mind accept all that and also bring him into her bed?
“Tell me true, wife,” he said, still keeping himself across the hollow from me.
I spread my hands wide and spoke my heart. “If I cannot accept that, my Bluebeard, then where shall I go? For you are not only everywhere by right of Bramble King, you are also everywhere to me by right of heart and vow. When I look at the moon I will see you, whether you are moon or mortal. When I hear the bird sing, it will be your voice echoing in my mind whether you are bird or memory. Such is the way of a heart anchored deep in love.”
