Ki’e’iren gasped, clearly unhappy, but then the vines drew her in and she disappeared, sent to her fate.
Bluebeard quirked an eyebrow at me and I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. Had he thought that too harsh, or too light? I could not tell. Or perhaps he found it too predictable. The Wittenbrand did not like things to be predictable. He flourished a hand as if bidding me to continue.
“To Coppertomb who conspired against my husband and tried in every way to make him stumble and fall, who, at the end, stole his beating heart and gave it as a feast to the barrow. Execution is too good for him. One death can only be enjoyed once.” There was a murmur of approval from my husband and a mirror murmur from the crowd. Better, then. They turned their sparkling eyes on me, ready to see what torture I would gift to the one they had followed into tormenting the mortal world. “Coppertomb, I condemn to banishment.” There was a disappointed sound from the crowd and I saw the man in question begin to smile. Until he heard my next words. “I banish you to the lands of Death to wander until you succeed in walking the Path of Princes.” My heart was racing as I uttered his judgment in full and my voice rose as it gained confidence. “Languish there among so many whose fate you wove. Drink deep of despair with them. Make friends with Death — your only companion. And learn the lesson hubris teaches all of us: that in the end, we are all equals. Rich or poor, mortal or immortal, in the dark of despair, there is no great and small. We all are lowered even into the dark embrace of death. And how shall we bear up under his crushing weight?”
“I hardly think,” Coppertomb began with an easy smile, but his words choked off and he gasped and the crowd gasped with him, freezing, as a white figure in long robes strode forward.
Death’s beard and hair flowed delicately in a wind that was not there, and he walked over the waves of the sea without his feet so much as getting damp. In one hand, he held my severed hand, and he twisted it so that it beckoned to Coppertomb, and with a look of horror, Coppertomb looked down at his feet and when he saw that they were moving of their own accord to follow Death, ignoring any will of his own, they danced a complicated step as they went. And in this moment, he was no higher or greater than those poor mortals who were made to dance until their feet were in tatters. He let out a choked cry that cut off as if he’d bit his own tongue.
And when he had danced half down the aisle, following the white specter, his breath hitched into panicked short breaths, he threw a look over his shoulder and spat. “I will see you again, mortal Izolda. If not in this life, then in the next.”
“I’m counting on it,” I said. “For my husband bid me dispense justice and so I have. But if ever I lay eyes on you again, I shall dispense injustice and that to fulsome measure.”
And my husband’s barked laugh was the last thing Coppertomb heard for Death leaned in, kissed him, and he was no more.
I swallowed and we all took one long minute to breathe before Bluebeard slurped his wine noisily and startled us back to reality.
“More judgments, wife?” he asked with a lifted brow.
“Yes,” I said in a shaky voice, for Bluebeard was looking at Grosbeak, but this next judgment I planned to go elsewhere. I turned in place again and looked out over the feasting crowd. “Folk of Wittenhame,” I said clearly. “I judge that you, too, have wronged my husband, uniting under his rival.” I risked a look at Bluebeard and saw him frozen, regarding me warily. “And so I sentence you with this. For the duration of my husband’s reign, you shall not cross the barrier into the mortal world. You shall not harry those made without magic, nor reward them, nor use them in your schemes. You shall not know them at all. They shall be insulated from you, and you from them, for an age and half an age.”
And the silence that met me was far deeper and far more sober than even the silence that met my judgment of Coppertomb.
“Wisely said, Bramble Queen,” my husband said in a low voice.
The murmur that followed his was part resigned despair and part awe, and I felt I needed to swallow to go on.
“But there is more,” Bluebeard said, nodding toward Grosbeak. My old friend had his rotting chin thrust up into the air, his clay arms crossed over the jutting hilt of the sword sticking from his chest. “Loathe though you may be to judge he who was once your ally, he is enemy to me, and he shall be punished. Doom him now, with your own tongue.”
I reached down to the table and drew up a goblet and drank, and then I turned and I strode to Grosbeak and offered him the cup and to my surprise, he met my eyes silently, his twinkling with humor, and he took the cup and drank it to the dregs.
“Think not that you can best me, Izolda. For I know all your secrets and all your lies.” His voice had an edge.
“This much is true.”
“Strike then, your harshest blow. I shall drink your cup of wrath.”
It took great courage for me to meet his eyes then. For though he may have been enemy to my husband, I owed him as many thanks as I did punishments. And so I took a long breath, tossed the cup aside, and turned to the crowd.
“To Grosbeak, treacherous ally, betrayer of plans, criminal of heart and mind, I give this punishment. Lose now your clay body and be delivered to the sea in the flesh you wore before you were dead and buried. And the sea shall have you until she tires of you. And you shall be our ambassador to both her and her kind. A punishment and a gift knit together for both the good you did and the evil, that you may know the emptiness of great power and find, perhaps, at last, what love might exist still for those who seem beyond all redemption.”
And when I looked back at my old friend he was laughing and as he laughed, his clay body fell away, and his face crumpled to nothing and out of the wreckage of what had once been Grosbeak a man rose to full height and stepped out, his skin perfect and unmarred, naked as the day he born and — to my shock, for I had forgotten his face from before death — surprisingly good-looking.
He bowed to me once, folding at the waist, and then a great wave rose from the sea and splashed over him, sweeping him away, and for a heartbeat, I thought I saw four mermaids, two holding each arm, one cradling his head and a third tangled around his waist and they carried him off to the heart of their mistress.
And the last I saw of him was a wink.
I could not claim I would not miss him sorely, or that I was not sad to see him leave, and I do not know how long I stood, looking out to sea, only that after a time, my cheek was tickled by whiskers and warm breath and arms wrapped around me from behind, and my beloved’s voice purred in my ear.
“And now, fire of my eyes, I think it is time that you, also, receive your just reward.”
CHAPTERTHIRTY-THREE
My Bluebeard sweptme up in his arms and carried me, hooting owls and all, out across the azure waves as if it were no more difficult for him to walk on the rolling surf as to walk on the sand, and I should have been caught up by the silver gleams of the wave-tips or the soft deep blue of the cloudless sky, or the pollen that still followed my beloved in a golden swirl, stirring up new life in his wake. But it was not these things that I dwelled on. Nor was it the white sandy beach of the island he took me to, nor the great leafy fronds of the trees there that cast the cool relief of shadows over the sand.
No, it was the depth of the world held in his shining cat’s eyes and the hungry longing that hovered just beneath the surface of them. It was the warm arms that held me safe in their embrace and the gust of his breath as he carried me, the quirk of the edge of his smile as we drank each other in wordlessly. Those were what caught my heart.
“Is this to be my reward then, or yours?” I whispered, my breath caught slightly in my throat for in all the wild, tangled fairytale we’d woven together, I’d had little time to dwell on what “after” might look like and I found myself to be almost overwhelmed now that it was upon me.
