I must summon all my practicality and common sense for this. I would need every shred of it.
I opened the wooden door at the top of the stairs, running a hand over Bluebeard’s crest etched upon it. An arrow with a streak of blood behind it and a bird flying above. It squealed in protest, binding on the floorboards so that I had to carefully thread the lantern pole through the gap and then adjust Bluebeard on my back to squeeze the pair of us through. The house was shifting, falling apart at the seams. It made something uncomfortable lurch in my belly. I had begun to think of this place as home, but like all my homes from the past, this too would fade and fail and leave me without anchor or place once more.
“Riverbarrow.” This time, I did not imagine the whisper in my mind. I smelled the mint on the edges of it as I stumbled into the main room, heart in my throat. I paused, lifting the candle as I turned so I could see his face.
“The pearl,” he whispered, his short beard tickling my neck and his words making my mouth suddenly dry. He could speak. He still had that much life.
His pale blue cat’s eyes met mine, and for a moment I was almost nauseated by the powerful emotions that tore through me from my numb lips, through my aching chest, and down through vibrating thighs to my toes. Need, desire, hope, absolute obsession — how could I disentangle one from the other when they wove themselves all through every root and branch of me with just one shared glance eye to eye?
He wet his lips with a bloody tongue. “Please, sun of my world. Please. ”
I could never say no to that “please” and I did not try. Hope galloped in my chest as I hurried to where the painting hung on his wall — the door to Riverbarrow. I saw that yes, there was a pearl hanging from the frame, strung on a single cord of something that looked like hair twisted and braided into a narrow rope. It was a strange hair, indigo in color and rough in texture as if it were made from a blueish green horse. Or perhaps a kelpie? Was this hair from the water creature he both was and wasn’t? My eyebrows were rising even as I reached for it.
This pearl?I asked with my mind and he gasped, almost inaudibly, and then with a look of enormous concentration, his hand lifted slow, slow as honey in the depths of winter, causing little flutters of emotion in my chest. He snapped his fingers and the painting vanished. His hand fell and his face sagged once more into my shoulder, his eyelids falling shut, and his cheek going limp against my shoulder.
I shuddered into the feeling of his heavy-eyed self resting entirely on me. It was like watching something precious as it dropped from a ship into the sea. One could not tear one’s eyes away from the fall, but the moment it plunged into the water all would be lost.
I paused for a breath — refusing to give up the fall, if that was all I had left. And for that breath, I savored the press of his cheek into my shoulder, the sensation of his bare, cooling flesh against my back, the way his fallen hand was slung around my narrow hip. And when I breathed in, I breathed in his scent and I brought his air into me, and it was heady as good wine and it swirled in my heart and body in a way that made me gasp. Was that a tear I blinked back? Surely not.
“Put it around your neck you fool girl,” Sparrow said in a tight voice that suggested her patience had thinned to a thread. “Don’t you see he put Riverbarrow into it?”
The pearl was as large as the end of my thumb and a hole had been bored through it to take the binding of the hair rope. When I held the pearl up, I saw in its depths the same scene that had been in the painting a moment ago — one of the tranquil river and the blowing willows, with tiny golden fairies floating between them — as if the opaque surface were reflecting back what had been wrought in oil and skill. I swallowed and slung it around my neck, tucking the pearl into my jacket and shirt to keep it safe.
“Wouldn’t that take an enormous amount of magic, to transfer a whole world like that?” I asked, in awe.
“Were I you,” Sparrow said acidly, “I would not make my estimates of the Arrow so low. He always rises to exceed expectation.”
I felt my face heat at that and grow even hotter at the knowing look in her eye as if she knew him better than I ever could. I did not like the splinter of jade jealousy that pierced me with her expression. It did not suit me or aid my efforts.
“Oh, yes, this is excellent. Ignore the end of the world to thrash out which of you is Queen Hen,” Grosbeak mocked. “Will it be a battle of devil looks or sharp silences? Have no thought to whether you will hurt me in the crossfire. For I am unaffected by the evil eye and I can fill any silence. Have I told you about the writings of Mistress Le Pen? I was indulging in them not long before my head was taken.”
His rambling shook me back to the present. He was right. What we had to do was urgent and there was no time for me to worry about where and how my husband’s loyalties might be been entangled.
I strode to the frigid fireplace, searching among the stacks of books as Grosbeak rambled on. Antlerdale’s memoir must be here somewhere.
“She writes the most scandalous truths, Sparrow. You really should have read them while you could. Delightful, flagrant, violent, and absolutely addictive,” Grosbeak said, warming to his tale as I sifted through books in the light of my flickering candle.
These volumes looked intact and solid but they fell to pieces in my hands, bindings splitting apart and pages streaming out and spreading across the floor. In vain, I took up one after another only for them to slide through my fingers and disintegrate. But even so, I could read the titles and none wereMist and Memory.
All at once, the tangled roots of the tree that held coats by the entrance gave a terrible creak, and then with a shudder, the tree toppled, cracked, and split into two halves. The top half crashed downward, pulling with it the chandeliers, the candle ends, and the yowling cat that lived within them. He did not look right, his hair falling out in clumps and his tail dragging as he moved.
He hissed at us and then fled through the front door which had been knocked open and left ajar.
We were running out of time.
I lifted the lantern pole and scrambled over the tree when I heard the stones of the fireplace begin to crumble. I was through the door when a terrible crack split the air. My nose filled with the scent of dust and earth, I leapt from the doorway and away, as the house on grouse feet collapsed in on itself in a heap.
“The end of an age,” Grosbeak whispered sadly.
“The end of a lot of things,” Sparrow agreed, but her voice was more than sad. It sounded like resigned despair.
I stood for a moment, working my dry mouth, shock and worry filling every inch of me.
“I suppose I’ll have to find the book somewhere else,” I said, returning to common sense and trying to stay hopeful. We could find this book. Just not here. There was no point fussing about it. I needed to get to work to fix it.
From somewhere nearby, a dog barked and then the horn sounded again, long and eerie, and I bit my lip and tasted blood.
“Run, run, the hunt has come! The Hounds of Heaven flush the prey!” Grosbeak warned, delight in every syllable.
