No wonder the nuns went on and on about being reborn.
Using the spare wooden cross they’d placed at my grave; I managed to rise. Grave soil was packed tight under my fingernails and covered my shift, my bare feet, my hair. I sniffed, dirt still in my nose, the air raw and clear over the sleeping village. The fires burnt low in their huts and homes. The Blue Moon would be bright and warm, filled with the soldiers and farmers and merchants and priests.
I exhaled and turned my back on the village.
VI.
Reborn
Ilifted my gaze to the wall of sentinel trees, rising dark along the mountain ridge.
For a flickering moment, I wished I hadn’t made it out. My only place of refuge now was the one place I feared most—the forest. Even if I could evade the clutches of the otherworld, I had no more interest in dying of cold than I did of being buried alive. I was in desperate need of mercy, and who would be most likely to extend it—the gods or men? Grimly, I headed out of the churchyard. I crept to the village outskirts, frequenting the houses and farms where I knew the occupants and their habits.
From Amis, a widower merchant who drank at the Blue Moon nearly every night, I stole a pair of boots just a little too big. In his dark hut, I ripped pieces off a loaf with my filthy fingers, shoving the cold bread into my mouth. As I scrounged, a hungry-looking kobold emerged from the fire in the pot-belly stove. It transformed into a tiny man with eyebrows that touched its shoulders and a hat that still glowed like a coal. I froze, thinking the little house demon might attack me. But it only looked at me, from my dirty feet to the soil clinging in my hair, and curled its lip in disgust. Not taking any chances, I left the heel on the hearth for it and departed. It made no protest.
From the slatted goat shed behind the brewess Joanna’s hut, I took a curing deer hide and managed to steal away without disturbing thechickens. Slinging the hide over my shoulders, I turned my back at the other small huts and headed for the bare vineyards and the mountains beyond them.
The fields were snowed over, but the late winter rain had worn the snow in low points to ankle deep, and I made quick progress. As the ridge rose higher, and the forest loomed darker than the space between the stars, it was impossible not to think of every lost girl and uncanny creature I’d seen in the darkness. It was impossible not to remember the monster that had stolen Rochelle.
I reached the edge of the field and stopped before the boundary of the forest, pulling the hide higher on my neck. The thick boughs stirred, whispering in the thin voice of trees that seemed all at once both so alien and so human. A chill ran up my back.
The narrow stretch of hooded darkness, reaching for Valerie in the flames, seemed now to reach for me. Even if he did not keep a home here, I was no fool. Death was lord of these lands. Cruel, mysterious, unforgiving, arcane … the forest was all those things, just as Death himself was. The wind shifted, pushing me, beckoning me into its cold depths. For a moment I hesitated. Behind me, the low fires of the village glowed on the horizon. Those fires were the beacons of safety, what kept the nightmares at bay. And I …
I belonged to the nightmares.
I imagined myself returning, fresh from the grave, to open arms, toDacia—and then scoffed at my desperation. It was easier to ridicule myself than to acknowledge the way my heart collapsed under the weight of all my longing. As a girl in the convent, I’d thought it was only that I did not belong with the nuns—that there was some other place for me. But now, it was clear that I did not belong among anyone.
I was caught between the world unseen and the world that was known—not one or the other, but the stranger who wore a skin of humanity and frightened dogs and children who could sense the other. Even Dacia, who loved me more than I deserved, had held me atarm’s length. If I went on to a new town along the road, the word was soon to spread once morning light illuminated my broken coffin. The priests would burn me. The debts would still weigh on me. I could not explain what I had done to Maxime. In the drab gray skin of a worthless prostitute, I might be able to ignore the otherworld, but I could not ignore the curse of being a worthless girl who should have died at birth, a sinner, and a woman who did not belong. That darkness in me had only grown closer to the surface.
With no more lingering, I crossed the boundary of trees and headed into the heart of the forest.
The cold and my hunger were both relentless, my head swimming between lives as I walked and walked. At some point, my humanness seemed to peel apart like a shroud. I panted and stepped into something animal. My thoughts wandered to the life of the doe whose skin I wore, whether she had walked these same paths. The pain and memory of the grave fell away, and I thought only of going forward.
For hours, I wandered the forest. The blue frost crept dangerously along my fingers and toes and nose. A deep trench under a thin crust of ice swallowed my leg to the hip, and I grabbed a branch to wrench myself free. Thin ribbons of ice lashed my palm as the thorns bore into my hands. Blood dripped off the branch and spattered the snow. It seemed too stark, too bright, a beacon that called out to other things. The darkness thickened all around me, solidified, a presence sharpening into realness that waited for me with its maw opened. My breath hurt my chest. I did not turn to look around me.
The snow drove deeper, and the night darker, with a moon that seemed never to rise. Not even the spirits lingered around me now.
Finally, just as I stepped through the spindly trees at the top of a ridge, the moon emerged, its light wan and fading over the lonely mountains. The wind gusted up from the valley below, ice cold, wrenching the last of my breath.
What a little fool I’d been. An utter fool. The enormity of where I stood smacked me in the face, and I nearly dropped to my knees. Allthe adrenaline of my resurrection had worn off, and my animal instincts were swallowed in a rise of sheer, aching fragility. My stomach gurgled and ached, unsatisfied with the meager rip of bread from the village. My palm wept. My hair hung dirty and frozen in front of my face.
What was I going to do? The mountains stretched fathomless and unbroken, ridge after ridge, until they crossed the river and became the Alps and roads to Rome and Ravenna. And all along their sides crept the thick, impenetrable forest. Thicker and darker than even the one that I had just walked through.
Death’s wood.
I found, then, that I wasn’t interested in dying a heroic, lonely death. I would take my chances at finding a new village, after all. It would not be the first time I had escaped certain condemnation. I’d have to come up with a new name. Silvia maybe. I’d known a pretty nun named Silvia. Turning back, I hunted for my steps in the snow to trace my way back to the road.
But the feeble moonlight illuminated no steps.
My trail was gone.
My stomach dropped. I spun, looking everywhere. Where my tracks should have been, the snow stretched pristine and unbroken.
I had come from somewhere. I couldn’t have missed my own tracks. I floundered into deeper snow, the banks swallowing me up to my waist, dry and barely cold on my numb skin. But there was nothing.
It was as though I had never been.
I told myself sternly that I couldn’t panic. Waist deep in the blowing snow, in the darkest part of the night, I lifted my palm to the moonlight. The blood had frozen in strange patterns. I stretched and moved my white-tipped fingers and the crystals crunched and broke. Something heated and thick welled up at the root of the ice.Life.
