I didn’t think he’d answer, but he did. “An age and an era.” He still avoided my eye, as if I were too great a burden to even look upon. “It’s been a very long time.”
I imagined it went like this. As a godlike creature, such as he was, there was no mortal who could withstand his confession, his own private darkness. But as a whore, I was best at holding the darkness of men, a vessel for their rage and contempt and fears. I felt certain I could do this also for Death—of all the women in the world, there was none so cursed as me, so perfectly suited for bearing his burdens. I put the bread down. I sat straight in my char. “You said you were human once …”
He was quiet for a long time, staring at his hands as if lost back in those years. Just when I thought maybe I’d pushed too far, he answered. “I was a man once. But I am no longer. You would do well to remember that.”
I knew I had succeeded—the very air in the room shifted. With a thrill I realized he would not dismiss me. He even longed for this.
“What was your name?” I asked, ignoring his warning. “Back then?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Surely you do.” Though I did not doubt that he would not want to reveal such an intimate thing.
“No,” he turned to me, meeting my gaze with an openness, a clearness about him I hadn’t seen before. “No. I do not,” he said. “That man is entirely lost to me.” And there was such a profound sadness in the air, I could not help but believe him.
XV.
The Void, Unlocked
Icould not afford to succumb to my weaknesses. I had misjudged the safety of Death’s house, thought it to be a place where I could be my darkest, my most undone, and yes, even weak, but I sensed that if I continued, Death would grow weary of me, and the house itself might feed upon my mind. I did not want to be seen by either as being any mere woman, and so I left Death’s room, in triumph but sicker than ever. I went to take care of my battered body the only way I knew how.
Maybe it was that the sharp smell of the poultice in my room seemed to clear the hazy panic of my thoughts. Maybe it was only that I was desperate. But I left the château and fixed the crone’s hut in my mind, conjuring the image of the little grove with its wintered garden and moss-covered eaves like a map as I began to walk. I slipped into the forest, leaving the blackened stones of the château to disappear behind their boughs.
Though I had no other choice, doubt still pulled at me, coming at first in strange whisps, snaking into my mind in the way that spirits used to scratch. It felt too empty, too strange. Hostile even. It did not feel like I was being observed. In fact, it did not feel as though anything lived in this wood at all. I even found myself longing to see a spirit, simply for the reassurance of something familiar. The path wound me along in places I was sure I had never been, but I kept on with the grove fixed in my mind. I was sure that, like the magic in thechâteau, the old woman could only be found by instinct. But as I went, I felt worse and worse, and the trees seemed to leer and grab for me. I couldn’t tell whether the forest was trying to keep me from the grove or whether it simply wanted me to die.
Wrong,WRONG.Wind rushed through the tops of the trees, and it seemed their bare branches spoke as if the forest itself were warning me. I stumbled on a root and fell to the ground, jarring my wrists. My heartbeat seemed to pulse in my face and hands. Was this magic, leaking out of some wound and spent on the ground? Could it kill me? I tried to draw it back into me somehow, but the effort only made my stomach roil. Rolling over into the leaves, I stared at the gray sky and the bare branches.
I would have slept there, in the wet rot of the leaves. Whether enchantment or exhaustion, it did not matter, I would have died there, letting the forest creep over me and draw me into its silence forever. My eyes closed and behind them, my dreams still too vivid and hot, the memory of lying against the stone slab in the chapel. I couldn’t hear anything other than the pounding wrongness in my body. And then, with a jolt, I realized the pounding was hoofbeats.
Lord Death.
I jumped out of the leaves and flew behind a fat fir with sweeping boughs that hid me. I had not considered him discovering I was missing and following me. Instinctively, I knew he should not hear my true reason for being in the woods, and my mind scrambled for an excuse. But before I could decide on one, two riders appeared through the trees, cutting expertly through the brush. Though they passed close enough that I could almost reach out and touch them, they were nearly invisible—wrapped head to toe in woolen rags. Even their nimble horses were draped in rags sewn with leaves.
As the lead rider passed, I caught a glimpse of his eyes—cunning and brightest green. These eyes were sung about at the boards, cursed by the village men, and sighed over at the women’s well. I covered my mouth to hide my gasp.
The Bandits of Molsheim.
Somehow, though they had been assaulting the Baron’s retinue on the road for months and though the village and Maxime talked about it constantly, I was surprised to find they truly existed.
Just beyond my tree, they pulled their horses to a stop. “Did you hear something?” the green-eyed leader asked the other, a man as big as a mountain, wrapped in drab brown.
The big man was instantly alert, pulling his horse in a tight circle to sit the opposite direction. He lowered his face covering, exposing a heavy brown beard. “Do ye think we’ve been followed?” He spoke in French, but his accent was foreign and broad. “The Baron’s henchman?”
“I don’t like the look of these trees,” the green-eyed man said. His voice was surprisingly soft.
The other man said some word I did not recognize—neither Latin nor French nor German—and they switched positions quickly, their horses in sync. Now the green-eyed man tracked the forest where I hid.
There was something about his preternatural eyes—they gleamed from under a hat pulled low and wrapped with a scarf against the rain. With his sandy, pointed beard, he reminded me of a fox, but in a way that was like a fox had become human, rather than a human who resembled a fox. If he looked at where I hid, he was going to see me. I felt certain of it.
I pulled back, as slow as I could manage. The fir cover was not impenetrable, and my blue cloak would stand out in the murky brown shadows. I needed to be what I had just decided I couldn’t be—weak. A weak woman was an invisible one, like all prey; weakness was a way to survive. A mouse, scurrying through the undergrowth. A rabbit frozen. The images kept flickering through my pounding skull as I watched the bandit’s gaze track through the forest. I stared at the ground for a long time before realizing I was staring at the first spring violets, peeking up out of the snow.
The rain began to fall, steady and drumming. I clenched my fistsand pulled tight on the reins of my mind.A mouse.The small brown field mice that scurried in and out of the eaves of Josef’s. The ones who’d made a nest in Christine’s silks and sent all the girls screaming when it was discovered. Me and Dacia had carefully scooped up the mama and her babies and put them in a warm, dark corner where Cook would never notice. The kind that Valerie would coax out of the grain and hand over to me and Rochelle to take back to the fields. I fixed my thoughts carefully, steadily on the image of a mouse. My breathing slowed. The dull beat in my head continued, but I used it as best I could by setting my breathing to its rhythms.
It wasn’t that I became a mouse. It was only that, as the bandit’s green gaze landed on me, staring straight through the cold rain into the fir boughs where I hid, I could sense a hairline crack through which I could slide into a version of the world where I was already as invisible as this mouse. The place in those rooms where I pulled something from nothing. The river somewhere in the dark. The seam that had opened in the chapel. Whatever it was, however it appeared, I realized with a warm prickle that this was my first real sense of the shape and taste of my magic.
I was still aware of myself as a woman, with sharp edges and bones and flesh, and I thought it likely I’d get spotted the moment I tried to move. But as the bandits turned to one another and clicked their heels to their horses, resuming their trot back through the forest, I slipped out of the boughs and began to follow them.
I moved half out of instinct and half out of curiosity about that strange light in the bandit’s eyes. They did not seem entirely human. But also because I had this real moment of magic in my hands, and I didn’t want to lose it. It took every ounce of energy I had to keep myself focused—scurrying after the soft thud of the horses’ hooves. I carried the mouse out in front of me as a fixed image, picking my way between the tree trunks and trying not to lose sight of the horses. As the rain drummed down harder and they pulled their hoods low, they never once looked back.
